“What I felt … was the sort of detached, sardonic amusement an alien might feel on viewing from outer space a once-great civilisation destroying itself over an issue of immeasurable triviality. That issue, of course, is ‘Climate Change’.”

So James Delingpole writes at the Telegraph.

He goes on magnificently:

Never before in history, I doubt, has so much money ever been squandered, so much suffering and poverty exacerbated, so much economic damage been inflicted, so many lies promulgated and so much environmental destruction wrought in order to deal with a problem so microscopically miniscule. Really, if Barack Obama were to declare war on Belgium because he’d always found Tintin Au Congo offensively racist, or if David Cameron were to launch a nuclear strike on Mykonos because all those white-painted buildings were “way too gay”, you still wouldn’t be even half way close to equalling the quite breathtaking stupidity, purblind ignorance and suicidal wrongheadedness of the disasters currently being inflicted on the world by our boneheaded political and administrative classes on their holy mission to “combat climate change.”

Let’s concentrate on the British example since, thanks to Cameron’s determination to lead the “greenest government ever”, we’re further down the road to Eco Hell than most, and let’s look at the reasons behind those electricity and gas price rises.

These are outlined here in this must-read piece by the Global Warming Policy Foundation’s Benny Peiser, which lists the various mechanisms (Renewables Obligations, European Emissions Trading Scheme, Feed-In Tariffs, etc) which, this year alone, will drive up our domestic energy bills by around 15 per cent and business energy costs by 20 to 25 per cent. Every one of these mechanisms is based on the so-far-very-much-unproven hypothesis that Anthropogenic Carbon Dioxide emissions are contributing dangerously to “Global Warming” and that this “Global Warming” is an undesirable thing. In other words, our political classes are imposing on both our domestic expenses and on the broader economy swingeing costs whose sole justification is the threadbare theorising of a small number of heavily compromised scientists brandishing dodgy computer models.

“How did those charlatans get away with it?” That is the question historians will be asking in generations to come. …  And: “How can it possibly have been that, during the worst global recession since the 1930s, the world’s political leaders were able to impose such enormous, unjustified extra costs on their ailing economies without serious criticism from the commentariat or rebellion from their electorates?” …

The answer to that question lies largely in the deceitful propaganda put out by the Left, its hurray-chorus the media, and their useful idiots who hold political power:

Here we have Tim Yeo MP – a Conservative MP, allegedly, and one with an influential position on Britain’s energy policy – joining up with various violently left-wing members of the Opposition to promulgate exactly the same almighty whopper: that the reason are energy prices are skyrocketing is down to a combination of insufficient regulation and corporate greed.

Let me just repeat that: here is an influential member of Britain’s Tory-led Coalition essentially arguing that what Britain needs right now is a less free market and more regulation. …

Prime Minister David Cameron is not the brightest spark in the generally rather damp fireworks of British politics. He is the leader of the Conservative Party,  yet he has expressed admiration for … wait for it … you’ll find it hard to believe … Saul Alinsky (the Marxist revolutionary inventor of “community organizing”, guru to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama). See here and here.

Delingpole concludes:

Say what you like about David Cameron … but if there’s one thing he’s good at it’s being more slippery than a jellied eel in a tub of KY Jelly. And he’ll need this skill in spades if he’s not to go down in history as the Prime Minister who, in the name of a non-existent problem, presided over the devastation of the British countryside with bat-chomping eco-crucifixes for rent-seeking toffs (aka wind farms) and the destruction of the British economy thanks to the imposition of wholly unnecessary costs and regulations.

Actually there’s probably no saving the British economy. Or  Britain. Unless it abandons Socialism/Greenism, it will be poor; and whether or not it abandons Socialism/Greenism, it will be Islamized. Few British politicians – few Britons – want to face up to those all-too-real threats. It’s easier to pretend that the problem is climate change and the solution is wind-farms.

More and more Europeans are growing angry over the Islamization of their countries.

Here a Catholic member of the Austrian parliament, Ewald Stadler, rages at the Turkish ambassador, referring inter alia to the beheading of a Catholic Bishop by a Muslim, and the burying alive of adolescent girls by their Muslim families in Turkey.

Professor Stephen Prothero is a professor of religion at Boston University.  As one might expect of a professor of religion, he makes unwarrantable assumptions.

He does so in a column he’s written for USA Today titled You can’t reconcile Ayn Rand and Jesus.

Who’s trying to?

The Tea Party, he assumes.

The Tea Party protests against the Obama government’s economic policies of redistribution, deficit spending on ever-increasing entitlements, the robbing of “the rich” and the enforced dependency of “the poor”, resulting in high unemployment and a load of debt on future generations.

Ayn Rand would be sympathetic to such protest. Some Tea Partiers carry signs quoting her.  So  – Professor Prothero reasons – the Tea Party is inspired by her philosophy.

“But hold on a mo!”, he says to himself, figuratively scratching his head. “Everyone in the Tea Party is conservative – and aren’t all conservatives religious? Aren’t most of them evangelical Christians?  Sure they are. So they’re in deep confusion. Ayn Rand was an atheist. I must straighten them out. Make them see that they hold contradictory views. Explain to them that they cannot be both for Jesus and for Ayn Rand.”

For what Jesus? We surmise that everyone who thinks about Jesus, whether or not he’s a Christian, has his own Jesus in his head. Stephen Prothero’s Jesus is a lefty.  He quotes the biblical Jesus as saying: “Blessed are the poor”. Lefties have reason to bless the poor every day of their lives, and hope they never go away (ie become rich), for in the name of that imaginary caste lefties pursue their egalitarian cause, believing the pursuit to be so ennobling that they can be as nasty as they choose to real people without losing a drop of their moral pride.

Professor Prothero will remember that the biblical Jesus is reported as saying not only “Blessed are the poor” (Luke 6:20), but “Blessed are the poor in spirit” (Matthew 5:6), which lefties plainly are not.

But let’s go to the professor’s own words (you can read them all here if you care to):

In Rand’s Manichaean world, it is not God vs. Satan, but individualism vs. collectivism.

Right. And we too see the great political divide as being between individualism and collectivism.

He goes on:

While Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor,” she sings Hosannas to the rich. The heroes of Atlas Shrugged (which, alas, is only slightly shorter than the Bible) are captains of industry such as John Galt. The villains are the “looters” and “moochers” — people who by hook (guilt) or by crook (government coercion) steal from the hard-won earnings of others.

The professor’s sympathies are all with the moochers. He praises Jesus for being “a first-class, grade-A ‘moocher’.”

He proceeds, scornfully and sarcastically:

Turning the tables on traditional Christian morality, Rand argues that altruism is immoral and selfishness is good.

Our argument is that selfishness is essential to our survival, though it doesn’t preclude generosity or even altruism (which is very rarely practiced). See our post Against God and Socialism, April 29, 2011.

Moreover, there isn’t a problem in the world that laissez-faire capitalism can’t solve if left alone to perform its miracles.

Of course there are problems that cannot be solved, but individuals left free to innovate profitably can and do solve a lot of them. Collectives cannot and do not.

The solutions that capitalism facilitates are not claimed to be miracles. Miracles happen only in the minds of the religious and the gullible.

Ayn Rand was as much against religion as we are. “Faith, as such, is extremely detrimental to human life,” Prothero quotes her as saying, without comment. To him her words are shocking, and he expects them to shock his readers. We, however, agree with her. Our pages provide ample evidence that religion has always done and continues to do immense harm.

He himself, Prothero half confesses, was a bit of a fan of Ayn Rand when he was in his adolescnce. But, he implies, her appeal can only be to the adolescent mind:

I first read Atlas Shrugged and her other popular novel, The Fountainhead, while festival-hopping in Spain after graduating from college, so I can attest to the appeal of this philosophy to late adolescents of a certain gender.

“A certain gender”? What gender would that be? And why only that one? He doesn’t say.

As an adult, however, Rand’s work reads to me like a vulgar rationalization for greed lying on top of a perverse myth of the right relationship between individual and community.

Now we don’t recognize the sin of greed, but we do recognize the sin of envy. Socialism – or “redistributionism” – is the politics of envy.

The obvious tendency of Prothero’s argument is that Jesus is right and Rand is wrong. Towards the end of his column he claims, however, not to be trying to win readers from Rand to Jesus, he’s only trying to point out that the two contradict each other. “You cannot worship both the God of Jesus and the mammon of Rand,” he says. Choose one or the other,  “or say no to both. It’s a free country. Just don’t tell me you are both a card-carrying Objectivist and a Bible-believing Christian. Even Rand knew that just wasn’t possible.”

That’s his message to Tea Partiers who display Rand quotations, and to Republicans, who also, he assumes, are guilty of trying to reconcile Ayn Rand and Jesus.

Any Republicans in particular? He names Paul Ryan:

Among Rand’s adoring acolytes on Capitol Hill is Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, who at a Library of Congress Symposium held in 2005 on the centenary of the Rand’s birth called her “the reason I got involved in public service.”

We are delighted, and not at all surprised, to hear that Paul Ryan learnt from Ayn Rand. If we had nothing else to be grateful to Ayn Rand for, her getting Paul Ryan “involved in public service” would put us hugely in her debt. His capitalist convictions and economic know-how is already doing good for the Republican Party, and would do good for America (and therefore to the world) if he were to become president. We see him as the desperately needed leader under whom the United States of America would again embody the great idea of individual freedom on which it was founded.

(Hat tip to our reader George for bringing Stephen Prothero’s column to our attention.)

Note added in 2020: We sure were wrong about Paul Ryan! But we still like both the Tea Party and Ayn Rand. Not Jesus.

On March 20, Terry Jones, a Christian pastor in Florida, publicly burnt a copy of the Koran, a book that orders murder, slavery, cruelty, exploitation of women, intolerance, and aggressive war as religious duty.

On April 1 a shrieking pack of Afghans – Muslims, for whom the Koran is holy writ – killed 20 people, two of them by chopping their heads off, on the pretext that their feelings were hurt by Terry Jones’s little bonfire. (The victims all worked for the disgusting UN, but even that is not a reason to murder them.)

Senator Harry Reid of the Democratic Party and Senator Lindsey Graham of the Republican Party blame the killings not on those who perpetrated them but on Terry Jones, and suggest that Americans should be prevented by law from doing what he did.

Of the many comments published on the issue, the one we like best is by Mark Steyn. He writes:

In defense of freedom of expression … I have no expectations of Harry Reid or the New York Times [see also this comment], but I have nothing but total contempt for the wretched buffoon Graham.

A mob of deranged ululating blood-lusting head-hackers slaughter Norwegian female aid-workers and Nepalese guards — and we’re the ones with the problem? …

Lindsey Graham is unfit for office. The good news is there’s no need for the excitable lads of Mazar e-Sharif to chop his head off because he’s already walking around with nothing up there. …

We are expending blood and treasure building an Afghanistan fit only for pederasts, tribal heroin cartels, and the blood-soaked savages of Mazar e-Sharif. … We are sending the message that the bedrock principles of free, pluralist societies will bend and crumble in a vain race to keep up with the ever touchier sensitivities of the perpetually aggrieved. … The real “racists” here are not this no-name pastor and his minimal flock but Reid, Graham, and the Times — for they assume that a significant proportion of Muslims are not responsible human beings but animals … If that is true [and it obviously is – JB], certain consequences follow therefrom. The abandonment of the First Amendment is not one of them. …

A society led by such “men” [as Lindsey Graham] cannot survive, and does not deserve to.

At the request of our valued reader and  frequent commenter Frank, we have written this article on foreign aid and what would happen if it were stopped. He was prompted to think about it when he watched a news video reporting that in this time of recession and severe unemployment, hundred of millions of US taxpayer dollars are being sent abroad for the refurbishment of mosques in Islamic countries, many of which are known to incite terrorist attacks on US targets.

(Note: Requests are welcome, though we can’t promise always to grant them.)

*

“Foreign aid is the transfer of money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.”

There’s disagreement on who first said that, but it doesn’t matter. The question is: is it true?

The first part is not entirely untrue: among the tax–payers whose money goes to foreign aid are many who are poor, or at least not rich, by their own country’s standards.

The second part is almost entirely true. Foreign aid is paid by the donor states to the governments of the recipient states, and very little of it goes any further. The dictators, the kleptocrats, the oligarchs, the once-elected-always-in “democratic” panjandrums, the tribal chiefs who rule weaker tribes by tradition or conquest, pocket the lion’s share of the incoming largesse, distribute some of it to their kinsfolk, chums, influential supporters and selected rivals, and only then, if there’s anything left – which would likely be by oversight for which someone gets fired or shot – it’s flung from the balcony of power, in a little glittering shower, down upon the ravenous masses who scrabble for it in the dust.

Our own sort of government is not like that. Ours is accountable to us, at least in theory. The present government of the US has acted on a different understanding, but even the worst members of the Obama administration cannot – as far as we know – be accused of the venality of, say, African dictators, or even the routine corruption that characterizes the unelected leaders of the European Union.

Now what may be virtuous in an individual can be a fault in government, and vice versa. You, sir/madam, may not kill, but governments must in war. You may not demand money with menaces, but governments must when they tax you. You may not hold someone against their will, but governments must imprison convicts. You may give away your money, but a government is a trustee of others’ money and should spend it only for the benefit of those who earned it. Generosity is a virtue in a person, a vice in a government.

Those who want a government to be a wellspring of cash to pay for all their personal needs, vote for socialism. A socialist government is extortionist, the idea being that those who earn money should be forced to hand it over for the benefit of everybody else. A central agency – which can only be government as it’s the only institution with the legal power of compulsion – must gather it in and deal it out again “fairly”.  Some toil, and all hold their hands out. The system is not just, though it’s devotees call it “social justice”.

Socialists think of an economy as a pie, of which everyone should get an equal slice. They assume there is a fixed amount of wealth in the land, established once and for all long ago by divine grant, so if some are richer than others they must have become so by theft. A few are rich – they imagine – because the many are poor: the many are poor because a few are rich. They cannot grasp, or will not learn, that wealth is created, and where it is created some become rich and many become richer. (A fine example is the “second industrial revolution” that began to the world’s wonder and glory in Silicon Valley about half a century ago. Apple orchards gave way to Apple computers – to sum it up – and where there had been hundreds of poor field workers there are now millions of prosperous industrial workers, and the persons who were free to invest their own money, time, innovative ability as they chose, not only became rich themselves, but have also benefited hundreds of millions of people all over the world. That’s what capitalism and the free market – so dreaded and hated by socialists – can do.)

Foreign aid is a socialist idea. It is redistribution of the “world’s wealth”. That pie idea again, writ very large. Equal slices. A fixed amount that needs to be distributed “fairly”.  (Ideally, to the true believers, by a world government.) Those who advocate it get a warm glowing feeling inside. Puffed up with moral pride, they simply know they are virtuous. They hold compassion to be the highest value, and bestow their compassion, by means of other people’s money, liberally on the wretched of the earth.

But have they actually done any good?

They claim to have “helped” poor countries by bringing plenty where there was  scarcity. The more realistic among them, not entirely persuaded by the pie theory of wealth, see the free grants of cash from the First World as seed money with which  to grow profitable projects that will make many an economic desert bloom.

Has the looked-for transformation ever come about? Has US aid – for instance – ever actually promoted economic success anywhere?

Well, yes. Once. Maybe. European economic recovery after the devastation of World War Two was probably boosted by the aid it received through the Marshall Plan. About $13 billion was distributed in varying amounts to the west European states, including Italy and  Germany  (and even neutral Sweden but not Spain), Britain getting the most. It’s  impossible to know whether Europe would have recovered as well, less well, or better without it. It was given, it was used (much of it to buy goods from the United States), and Europe did recover and prosper, so you could say that the aid wasn’t wasted.

But can as much be said for other hand-outs to foreign lands? If you hunt about you may light upon a successful outcome from a grant being well used here and there on our big round globe. But in general the answer is no. Aid has not proved a successful means to help poor peoples to thrive. And that isn’t all of the bad news. The rest of the story is worse. For the most part aid is squandered.  Worse still, it has often had the effect of making poor countries poorer – a point to which we shall return. And arguably worst of all, it sometimes goes to strengthen the aid-giver’s active enemies. (See our post, Aiding our enemies , March 14, 2011.)

The  redistribution enthusiasts explain, in the patient tones of saints, that the waste of what is given and the hatred directed at the giver are the direct results of the rich countries not giving enough (see for example here, here, and here). They complain that no developed country in the Western world budgets even as much as the .7% of its GDP that they promised once upon a time at some international forum, some field of the cloth of gold. The richest country in the world, the USA, allots barely .2%, and the saints who want to be generous with Americans’ money feel that the US government should hang its head in shame for being so miserly.

But if the money is squandered, what justification is there for giving any at all? If it doesn’t improve living standards, does it at least secure a strategic advantage, a port or an air base? Ensure an ally where one might be needed? Engage a supportive voice in the United Nations? Yes, sometimes, for a while, if nothing comes along to put a strain on the agreement.

Does it matter if the aid money does no good for the recipient and possibly endangers the giver? Conservative governments seem to have answered this question cynically, along such lines as: “Even if a few millions bestowed on this or that Havenotistan is spent on a gold bed for the tyrant’s wife, or a fleet of Mercedes that cannot be moved from the airport where they were landed because no one knew to put oil in them before trying to drive them away (both actual examples), the amounts are too small to fuss about … chump change … and there may be some sort of  dividend coming out of it one sunny day.”

What if consumer goods are sent rather than money? Food, say? Doesn’t that reach the people who need it? Not often. It gets diverted –  to  cartels, army top brass, transport operators, profiteers in influential positions, who will sell what they don’t keep for themselves at inflated prices when famine gets severe enough. For instance, in Somalia, after such slavering packs of wolves have chewed off  their share  –  al-Qaeda linked terrorists among them in that benighted land –  only half the food sent as aid is “distributed to the needy population”. (See our  post,, Out of Africa always something familiar, March 11, 2010.)

But, it might be objected, not all recipients are unpredictable despotisms. The biggest beneficiary of US foreign aid is Israel – $3 billion per annum. Any complaint about that?

Yes. From Israel – because of the strings attached. Israel has to use some of the money to buy American military aircraft and weapons – not the ones it wants, but the sort Israelis say they can make better themselves. Some also say they don’t really need the aid at all, which amounts to under 1% of Israel’s total GDP, but are not allowed to refuse it because tens of thousands of American jobs depend on the Israeli munitions market. If this is true, Israel is not a beneficiary but a victim of aid!

From America’s point of view, however, that’s surely one lump of aid worth giving. Or is it? The economist Peter Bauer, who was Prime Minister Thatcher’s special adviser on foreign aid, pointed out that such an arrangement as that is analogous to your local store owner giving you cash on condition that you spend some of it buying his merchandise.

But let’s return to our assertion that aid often has the effect of making poor countries poorer. Here’s a quotation from an article by Matthew Rees in the Wall Street Journal [first quoted in our post, How to spread poverty, April 4, 2009]:

Dambisa Moyo, a native of Zambia and a former World Bank consultant, believes that it is time to stop proceeding as if foreign aid does the good that it is supposed to do. …  Aid, she writes, is “no longer part of the potential solution, it’s part of the problem – in fact, aid is the problem.” … Ms. Moyo spells out how attempts to help Africa actually hurt it. The aid money pouring into Africa, she says, underwrites brutal and corrupt regimes; it stifles investment; and it leads to higher rates of poverty – all of which, in turn, creates a demand for yet more aid. Africa, Ms. Moyo notes, seems hopelessly trapped in this spiral, and she wants to see it break free. Over the past 30 years, she says, the most aid-dependent countries in Africa have experienced economic contraction averaging 0.2% a year.

In the light of that dismal fact, foreign aid is plainly a bad idea and it should be stopped.

What would happen if it were?

It’s more than likely that the redistribution saints would wax very wrathful indeed. It would soon become plain that their motive was never so much – or at all? – the betterment of life for the hungry masses in poor countries. They, or many of them, have a higher goal in mind: global redistribution of what they call “resources” – meaning the wealth created in and by the capitalist First World.

Matthew Rees explains in his Wall Street Journal article:

The report blends the socialist and Islamic economic perspectives as an alternative to our present capitalistic system.  It has four basic themes.  Western-style free market capitalism is the villain. Redistributive justice is mandatory. New global governance authorities are required. Global taxes are also needed.

The only institution that the UN experts believe has broad enough political legitimacy to serve as the global decision making forum and eliminate the abuses of free market capitalism is, unsurprisingly, the body that gave them the platform to air their views on a global stage in the first place – the United Nations.

Since the United States is usually asked by the UN to put up at least 20% of whatever money it is raising, that would mean U.S. taxpayers would be expected to fork over $200 billion extra over the next two years.

Would we at least be able to impose some reasonable conditions on the massive grants and loans for development and other support (or “conditionalities” as the Commission of Experts calls them)?  The UN experts say absolutely not!

After all, it would be politically incorrect to expect each recipient of our taxpayers’ money to actually have to demonstrate that the money won’t end up in a corrupt dictator’s Swiss bank account because, according to the UN experts’ circular reasoning, such “conditionalities” would “disadvantage developing countries relative to the developed, and undermine incentives for developing countries to seek support funding…

Our sovereignty as a self-governing people to regulate our own economy must give way to global government for the sake of “the broad interest of the international community”.

The bid failed. But the saints never give up. They had another go by claiming that the planet could only be saved from man-made global warming by world government, which would oversee the redistribution of the developed world’s “resources”.

That would be the killing of the goose that lays the golden eggs. There would soon be no more “resources” to redistribute. No one would be rich (except themselves), but there’d be that equality of misery everywhere on earth which, to the socialist conscience, is the non plus ultra of moral good.

We must not let it happen. Our verdict is that if foreign aid were stopped, everyone would benefit, the nations that give and the nations that receive. So what we need now – to save not only ourselves who are thriving on capitalism, but the rest of the world too – are tightfisted governments. America must elect a miser-government, the stingiest ever, refusing so much as a crumb in aid to another country. Then the wretched of the earth can imitate our ways, and prosper.

Jillian Becker   March 21, 2011

Believers in God speak of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, hurricanes and other such natural events as “acts of God”. Funny thing is, they still maintain that their God is good, the very essence of Goodness. Plainly enough to us, if there were a God killing people, ruining their lives, wrecking their homes, dooming them to hunger, cold, loss, and sickness in Japan right now by earthquake and tsunami, he would be an evil power.

For us who do not believe in divine control of the universe, what is happening in Japan is not a moral evil but a natural disaster. Nature is not a thinking thing. It has no moral responsibility. There is no point in criticizing it. Being  good and bad has to do with moral decisions, which are human and only human. What human beings do must be judged, not what nature does.

It is for this reason that we say the cold-blooded murder of five people in Samaria, the victims of human viciousness, needs our thought more than does the plight of tens of thousands of earthquake and tsunami victims in Japan, regardless of how much our emotions may be moved by one or the other.

Udi Fogel, 36, his wife Ruth, 35, and their children Yoav, 11, Elad, 4 and Hadas, 3 months were all stabbed to death in the early hours of Saturday March 12.

Can there be any reasonable doubt that the killings were carried out by a Palestinian or more than one Palestinian?

The Palestinian Authority (PA) is ostensibly the keeper of law and order on the “West Bank” which includes Samaria. The PA, which is Fatah in a suit, has received billions of US tax-payers’ money – at least $500 million per annum. Its  law enforcers are equipped and trained by the US. And where else does the money go? To raise generations hating Israelis and all Jews, teaching that the killing of Jews is a high moral duty, and to attain the “martyrdom” of suicide while doing so is the highest of moral achievements. That is what the US tax-payer is subsidizing.

From RedState:

For years, the left wing foreign policy establishment has rapturously promoted the ‘Palestinians’ as the cause célèbre of our national security interests. Despite their unyielding commitment to terror, these supercilious ‘wizards of smart’ have credulously identified the creation of a ‘Palestinian’ state as the consummate solution to all geo-political problems. They posit that upon creation of a 22nd Arab state and 2nd Palestinian state (the first being Jordon), the culture of terror would cease and we would all experience peace in our time. …

To that end, congress has been cajoled into authorizing billions of dollars in foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority (PA). In addition, we have equipped and trained their armed forces with the best our military has to offer. This travesty is justified as integral to strengthening the “Palestinian people” and the “moderate PA leadership” in their alleged battle against the “extremist” Hamas. Those of us with more than a superficial understanding of the Middle East and Islamo-fascism, have always known the PA to be indistinguishable from Hamas. After all, the PA, otherwise known as the Fatah, was the catalyst in terror under the leadership of Yasser Arafat long before Hamas arrived on the scene.

The barbaric massacre of a family of five … should dispel the fallacy of the moderate Palestinian even in the eyes of their fatuous promoters. Here are the sickening details of the massacre:

Between 22:20 and 22:30 the terrorists entered the house through the living room picture window, did not notice the 6-year-old boy sleeping on the couch and continued on to the bedroom where they slashed the throats of the father and newborn [three months old] baby who were sleeping there. The mother came out of the bathroom and was stabbed on its threshold. The evidence shows that she tried to fight the terrorists.

They then slashed the throat of the 11-year old-son who was reading in bed. They did not notice the 2-year old asleep in his bed, but murdered the 3-year old with two stabs to his heart. After that, they locked the door, exited through the window and escaped.

So who committed this atrocity, Hamas? Nope. They always blithely claim responsibility for such attacks, yet have been silent in this instance. …

After the “Imad Mughniyeh” cell [of Fatah’s al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade] assumed responsibility for the attack on Saturday, the organization released a statement saying that killing children is not part of their ideological views.

And there are those who will believe that lie, so the subventions from the US will continue without President Obama or Secretary of State Hillary Clinton having a moment’s uneasiness of conscience – if either of them even possesses such a moral faculty, which we seriously doubt.

We are opposed to all forms and uses of collectivism, including collective bargaining. We are against trade unions as such, and most emphatically against unions of public employees.

Matthew Vadum is of the same opinion, as he explains in this article at Front Page:

Bloated, rapacious, violent public employee unions indifferent to the suffering and social decay to which they contribute have been eating Wisconsin and other states alive for decades.

They’re not giving up their elite status without a massive fight and they don’t care if they take the whole nation down with them into the abyss. …

The backlash against … the unions’ legalized thuggery continues to build. Wisconsinites want their elected officials to balance the books, but the spendthrift unions won’t allow that to happen. Outraged that they may finally be held to account for their many abuses, participants in the labor movement are … using the seductive language of rights to defend the fat cat government worker unions.

Of course, rights have nothing to do with this …

[But] this rhetoric, which masks the fact that these rights are actually privileges, has served the grasping racketeers of organized labor well over the years, even though it is predicated on a fraud.

That fraud is known as group “rights.” It is the idea that when a group of people get together they somehow magically gain rights that supersede the rights they hold as individuals. It is a lethal, misanthropic fallacy that negates the very spirit of 1776.

Contrary to the fairy tales told by leftist professors, the idea of group rights was antithetical to the Enlightenment-era thinking of the Framers. They understood that a collective right is not a right at all … They would never have wanted to extinguish the right of individual workers to walk away from union-negotiated contracts. The Constitution mandated the most exquisite protection of individual rights and treated the right to enter into a contract, in particular, as sacrosanct. …

But this all-American reverence for individual rights gave way to pressure over time. As organized labor became increasingly violent and troublesome, eventually, lawmakers grew weary of the unrest fomented by radical agitators. Worn-down, shell-shocked politicians purchased so-called labor peace by selling out the U.S. Constitution. How exactly did they betray it? They ignored the fact that America’s great national charter protects the right of individuals to freely associate with others. At the same time, it does not protect any purported group rights. …

Legislatures across the country have also gone out of their way to exempt labor unions from antitrust laws, which is one of the reasons they run wild today. It was a mistake, and it was compounded exponentially when policymakers decided to let government employees form unions, since public employee unions can never serve the public interest. … Government workers … merely negotiate for more tax money. When government unions strike, they strike against taxpayers.

Public employee unions, which are always willing to collude with politicians against the common good, inexorably lead the jurisdictions they infest to fiscal ruin and discontent. Look across America. Look at strike-crazed Europe where socialism has never secured labor peace. …

A community organizer and labor agitator is in the White House sending DNC-approved goon squads to Wisconsin to reinforce the dirty hippies and labor activists threatening Republican lawmakers with violence. …

The labor movement is in complete and utter denial, unable to see the freight train of fiscal reality barreling down the tracks toward it, and there’s something really beautiful about that. …

The great Thomas Sowell writes at Townhall on the same subject, and makes the same case:

The most fundamental fact about labor unions is that they do not create any wealth. They are one of a growing number of institutions which specialize in siphoning off wealth created by others, whether those others are businesses or the taxpayers.

There are limits to how long unions can siphon off money from businesses, without facing serious economic repercussions. …

Higher wage rates led coal companies to replace many miners with machines.

The net result was a huge decline in employment in the coal mining industry, leaving many mining towns virtually ghost towns by the 1960s. …

Similar things happened in the unionized steel industry and in the unionized automobile industry. At one time, U.S. Steel was the largest steel producer in the world and General Motors the largest automobile manufacturer. No more. Their unions were riding high in their heyday, but they too discovered that there is no free lunch, as their members lost jobs by the hundreds of thousands.

Workers have … over the years, increasingly voted against being represented by unions in secret ballot elections.

One set of workers, however, remained largely immune to such repercussions. These are government workers represented by public sector unions.

While oil could replace coal, while U.S. Steel dropped from number one in the world to number ten, and Toyota could replace General Motors as the world’s leading producer of cars, government is a monopoly. Nobody is likely to replace the federal or state bureaucracies, no matter how much money the unions drain from the taxpayers.

That is why government unions continue to thrive while private sector unions decline. Taxpayers provide their free lunch.

In an article in the Telegraph, Niles Gardiner reveals that the (undemocratic, left-leaning) European Union is actively interfering in US affairs. It is shelling out taxpayers’  money to groups in America that oppose the death penalty.

Here is a large part of what he writes:

Why on earth are British taxpayers being forced to fund European Union lobbying for policy campaigns in the United States? Furthermore, why is the EU directly interfering in domestic political debates in America, and so far without Congressional oversight? As the research detailed below demonstrates, the EU’s European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR) is spending millions of Euros on US-based campaigns against the death penalty. An extraordinary development. …

This extremely unusual funding for US groups – by a taxpayer-funded foreign entity to advance a political cause – deserves to attract a great deal of public attention, including Congressional scrutiny in Washington and parliamentary scrutiny in London. …

Here is a list of US recipients of EU EIDHR aid in 2009, which amounted to €2,624,395 ($3,643,951). The recipients of EU aid include the rather wealthy American Bar Association, whose annual budget approached $150 million in 2008.

American Bar Association Fund for Justice and Education: EU grant: €708,162 ($983, 277)

Project: The Death Penalty Assessments Project: Toward a Nationwide Moratorium on Executions

Death Penalty Information Center: EU grant: €193,443 ($268,585)

Project: Changing the Course of the Death Penalty Debate. A proposal for public opinion research, message development, and communications of capital punishment in the US.

The National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty: EU grant: €305,974 ($424,829)

Project: National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty Intensive Assistance Program

Reprieve LBG: EU grant: €526,816 ($731,591) (some of these funds also went to “European countries”) Project: Engaging Europe in the fight for US abolition

Murder Victim’s Families for Human Rights Non-Profit Corporation: EU grant: €495,000 ($686,608) (some of these funds also went to other countries, including Japan and Taiwan). Project: Voices of Victims Against the Death Penalty

Witness to Innocence Protection: EU grant: €395,000 ($548,538)

Project: American DREAM Campaign [Note that this is a far left project – JB.]

MPs reading this should be asking questions why British taxpayers’ money is being used by the European Union to fund campaigns against the death penalty in the United States, without the consent of the British people. (Not least when 51 per cent of the British public support the reintroduction of capital punishment for murder, with just 37 per cent opposing it, in a recent YouGov poll.)

This is also an extraordinary intervention in a highly charged, intensely political domestic debate in the United States over the death penalty, the use of which has been ruled Constitutional by the US Supreme Court on several occasions, and is backed by 64 percent of Americans according to Gallup, with just 29 percent opposing. Can you imagine the outcry in Brussels if the US government funded policy groups in the EU, and the charges of “American imperialism” that would inevitably follow?

It is bad enough that Brussels consistently interferes with the internal affairs of EU member states, but it is surely a bridge too far when it tries to intervene in the affairs of one of the world’s greatest democracies that isn’t even part of the EU. This is hugely insulting to the US. …

Evidently, unelected bureaucrats sitting in the European Commission feel they have a divine right to lecture the United States and its citizens on how they should decide their own policies. This demonstrates a fundamental lack of respect for US national sovereignty, and a sneering condescension towards the American people. But perhaps this should come as no surprise. A supranational entity like the EU that has no respect for the democratic rights of hundreds of millions of Europeans can barely be expected to respect freedom and democracy outside its own borders.

The interference is wrong, and the cause is wrong.

We are for the death penalty.

To remove the death penalty is to permit murder.

The strange inclination some have to pity a murderer facing execution more than his or her victim is the sheerest sentimentality.

Some argue that mistakes can be made, and if someone is executed and later proved not guilty of the crime, there can be no redress. This implies that there can never be certainty; but there can be and there should be, and the law allows for ample (it could be argued too much) opportunity for arriving at it.

Some say the death penalty is not a deterrent. Sociologists and others of that kidney have toiled to show statistically that states with the death penalty have higher rates of murder than states without it. What the statistics cannot show is how many more murders there would have been in the death-penalty states if they did not have it.

We apply a simpler test of the efficacy of the death sentence as a deterrent: does it deter us? And our answer is yes: we’re absolutely sure that it would deter us if ever we thought of killing (and we can’t say the thought has never crossed our mind).

The only argument against it we think has some merit is that a lifetime in prison may be worse for a murderer to endure than execution. But it doesn’t persuade us. Prison these days – for those who don’t feel the lack of freedom to be the worst thing about it – is not unpleasant. Nowhere near dreadful enough to be fitting punishment for murder.

We would also favor the death penalty for treason, a crime that seems to have been removed from the book.

Justice is the prime responsibility of everyone all the time. It may be hard, even impossible, to achieve perfectly. But it has to be attempted constantly, unremittingly. It is what the law is for. Without law and the hope of  justice there is no civilization.

Be judgmental. Without personal judgment there is no morality.

From RedState:

From 2008 to 2009, Planned Parenthood received $363 million in government grants and contracts — our tax dollars. …

New footage released just this morning shows a Planned Parenthood manager in New Jersey coaching a man and a woman posing as sex traffickers on how to secure secret abortions and other services for their female underage sex slaves.

The Planned Parenthood manager explains to the “pimp” how to make their operation “look as legit as possible” and how to lie to avoid mandatory reporting laws.

Watch it all through. The worst comes towards the end.