Environmentalists “refuse to look at or admit the existence of the carnage they have created and continue to perpetuate worldwide.”

So writes Robert Zubrin in an article at PJ Media.

He contends that more people have died as a result of the environmental movement than at the hands of the most extreme mass-murdering dictators. In fact, he argues, millions of those deaths in the dictatorships have been caused, indirectly, by the environmental movement.

How good is his case?

Let’s look at the record.

Some of the worst atrocities can be laid at the feet of the population control ideologues such as Paul Ehrlich and his co-thinkers who argued — in direct contradiction to historical fact — that human well-being is inversely proportional to human numbers. As a result of their agitation, since 1966 U.S. foreign aid and World Bank loans to Third World countries have been made contingent upon those nations implementing population control programs. In consequence, over the past four decades, in scores of countries spanning the globe from India to Peru, tens of millions of women have been … subjected to involuntary sterilizations or abortions, often under very unsafe conditions, with innumerable victims suffering severe health effects or dying afterwards.

We are against foreign aid. But we are even more against the forced reduction of populations by “population control programs” including compulsory abortion and  sterilization.

Ehrlich also called for the United States to create a Bureau of Population and Environment which would have the power to issue or deny permits to Americans to have children. While rejected here, this idea was adopted by the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, who were convinced of the necessity of such measures by the writings of the Club of Rome* after these were plagiarized and republished in China under the name of one of its top officials. Thus was born China’s infamous “one-child policy,” which has involved not only hundreds of millions of involuntary abortions and forced sterilizations, but infanticide and the killing of “illegal children” on a mass scale.

There have been tens of millions of cases of murder-by-default: people being allowed to die by keeping from them a remedy for fatal disease:

The anti-technology wing of the antihuman movement also has its share of human extermination to account for. …

… by getting governments to ban the highly effective pesticide DDT – not always for scientific reasons, but precisely because it saves lives:

To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT. It has contributed to the great increase of agricultural productivity, while sparing countless humanity from a host of diseases, most notably perhaps, scrub typhus and malaria. Indeed, it is estimated that in little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million deaths due to malaria that would otherwise have been inevitable. But the role of DDT in saving half a billion lives did not positively impress everyone. On the contrary, as Alexander King, the co-founder of the Club of Rome put it in his 1990 biography, “my chief quarrel with DDT …  is that it has greatly added to the population problem.” …

Scientific arguments were also used, for instance that DDT endangered birds. To these lunatics (what else can one call them?), the preservation of bird life was more important than the preservation of human life.

Rachel Carson … in her 1962 book, Silent Spring, … made an eloquent case that DDT was endangering bird populations.

Which wasn’t even true:

This was false. In fact, by eliminating their insect parasites and infection agents, DDT was helping bird numbers to grow significantly. No matter. Using Carson’s book and even more wild writing by Ehrlich (who in a 1969 Ramparts article predicted that pesticides would cause all life in the Earth’s oceans to die by 1979), a massive propaganda campaign was launched [in the US] to ban DDT.

The EPA – not yet the storm-trooper arm of a dictatorial administration as it has now become – carried out an investigation into the effects of the pesticide:

In 1971, the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency responded by holding seven months of investigative hearings on the subject, gathering testimony from 125 witnesses. At the end of this process, Judge Edmund Sweeney issued his verdict: “The uses of DDT under the registration involved here do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds, or other wildlife. … DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man.”

But dedicated environmentalists are never put off by facts:

No matter. EPA administrator William Ruckelshaus (who would later go on to be a board member of the Draper Fund, a leading population control group), chose to overrule Sweeney and ban the use of DDT in the United States.

Subsequently, the U.S. Agency for International Development adopted regulations preventing it from funding international projects that used DDT. Together with similar decisions enacted in Europe, this effectively banned the use of DDT in many Third World countries. By some estimates, the malaria death toll in Africa alone resulting from these restrictions has exceeded 100 million people, with 3 million additional deaths added to the toll every year.

The harm done by the EPA, itself a creation of the environmental movement, has not been limited to stopping DDT. It is no coincidence that U.S. oil production, which had been growing at a rate of 3 percent per year through the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, peaked in 1971, immediately after the EPA’s creation, and has been declining ever since. In 1971, the U.S. produced 9.6 million barrels of oil per day (mpd). Today we are down to 5.6 mpd. Had we continued without environmentalist interference with our previous 3 percent per year growth in the period since — as the rest of the non-OPEC world actually did — we would today be producing 35 mpd, and the world economy would not be groaning under the extremely regressive tax represented by $100 per barrel oil prices. The environmentalist campaign against nuclear power has made its promise for plentiful, cheap electricity impossible as well.

The genocidal effect of such support for energy price-rigging should not be underestimated. Increasing the price of energy increases the price of all other products. It is one thing to pay $100 per barrel for oil in a nation like the USA which has an average income of $45,000 per year. It is quite another to pay it in a Third World country with an average income of $1500 per year. An oil price stiff enough to cause recession in the advanced sector can cause mass starvation among the world’s poor.

While we think the phrase “genocidal effect” is not well chosen, we follow Dr. Zubrin’s argument.

Again, the evil that he accuses environmentalists of is choosing not to allow the saving of lives that could be saved: 

European greens also have much horror to account for, notably through their campaign against genetically modified crops. Hundreds of millions of people in the Third World today suffer from nutritional deficiencies resulting from their cereal-dominated diets. This can now readily be rectified by employing genetically enhanced plants, such as golden rice, which is rich in vitamin A. Other genetically modified crops offer protection against iron or other vitamin deficiency diseases, dramatically increased yields, self-fertilization, and drought or insect resistance. But as a result of political pressure from the green parties, the European Union has banned the import of crops from countries that employ such strains, thereby blackmailing many governments into forbidding their use. In consequence, millions of people are being unnecessarily blinded, crippled, starved, or killed every year.

Taken together, these campaigns to deny billions of people the means to a decent existence have racked up a death toll exceeding that achieved by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or any of the other tyrants whose crimes fill the sordid pages of human history.

*And here is a very important footnote that explains how and why environmentalists decided to exploit pollution, global warming, and famine in order to make a case for global unification [ie for world government] as long as the earth is peopled, but also against the human race, which they perceive as the planet’s enemy. What their ultimate aim is –  whether absolute power over the human species or its total annihilation – is not clear. Is preservation of the environment the pretext for, or the goal of world government? Perhaps they are not sure themselves.

From Wikipedia:

The Club of Rome raised considerable public attention with its report Limits to Growth … It predicted that economic growth could not continue indefinitely because of the limited availability of natural resources, particularly oil. …

Mankind at the Turning Point was accepted as the official Second Report to the Club of Rome in 1974. … [It claimed] that many of the factors [affecting the environment] were within human control and therefore that environmental and economic catastrophe were preventable or avoidable. …

In 1993, the Club published The First Global Revolution. According to this book, divided nations require common enemies to unite them, “either a real one or else one invented for the purpose.” Because of the sudden absence of traditional enemies, “new enemies must be identified. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. … All these dangers [to the planet] are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.”

It is not a conspiracy theory. It is not a paranoid illusion arising from feverish nightmares. The international Left really IS plotting to establish world government.

The plotters are trying to do it by various means: with an International Covenant on Environment and Development (see our post Prepare to be DICED, March 23,2012); by controlling “carbon emissions”; through the furtive application of the sinister “Agenda 21″* – all spawned by the UN.

The Obama administration is doing its best to assist the process, for instance by claiming that the US cannot go to war without getting the nod from other countries (see our post US needs permission of foreign states to go to war, March 10, 2012), and now by making the US a signatory to a treaty that will hand over its rights to fishing, seabed mining and oil extraction, and the activity of its own navy, to a global bureaucracy.

This report and discussion of the treaty comes from Investor’s Business Daily:

Even if he’s not re-elected, the president hopes to leave behind a treaty giving a U.N. body veto power over the use of our territorial waters and to which we’d be required to give half of our offshore oil revenue.

The Law Of The Sea Treaty (LOST) has been lurking in the shadows for decades. Like the Kyoto Protocol that pretended to be an effort to save the earth from the poisoned fruit of the Industrial Revolution, LOST pretends to be an effort to protect the world’s oceans from environmental damage and remove it as a cause of potential conflicts between nations.

But what is it really?

Like its Kyoto cousin, LOST is an attempt at the global redistribution of power and wealth, the embodiment of the progressive dream of the end of the nation state as we know it and the end of political freedom by giving veto over all of mankind’s activities to a global body — in this case something called the International Seabed Authority, located in Kingston, Jamaica.

The ISA would have the power to regulate 70% of the earth’s surface, placing seabed mining, fishing rights, deep-sea oil exploration and even the activities of the U.S. Navy under control of a global bureaucracy. It even provides for a global tax that would be paid directly to the ISA by companies seeking to develop the resources in and under the world’s oceans. …

The U.S. government now can collect royalty revenues from oil and gas companies that wish to drill on our extended continental shelf — the undersea areas beyond 200 miles of our coast. But if we ratify LOST, we’d have to fork over as much as 7% of that revenue to the ISA for redistribution to poorer, landlocked countries.

Maritime and jurisdictional disputes would be settled by the ISA, which presumably would tell the U.S. Navy where it could and could not go. Freedom of navigation has been guaranteed by the U.S. Navy and, before it, the British Royal Navy. Now it would be the ISA. This meets perfectly the definition of the “global test” Sen. John Kerry, a backer of LOST, said in 2004 that our actions must meet. …

Senator John Kerry is one of that weird schizophrenic breed, an exceedingly wealthy International Communist Plutocrat. Seems he can’t wait to give America away to some atrocious consortium of Third World dictatorships. If he and his like-minded comrades have their way, the US will indeed be lost.

President Reagan, of course, took an oppositie view:

LOST was a bad idea when President Reagan refused to sign it in 1982 and actually fired the State Department staff members who helped negotiate it. It was drafted at the behest of Soviet bloc and Third World dictators interested in a scheme to weaken U.S. power and sovereignty while transferring wealth from the industrialized to the developing world. Reagan rightly decided the U.S. shouldn’t be a part of this global resource grab and redistribution of wealth.

The treaty was co-authored by Elisabeth Mann Borgese, an admirer of Karl Marx and a socialist who ran the World Federation of Canada.

Elisabeth Mann Borgese is, sad to say, the daughter of Thomas Mann, the great (arguably the greatest – JB) novelist of the 20th century.**

She views the oceans as the “common heritage of mankind” and in a 1999 speech declared, “The world ocean has been and is, so to speak, our great laboratory for the making of a new world order.”

We prefer the world order under Reagan, where we called our own shots.

*For the evils of “Agenda 21”, see our posts: Blessed are the slimy, May 5, 2012; Beware “Agenda 21″, June 24, 2011; The once and new religion of earth-worship, October 27, 2011; Agenda 21: the “smart growth” conspiracy, November 21, 2011;Three eees for environmental equalizing economics, December 4, 2011.

** Those who know the works of Thomas Mann will know why it is sad that his daughter is in the world government camp.

Change? Yes, there is change under the Obama administration.

A free democracy is being turned into a tyranny.

How is this being done?

One way is by unleashing anarchic mobs; tying the hands of the police; criminalizing the victims of mob-violence; and systematically discrediting civilized values, as described in this column by Thomas Sowell on the “Occupy” movement:

The unwillingness of authorities to put a stop to their organized disruptions of other people’s lives, their trespassing, vandalism and violence is a de facto suspension, if not repeal, of the 14th Amendment’s requirement that the government provide “equal protection of the laws” to all its citizens.

How did the “Occupy” movement acquire such immunity from the laws that the rest of us are expected to obey? Simply by shouting politically correct slogans and calling themselves representatives of the 99 percent against the 1 percent. But just when did the 99 percent elect them as their representatives? If in fact 99 percent of the people in the country were like these “Occupy” mobs, we would not have a country. We would have anarchy.

Democracy does not mean mob rule. It means majority rule. If the “Occupy” movement, or any other mob, actually represents a majority, then they already have the votes to accomplish legally whatever they are trying to accomplish by illegal means. Mob rule means imposing what the mob wants, regardless of what the majority of voters want. It is the antithesis of democracy.

In San Francisco, when the mob smashed the plate-glass window of a small business shop, the owner put up some plywood to replace the glass, and the mob wrote graffiti on his plywood. The consequences? None for the mob, but a citation for the shop owner for not removing the graffiti.

When trespassers blocking other people at UC Davis refused to disperse, and locked their arms with one another to prevent the police from being able to physically remove them, the police finally resorted to pepper spray to break up this human logjam. The result? The police have been strongly criticized for enforcing the law. Apparently pepper spray is unpleasant, and people who break the law are not supposed to have unpleasant things done to them. Which is to say, we need to take the “enforcement” out of “law enforcement.”

Everybody is not given these exemptions from paying the consequences of their own illegal acts. Only people who are currently in vogue with the elites of the left – in the media, in politics and in academia.

The 14th Amendment? What is the Constitution or the laws when it comes to ideological soul mates, especially young soul mates who remind the aging 1960s radicals of their youth?

Neither in this or any other issue can the Constitution protect us if we don’t protect the Constitution. When all is said and done, the Constitution is a document, a piece of paper.

If we don’t vote out of office, or impeach, those who violate the Constitution, or who refuse to enforce the law, the steady erosion of Constitutional protections will ultimately render it meaningless. Everything will just become a question of whose ox is gored and what is the political expediency of the moment.

There has been much concern, rightly expressed, about the rusting of bridges around the country, and the crumbling and corrosion of other parts of the physical infrastructure. But the crumbling of the moral infrastructure is no less deadly. …

If everyone takes the path of least resistance – if politicians pander to particular constituencies and judges give only wrist slaps to particular groups or mobs who are currently in vogue, and educators indoctrinate their students with “non-judgmental” attitudes – then the moral infrastructure corrodes and crumbles.

Another way is by criminalizing citizens who are going about their lawful business. This method is as ruthlessly pursued by the Obama administration, in the name of preserving the environment and species, as the promotion of mob-rule.

How it is done is described in this study by Joe Luppino-Esposito, a Visiting Fellow at the the Heritage Foundation:

How did a law originally enacted to target poaching of migratory birds evolve to authorize an armed raid of a guitar factory in search of wooden veneers imported without the proper paperwork? The Lacey Act was the first federal wildlife conservation statute, narrowly targeted at the interstate sale in poached game. But in the century since its enactment, the statute’s scope has been enormously expanded to the point that it now incorporates the wildlife and trade laws of every foreign nation. As a result, it has become a trap for the unwary, placing honest businessmen and businesswomen at risk of criminal liability for unknowing violations of hyper-technical foreign laws and regulations.

In short, the Lacey Act has become the poster child for the phenomenon of overcriminalization and should be at the top of Congress’s list for reform. …

The original Lacey Act was … a modest addition to federal authority. In effect, it promoted federalism by preventing poachers and pot hunters from circumventing the states’ game laws. And it expanded criminal liability hardly at all, making federal crimes out of conduct that was already prohibited under state law rather than creating a new federal mandate. The penalty for a violation was a not-inconsequential $200 fine.

Over time, however, the scope of the Lacey Act expanded as federal legislators became more comfortable with passing broad federal environmental laws. In 1935, Congress increased the penalty for violations to $1,000 with a maximum penalty of six months imprisonment. Congress also empowered Department of Agriculture agents to arrest citizens for violations in their presence and to execute warrants. Most important, Congress also extended the Act’s list of predicate offenses to include foreign laws. This meant that if a bird was “captured, killed, taken, shipped, transported, or carried” in violation of the foreign state from which it originated, the United States could prosecute that individual or organization. …

In 1981 … indigenous plants were added to the list of covered species, including those that are considered endangered under U.S. law and those identified in the appendices of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). …  The Act’s criminal offenses were divided into felonies and misdemeanors, with the former carrying a maximum sentence of five years’ imprisonment and a $20,000 fine and the latter a maximum of one year’s imprisonment and a $10,000 fine. …

The most significant change occurred in 2008, when Congress expanded the statute’s reach once again to criminalize improper marking and labeling of protected plants. As amended, the statute prohibits the “knowing” import or export of a prohibited fish, wildlife, plant or the “knowing” conduct of a sale of prohibited fish, wildlife, or plant. Additionally, anyone who “knowingly engages in conduct prohibited by any provision of this chapter … and in the exercise of due care should know that the fish or wildlife or plants were taken, possessed, transported, or sold in violation of, or in a manner unlawful under, any underlying law, treaty or regulation” may be subjected to criminal punishment.

This amendment was hailed by proponents as the first ban on illegal logging operating across international borders. Critics, however, have explained that tracking wood products back to their sources is incredibly difficult and that the “due care” provision is too vague.

Since the beginning of the debate on the Lacey Act, Congress has been concerned about how the statute may affect legitimate business. The result, one century later, is that individuals who try to act within the law are too often ensnared by the Lacey Act.

David McNab and Abner Schoenwetter, who were engaged in the lobster trade, were convicted under the Lacey Act for importing undersized lobsters in 1999. In addition, some of the lobsters were also egg-bearing, and all of them were shipped in plastic bags instead of cardboard boxes. These were not requirements of American environmental law, but requirements of Honduran law—requirements that Honduran courts later determined were invalid. Nonetheless, McNab and Schoenwetter were sentenced to eight years in prison. Due to the low level of criminal intent required for conviction, it did not matter that the two men were unaware of the Honduran environmental regulations.

More recently, armed federal agents raided Gibson Guitar facilities …

Gibson Guitar Corporation being “the world’s best known and most respected maker of fretted instruments” …

… to seize imported woods intended for fingerboards, for the second time in two years. Although no formal charges have been filed, Gibson believes that it is being targeted for their importing of ebony from Madagascar in 2009 and from India this past year. The Justice Department has confirmed that a criminal investigation is under way.

The case appears to turn on the thickness of the wood and what constitutes “finished” wood. The Indian tariff code “HS 4407” is meant for wood that exceeds 6 millimeters in thickness, which cannot be exported. Wood thinner than that is identified as “HS 4408” and may be exported. In this case, the Indian export documents labeled the fingerboard blanks as “HS 9209,” which refers to “[p]arts (for example, mechanisms for music boxes) and accessories (for example, cards, discs, and rolls for mechanical instruments) of musical instruments,” which may also be exported. But the import forms identified the wood as “HS 4408.” An affidavit filed by a special agent with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service alleges that the Lacey Act declarations incorrectly identified the wood as finished veneers rather than unfinished wood that exceeded 6 millimeters in thickness. …

In effect, Gibson was raided because of an otherwise harmless paperwork error. At worst (although even this is unclear), the company may have violated regulations pertaining to the export of unfinished wood that were intended to protect jobs in India. In any event, neither the law in question nor the pending investigation seems based upon the alleged violation or appears to have anything to do with protecting the environment.

Beyond criminal intent, both of these cases also raise questions regarding the requirements of foreign law. In the lobster case, evidence was presented showing that the Honduran regulations at issue were invalid because the size restriction had never been signed by the President of Honduras. The Honduras Attorney General issued an opinion confirming that without the presidential signature, the law was, in fact, invalid. [But] the U.S. court determined that this testimony by an expert on Honduran law was not sufficient to reverse convictions.

As for Gibson Guitar, the company claims that Indian officials permitted the export of the unfinished wood.

If that claim is correct, it appears that in both cases, the United States government is now attempting to make a federal crime out of foreign conduct that the foreign countries do not hold to be unlawful.

Finally, both cases suggest that enforcement of the Lacey Act has deviated far from the Act’s purpose of respecting existing environmental laws to its current use in enforcing laws concerned with trade protection and economic advantage. The Indian regulation that Gibson stands accused of violating exists only to protect Indian workers from foreign competition …  And McNab and Schoenwetter were victims of an anonymous fax to the Fish and Wildlife Service by a competitor who lost out on the bid for the lobster shipment.

Environmental protection was not even at the heart of either case. …

The Lacey Act has now become a casebook example of federal overcriminalization run amok.

The abandonment of law and order along with contemptuous disregard of the Constitution on the one hand, and over-regulation to criminalize the innocent and productive on the other, provide a double-barreled means of bringing free America to its knees. “Change – or else!”

And the change to tyranny is also helped along, of course, by Obamacare, the redistribution of wealth, the growingof the national debt, the corruption of the Department of Justice, the implemention of “Agenda 21″* …

* For the evils of Agenda 21, see our posts: Blessed are the slimy, May 5, 2012; Beware “Agenda 21″, June 24, 2011; The once and new religion of earth-worship, October 27, 2011; Agenda 21: the “smart growth” conspiracy, November 21, 2011;Three eees for environmental equalizing economics, December 4, 2011; Prepare to be DICED, March 23, 2012.

The Obama campaign has created a dependent woman named “Julia”.

It’s a kindergarten presentation, made to woo the votes of the stupid – which in the minds of the Obama clique probably means the entire electorate.

Derek Hunter sums up the story of Julia the Parasite in an article at Townhall:

As a child, Julia is shuttled off to a Head Start program at age 3 that even the government says is a waste of money and makes no difference in the future academic success of children. The site touts President Obama’s commitment to Head Start, which makes sense because it’s a big government failure.

Next we see Julia at age 17, ready to take the SAT and apply to college. It’s not because she’s smart or because of her hard work, it’s because President Obama’s Race to the Top program dumped more cash into the coffers of teachers unions.

There’s nothing about any work put in by Julia to accomplish what she has …

At 18, Julia is ready to suckle the government teat for money for college. Her parents, who finally enter the story, get a $10,000 tax credit, and she gets a Pell Grant. The site says this “puts a college education within reach.” … Missing from this lovely story is any sense Julia plans to pay for any of this herself. Did she qualify for scholarships? Did she work on the side? Did she take any responsibility for herself or just rely on government handouts?

When she’s 22, Julia needs some sort of surgery. They don’t say what kind, but I’m assuming parasites since she’s presumably hanging around Occupy Wall Street camps. The Obama campaign says she’s fine because of Obamacare and the ability to stay on her parents’ insurance until she’s 26. …

The next year, Julia is a web designer and ready to sue her employer under the Lilly Ledbetter law because she thinks a man might be getting paid more than her, regardless of whether he’s better at the job or otherwise a more valuable employee. She made a deal. She agreed to work for a certain wage. But then she caught wind someone else made a better deal, and naturally, that entitles her to the other person’s deal.

This is fiction, of course, because there’s no way Julia finds a job right out of college in Obama’s economy. But saying “Julia is depressed, drinks a lot and moved back home hoping to get a job at McDonald’s so she can have some money beyond her food stamps” doesn’t so much convey the message they’re trying to put out here.

Somehow she graduates at 25 – even though she’s the only college student in the country working in her chosen field since age 23 – and, thanks to her hero, President Obama, is ready to start repaying her student loans. She then becomes the only student in recent history who “makes her payment on time every month.”   …

At 27, Julia is happy again because … “Thanks to Obamacare, her health insurance is required to cover birth control and preventive care, letting Julia focus on her work rather than worry about her health.” Julia is relieved of the burden of spending $9 a month at Wal-Mart to buy her own birth control. This comes in handy if she’s sexually assaulted at an Occupy Wall Street camp, even though progressives and the media tell her the camps are perfectly safe. But don’t worry, Julia. Obamacare will cover your therapy, too!

When she turns 31, she gets pregnant. Who is the father? Who knows? No one in the Obama campaign cares either. Who needs a dad when you’ve got government? …

When her son, Zachary, is old enough to go to kindergarten, he’s shipped off to school and never, ever heard from again. Thanks to President Obama, schools are so awesome you can just give your kids to them and government will take care of the rest. Parenting is for suckers anyway. Well, not for his kids in their elite private school, but for your kids.

At 42 (and apparently childless again), Julia starts a web business with a Small Business Administration loan. Why Julia felt the need to borrow money to start a business millions of people start from home at minimal expense would be a mystery until you recall how she has relied on government to take care of her since the moment she was born. No one sacrifices for success anymore. They’re entitled to it.

The next time we hear from Julia, she is 65 and signing up for Medicare. This is funny because it assumes Medicare will still be around when Julia not only turns 25, but 65.

The real comedy hits when Julia is 67. It says, “After years of contributing to Social Security, she receives monthly benefits that help her retire comfortably, without worrying that she’ll run out of savings.”  … This occurs even though you can’t survive on Social Security alone today. But Julia lives in a world where government takes care of you every step of the way.

Missing from all of this Julia garbage is the fact the country is broke and Julia probably speaks Chinese now since they would own everything.

Never once does it talk about how well Julia does, how successful she becomes. Mostly because she won’t in Obama’s economy, but also because success isn’t really the goal … dependence is. If she becomes wealthy, she could think for herself … she could become the enemy.

Julia lives a lonely life, her son long since gone and forgotten, until she gets cancer at age 71, and the descendents of the bureaucrats Obama empowered to make everyone’s health care decisions for them deem her treatment too expensive and condemn her to death in a government nursing home.

No, of course, that’s not really part of the [Obama campaign] narrative.

You know what else is not part of the narrative? That she never once stood on her own. If Republicans had created Julia, this would be cause for uproar among feminists. But if Obama said she needed to live a life of dependency, who are they to argue?

Julia’s life has replaced what 100 years ago would’ve been “the role of a man in her life” with government. Julia is not a strong woman. She’s a weak stereotype who depends on big brother for everything in her life.

According to polls, this sort of cradle-to-grave government dependency is appealing to a large percentage of women. This should bother those feminists who tell us constantly they don’t need a man; they can take care of themselves. They don’t need a man but only because they have President Obama and his trillions of [borrowed] dollars … to meet their every need.

You’ve come a long way, baby…full circle, in fact, right back to where you started.

Self-reliance is best for everyone; but if a person has to be dependent, it must be better to depend on another individual, on a personal relationship with mutual interests, shared responsibilities, reciprocity of assistance, than on the impersonal State with which no negotiation is possible.

The State has the power to force compliance. It is not concerned with individuals. It makes rules to fit all. If it is allowed to be the chief or sole source of livelihood, it has the power to withhold what it gives and destroy you. That is the nature of the socialist State. Its citizens have traded in their freedom (however involuntarily) for “security” – cradle-to-grave provision of their needs. But that sort of security is an illusion. The only security anyone can rely on is his own ability and determination to provide his (her) wants for himself (and his own) as soon as he is old enough to end his dependency on his parents.

It strikes us that Julia is the antithesis of Sarah Palin, the woman who, with her husband, hunts and fishes and builds her own house, and thinks for herself and succeeds by using her own brains, abilities, energy, and earned money.

Which of course is why leftists, and especially the feminists of the left, hate Sarah Palin.

… for they, the International Communist Dictators of the United Nations, shall inherit the earth.

They, the ICDs of the UN, and their collaborator-in-chief Barack Obama, plan to bring about world-government through environment and species protection.

In fact, the appearance and disappearance of species can no more be controlled by human beings – even such super-beings as the ICDs of the UN – than can climate and the weather.

According to Wikipedia, “A typical species becomes extinct within 10 million years of its first appearance although some species, called living fossils survive virtually unchanged for hundreds of millions of years. Most extinctions have occurred naturally, prior to Homo sapiens walking on Earth: it is estimated that 99.9% of all species that have ever existed are now extinct.”

Alan Caruba writes at Canada Free Press:

The Endangered Species Act (ESA) was passed in 1973 at the height of the period in which Congress became enthralled with any legislation purported to save the planet and to regulate anything and everything that had to do with the environment. It is a complete failure.

In 1999, Jamie Rappaport Clark, then the director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), told a congressional committee that “… in 25 years of implementing the ESA, we have found that designation of ‘official’ critical habitat provides little additional protection to most listed species … ”

Why then did the Associated Press report in September 2011 that “The Obama administration is taking steps to extend new federal protections to a list of imperiled animals … from the melodic golden-winged warbler and slow-moving gopher tortoise, to the slimy American eel and tiny Texas kangaroo rat”?

The Obama FDS “… issued decisions advancing more than 500 species toward … new protections under the Endangered Species Act.” Among the species selected for protection were 35 snails from Nevada’s Great Basin, 82 crawfish from the Southeast, 99 Hawaiian plants and “a motley cast of butterflies, birds, fish, beetles, frogs, lizards, mussels and more from every corner of the country.”

The answer is that the ESA was never about endangered species. It is a blunt instrument of environmental groups and those within the federal government to delay development anywhere in the nation. Almost 1,400 species on the government’s list are listed as “threatened” and none of them can be expected to avoid extinction, a natural process that cannot be impeded by human intervention. …

Recall the outcry two decades ago that spotted owls were on the brink of extinction. The resulting action to protect them shut down a great swath of the timber industry in the northwest. It turned out that barred owls were preying on their cousins, again a natural competition between species. The Obama administration wants to set aside millions of acres to protect the spotted owl and to authorize the killing of barred owls!

The plan … has nothing to do with spotted or barred owls and everything to do with attacking the timber industry in the same fashion it is attacking the coal and oil industry. It is an attack on the nation’s economic maintenance and growth.

Little known is the fact that the government compensates the legal fees of environmental groups that bring action to get a particular species designated as “threatened” or “endangered.” It is a scheme … that has nothing to do with the question of extinction and everything to do with setting aside vast parts of the nation from any development or use.

Which greatly assists the implementation of the UN’s “Agenda 21”. This collectivist, world-government program, already being put into practice by left-dominated local authorities all over the US, aims to herd people into small living-units in cities and return as much of the developed countryside as possible to wilderness. Watch out for the surreptitious advance of the scheme in your own area.

See our posts: Beware “Agenda 21”, June 24, 2011; The once and new religion of earth-worship, October 27, 2011; Agenda 21: the “smart growth” conspiracy, November 21, 2011; Three eees for environmental equalizing economics, December 4, 2011; Prepare to be DICED, March 23, 2012.

In 2006, California had the second-highest number of endangered species — from the California condor to the Delhi sands fly. It led the lower 48 states in acres of officially designated critical habitat with nearly twenty percent of approximately 100 million acres in the regulatory clutches of the FWS. It will cost California millions in lost revenue, particularly from its agriculture sector which feeds much of the rest of the nation.

In 2006, a federal judge halted a $320 million irrigation project in Arkansas for fear it might disturb the habitat of the ivory-billed woodpecker that many believed had already gone extinct. The National Wildlife Federation and the Arkansas Wildlife Federation had sued the Army Corps of Engineers, to stop a project to build a pumping station that would draw water from the White River. Among their claims was that the noise from the station would cause the woodpeckers stress!

The author rightly concludes:

The only species that is endangered is the human species as environmental organizations continue to deny access and use of American land needed for growing crops, raising livestock, and building any new improvements … that would contribute to the welfare of the human inhabitants of planet Earth.

Not only is the ESA a huge bureaucratic failure, it is testimony to the arrogance and evil intent of the environmental movement to harm any form of economic activity and growth in America.

The UN must be destroyed.

This video is an overview of an excellent course in 10 parts. It teaches how the Muslim Brotherhood is pursuing its agenda in the US, which is to infiltrate the institutions of American democracy and penetrate the highest echelons of government, in order to spread totalitarian sharia law, and advance towards the establishment of a caliphate as a dominating global power.

It shows that even the Republican Party is being subverted by Muslim Brotherhood agents, most notably Grover Norquist, whose tax-cutting ideas are good, but whose affiliation to America’s worst enemy is evil and needs to be exposed.

It shows how “useful idiots” in the military and security services are helping the Muslim Brotherhood achieve its aims.

Learn more about it, or take the whole course free of charge, here.

Following on from our post Childlessness (April 30, 2012), we quote today from an article about a spreading aversion to sex. It is by Spengler, writing in the Asia Times:

A Japanese government study [shows that] almost a third of Japanese boys aged 16-19 and three-fifths of girls say that they have no interest in sex. …

The hormones of late adolescence evidently rage in vain against some cultural barrier that makes young Japanese “despise” sexual relations. …

For 60 years, the sexual revolution insisted that repressed desire is the root of all evil. It turns out that the ultimate victim of the sexual revolution is sex itself.

What makes the Japanese hate sex? The same things that make a growing proportion of Americans hate sex. Joan Sewell’s 2007 book I’d Rather Eat Chocolate became the manifesto of American women who don’t like sex …

Pharmaceutical companies are racing to market a pill to revive fading female libido, to no avail: women do not want to be sex objects, and a culture that objectifies women will make them hate sex …

Japan is a step ahead of the United States, as the first industrial country to bring sadism and pedophilia into the mainstream. … A streak of cruelty pervades Japanese culture … But the West has begun to embrace cruelty in sexual relations on a scale comparable to Japan, and the consequences most likely will be identical.

For example: Fifty Shades of Grey [by E L James], the adult version of the Twilight vampire-and-werewolf series, has become a soccer-mom bestseller. Now we know what the original, adolescent version was about, namely sadism and submission. What is it that makes adolescent girls crave sexual control and degradation? Evidently, it is the same thing that prompts their mothers to buy heavy-breathing pulp versions of the same thing in more explicit form.

After half a century of sexual revolution – otherwise known as objectification – women suffer en masse from the sexual equivalent of Stockholm Syndrome, identification with their tormentors, as a number of popular commentators observe. After a quarter-million e-book downloads, Viking Press has just paid a seven-figure advance to … E L James, an Englishwoman who initially posted the manuscript as bondage porn on a Twilight fan fiction site under the screen-name “SnowqueensIcedragon”.  In the original, still available online, little Bella of the Twilight books is deflowered not by her vampire boyfriend, but by a billionaire sadist instead, and becomes his adoring sex slave. …

The Austrian novelist Elfriede Jelinek … got the 2004 Nobel Prize in literature for explicit portrayals of sexual violence, but with literary pretensions. Jelinek … is an Austrian communist who politicizes domination. …

Why are so many American women fascinated by sexual cruelty? The answer is that the prevailing regime of sexual objectification already carries with it the experience of cruelty. For adolescent girls, the replacement of courtship by “hooking up” with “friends with benefits” is a cruel prospect.

Somehow that doesn’t seem an adequate explanation. Cruel prospects might be expected to invoke a yearning for happier ones, not an appetite for reading about cruelty.

Even though only three out of ten American teenagers aged 13 to 16 are sexually active, the options available to adolescent girls are narrowly defined. Adolescent boys are monsters, as anyone who has been one, or known one, can attest, and to require adolescent girls to engage in sexual activity of any kind with such creatures is horrifying. The considerate and courteous young vampire of the Twilight books is a cavalier by comparison.

Freud’s question, “What do women want?,” showed what an ideologically-driven fanatic he was. Women want what every human being wants, which is to be unique, and to be loved for their uniqueness. With rare exceptions, human beings become unique by bearing and raising children: a child can have only one mother. Women are unique as mothers, and men are lifted above their animal instincts by their attachment to the mother of their children.

The moment we separate sexuality from child-bearing, we turn women into generic sexual objects, which makes it impossible for them to obtain what they want, because sexual objects are generic. The one thing you know with 100% certainty about any woman you see, supermodels included, is that some man, somewhere, is tired of sleeping with her. If women cannot control men by bearing their children, what other means to they have to control them? We find the answer in the sudden popularity of dominant-submissive fantasies.

The dominant “master of the universe” in EL James’ story can be controlled by his own need to dominate, for the submissive female heroine has something that he needs in addition to generic sexuality. …

The controller is controlled by the woman he controls? Control, control. Women liberationists, are you listening?

The stylized sexual games that EL James recounts become a creepy substitute for actual courtship. Like the romance novel hero, who must pay court to the female lead, the “master of the universe” must pay prolonged attention to the female lead in preparation for sexual acts. Romance fiction requires a suspension of disbelief that is increasingly precarious in a culture of sexual exploitation. The dominant-submissive fantasy is more credible.

The sudden popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey portends the death of America’s libido.  I cannot speak from personal experience, but the paradox of domination … surely applies to the ritualistic cruelty described in this silly book and its sequels. After the initial frisson has passed, repetition of the same handcuffs-and-riding-crop routine must become unspeakably boring over time. …

And when perversion fails to titillate, nothing at all will. Like Japanese women, who encountered mainstream sexual violence and now eschew sex altogether, American women will have a great deal less sex and a great deal more chocolate.

All the signs are there. …  American women will follow their Japanese sisters into asexuality, and if women become sufficiently disgusted with men, men will become disgusted with themselves.

But then again, much of that diagnosis may be just psychobabble. The ingestion of chemicals could be to blame:

There might be a simpler explanation for the disappearance of Japan’s libido. Between 1998 and 2003, sales of anti-depressants in Japan quintupled …

Prozac is well known to cause sexual dysfunction, along with general calming. Maybe the attack on depression and hyperactivity is affecting aggression, violence, crime, and many other antisocial behaviors. …  Maybe America and other nations are prescribing themselves a gradual but gigantic and deadly loss of libido.

Whether it is due to disgust at the misery of their circumstances, or the side-effect of drugs intended to dull the misery of their circumstances, women are abandoning sexuality.

When human beings cease to desire each other physically, it is because they have ceased to desire each other at all. The things that motivate human beings to unite in intimate and permanent union, procreating and acculturating another generation, give way to the pure exercise of ego.

No, no: “pure ego” is being denied. What is the evolutionary use of sexual desire? The only discernible purpose our biology provides for us is to reproduce. As a biologist once put it: “The only reason an egg gives birth to a chicken is to ensure that there will be another egg.”

But we agree with the main point: promiscuous sex is lonely, sterile, boring, purposeless, destructive of dignity and self-respect, and terminally bad for human beings both individually and as the human race.

The typical [not quite – JB] American household no longer harbors a family but a person living alone. As Eric Klinenberg reports in his much-commented new book Going Solo, 28% of all American households now contain a single person, compared to just 9% in 1950.

Klinenberg, to be sure, thinks this is wonderful; his typical “Singleton” lives in Manhattan, hangs out at the local sushi bar and coffee shop, swims in a rich cultural current, and devotes himself to the grand diversion of the age, namely “self-realization”, which is easier to pursue in the absence of another self that might make competing demands.

In another 20 years or so, though, the self-sufficient singles of American cities will emulate the kodokushi (“lonely death”) victims of Japan, another much-commented 21st-century phenomenon. … Kodokushi clean-up has become a minor industry:

In the 1990s … the owner of a small moving company in Osaka, Japan, began noticing that many of his jobs involved people who had just died. Families of the deceased were either too squeamish to pack up for their dead relatives, or there wasn’t any family to call on. So [he] started a new business cleaning out the homes of the dead. Then he started noticing something else: thick, dark stains shaped like a human body, the residue of liquids excreted by a decomposing corpse.

That is the end that enlightened secular culture has prefigured for us …: to leave no trace of our mortal existence except for a grease-stain on the carpet.

A sickening image, a pathetic fate.

But we don’t like his putting in the word “secular”. His implication is that lack of religious belief underlies or directly causes this vast disillusionment and lapse into hopeless futility. What does religion offer as a counter? A purpose beyond this world, this life? It is in this world, this life that we need happiness and fulfillment. There is no other.

(Hat tip for the link, reader and commenter rogerinflorida.)

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

– Robert Frost

*

This is from Canada Free Press by Robert Felix:

Satellite data show that glaciers in part of the Karakoram range on the China-Pakistan border are putting on mass, defying the general trend toward glacier shrinkage. In an article entitled “Slight mass gain of Karakoram glaciers in the early twenty-first century,” Researchers from the National Centre for Scientific Research and the University of Grenoble admit to “an anomalous gain of mass” for the Karakoram glaciers.

This is in direct contradiction to the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, which claimed that ice from most of the region could disappear by 2035.

Often considered a part of the Himalayas, the Karakoram range, which runs through Pakistan, India and China, is technically a separate chain that includes K2, the world’s second-highest peak. …

We’re talking about the greatest chain of ice-capped peaks in the world — from the Himalayas to Tian Shan on the border of China and Kyrgyzstan — and satellite measurements show that they have lost NO ice in the past 10 years.

Not only have they lost no ice, in a defiant act of political incorrectness, some 230 glaciers in the western Himalayas – including Mount Everest, K2 and Nanga Parbat – are actually growing.

“These are the biggest mid-latitude glaciers in the world,” says John Shroder of the University of Nebraska-Omaha. “And all of them are either holding still, or advancing.”

And get this. Eighty seven of those glaciers have surged forward since the 1960s.

But we don’t need to look to the Himalayas for growing glaciers. Glaciers are also growing in the United States. Yes, in the United States.

Look at California. All seven glaciers on California’s Mount Shasta are growing, including three-mile-long Whitney glacier, the state’s largest.

Farther north in Washington State, the Nisqually Glacier on Mt. Rainier is growing. The Emmons Glacier on Mt. Rainier is growing. Glaciers on Glacier Peak in northern Washington are growing. And Crater Glacier on Mt. Saint Helens is now larger than it was before the 1980 eruption.

Even farther north, the Juneau Icefield, which covers 1,505 square miles (3,900 sq km) and is the fifth-largest ice field in the Western Hemisphere, is also growing.

Are these growing glaciers also just “an anomalous gain of mass”? Well, let’s look at a few other countries.

• Perito Moreno Glacier, the largest glacier in Argentina, is growing.

• Pio XI Glacier, the largest glacier in Chile, is growing.

• Glaciers are growing on Mt. Logan, the tallest mountain in Canada.

• Glaciers are growing on Mt. Blanc, the tallest mountain in France.

• Glaciers are growing in Norway, says the Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate (NVE).

• And the last time I checked, all 50 glaciers in New Zealand were growing. (The Franz Josef glacier is advancing at the rate of 4 to 7 feet per day!)

But these glaciers are babies when you look at our planet’s largest ice mass, namely, the Antarctic ice sheet.

Contrary to what you may have heard, this huge ice sheet is growing.

In 2007, Antarctica set a new record for most ice extent since 1979, says meteorologist Joe D’Aleo.

Antarctic sea ice has also been increasing, on average, since 1980.

Think about that.

The Antarctic Ice Sheet, which is almost twice as big as the contiguous United States, is about 90 times bigger than all of the rest of the world’s glaciers combined.

Close to 90 percent of the world’s glaciers are growing, in other words, and all we hear about are the ones that are shrinking.

Welcome to the new ice age.

Are the warmists embarrassed? Well, yes:

“Our measurements…indicate that the contribution of Karakoram glaciers to sea-level rise was -0.01 mm yr for the period from 1999 to 2008,” write the French researchers [Julie Gardelle, Etienne Berthier, Yves Arnaud].

Huh? What does that mean? “The contribution to sea-level rise was MINUS 0.01 mm per year”? …

“Why this should be is not clear,” writes BBC News environment correspondent Richard Black. “Though it is well known from studies in other parts of the world that climate change can cause extra precipitation into cold regions which, if they are cold enough, gets added to the existing mass of ice.”

Get that? Global warming adds to the existing mass of ice (“climate change” being the replacement phrase for “global warming” since global warming paused in the last ten years).

Uh huh. First we’re told that global warming will melt all of the world’s glaciers and sea levels will rise catastrophically. Now, we’re being told that global warming will make the glaciers grow and contribute – in a minus sort of way – to sea level rise. Does that mean that sea levels will fall?

If it does mean that, you won’t hear the warmists say so. They believe that sea levels will rise, so rise they must.

Seems, one way or another, the earth has only about 5 billion more years before Carl Sagan’s promised “last perfect day” and then …