Arguments for totalitarianism are crowding thick and fast on one another as the Left grows daily more arrogant, and at the same time more afraid that its days in power may be coming to an end.

The latest to reach our ears issue insistently from a Princeton professor, Peter Singer. He has worked himself up, like Michelle Obama, over the shape of other people’s bodies, how much they eat, and what they weigh. Also over manmade global warming. Also over an itch he has to redistribute your money to foreigners.

The aim of people who think like Professor Singer is to set up a global Politburo, consisting of control freaks like him, to keep the rest of us doing what they know is right for … for what or whom? For the planet. Yes. And for … for … whatever. Never mind for what or whom. The point is you must be controlled by those who know better than you what’s best for you. Your betters.

Okay, so maybe you won’t like it. No one is promising you that you’ll like it. Why should you? Stop being so selfish as to believe you have a right to pursue your personal happiness. You must do what you’re told for the Greater Good, for Society, for the human and geographical world as a whole.

This is from Front Page, by Daniel Flyn:

Flyers feeling violated by airport x-ray scanners or TSA pat-downs may find a new proposal just too heavy an intrusion. A professor wants to add scales to airports for carriers to weigh passengers. The pounds on the scale would determine the price of the ticket.

“Is a person’s weight his or her own business?” Peter Singer asks in a Project Syndicate article. “Should we simply become more accepting of diverse body shapes? I don’t think so. Obesity is an ethical issue, because an increase in weight by some imposes costs on others.” The Princeton bioethicist notes that a plane’s load factors into the fuel it consumes.

But some 747s weigh 1,000,000 pounds. Does the 230-pound woman sitting in 11C really make such a big difference?

Singer tacitly admits it doesn’t by shifting the discussion away from the ostensible subject of the piece, fat passengers weighing us down with heavy fuel costs, to eclectic matters more germane to his interests. The bioethicist argues that the increased fuels burned to propel large people to their destinations emit a spare tire of greenhouse gases around the earth, which contributes to global warming. He further justifies elephantine ticket prices for rotund travelers by noting the corpulent health-care costs of obesity. Singer reasons, “These facts are enough to justify public policies that discourage weight gain.”

The unfocused reasoning is a staple of the Australian’s argumentation. He finds no “ethical distinction between a Brazilian who sells a homeless child to organ peddlers and an American who already has a TV and upgrades to a better one” since the money for the better television could have been used to help homeless Brazilian children.

What a reasoner he is! You have to admire the breadth of his vision, his capacity to connect widely separated and apparently disparate events.

He argues for a $30,000 cap on income to pay for life’s necessities but not its luxuries.

Who will decide what is necessary? They will.

Luxuries – ugh! (Remember, for all their talk of tolerance in sexual matters, they are the new puritans.)

He wants to take away the right to bear arms, to smoke tobacco, and even the right to life for babies.

Babies are a luxury?

In Rethinking Life and Death [!], he writes that “in the case of infanticide, it is our culture that has something to learn from others, especially now that we, like them, are in a situation where we must limit family size.”

He hasn’t noticed, or has chosen to ignore the fact that fertility rates are sinking so low that whole nations – Russians, Italians, Spaniards … – are dwindling to extinction.

While he advocates legalizing the murder of newborns, Singer condemns eating hamburgers, imprisoning whales at Sea World, and what he describes as the Auschwitz-like conditions of chicken coops.

Feeling sorry for chickens has been an emotional staple of the anti-human lobby for the last half century or so.

“Many of us are rightly concerned about whether our planet can support a human population that has surpassed seven billion,” Singer concludes in the Project Syndicate piece. “But we should think of the size of the human population not just in terms of numbers, but also in terms of its mass. If we value both sustainable human well-being and our planet’s natural environment, my weight — and yours — is everyone’s business.”

If such a private matter as one’s weight is the public’s business, then the question arises as to what, precisely, remains one’s private business? One’s finances, one’s weight, one’s choice of doctor, one’s plasma-screen television, and even the meat on one’s plate all become the business of Big Brother in Singer’s expansive vision of the state. Singer’s is the logic of totalitarianism. Since any private action can be rationalized as having a public consequence, all becomes the interest of the government. Singer advocates copious limits on private behavior. Where are the checks on the state’s gargantuan appetite?

The enormous arrogance required to force people onto scales as a prerequisite to boarding a flight is a natural consequence of Singer’s philosophy. The Ivy League philosopher is an heir to the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill …

“The greatest happiness of the greatest number” is the phrase used to sum up utilitarianism. But you can’t achieve a compilation of a commodity where there isn’t any of it to compile.

If everyone in the grand scheme is personally unhappy – except of course the members of the Politburo who will have their dachas, their special stores, their limos, their engorged egos – there won’t be a general happiness. But never mind. Thing is, the rest of us will be equally unhappy.

Ah, drab new world that has such monsters in it!

The human species is wrong for this world. Those of us – we special few who bear the heavy knowledge of human inadequacy and who know what is good for the world – might have to come to the conclusion that humankind must be eliminated altogether. But before we take drastic final action to rid the planet of the human plague, we will try our utmost to improve the species: adapt it, trim it, re-shape it physically and mentally; change its habits, its desires, its appetites and ambitions, its needs, its abilities; transform it, using the very minimum of the material it’s made of as a base on which to build what we judge an earth-suitable ratiocinating species should be.

Three members of our panel, Matthew Liao of the University of New York, professor of Philosophy and the young hybrid ecumenical discipline Bioethics [Ecumenical: from Greek oikoumene = the inhabited earth], and Anders Sandberg and Rebecca Roache of Oxford,  have published a paper on how human beings may be experimentally re-engineered in a last-ditch effort to solve the paramount problem of CLIMATE CHANGE.  

Liao gave an interview to the Atlantic – with the consent of the rest of us, we hasten to confirm. The full report of it may be read here.

Greatly excited that we can at last hint at what we, the “Doom Panel” as we  jokingly call ourselves, are contemplating in our closed meetings, we select a few highlights to whet your curiosity.

Some of the proposed modifications are simple and noninvasive. For instance, many people wish to give up meat for ecological reasons, but lack the willpower to do so on their own. The paper suggests that such individuals could take a pill that would trigger mild nausea upon the ingestion of meat, which would then lead to a lasting aversion to meat-eating.

Other techniques are bound to be more controversial. For instance, the paper suggests that parents could make use of genetic engineering or hormone therapy in order to birth smaller, less resource-intensive children.

Here is why we think “human engineering could be the most ethical and effective solution to global climate change”.

Each kilogram of body mass requires a certain amount of food and nutrients and so, other things being equal, the larger person is the more food and energy they are going to soak up over the course of a lifetime. There are also other, less obvious ways in which larger people consume more energy than smaller people – for example a car uses more fuel per mile to carry a heavier person, more fabric is needed to clothe larger people, and heavier people wear out shoes, carpets and furniture at a quicker rate than lighter people, and so on. And so size reduction could be one way to reduce a person’s ecological footprint. For instance if you reduce the average U.S. height by just 15cm, you could reduce body mass by 21% for men and 25% for women, with a corresponding reduction in metabolic rates by some 15% to 18%, because less tissue means lower energy and nutrient needs.

There are “various ways humans could be engineered to be smaller”, Liao explains:

You might try to do it through a technique called preimplantation genetic diagnosis, which is already used in IVF settings in fertility clinics today. In this scenario you’d be looking to select which embryos to implant based on height.

Another way to affect height is to use a hormone treatment to trigger the closing of the epiphyseal plate earlier than normal …  In fact hormone treatments are already used for height reduction in overly tall children.

A final way you could do this is by way of gene imprinting, by influencing the competition between maternal and paternal genes, where there is a height disparity between the mother and father. You could have drugs that reduce or increase the expression of paternal or maternal genes in order to affect birth height. …

The paper “also [discusses] the pharmacological enhancement of empathy and altruism, because empathy and altruism tend to be highly correlated with positive attitudes toward the environment”.

(What is most wanted is empathy with and altruism towards the earth, don’t forget. Always remember it is the earth that matters, not the people on it.)

What we have in mind has more to do with weakness of will. For example, I might know that I ought to send a check to Oxfam, but because of a weakness of will I might never write that check. But if we increase my empathetic capacities with drugs, then maybe I might overcome my weakness of will and write that check.

In giving this example, Liao is putting himself hypothetically on your level. Writing checks for Oxfam is the sort of thing your will should be used for. Leave the greater vision to us.

Some of you are probably mumbling about liberty. We know that you continue to be concerned about that grand old chimera, and we have not ignored your attachment to the idea.

The authors of the paper “suggest that some human engineering solutions may actually be liberty enhancing”:

It’s been suggested that, given the seriousness of climate change, we ought to adopt something like China’s one child policy. There was a group of doctors in Britain who recently advocated a two-child maximum. But at the end of the day those are crude prescriptions – what we really care about is some kind of fixed allocation of greenhouse gas emissions per family. If that’s the case, given certain fixed allocations of greenhouse gas emissions, human engineering could give families the choice between two medium sized children, or three small sized children. From our perspective that would be more liberty enhancing than a policy that says “you can only have one or two children.” A family might want a really good basketball player, and so they could use human engineering to have one really large child.

You could order Child by the pound, you see.

Don’t think of it as an entirely new definition of freedom – notice that you will still have choice: two medium sized children, OR three small sized children, OR one hulking great basketball player.

Embarras de richesses!  

And that’s not the only way the new techniques will be “liberty enhancing”:

Liao: I would return to the weakness of will consideration. If you crave steak, and that craving prevents you from making a decision you otherwise want to make, in some sense your inability to control yourself is a limit on the will, or a limit on your liberty. A meat patch would allow you to truly decide whether you want to have that steak or not, and that could be quite liberty enhancing. …

In any case, liberty is not a major issue. Speaking for the whole panel, Liao stresses –

We believe that mitigating climate change can help a great many people, [so] we see human engineering in this context as an ethical endeavor. 

He also touches on another point, a particularly sensitive one perhaps, that has to be made: the human species is guilty of harming the planet, and must be made to pay for what it has done:

We [humanity as a whole] caused anthropogenic climate change, and so perhaps we ought to bear some of the costs required to address it.

But having said that, we also want to make this attractive to people—we don’t want this to be a zero sum game where it’s just a cost that we have to bear. Many of the solutions we propose might actually be quite desirable to people, PARTICULARLY THE MEAT PATCH. 

Ah, yes. We knew that would entice you. Only have patience, and it will come to you just as soon as we can get it out in sufficient quantities for world-wide distribution. And that depends only on when the US government can raise the necessary taxes.

And maybe – just maybe – if you all give up eating meat, have very few very small children (if you must have any at all), become truly empathetic to the earth, and show willing to sacrifice yourselves for it’s welfare to the extent we tell you is needed, we may allow some of you to continue existing. For a while at least. No guarantees.

We breed at the planet’s peril. They say.

The Daily Caller reports:

During a discussion series … at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., speaker and activist Kavita Ramdas argued that contraceptives should be part of a strategy to save the planet, calling lower birth rates a “common sense” part of a climate-change reduction strategy.

Kavita Ramdas is “executive director of the Program on Social Entrepreneurship at Stanford University”.

“Social Entrepreneurship”. Another pseudo-science to entice kids into dead-end courses at universities?

At the event, titled “Women’s Health: Key to Climate Adaptation Strategies,” Ramdas pointed to studies conducted by health consultants at the for-profit Futures Group, the government-funded National Center for Atmospheric Research and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, in Austria, to connect contraception with climate change.

Ramdas told The Daily Caller that the research shows “empowering women to time their pregnancies” and avoid unwanted births would reduce carbon emissions between 8 to 15 percent globally.

8 to 15 percent? Wonderful what they can calculate, these mathematical geniuses of the global warming lobby!

“It is common sense that when women are able to plan their pregnancies, populations grow more slowly and as a result so do greenhouse gas emissions,” she explained. “Providing access to contraception and preventative health should be one of the many effective strategies used to fight climate change.” …

Global warming activists argue increasing greenhouse gas emissions, partly resulting from unsustainable population growth, is resulting in “environmental devastation” such as frequent severe weather events and rising sea levels.

There it is. Doom. You go and have babies and what happens? Tornados whip up, seas rise, the earth heats, deserts spread.

The United States and other countries with high levels of emissions, Ramdas [said], have the potential to make the biggest impact by making contraception more accessible.

So it’s not the ignorant Third World that’s breeding too much; its the First World, and in particular the USA.

She said every child in America absorbs, on average, 40 percent more of the earth’s resources than children in other countries.

Greedy little imperialist pigs!

Ramdas isn’t the first activist to suggest a connection between global warming and birth rates.

At a January “Climate Change, Population and Sustainability” event organized by Aspen Global Health and Development, International Planned Parenthood Federation regional director Carmen Barroso said limiting population growth may reduce carbon emissions significantly. …

“It’s about the facts,” said Barroso. … “Recent research shows that meeting this need, and thereby slowing population growth, could reduce carbon emissions by 16 to 29 percent of the emission reductions necessary to avoid dangerous climate change.”

16 to 29 percent now, not 8 to 15? Or is it just fluffy math?

The anti-human ethos is not without its critics in the profession:

Myron Ebell, director of the Center for Energy and Environment, said the “population issue” has been underneath the surface of the global warming debate since it began. Activists’ solution to that particular problem, he explained, has always been to decrease the human population somehow.

“It is the case that less people [fewer people, please Myron – JB] means less carbon emissions [emission],” Ebell told TheDC. [About grammar none of them gives a damn.] “But we fundamentally disagree with the effect that it is having on the planet. We believe that people are an asset, not a burden, to the world.”

To the world? What world is there to be benefited or harmed if there are no people?

Kavita Ramdas confesses that her big concern is not after all the saving of the earth but the prevention of births as a cause in itself.

In her address … Ramdas said there was a growing global consensus about putting “population development and women’s rights” in the same argument. [She]  later told The Daily Caller, however, that her contraception advocacy isn’t about population control, but rather supporting a woman’s right to decide when to get pregnant. The two causes, she insisted, just happened to complement one another.

And besides, if you say you’re working on population/carbon control, you get the big bucks.

President Obama is an anti-birth enthusiast:

The president’s proposed 2013 budget, which calls for $296.8 million in funding for the Title X Family Planning Progress, $104.8 million for the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program and $530 million for USAID family planning and reproductive health programs.

And of course wherever there’s interference in private lives, a plan to redistribute your property, accusation that you’re guilty because you’re a prosperous Westerner (extra so if you’re American), you can be certain the United Nations is involved.

The United Nations Population Fund would also receive $39 million, a $4 million increase over 2011 funding. It supports family planning, population development and climate change mitigation work, among other causes.

A publication by the U.N. agency called “Population Dynamics and Climate Change” argues that “the lack of consideration of population dynamics hampers the development of stronger, more effective solutions to the challenges climate change poses.”

In other words: people are bad for the earth.

The UN’s number two obsession (after the need to excoriate Israel) is to save the earth from people. That’s where the two causes – climate control and population control – connect.

So let fewer babies be born. Eventually, with enough US funding, perhaps none at all. Free of the burden of raising the next generation, existing adult populations will age delightfully and live longer. Until the last generation, coming quite soon.

But … wait a moment. Who will work to support the carefree life of the old?

In Russia, in Japan, in Italy, Portugal and Spain, and many another country where the professors’ writ runs, the population is just about halving with each generation.

A world without children is a dying world.

Once cleansed of people, it may become a “healthy” planet spinning round the sun, but who will know it?

In its February issue, the Journal of Medical Ethics published an article titled: After-birth abortion: why should the baby live? by Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva.

Glenn Beck’s newscast The Blaze reports:

Alberto Giubilini with Monash University in Melbourne and Francesca Minerva at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne write that in “circumstances occur[ing] after birth such that they would have justified abortion, what we call after-birth abortion should be permissible.”

The two are quick to note that they prefer the term “after-birth abortion“ as opposed to ”infanticide.” Why? Because it “[emphasizes] that the moral status of the individual killed is comparable with that of a fetus (on which ‘abortions’ in the traditional sense are performed) rather than to that of a child.” The authors also do not agree with the term euthanasia for this practice as the best interest of the person who would be killed is not necessarily the primary reason his or her life is being terminated. In other words, it may be in the parents’ best interest to terminate the life, not the newborn’s.

The circumstances, the authors state, where after-birth abortion should be considered acceptable include instances where the newborn would be putting the well-being of the family at risk, even if it had the potential for an “acceptable” life. The authors cite Downs Syndrome as an example, stating that while the quality of life of individuals with Downs is often reported as happy, “such children might be an unbearable burden on the family and on society as a whole, when the state economically provides for their care.”

The editor of the Journal of Medical Ethics, Professor Julian Savulescu, said that those who object are “fanatics opposed to the very values of a liberal society”.

Regardless of your views on abortion – a subject that even atheists cannot, we have found to our dismay, debate rationally – we invite your reasoned arguments for or against the killing of children if their existence is inconvenient for their parents, or a burden on the welfare state.

If you are for it:

Under what age is a child disposable? 1 month, 6 months, 1 year, 3 years, 5 years, 10 years, 15 years? Why that age?

How should the child be killed?

Should a child be killed only if it is abnormal? Should all abnormal children be condemned to death? What degree of abnormality would mark him/her for killing?

Should any child who is a burden or nuisance to its parents be destroyed?

Should the parents alone have the right to decide on the child’s elimination? What if they disagree with each other ?

Since the welfare state supports the lives of the people, would it also be right for the state to kill those it no longer chooses to support? If so, on what grounds would this be justified – age, physical health, deformity, mental health, political activity, political opinion, general non-conformism, unpopularity, any?

At what level of government should such a decision be taken, and should it be taken by a single bureaucrat or a committee?

What method of killing should the state use?

Should the organs of parent- or state-condemned children/citizens be regularly harvested for transplant? Should children/citizens be killed in order that their organs may be harvested?

Would it be acceptable for freshly killed people to be eaten? Should human meat be sold by butchers?

Discussion need not be limited to these questions. Any aspect of the topic may be examined.

*

Afterword (March 9, 2012)

Giubilini and Minerva, the authors of the paper advocating that newborns who are a nuisance to a parent or “society” should be killed, have issued this sort-of apology:

We are really sorry that many people, who do not share the background of the intended audience for this article, felt offended, outraged, or even threatened. We apologise to them, but we could not control how the message was promulgated across the internet and then conveyed by the media. In fact, we personally do not agree with much of what the media suggest we think.

Their suggestion is that reaction to what they wrote is merely emotional: “people … felt offended, outraged, or even threatened”. Such people, they imply, are not capable of the superior detached ratiocination that they themselves and their “intended audience” bring to ethical questions. Yet it is they who did not think out objectively the results of their recommendation if it were to be enacted in law. And what they meant was perfectly clear and not distorted by the media.

Check out the whole article on their weasel-worded apology here.

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

So Daniel Greenfield writes at Front Page.

Here are some more quotations that we like:

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

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

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

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

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

Communism and Christianity are ideologically identical in a fundamental assumption: that ultimate virtue lies in the sacrifice of the individual to the supposed good of the community.

There are other salient resemblances between them, vivid in their histories; most notably a reach for totalitarian control and the punishing of dissent; but what they similarly do, for the Party or for the Church, is always in the name of their similar communitarian ethic.

The United States of America was founded on an opposite fundamental principle: that the individual is of paramount importance; that each should be free to act in his own best interests provided only that he does not impinge on the freedom of his fellow citizen. Those words are not used in the Constitution, but it is what the Constitution is all about, establishing a rule of law to protect individual liberty. That is what the rule of law is for. Where the individual citizen is free to strive lawfully for his own welfare, the nation as a whole flourishes and prospers. That was what was visualized by the founders, and they were proved right. (The paramountcy of individual freedom does not of course preclude necessary co-operation, to keep foreign enemies of the nation at bay with a strong military, or to provide conveniences that large numbers of citizens need in their particular localities such as street lighting, sewerage, transport. Nor does it exclude voluntary philanthropy.)

The United States of America came to embody the ideal of freedom. But the ideal seems to be fading. President Obama is a Communist by upbringing and choice, and has manifestly tried to turn America towards Communism by means of government-enforced wealth redistribution.

The apparent alternative to Obama at this point in the presidential election year is Rick Santorum. The picture at the top of this article suggests that this ardent Catholic stands more than anything else for Communism’s twin ideology, Christianity.

If that is the case, we need to ask: is there no one who will stand for freedom?

Yet again, the UN is conspiring against the world.

Claudia Rosett writes:

The United Nations hasn’t stopped the carnage in Syria, hasn’t stopped Iran’s race for nuclear weapons, and so far hasn’t even managed to produce financial disclosure forms for its top officials that actually disclose anything about their finances. (For instance, here’s the UN “disclosure” form for the head of the UN Environment Program, Achim Steiner.)

Please read the disclosure form. All by itself it provides an insight into everyday practices at the United Nations.

But that’s no bar to the UN proposing to plan the future of the planet. While the headlines focus on upheaval in the Middle East, financial crisis in Europe, an election year politics in the U.S., the UN has been planning its grand summit-level Rio+20 Conference, scheduled for June 20-22 in Brazil. This will mark the 20th anniversary of the Rio Earth Summit, which helped spade the ground for climate hysteria, the Kyoto treaty, and the quack vilification of the world’s most productive economies. This round, the UN plans to make even more “sustainable” the things the UN-ocracy would like to see sustained — paramount among them, the UN itself.

As is the way of such UN confabs, the Rio+20 Conference already has a “Dedicated Secretariat,” headed by China’s Sha Zukang, the UN Under-Secretary-General who made news in 2010 for his drunken rant during a UN retreat at an Austrian ski resort — in which Sha declared he had never liked UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, and he didn’t like Americans either. Also in 2010, Sha served as ceremonial presenter of a “World Harmony Award” to the former Chinese military chief who was operational commander during the 1989 crushing of the Tiananmen Square uprising. 

Now … Ban Ki-Moon, Sha Zukang and another two dozen or more of the UN’s top Rio+20 planners held a closed-door retreat last October, at a Long Island mansion, where they discussed how Rio+20 could help them reshape the world. The proceedings were meant to be secret (apparently, UN top managers prefer that the world not know the details until their world reshaping is already well underway). …

The minutes include the usual mind-numbing welter of UN buzz words: “sustainable…implementing… institutional framework… integration, implementation and coherence…” etc. …

Thanks in substantial part to U.S. tax dollars that subsidize most of its system, the UN has the ability and resources to stage these mega-conferences, whether the U.S. contributes directly or not.

These conferences produce secretariats that become permanent fixtures, and spin off other conferences, commissions, programs — which in turn become frameworks and funders of global lobbying efforts in which an organized few can trample the interests of a disorganized many.

At what cost to humanity does this “sustain” and continually expand the UN, and its ever-swelling ambitions?

As it is, we have a huddle of UN officials — none of them chosen by any process that a normal democracy would recognize as elections — bankrolled in substantial part by U.S. tax dollars, and protected by UN immunities, meeting in luxurious secrecy on Long Island to plan the reshaping of the world.

The UN must be destroyed.

Obama’s 2010 health-care law was a levelling, socialist, collectivist, wealth-redistributing, government-enlarging measure. It was a power-grab, in the name of “compassion” as always –  the pretence by the left that the governing elite has nothing so much at heart as the welfare of the poor. The poor must have free stuff. Everyone must have free stuff so that no one is any different from anyone else – except of course the power-elite (what they called the “nomenclatura” in Soviet Russia).

But stuff does not come free. If some are getting something without paying for it, someone else is giving to them – involuntarily, in the collectivist state. “Free” means the state pays. The state gets its money from – well, from the people actually. The socialist, collectivist, redistributing state robs Peter to give free stuff to Pauline.

Among the free stuff Pauline must have is health-care. Obama’s health-care law requires contraception and sterilization to be included in all health insurance policies. There must be “free” contraceptives available to all women. They must be able to copulate without fear of conceiving. To have a baby is a “punishment” according to Obama. If conception accidentally happens, they must be able to have a “free” abortion. Copulating is good but conceiving is bad. Babies are bad for women’s health. And, besides, having a baby or an abortion is much more expensive than contraception.

Of course if every man and woman paid for their own health care just as they pay (or as most of them still do in America) for their food and shelter and clothing, the budgeting choices would concern nobody else. But freedom for the individual to make his and her own choices is precisely what the all-controlling, levelling, collectivist state is ideologically against. To prevent such freedom was the real reason why “Obamacare” was enacted.

To achieve their aim, Obama and cronies must ignore the Constitution. In any case it’s an outdated document, they say. As is stated in the official organ of the Dark Side, the New York Times:

The Constitution is out of step with the rest of the world in failing to protect … entitlement to food, education and health care.

By “the rest of the world” is meant places like Greece which recognize – to their financial embarrassment – that there’ s an entitlement to health care and everything. That’s the nub of the Obama collectivist ideology. All are entitled to have it, so some must pay for everyone to have it. Even if it brings the country to economic ruin.

However, those who pay must not be allowed to buy it for themselves. What selfishness! Private purchase is forbidden.

A Wall Street Journal editorial reports this and comments:

The HHS [Department of Health and Human Services] rule prohibits out-of-pocket costs for birth control, simply because Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’s regulators believe no woman should have to pay anything for it. To take a larger example: The Obama Administration’s legal defense of the mandate to buy insurance or else pay a penalty is that the mere fact of being alive gives the government the right to regulate all Americans at every point in their lives

But there was a small difficulty, a minor nuisance. Some religions do not think of reproduction as a punishment and actually forbid contraception and abortion. They don’t see the question as one of health as the state pretends it is, but of morals. So the administration will allow an exception. Churches that object to birth control and abortion need not offer cover for them to their employees, and the employees may claim these “free” services directly from the insurers.

Of course they cannot and will not be free.

This is from PowerLine:

First, there is no possible constitutional basis on which the federal government can order insurance companies to provide specified services for free. Second, the idea that the cost of contraception and abortion services will be borne by insurance companies is absurd. Obviously, insurance companies will quote premiums based on the total cost of the coverage in the proposed policy. If the policy includes contraception and abortion, those costs will be included in the premium, regardless of whether those particular services are designated as “free” to the employee and/or the employer. It is the employee, of course, who ultimately bears the cost.

We’ll all ultimately bear the cost, which is our freedom.

Freedom itself, not health or religious doctrine, is the vital issue.

An Iranian reader, Kourosh, tells us that “Iranians don’t care about Mahdi or any of those things. I’m Iranian and I can tell you that most Iranian youth hate Islam and love America/Israel. It’s the Arabs that are the problem. Remember that Iran is a multiethnic country, only 60% of Iran is truly Iranian.”

To illustrate what he says about Iranian youth hating Islam, he sent us video links.

Here’s one of the videos showing an Iranian burning the Koran.

And here we can see tides of men and women surging with ferocious violence, and great courage, in protest against the ruling regime of religious fanatics.

He asks us, “Why do you only show bad things about Iran and Iranians? Why do you dehumanize Iranians? Show something good about Iran.”

With those questions he sent us links to videos (here and here) showing the beauty and grandeur of Iran, both natural and manmade, with glimpses of monuments to its splendid history.

We admire the beauty and the grandeur. And we do not “dehumanize” anyone except those who act inhumanly – and they dehumanize themselves. But our business is to speak out against political evil and the cruelty of religion, and at present we find both in Iran.

It’s encouraging to see that many Iranians want regime change. We wish the US would support the protest movement. Obama’s refusal to do so is disgraceful and dangerous. Regime change in Iran would likely rid the world of the worst threat hanging over it –  nuclear arms in the hands of the mullahs and Ahmadinejad.

We are grateful to Kourosh for the links, and for providing us with an opportunity to explain our views.

Adolf Hitler did not seize power in Germany; he was given power by democratic process, and then he established his dictatorship.

Hamas came to power in the Gaza strip through democratic election. It is unlikely to allow another election.

In Tunisia and Egypt, democratic elections have brought parties to power which intend to bring their countries under sharia law.

Elections in Iraq and Afghanistan will not give Iraqis or Afghans freedom under the rule of law. The majority of Iraqi and Afghan voters do not want freedom under the rule of law.  To call either country a democracy in the Western meaning of the word is to affect deliberate blindness.

Daniel Greenfield writes at Front Page:

The advocates of democracy have been unable to admit that Hamas, Al-Nahda, the Brotherhood and the Salafis are the people’s choice because they represent their values and ideals. The Salafist victory in Egypt … was not based on any external factor or political cunning, but on their core message of hate for non-Muslims, repression for women and …  tyranny for Egypt.

Democracy is not in itself a prescription for good government. The very fact that it expresses the will of the majority of a nation is precisely why it is dangerous.

The trouble with democracy is that it is representative. It is representative in Egypt, in Tunisia, in the West Bank, in Iraq and beyond. …

Democracy has not worked all that well throughout the rest of the world either.

After all the efforts made to keep the Sandanistas out of power, El Salvador’s supreme leftist pedophile Daniel Ortega is back in the Presidential Palace in Nicaragua. …

Twenty years after the fall of the Soviet Union, the second largest party in the Russian Duma is the Communist Party. Its actual vote totals are probably higher due to the fraudulent nature of the elections under the control of Putin’s United Russia Party. This roster is rounded out by the Liberal Democratic Party, which is run by a career lunatic who has proposed conquering Alaska, dumping nuclear waste on nearby nations and rounding up the Jews into camps. If Putin’s power base finally collapses, then the party best positioned to pick up the pieces is the Communist Party. It’s not at all inconceivable that within the decade we will see the return of a Communist Russia. …

Democracy is not a universal solvent. It is not a guarantor of human rights or the road to a free and enlightened society. …

A strong showing at the ballot box eliminates the need to gather a mob. …

In Turkey the electoral victories of the AKP gave [it] the power to radically transform the country. Given another decade the elections in Turkey will be as much of a formality as they are in Iran. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt will follow the same program, bringing down the military leadership as soon as they can to the applause of the European Union and the United States who care more about the appearance of democracy than the reality of the totalitarian state they are endorsing.

When Western powers facilitate – in Iraq and Afghanistan compel  – democratic elections, they only encourage a charade; they play along with the pretense that universal suffrage will guarantee freedom. But most Russians and Nicaraguans don’t want freedom. The men of Iraq and Afghanistan, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, do not want freedom; their religion negates freedom, commands submission to an ancient set of oppressive laws.

Democratic elections are only as good as the people who take part in them. When the people want the Koran or Das Kapital, then they will get it.

Such elections measure the character of a people …  The Egyptians failed their election test [of character] … As did the Tunisians and the Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza.

To the advocates of universal democracy such failures are only a temporary manifestation that can be reversed with enough funding for social NGO’s and political outreach. But the reality is that they represent a deeper moral and spiritual crisis that we ignore at our own risk.

Democracy worked for the West, as the least bad system of government yet devised, because the West wanted freedom under the rule of law. Nations get the government they deserve. Or, as Daniel Greenfield puts it, “Governments reflect the character of the people they rule over.”

The “democratic” elections that have taken place in Islamic states prove it.

Democracy is allowing the Muslim world to express its truest and deepest self. … By helping to liberate them we have set their worst selves free.