The Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas score a victory, with only a US general being fired.

Here in part is the story as told and commented on by Diana West:

One day, William G. “Jerry” Boykin, a highly decorated retired Army general and ordained minister, and a founding member and leader of Delta Force, was scheduled to speak at a West Point prayer breakfast.

We find the thought of a prayer breakfast unpalatable, but that’s straying from the topic.

The next day, following a campaign to stop Boykin’s appearance by what the New York Times describes as “liberal veterans’ groups, civil liberties advocates and Muslim organizations,” Boykin was not scheduled to speak at West Point. “In fulfilling its commitment to the community,” West Point announced, “the U.S. Military Academy will feature another speaker for the event.” …

You can bet your last bullet the replacement speaker will not have identified, studied and himself experienced jihad – in military terms, the enemy threat doctrine – as Lt. Gen. Boykin has. This makes Boykin’s abrupt cancellation an information-war victory for the Muslim Brotherhood something few in Washington or West Point will even notice.

Muslim Brotherhood? Isn’t that in Egypt? How does the Muslim Brotherhood figure into a story about West Point?

Prominent in the stop-Boykin coalition is the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), known mainly for sound bite-ready spokesmen who present an Islamic point of view on TV. More important is CAIR’s place in the Muslim Brotherhood constellation of front groups as an entity founded by members of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian franchise, the jihad terror group Hamas.

This revelation emerged during the 2008 Holy Land Foundation terror-financing trial in a document authored by the Muslim Brotherhood itself. It attests to the presence in the United States of multiple Muslim Brotherhood front groups, including CAIR, which remains an unindicted co-conspirator in that case. The FBI cut off official contacts with CAIR in 2008.

Such information is documented in “Shariah: The Threat to America,” a book Boykin and I and 17 others, including former CIA director James Woolsey and former Reagan Pentagon official Frank Gaffney, co-authored in 2010. I wouldn’t be surprised if the book played some animating role in the Battle over Boykin at West Point, won by CAIR and celebrated in all the best bastions impregnable to fact. …

Some animus toward Boykin may form in reaction to the evangelical brand of Christianity he expresses on faith and war in churches across the country. Back in 2003, following the publication of snippets of these talks, the Pentagon investigated Boykin’s invocations of “Satan” as the enemy, and his attesting to his faith in the Christian “real God” over his enemy’s “idol.”

So in gagging on the prayer breakfast, we weren’t far off topic after all.

However, the outrage here is not Boykin’s Christianity, but a great US military academy’s capitulation to the impudent demands of a terrorist-founded, terrorist-funding, jihad-promoting Islamic organization.

It was the worst mistake in the history of the USA – the election of a dedicated Communist to the presidency. Barack Hussein Obama, well in his forties but still besotted with his adolescent Communist ideology, who associated only with Marxists, Communist revolutionaries and terrorists – and the odd Chicago crook –  was actually elected to the office of president. It’s the stuff of nightmares, but as we all know, and to the wonder and dismay of half the world, it actually happened. America is suffering ever more acutely from the consequences of that amazing error of judgment by tens of millions of voters.

This is from Investor’s Business Daily:

The late [Saul] Alinsky is the father of community organizing and the author of the far-left bible “Rules for Radicals.” …

Obama first learned Alinsky’s rules in the 1980s, when Alinskyite radicals with the Chicago-based Alinsky group Gamaliel Foundation recruited, hired, trained and paid him as a community organizer in South Side Chicago. (Gamaliel’s website expressly states it grew out of the Alinsky movement.)

In 1988, Obama … wrote a chapter for the book “After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois,” in which he lamented organizers’ “lack of power” in implementing change.

Gamaliel board member John McKnight, a hard-core student of Alinsky, penned a letter for Obama to help him get into Harvard Law School.

Just think about the implications of that: a letter from a radical Communist helps to get an applicant into Harvard Law School!

Obama took a break from his Harvard studies to travel to Los Angeles for eight days of intense training at Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation …

In turn, he trained other community organizers in Alinsky agitation tactics.

“Community organizing” means organizing for Communist revolutionary agitation.

Obama also taught Alinsky’s “Power Analysis” methods at the University of Chicago.

During the presidential campaign, Obama hired one of his Gamaliel mentors, Mike Kruglik, to train young campaign workers in Alinsky tactics at “Camp Obama,” a school set up at Obama headquarters in Chicago. The tactics helped Obama capture the youth vote like no other president before him.

Power would no longer be an issue, as Obama infiltrated the highest echelon of the political establishment — the White House — fulfilling Alinsky’s vision of a new “vanguard” of coat-and-tie radicals who “work inside the system” to change the system.

After the election, his other Gamaliel mentor, Jerry Kellman (who hired him and whose identity Obama disguised in his memoir), helped the Obama administration establish Organizing for America, which mobilizes young supporters to agitate for Obama’s legislative agenda using “Rules for Radicals.”

Obama’s favorite rule is No. 13: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it.” You see that in his attacks on “fat cat bankers,” “greedy health insurers” and “millionaires and billionaires.” He also readily applies Alinsky’s fifth rule of “ridiculing” the opposition.

“Obama learned his lesson well,” said [Saul Alinsky’s son] David Alinsky … “I am proud to see that my father’s model for organizing is being applied successfully beyond local community organizing.”

“Beyond local community organizing”. That must be the understatement of all time.

The Greeks’ last stand: abandon the children, feed the pedophiles.

What is happening in Greece as the welfare state collapses perfectly illustrates the logic of politically correct policies – or in one word, socialism.

This is from the MailOnline:

Children are being abandoned on Greece’s streets by their poverty-stricken families who cannot afford to look after them any more.

Youngsters are being dumped by their parents who are struggling to make ends meet in what is fast becoming the most tragic human consequence of the Euro crisis.

Athens’ Ark of the World youth centre said four children, including a newborn baby, had been left on its doorstep in recent months. One mother, it said, ran away after handing over her two-year-old daughter Natasha. Four-year-old Anna was found by a teacher clutching a note that read: “I will not be coming to pick up Anna today because I cannot afford to look after her. Please take good care of her. Sorry.”

And another desperate mother, Maria, was forced to give up her eight-year-old daughter Anastasia after losing her job. She looked for work for more than a year, having to leave her child at home for hours at a time, and lived off food handouts from the local church. She said: “Every night I cry alone at home, but what can I do? It hurt my heart, but I didn’t have a choice.” She now works in a cafe but only make £16 [$25] per day and so cannot afford to take her daughter back.

Centre founder Fr Antonios Papanikolaou [said]: “Over the last year we’ve had hundreds of parents who want to leave their children with us… They say they do not have any money or shelter or food for their kids, so they hope we might be able to provide them with what they need.”

There are, however, some deserving citizens who will go on being supported by the state to the bitter end. While children are left on doorsteps to live or die, their molesters will start getting welfare checks.  

This is by StevenPlaut, from Front Page:

The government of Greece [decided] a few days ago to start funding pedophiles. No, that is not a spoof and not a misprint. … The Greek government has just recognized pedophiles as a population of the “disabled,” entitled under law to governmental disability compensation and added to the country’s welfare roll. The children who are the victims of those pedophiles evidently are not.

Pedophiles are not the only folks being added to the growing lists of those who may enjoy free handouts and disability income from the Greek government. (Notice I did not say benefits “paid for by the Greek taxpayer,” since so much of the Greek national budget is not covered by them these days.) Exhibitionists and kleptomaniacs were also just added to the welfare roll list that already includes pyromaniacs, compulsive gamblers, fetishists and sadomasochists. Under the new Greek “disability” rules and categories, pedophiles will get larger welfare checks than people who have undergone organ transplants. Peeping Toms will enjoy a higher level of support than diabetics.

Now we know – as if we didn’t always know! – for whom the Left’s heart bleeds.

America is confronted with an existential choice. If it can no longer afford both strong defense and social welfare – which seems to be the case ever more compellingly – which will it choose? A strong defense ensures survival. Welfare guarantees decline and fall.

Earlier this month, Obama announced his plan for weakening America.

We quote from an article by Arnold Ahlert at Front Page:

The scope of the divestment is daunting. The additional $500 billion in new spending cuts come on top of the $480 billion this president cut out of the military budget his first three years in office. Neither of these cuts reflect the possibility that an additional $500 billion in possible cuts will kick in next January, under “sequestration.” And since the 2012 budget request already calls for the reduction of 27,000 soldiers and 20,000 Marines over the next four years, it is likely those numbers will increase as well.

Critical technology has also [been targeted and], may get axed as well. The Airborne Laser, a project aimed at destroying enemy missiles soon after they blast off was killed 2010, along with the Future Combat Systems, a program deigned to coordinate mobile forces and unmanned vehicles. The latter was killed with the promise that modernization resources would go directly to the Army and Marines. So far it hasn’t happened, and now it may not. The Navy’s hypersonic electromagnetic rail gun, a project designed to intercept anti-ship missiles–like those that could be aimed at our carriers in a fight with Iran or China–lost funding in 2011. Cutbacks could also include the F-35 fighter plane, despite its radar-evading stealth technology that would allow us to maintain our dominance in the air.

Why? Incredibly, the president claimed “the tide of war is receding.” No doubt that would be news to Iraqis who are enduring large-scale attacks and the possibility of a civil war, due primarily to our premature withdrawal. So too for the Afghans, who must now contemplate the return of the Taliban, with whom the Obama administration has seen fit to negotiate, using Islamic cleric Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi as a “key mediator,” despite [no, because of  – JB] rabid anti-Semitism and his issuance of a fatwa urging the killing of American troops. No doubt Iran, fresh from conducting military exercises in the Strait of Hormuz last week, and further maneuvers near the Afghan coast on Saturday, would be equally surprised. And then there’s the multiple threats the Islamist uprisings, nostalgically referred to as the “Arab Spring,” have the potential to engender as well.

[The] administration [is] projecting military budget outlays of 2.7 percent of GDP by 2021. That number is comparable to our military outlays in the year 1940–one year before America’s fatal flirtation with both isolationism and peace literally blew up in our collective faces at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

As always, this chain saw approach to the military is what every military cutback has been about for progressives: maintaining the inviolability of the welfare state, for which spending is set to hit nearly 11% of GDP by 2020, before the projected $2.6 trillion slated for ObamaCare – a number that will undoubtedly rise – is factored in. Yet this is where that inviolability inevitably leads:

“Entitlements now account for around 65 percent of all federal spending and a record 18 percent of GDP. The three largest entitlements – Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid – eclipsed defense spending in 1976 and have been growing ever since. If future taxes are held at the historical average, these three entitlements will consume all tax revenues by 2052, leaving no money for the government’s primary constitutional obligation: providing for the common defense.”

Yet it is more than just a desire to expand the welfare state that drives this president and his administration. Mr. Obama is a dedicated progressive who cannot hide his disdain for American exceptionalism. The Hoover Institution’s Shelby Steele explains:

“[The American left] seeks to trade the burdens of greatness for the relief of mediocrity. When greatness fades, when a nation contracts to a middling place in the world, then the world in fact no longer knocks on its door… To redeem the nation from its supposed avarice and hubris, the American left effectively makes a virtue of decline  …”

How far is Mr. Obama willing to go in that regard? His administration recently acknowledged that it is pursuing a policy aimed at giving Russia detailed information about the performance of our offensive and defensive missile capabilities. Ostensibly this will be instrumental in breaking the deadlock in missile defense talks with Moscow, in that it will assure the Russians we mean them no harm. Yet section 1227 of the defense law prohibits spending on such a measure, until Congress receives a report on the numerous details involved. Furthermore, the president is required to certify to Congress that Russia will not share the secrets with other nations, or “develop counter-measures” to U.S. defenses. [Trust thine enemy?}

[But] Mr. Obama kicked section 1227 to the curb. In a signing statement, he said he considered the restrictions “non-binding.” …

Are Americans willing to completely abandon this nation’s role as the “last best hope of mankind” for a welfare state that will consume 100 percent of government revenue forty years hence?

For those who can’t work out in theory that the welfare state is unsustainable – to use one of the favorite words of the left  – there is the model of Europe to prove it, as one after another the socialist heavens come crashing down.

We would like to see all entitlements abandoned. Let’s have very low taxes instead, allotting the government enough revenue to maintain an extremely strong defense capability and a reliable justice system so that the only necessary function of government, the defense of the nation’s liberty, is thoroughly fulfilled;  allowing it nothing to squander on frivolous and counter-productive extravagances such as welfare and foreign aid.

We expect this opinion of ours will provoke the usual question: if the government stops being the welfare-provider for the nation, how will those who cannot support themselves survive? The answer: on the munificent charity that those who ask the question will not hesitate to provide.

Has it ever happened before? Is there any historical precedent for it?

A country in a time of war elects as its leader a passionate devotee of the enemy’s cause.

No, surely that’s a plot too far. Strains credulity. Let’s try another approach.

If an elected US leader wanted to further the cause of the international Left: the destruction of America as a free, prosperous, capitalist, powerful, rule-of-law democratic country – what would he do?

Let’s assume he got there – to his leadership position as president of the United States – as a result of a process that had been doggedly pursued by the Left through almost all the years of his life: “the long march through the institutions”, as first proposed in Europe by the New Left revolutionaries.

Plots and conspiracies seldom work but this one did. It succeeded better perhaps than any of the Sixty-Eighters, on either side of the Atlantic, had dared to hope. Slowly but steadily the New Left revolutionaries infiltrated the trade unions, the schools, the universities, the media, local government, and – the crowning triumph in Europe – central government. Those institutions which they couldn’t dominate and turn, they denigrated and demoralized into submission: police forces and the military.

Let’s say that last of all (but who, even among the most imaginative optimists, could have predicted that it would happen in just 40 years since the plot was hatched?) the US presidency, the most powerful position any one person can attain to, fell to the Long Marchers. What would the man do when he found himself on that eminence, with the levers of power in his hands? What steps would he take to realize the objective – the destruction of free, prosperous, capitalist, powerful, rule-of-law democratic America? 

We surmise:

• He would deny that Islam is at war with the West or even a threat to it. He would try to propitiate Iran, and do nothing effective to stop it becoming nuclear armed. He would cultivate close relations with the powers of the Islamic world: Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the Muslim Brotherhood. He would bring Islamic advisers into the White House and every government department. He would do everything he possibly could to weaken Islam’s bette noire, Israel. He would forbid the word “terrorist” to be associated with the word “Islam” by anyone in his administration. In wars he inherited from his predecessor, he would impose severely restrictive rules of engagement on American soldiers, and withdraw them altogether under conditions amounting in effect to American surrender. He would try to prevent military trials of enemy captives, and find pretexts for releasing them.
• He would cut the US defense budget, sell arms to the jihadist powers, concede as much as he could to the Russians to boost their military power.
• He would forbid the testing of new nuclear weapons.
• He would stop research and development of military space technology.
• He would wreck the economy by plunging the country into deep debt, redistributing wealth through high taxation and increased entitlements such as national health care, and stir up class conflict.
• He would hamper business by imposing thousands of regulations on it.
• He would prevent the domestic development of cheap energy, and devote billions of tax-payer’s money to the making of electricity out of moonbeams.
• He would diminish the sovereignty of the nation by implementing United Nations decrees, including limitation on free speech in order to protect Islam from criticism, and prohibiting the private ownership of handguns.
• He would appoint a constellation of czars as his personal advisers to implement his radical policies.
• He would govern by issuing administrative regulations, so imposing his will directly, bypassing Congress.

As we don’t share his aims  – in fact, are appalled by them – we cannot think of all the things he might do to change America into a leftist, Islam-friendly, authoritarian state, but he can.

And he’s doing them.

It is our contention that Christianity brought a thousand years of darkness down on Europe. It extinguished the bright light of classical culture, of which Socratean doubt, the need to examine all ideas critically, was the enlightening principle. Christianity claimed a monopoly of truth, and the  totalitarian-minded Catholic Church did its utmost to suppress dissent by the cruelest means imaginable. So did Protestant churches as far as they could reach. Like Communism and all ideological orthodoxies, Christianity feared open criticism, recognizing that it’s power could not survive argument. The Enlightenment proved that to be the case; a great upwelling of doubt, criticism, exploration and discovery, it loosened the grip of theocratic tyranny, dispersed the darkness of superstition, and let Europe flower again after a long and terrible night. Science flourished once more, achieving an immense extension of knowledge and giving birth to new technologies. The might of the West is rooted in the Greco-Roman culture revived in the Enlightenment, not in a “Judeo-Christian tradition”.

Now darkness is descending again on the West. Islam, a tyranny of the mind as cruel as Christianity and even more intolerant, an ideology from the Dark Ages that forbids criticism and kills critics, is spreading rapidly through Europe and America, zealously assisted by Western governments and passionately defended by the intelligentsia of the political left – which on principle favors ideological conformity and its totalitarian enforcement.

This is from the Stonegate Institute, by Soeren Kern:

The European Union has offered to host the next meeting of the so-called Istanbul Process, an aggressive effort by Muslim countries to make it an international crime to criticize Islam.

The announcement comes less than one month after the United States hosted its own Istanbul Process conference in Washington, DC.

The Istanbul Process – its explicit aim is to enshrine in international law a global ban on all critical scrutiny of Islam and/or Islamic Sharia law – is being spearheaded by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), a bloc of 57 Muslim countries.

Based in Saudi Arabia, the OIC has long pressed the European Union and the United States to impose limits on free speech and expression about Islam.

But the OIC has now redoubled its efforts and is engaged in a determined diplomatic offensive to persuade Western democracies to implement United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC) Resolution 16/18, which calls on all countries to combat “intolerance, negative stereotyping and stigmatization of … religion and belief.” (Analysis of the OIC’s war on free speech can be found here and here.)

Resolution 16/18, which was adopted at HRC headquarters in Geneva in March 2011, is widely viewed as a significant step forward in OIC efforts to advance the international legal concept of defaming Islam.

However, the HRC resolution – as well as the OIC-sponsored Resolution 66/167, which was quietly approved by the 193-member UN General Assembly on December 19, 2011 – remains ineffectual as long as it lacks strong support in the West.

The OIC therefore scored a diplomatic coup when the Obama Administration agreed to host a three-day Istanbul Process conference in Washington, DC on December 12-14, 2011. In doing so, the United States gave the OIC the political legitimacy it has been seeking to globalize its initiative to ban criticism of Islam.

Following the Obama Administration’s lead, the European Union now wants to get in on the action by hosting the next Istanbul Process summit, tentatively scheduled for July 2012.

Up until now, the European Union has kept the OIC initiative at arms-length. But Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, Secretary-General of the OIC, says the EU’s offer to host the meeting represents a “qualitative shift in action against the phenomenon of Islamophobia,” according to the International Islamic News Agency (IINA), the OIC’s official news/propaganda organ.

According to the IINA, “The phenomenon of Islamophobia is found in the West in general, but is growing in European countries in particular and in a manner different than that in the US, which had contributed to drafting Resolution 16/18. The new European position represents the beginning of the shift from their previous reserve over the years over the attempts by the OIC to counter ‘defamation of religions’ in the Human Rights Council and the General Assembly of the United Nations. …

Europe is retreating from the Enlightenment. But not without  protest.

The OIC is especially angry over its inability to silence a growing number of democratically elected politicians in Europe who have voiced concerns over the refusal of Muslim immigrants to integrate into their host countries and the consequent establishment of parallel Islamic societies in many parts of Europe.

According to the IINA, “Ihsanoglu said that the growing role of the extreme right in politics in several European countries has become stronger than the capacity of the Organization [OIC], explaining that the extreme right, who [sic] hates Muslims, became leverage in the hands of politicians. He added that the rise of the extreme right through elections has become an issue that cannot be countered, considering the democratic way in which these extremists reach their positions. He pointed out to the referendum held in Switzerland, as an example, which resulted in suspending the construction of minarets there following a vote by the Swiss people.”

In other words, the OIC is now seeking the support of non-elected bureaucrats at the headquarters of the European Union in Brussels to enact pan-European hate speech legislation to limit by fiat what 500 million European citizens – including democratically elected politicians – can and cannot say about Islam.

To be sure, many individual European countries that lack First Amendment protections like those in the United States have already enacted hate speech laws that effectively serve as proxies for the all-encompassing blasphemy legislation the OIC is seeking to impose on the European Union as a whole.

The author lists a dozen examples of Europeans who have dared to raise their voices to criticize the barbarous ideology of Islam and defend their own culture, only to be prosecuted and punished for it under recently enacted, bad and stupid laws. Among them, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff and Geert Wilders, whose cases we have discussed in our posts: The West on trial (December 16, 2009); Freedom versus Islam (January 20, 2010); Civilization on trial (October 11,2010); An honest confession of hypocrisy (October 23, 2010);The new heresy (January 11, 2011); Darkness descending – again (February 7, 2011); Sharia is the law in Austria (December 25, 2011); Only the gagged may speak freely (December 26/11).

Almost everywhere in Europe now, “speaking the truth about Islam is subject to swift and hefty legal penalties” as the author says.

Why should any religion be exempt from criticism? Religious ideas above all need to be criticized, being the most irrational and the most oppressive. And even more than other religions, Islam needs to be dragged into the sunlight. It is the only intolerant religion of our time –  and it is asking to be protected from intolerance!

Right now, when Islam is intent on conquering the West by all possible means including terrorism, it is especially necessary to be Islamophobic.

Americans must resist the Obama administration’s efforts to help the OIC drive our world back into darkness. At least in the United States – the great product and political embodiment of the Enlightenment – the light of liberty must be kept burning.

As an answer and antidote to St. Paul who spoke on our front page yesterday, here’s Ayn Rand speaking against self-sacrifice, and against loving everybody:

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)

We quote from a column by Judge Andrew Napolitano consisting entirely of questions. It has a strong libertarian theme which we like.

We think most of the questions are good – after the opening paragraph in which he assumes that “our rights come from God” and that we have “immortal souls”.

What if our rights didn’t come from God or from our humanity, but from the government? What if the government really thinks we’re not unique individuals with immortal souls, but just public property?

He offers an alternative to God as the source of “our rights”  in our “humanity”, implying that we have natural rights; in other words, because we exist we have a “right” to exist. In whose eyes? Who will enforce such a right? Our fellow human beings? If that were so there’d be no murder.

We prefer to say “we should be free to …” rather than “we have a right to…”. But we’ll accept that in the context of this article the two statements amount to the same idea: the paramount importance of freedom.

What if we were only entitled to our natural rights if it pleased the government? What if our rights could be stripped away whenever the government considers us to be its enemy?

What if this could all be accomplished with the consent of the people? What if the people’s own representatives subverted the Constitution?

As they do.

What if the people were so afraid that they accepted the subversion?

Accept it they do, whether out of fear or inadvertence or apathy.

What if the government demonizes an external enemy and uses fear of that enemy to suppress our freedoms? What if people are afraid to protest? …

What if threats become imminent dangers precisely because the government allowed them to happen? What if government scapegoating of an external enemy is as old as the government itself? What if the government has used scapegoating again and again to scare people into giving up their freedoms voluntarily? What if the government has relied on this to perform the same magical disappearing-freedom act time and again throughout history?

He doesn’t name a threat (though later he implies it is the Islamic jihad, which we think is real). But isn’t the “imminent danger” that government threatens us with now “climate change”? Isn’t carbon dioxide, the food of all green plants, the “scapegoat”?

What if the government could lock you up and throw you in jail indefinitely? …

What if you were just speaking out against the government and it came to silence you? What if the government could declare you its enemy and then kill you?

As many governments in the ghastly Third World do.  And as they’re doing again in post-Soviet Russia (see here and here for examples).

What if your elected representatives did nothing to stop the government from doing this? …  What if the government’s goal was to be rid of all who disagreed with it?

What if the real war was a war of misinformation? What if the government constructs its own reality in order to suit its own agenda? What if civil liberties don’t mean anything to the government? What if the government just chooses to allow you to exercise them freely because you don’t threaten it at the moment? What if the government released a report calling you a domestic terror threat, just because you disagreed with the government?

As the Obama administration has done.

What if the government coaxed crazy people into acting like terrorists, just to keep you afraid?

Does he think that’s happening in the United States? We don’t think it is.

What if the government persuaded you to believe that the greatest threat to your freedom is an impoverished and uneducated Third World population 10,000 miles away?

If he means Afghans, for instance, we agree with his implication that it is no threat. But Iran, which is not so impoverished or uneducated, is a serious threat.

What if the real threat to your freedom is a rich, powerful and all-seeing government? What if that government thinks it can write any law, regulate any behavior and tax any event no matter what the Constitution says?

As does the present too powerful government of the United States. Though it isn’t rich (governments own no wealth), it robs the citizens. And it’s by no means all-seeing; blinkered, rather, if not blind. (Perhaps he means all-spying.)

What if the government is always the greatest threat to freedom because only the government can constitute a monopoly on the use of force? What if, in fact, at its essence, government is simply a monopoly of force? What if, in fact, at its essence, government is simply the negation of freedom? What if the government monopoly incubated, aided and abetted enemies’ freedoms?

As the Obama administration incubates, aids and abets Islamic violence? (See our post Spreading darkness, November 19, 2011.)

What if, when the danger got more threatening, the government told you to sacrifice more of your liberties for safety? What if you fell for that?

As when nations let their governments provide benefits such as “free” health care, and so gain the power decide who will be treated and who not, who may live and who must die?

What if those who traded liberty for safety ended up in internment camps?

As happened to tens of millions of people who let their countries fall under communism.

What if the greatest threat to freedom was not any outfit of thugs in some cave in a far-off land …

Now he plainly means Afghanistan …

… but an organized force here at home? What if that organized force broke its own laws? What if that organized force did the very same things to those it hates and fears that it prosecutes people for doing to it? What if I’m right and the government’s wrong? What if it’s dangerous to be right when the government is wrong? What if government is essentially wrong and always dangerous?

What if these weren’t just hypothetical or rhetorical questions? What if this is actually happening to us? What if the ultimate target in the government’s war on terror [countering the jihad] is all who believe in personal freedom? What if that includes YOU? What do we do about it?

If government is always essentially wrong and always dangerous, is there anything we can do except recognize that government is a necessary evil, and limit its power as best we can? Isn’t that what the men who wrote the Constitution of the United States recognized and accomplished? Isn’t defending the Constitution the best thing Americans can do to stay free?

Another UN conference  on “climate change” with the ulterior motive of setting up a world government to redistribute wealth from prosperous Western countries to the bank accounts of Third World tyrants is running now in Durban, South Africa.

As we hoped and expected, Lord Christopher Monckton is there, speaking out as he constantly does against this conspiracy:

Mainstream science, politics, bureaucracy, academe, banking, business, media – all were of one mind. The West, so the playbook ran, must be shut down at once to Save The Planet from “global warming”, er, “climate change”, um, “climate disruption”, no, “extreme-weather events”, ah, that is, “energy-security challenges”. …

I find myself … in Durban among the creatures of “consensus” for the annual UN climate gabfest. Yet the party line was wrong. … Every dire prediction that the usual suspects had made with such sneering arrogance has failed.

Just look. Professor “Phil” Jones of the “University” of East Anglia had to admit … that there had been no statistically-significant “global warming” for 15 years. …

Arctic sea ice was supposed to be gone by 2013. Then it rebounded. Then it was going to reach a new low on 15 September this year …. [but] Antarctic sea ice has been on the up throughout the satellite era. Global sea ice shows little trend in 30 years.

Polar bears were supposed to be headed for extinction. … Today there are five times as many polar bears as 70 years ago.

Kilimanjaro has been losing ice since 1880. …  “Global warming” could not have caused the recent ice loss … The summit temperature, monitored by satellites, has not changed. Now the glacier is growing again.

Sea level is the big one. James Hansen of NASA, who made more than $1 million out of the climate scare last year alone, had predicted it would rise imminently by 246 feet. Was he right? No. The increase over the past eight years, according to the Envisat satellite, was at a rate equivalent to 2 inches per century. Not meters, not even feet. Inches. Two of them. Per century. …

Malaria was going to spread because of “global warming.” Yet the terrible leap in mortality from 50,000 to 1 million child deaths a year occurred a generation ago, when the Environmental Defense Fund – which, with Greenpeace and the World Wide Fund, spent $1 billion of taxpayers’ and donors’ cash on anti-Western pseudo-enviro propaganda last year alone – successfully campaigned for a worldwide ban on DDT, the only effective agent against the mosquitoes that carry malaria.

When the Board of the EDF met to plan the DDT ban, its then legal advisor, Victor John Yannacone Jr., begged it to ban only outdoor use: DDT sprayed inside houses would harm only the mosquitoes and spare the children. The then chairman, furious, fired Yannacone on the spot. As he left the room, someone said: “That’s the last time we employ anyone who knows any science.” That ban has killed 40 million children.

Extreme-weather deaths are down sharply. Global tropical-cyclone and hurricane activity is almost at its least in 30 years. Severe tornadoes have declined. Patterns of drought and flood remain as unpredictable and as devastating as ever. Bangladesh and nearly all of the Pacific atolls are gaining land mass, not losing it.

Net primary productivity of trees and plants worldwide is up. If you want a greener planet, add as much CO2 to the air as you can. Your emissions are also helping to stave off the next Ice Age. It’s already 6000 years overdue.

Yet the dreary, wasteful, pointless congresses of the greedy feeble-minded continue. The Bali Road-Map to Nowhere. The Copenhagen World-Government Treaty that collapsed as soon as it saw the light of day. The Cancun Concordats to establish 1000 – yes, 1000 – new bureaucracies: the structure of the unelected world government that every ex-politician from Gore and Chirac to Attali is demanding.

Everyone says nothing will happen at Durban. That worries me. It suggests the process of building a totalitarian global junta by what one UN official at Cancun called “transparent impenetrability” – publishing documents of such prolix length and complex obscurantism that no one can understand a word and yet no one can later deny the information was available – will invisibly gather pace. …

We like “transparent impenetrability”! Could we suspect that the UN official who invented it had a sense of irony?  No – too unlikely.

The Marxists’ wet dream …  is global totalitarian dictatorship. … But the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and I are in Durban to stop them. So perhaps you’re not going to have it after all.

It’s good to know that a Committee and the noble lord are defending us from world totalitarian dictatorship. But it would be better if the United States, which should be and can be and was always meant to be the truly powerful defender of liberty, had a president and administration that would put an end to the UN and a stop to all its evil schemes forever.

The UN must be destroyed.