Under daily observation from thousands of surveillance cameras mounted everywhere from street corners to taxicabs to public parks, Britons rank among the most-watched people on earth. But a new government plan is poised to take the gaze of this nation’s security services dramatically deeper: letting them examine the text messages, phone calls, e-mails and Web browsing habits of every person in the country.

According to the Washington Post report that we are quoting –

Britain generates more than 2 million e-mails a minute, and observers say the government may face technical challenges in capturing and storing such vast amounts of data. Currently, firms are required to store some communications data, such as phone calls, for one year. But the proposed law could compel them to store far more varied forms — such as Skype calls or online video game data — for at least twice as long.

Even with massive electronic help in selecting words and phrases to reduce the millions of messages, how  many people working how many hours would be needed to investigate the (surely still enormous) residue? And if they do come upon evidence of crime being plotted or committed, what will they do about it?

It’s not as if the police are really working to reduce crime (except maybe drug related crimes). For years now in Britain, if a crime is reported the police routinely issue the victim with a number but seldom investigate it. If the police investigate a crime, they seldom make an arrest; if they make an arrest, the case seldom comes to court;  if it comes to court the accused is seldom found guilty;  if the accused is found guilty, he is seldom convicted; if he is convicted he is seldom sentenced; if he is sentenced he seldom goes to prison; if he goes to prison he is seldom – no, he is never kept there even for the inadequately punitive time he is sentenced to serve.

Terrorists? If they are Muslim – and are there any terrorists other than Muslims now? – they are unlikely to be charged; if charged they are unlikely to be tried; if tried they are unlikely to be convicted; if convicted they are unlikely to be punished. Instead they are likely to be luxuriously housed and granted lavish incomes at tax-payers’ expense. (See our posts The tale of a Muslim terrorist parasite January 18, 2012, and A model citizen December 17, 2010.)

So what would the watching and listening really be for?

The only plausible answer is: for government power and control. But what is the feeble feckless government doing with its power? What is it controlling and to what end? Britain aims for nothing, has no vision of its future, and is unlikely to become an Iran-like or Afghanistan-like totalitarian state until Islam comes to power. Of course that won’t take long now, and Islam knows exactly what it will compel everyone to do. It will be nice for the Islamic Enforcers to find efficient means of surveillance already in place for them.

Let’s read on.

The “snooping” proposal set to be presented in Parliament later this year is sparking an uproar over privacy in Britain, fueling a debate over the lengths to which intelligence agencies should go in monitoring citizens — a debate that has resonance on both sides of the Atlantic.

Government officials say the new powers are critical to countering terrorism and other threats in an era of fast-changing social media, with criminals using even seemingly innocent venues such as Facebook and online games as means of communication. But furious citizen groups and some members of Parliament see the push as a part of Britain’s evolution into a “surveillance society” in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States and the 2005 London bombings.

Although the plan is yet to be fully outlined by the Conservative-led government, observers say parts of it may go beyond even the ability of officials in the United States to quickly access private data. Critics say the sheer breadth and scope of the plan also could put Britain out in front of other European countries such as Germany, where the government acts to block some Web sites deemed objectionable, and Sweden, where a law passed in 2008 allows the government to intercept international communications conducted via phones or the Internet.

“I’m afraid that if this program gets introduced, the U.K. will be leapfrogging Iran in the business of surveilling its citizens,” said Eric King, head of research at Privacy International. “This program is so broad that no other country has even yet to try it, and I am dumbfounded they are even considering it here.”

The plan may authorize the national surveillance agency — which is known as GCHQ and whose Web site describes its mission as keeping “our society safe and successful in the Internet age” — to order the installation of thousands of devices linked to the networks of Internet service providers, giving agents broader access to everyday communications. The examination of the contents of those exchanges — such as the text or images contained in an e-mail — would still require special warrants. But for the first time, intelligence agencies might, for instance, access information such as the times, destinations and frequencies of phone calls, texts and e-mails without a warrant…

The measure reportedly would compel communications companies to grant intelligence agents instant access to real-time information in certain circumstances, such as data that could be used to target the location of a user’s mobile phone or computer if authorities suspected a crime was in progress. It remained unclear whether British authorities would need judicial or other authority before accessing such data.

“It is vital that police and security services are able to obtain communications data in certain circumstances to investigate serious crime and terrorism and to protect the public,” Britain’s Home Office — a rough equivalent to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security — said in a statement.

Privacy advocates reacted swiftly Monday, saying the move would intrude so deeply into the lives of British citizens that it would rival or exceed measures used by totalitarian governments. They say it marks another of many steps that have curtailed privacy rights here in the post-Sept. 11 world, with one study by British police officials, for instance, indicating that a person strolling around London is captured on film by at least 68 cameras on any given day …

As it stands, key aspects of the proposal may go beyond the kind of surveillance now authorized in the United States, where privacy advocates were quick to raise concerns about the plan — especially given the heavy traffic of transatlantic communication. …

How does America do its watching?

Access in the United States to “metadata” — such as the time, who e-mailed whom and how often — depends on the kind of data and type of case. For example, authorities have to obtain court orders before accessing real-time data in both criminal and national security cases.

In criminal cases, authorities need a subpoena to get stored metadata on phone numbers dialed but a court order for e-mail information. In contrast, federal agents seeking stored e-mail header information in national security cases have contended that they may use a national security letter, which is an administrative subpoena that can be issued by an FBI field office. But some providers have refused access to such data without a court order.

Only some? And should that make us less worried?

Is it possible that sheer overreach could render government impotent? That freedom will be recovered because government has too big a body for its tiny brain, like dinosaurs, and will perish by taking on far more than it can ever accomplish, losing sight of what it means to accomplish and why?

Or would anarchy result? And would that make it easier or harder for Islam to take over?

(Hat tip to our reader True Freethinker for the link to the video)

This is from the International Herald Tribune:

Three children, all under the age of five [in Kabirwala, Pakistan], were ‘severely’ tortured by their teacher after they were caught plucking flowers from their madrassa’s garden.

Four-year-old Aasia, five-year-old Aqsa and four-year-old Junaid were beaten with sticks and were forced to lie under the sun with three bricks placed over their chests and legs after their teacher, Qari Asghar, got to know that they had plucked flowers from the garden. …

“We were plucking flowers for our female teacher who teaches us in the morning. Qari Asghar had put his leg on my neck and then grabbed my hair and beat me up,” said Aasia.

The parents found their children nearly fainting after they were called to the madrassa by some member of the staff. They said that the children were bleeding due to the bricks.

Qari Asghar, the torturer, “ran away from the madrassa after the incident”, but he was found and arrested. Will he be punished, we wonder? Why do we doubt it?

The children were taken to a hospital. The doctor “confirmed that the children were ‘severely tortured’.”

Irked by the incident, Aasia’s father Mukhtar Ahmed said that such a “brutal” person does not deserve to teach the Holy Quran.

We disagree with Mukhtar Ahmed. The perfect teacher of the Holy Quran is a sadist.

But no child deserves to be taught it.

Stories like these should be published widely in the West, precisely because they are painful to read, so those who take a tolerant view of Islam may be taught what to expect as they allow the slow encroachment of Islam into their countries.

Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May by John William Waterhouse

In Britain, which has an established (Anglican) church, and enforces Islam’s sharia law as a parallel legal system, a discussion was recently hosted by (left-biased, pro-Islam) BBC Radio 4 between an Anglican bishop, Jonathan Gledhill, and Member of Parliament Alan Beith, who is a Methodist, and they found themselves in complete agreement that the great threat to peace and order in Britain, the real menace to civilization, is something they called “militant secularism”. 

Nick Cohen comments in The Spectator:

Conformist and non-conformist united against their common enemy, ‘militant secularism’. Not just Anglicans and Methodists, Beith assured us, but Sikhs, Jews, Muslims and Hindus were at one in their fear of the secularist menace. …

I won’t labour the obvious point that an established church that uses the force of law to insist on a privileged position, seems slightly more authoritarian, and indeed presumptuous, than those of us who want a level playing field, but look instead at the corruption of language. …

British atheists are not killing believers … nor are we closing churches or preventing the faithful from practising their faith. We are merely arguing, as full citizens of a democratic society are entitled to do, about the laws that should govern our country. For bishops …  and Methodist Lib Dems to describe this as ‘militancy,’ reveals nothing except their paranoia, self-pity, ignorance of history and insecurity.

Atheists are not the source of ‘militancy’ in Britain. If you doubt me, consider the following scenarios:

This afternoon, as every afternoon, cartoonists will be presenting their work to editors, who give them free rein to be as “edgy” and “iconoclastic” as they wish. If they present a caricature of Richard Dawkins, however grotesque, no editor will object. If they present a cartoon of Prophet Mohammed, however reverential, not an editor in Britain will publish it. If you have to ask why, you haven’t been paying attention. …

If a bomb explodes on the London Underground, while you are travelling home from the West End, trust me, militant atheists won’t have planted it.

In all history there has never been a war or a persecution carried out in the name of atheism to promote atheism.

No, Hitler was not an atheist, he was a Catholic.

Communists who made wars and persecuted everyone they could including the religious were doing it in the name of Communism, their atheism being merely part, the only intelligent part, of their otherwise atrocious creed.

With bishops and MPs oblivious to what is really threatening them, every port of entry into Britain should carry the warning: ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE (unless ye are Muslim)

*

Here’s a sad video in which a British woman is brought to tears as she witnesses the loss of her town to Muslim invaders.

“Only 60 amputations ” since Islam began?

We’ve heard Catholics claim that only a few dozen people were sentenced to be burnt to death by the Inquisition.

The lies indicate that they are ashamed of what they do or did. But if sharia law is imposed on Western countries – and it will be – the cruel punishments will be enforced.

Look up and see the wonder. Pigs are flying.

The latest report by the IPCC (the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) actually tells the truth. It is “a far cry from the IPCC’s usual slipshod, scaremongering standards.”

Kudos to the IPCC — they have gotten the issue just about right, where “right” means that the report accurately reflects the academic literature on this topic. Over time good science will win out over the rest — sometimes it just takes a little while.

A few quotable quotes from the report:

“There is medium evidence and high agreement that long-term trends in normalized losses have not been attributed to natural or anthropogenic climate change”

“The statement about the absence of trends in impacts attributable to natural or anthropogenic climate change holds for tropical and extratropical storms and tornados”

“The absence of an attributable climate change signal in losses also holds for flood losses”

The report even takes care of tying up a loose end that has allowed some commentators to avoid the scientific literature:

“Some authors suggest that a (natural or anthropogenic) climate change signal can be found in the records of disaster losses … but their work is in the nature of reviews and commentary rather than empirical research.”

So what this IPCC report is saying is that WE DO NOT KNOW if there’s an anthropogenic signal in extreme weather patterns, and that there does not seem to be a trend towards increased extreme weather events such as tornados and tropical storms.

Our quotes come from an article by James Delingpole in the Telegraph.

Here’s more:

They’re calling it Global Weirding now, as I suppose, inevitably they were bound to do in the end. Well “global warming” stopped working in 1989 when the globe stopped warming. Climate change was always a bit of a non-starter because climate does change regardless of whether or not we all drive 4 x 4s, or buy carbon offsets …  And Global Climate Disruption, as some pillock tried to christen it, was never going to catch on because, well, it’s just too blatantly contrived and desperate isn’t it?

So Global Weirding it is. The concept was popularised last week in a characteristically dire and parti pris BBC Horizon documentary which purported to have lots of new evidence (or ‘hearsay’ as it would more likely have been termed in a court of law) showing that our weather is getting more extreme – weirder. It seems to have been broadcast to coincide with a new IPCC report which has been excitedly written up in newspapers like the Guardian and the Detroit Free Press as evidence that we are heading towards climate disaster.

Global warming is leading to such severe storms, droughts and heatwaves that nations should prepare for an unprecedented onslaught of deadly and costly weather disasters, an international panel of scientists has said.

The greatest danger is in highly populated, poorer regions, but no corner of the globe is immune. The document, by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, forecasts stronger tropical cyclones and more frequent heatwaves, deluges and droughts, and blames man-made climate change, population shifts and poverty.

But this is pretty much the exact opposite of what the IPCC report actually says. …

How can the warmists bear it? How do the left-biased media deal with this document?

James Delingpole has told us how – they lie.

The liberal MSM is reporting the opposite. How come?

Well here’s the weird part. The misinformation comes from the IPCC’s summary of its own report .. which has been regurgitated, in classic churnalism style, by all the usual lazy MSM suspects.

It begins:

“Evidence suggests that climate change has led to changes in climate extremes such as heat waves, record high temperatures and, in many regions, heavy precipitation in the past half century, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said today.” …

Thing is, the warmists are losing and growing desperate.

As we know, the great global warming alarmism Ponzi scheme is looking extremely vulnerable at the moment. Global warming has stopped. There’s a growing public backlash against eco-taxes, ugly flickery lightbulbs, higher energy bills, bat chomping eco-crucifixes [?] and all the other paraphernalia of the environmental religion.

And unfortunately … what these kind of people do when they get backed into a corner is not surrender but get nastier and more devious.

We’ve seen this recently in the Fakegate affair. …  And in the Planet Under Pressure comedy conference staged last week by comedy organisations including the Royal Society, mainly in order to try to breathe new life into the stagnant, green-tinged corpse of climate alarmism. …

Scepticism regarding the need for immediate and massive action against carbon emissions is a sickness of societies and individuals which needs to be “treated”, according to an Oregon-based professor of “sociology and environmental studies”. Professor Kari Norgaard compares the struggle against climate scepticism to that against racism and slavery in the US South. …

As Paul Joseph Watson notes at Prison Planet: “The effort to re-brand legitimate scientific dissent as a mental disorder that requires pharmacological or psychological treatment is a frightening glimpse into the Brave New World society climate change alarmists see themselves as ruling over.”

Due to the fact that skepticism towards man-made global warming is running at an all time high, and with good reason, rather than admit they have lost the debate, climate change alarmists are instead advocating that their ideological opponents simply be drugged or brainwashed into compliance.

Some at least may concede that their cause is lost.

Look for more pig-flights this year.

From time to time we quote a day’s count of deadly Islamic terrorist attacks kept by the excellent site, The Religion of Peace.

Here is the tally for March 31:

Islam’s Latest Contributions to Peace

2012.03.31 (Yala, Thailand) – A Religion of Peace bombing at a hotel ignites a fire that kills five and injures over three-hundred.

2012.03.31 (Yala, Thailand) – A brutal double-bombing in a commercial hub leaves at least nine shoppers dead and over one-hundred injured.

2012.03.30 (Askira Uba, Nigeria) – Radical Islamists shoot two people to death at a bank.

2012.03.30 (Yayakhil, Afghanistan) – Nine Afghan police are shot to death in their sleep by a Taliban wearing a uniform.

2012.03.29 (Quetta, Pakistan) – Sunni militants open up on a group of Shiites with automatic weapons, taking down at least five, including a woman.

2012.03.28 (Nazimabad, Pakistan) – Wahhabi gunmen pick off a Shiite tailor outside his shop.

Today the total of deadly terrorist attacks carried out by Muslims since 9/11, quoted daily in our margin, stands at 18,665.

For a collection of collective nouns:

A Rally of Reasoners

An Argument of Atheists

Our reader and commenter Frank sent us the link to this video. He thinks we did not do justice to the Reason Rally of atheists in Washington, D.C., on March 24, 2012. (See our post Atheists in a Feel-Good Rally, March 30, 2012.)

If any of our readers were at the rally, comment from them on what they thought of it, what in particular they liked, disliked, learnt, and what they hope will come of it, would be welcome.

The way to keep the poor poor, is to keep them dependent on government.

The compassioneers of the Left need to keep the poor poor, or they’d lose not only their pretext for empowering the state to control our lives, and all those voters whom they make dependent on big government, but more dreadfully for them the cause in the name of which they claim moral superiority.

The name of their ideology of forced dependence is Socialism. It’s imposition on a nation is the tried and tested way to create poverty and keep the poor poor.

Capitalism, or what Adam Smith called “the natural order of liberty”, is the tried and tested way to create prosperity and bring people out of poverty.

Whenever socialist states and other tyrannies relent to free markets, their per capita income rises. This has been happening steadily over the last thirty years or so, despite the fervid efforts of Environmentalists and world government fanatics to establish a global socialist economy. The Third World has measurably benefitted.

This is from Townhall by Steve Chapman:

[According to] a new World Bank report, “the data indicate a decline in both the poverty rate and the number of poor in all six regions of the developing world.”

In 1981, 70 percent of those in the developing world subsisted on the equivalent of less than $2 a day, and 42 percent had to manage with less than $1 a day. Today, 43 percent are below $2 a day and 14 percent below $1.

“Poverty reduction of this magnitude is unparalleled in history: Never before have so many people been lifted out of poverty over such a brief period of time,” write Brookings Institution researchers Laurence Chandy and Geoffrey Gertz.

Just as important as the extent of the improvement is the location: everywhere. In the past there has been improvement in a few countries or a continent. Not this time.

China has continued the rapid upward climb it began three decades ago. India, long a laggard, has shaken off its torpor. Latin America has made sharp inroads against poverty. “For the first time since 1981,” says the World Bank, “we have seen less than half the population of sub-Saharan Africa living below $1.25 a day.”

The start of most global trends is hard to pinpoint. This one, however, had its big bang in the early 1970s, in Chile. After a socialist government brought on economic chaos, the military seized power in a bloody coup and soon embarked on a program of drastic reform – privatizing state enterprises, fighting inflation, opening up foreign trade and investment and unshackling markets.

It was the formula offered by economists associated with the University of Chicago, notably Milton Friedman, and it turned Chile into a rare Latin American success. In time, it also facilitated a return to democracy.

Chile was proof that freeing markets and curbing state control could generate broad-based prosperity, which socialist policies could only promise.

If that experiment weren’t sufficient, it got another try on a much bigger scale when China’s Deng Xiaoping abandoned the disastrous policies of Mao Zedong and veered onto the capitalist road. The result was an economic miracle yielding growth rates that averaged 10 percent per year.

The formula was too effective to be ignored. Over the past two decades, poorer nations have dismantled command-and-control methods and given markets greater latitude. Economic growth, not redistribution, has been the surest cure for poverty, and economic freedom has been the key that unlocked the riddle of economic growth.

Over the past 30 years, notes the libertarian Cato Institute in the latest edition of its “Economic Freedom of the World,” the average country’s economic freedom score has risen from 5.53 (on a 10 scale) to 6.64 — a significant improvement that has paid off in higher growth and earnings. The evidence indicates a reliable pattern: the freer the economy the faster the growth. …

The latest cover story in The Economist magazine is: “Cuba hurtles toward capitalism.” Cuba! Even communists eventually have to make peace with reality.

But as they do, the country that has grown to be the richest ever because of its freedom – the USA – is being turned into a socialist welfare state by a leader raised and trained as a communist.

President Obama calls capitalism, the magic formula for prosperity, “You’re-on-your-own economics”, and insists that it doesn’t work.

This is from Investor’s Business Daily:

“You’re-on-your-own economics” doesn’t work, President Obama asserted Friday, just as the World Bank reported a halving of world poverty due mainly to — you guessed it — you’re-on-your-own economics. …

Perhaps he didn’t try free-market economics himself in the past decade, but all six global regions observed by the World Bank did try it — and the stunning result is that global poverty has been slashed in half … It started with the advent of free markets in Chile in 1975, gained speed with the Reagan and Thatcher revolutions, took off with the Asian Tiger states and has been crescendo-ing around the globe ever since. …

Anyone who travels to countries like Peru, Poland, Indonesia, Colombia, Thailand, Hungary, South Africa, Chile, Tanzania and India knows very well that things aren’t what they used to be. Vast middle classes have formed, education is booming, business is up and many of their cities no longer resemble the Third World.

More to the point, people have growing access to jobs, education and a future. Mexico’s rate of illegal immigration has plunged since 2009 as average incomes there approach $7,000 — the threshold that makes staying in Mexico more attractive than living abroad illegally.

Technology has helped; they all have Facebook, cellphones and ATMs to make living more efficient.

The World Bank cites generally stronger political institutions — the kind that enforce one set of laws for all, respect property rights and don’t reward crony capitalists or stacked courts — something Obama might learn from. …

The big Goliath of this revolution is the embrace of free markets. Against the president’s claims that free markets don’t work, note that all six regions of the world are making big progress by embracing markets. …

President Obama’s ambition to keep the poor poor is not limited to turning America into an economically depressed, heavily indebted socialist state; he takes whatever active steps he can to establish a globally centralized control-and-command economy.

He has appointment a new head of the World Bank,  Jim Yong Kim, who will no doubt try to prevent such a report as Steve Chapman sums up ever coming out again: a man in whose dogma such truths need to be suppressed.

This is by Jacob Laksin at Front Page:

Imagine if President Obama appointed radical Noam Chomsky, who has denounced capitalism as a “murderously destructive catastrophe,” to head up a committee on economic growth. That’s less of a stretch than it may seem, considering Obama’s nominee to head the World Bank, current Dartmouth College President Jim Yong Kim.

Kim’s expertise is in health policy, so little is known about his views on economic development, the World Bank’s primary purpose. What is on the public record, however, is deeply troubling. A case in point is a collection of studies that Kim co-edited in 2000, Dying for Growth: Global Inequality and the Health of the Poor. The grim title accurately reflects the book’s radical central premise, namely that capitalism and economic growth is bad for the poor across the world. The introduction, which Kim co-authored with several other academics, states the point bluntly: “The studies in this book present evidence that the quest for growth in GDP and corporate profits has in fact worsened the lives of millions of women and men.”

A barefaced lie, as the statistics in the World Bank’s report demonstrate.

In this vein, the authors go on to dismiss “neoliberalism” – the preferred left-wing academic pejorative for free trade and free markets – as a failure, particularly for the world’s poor. “Even where neoliberal policy measures have succeeded in stimulating economic growth, growth’s benefits have not gone to those living in ‘dire poverty,’ one-fourth of the world’s population,” the authors assert.

If economic growth hurts the poor, especially in the Third World, what helps their cause? The book answers that question with a chapter touting what it considers a true success: communist Cuba’s health-care system. As the chapter’s author tells it, Cuba’s health care is supposedly on par with that of the United States, an achievement made “possible because of a govern­mental commitment not only to health in the narrow sense but to social equality and social justice.” Relying on bogus statistics from the Cuban government and distorting the extreme inequities of Cuban health care, where few of Cuba’s poor can either afford or obtain either medicine or doctors’ treatment, the study is revealing mostly of the ideological extremism of its author. Indeed, it might well have been written by Chomsky, which in fact it was: the author is Aviva Chomsky, Noam Chomsky’s eldest daughter. Noam Chomsky himself is quoted in the book’s conclusion, which cites his dismissal of economic growth as “efforts to make people feel helpless.” The book’s authors, including Jim Yong Kim, seem to agree.

They could hardly be more wrong.

(For confirmation of how they could hardly be more wrong, see our post Any old pills?, October 29, 2010.)

In fact, there is overwhelming evidence that economic growth raises income levels, which in turn reduces poverty and improves the lot of the global poor. Much of that evidence has been documented by the World Bank, the very institution that Kim has been tapped to lead. Earlier this month, for instance, the World Bank released a report documenting a decline in the poverty rate of the poor in all the regions of the developing world. The finding is especially striking because it comes amidst a global downturn. Economic growth accounts for much of this astounding progress.

He too quotes statistics:

And that progress is truly impressive. In 1990, 52 percent of the population in the developing world lived below the poverty rate of $1.25 a day. That number was halved by 2008, when 22 percent lived below the poverty rate. Progress has been most dramatic in East Asia, particularly China, which has seen the greatest surge in economic growth. In the 1980s, according to the World Bank report, East Asia had the world’s highest poverty rate, with 77 percent of the population living below the poverty rate as recently as 1981. By 2008, that number had plunged to 14 percent. The report points out that in China alone, 662 million people are no longer living poverty. Not only is no one “dying” due to economic growth, but literally millions of lives have been bettered thanks to economic gains.

China may be the most spectacular example of economic growth’s unmatched capacity to improve the lives of the poor, but it is not an exception. Africa, so long associated with extreme poverty, is also making strides on poverty reduction thanks to economic growth. … As a result of sustained economic growth over the past 15 years …

Africa’s success is especially noteworthy because it has not been limited to countries with natural resources, such as South Africa’s diamonds or Nigerian oil. On the contrary, the authors note that poverty has fallen “for both landlocked and coastal countries, for mineral-rich and mineral-poor countries, for countries with favorable and unfavorable agriculture, for countries with different colonizers, and for countries with varying degrees of exposure to the African slave trade. The benefits of growth were so widely distributed that African inequality actually fell substantially.”

Poverty reduction through economic growth is thus one of the great success stories of recent decades. And that work is not done. …  Achieving sustained reduction in poverty will remain the great cause of the 21st century.

Yet it’s hard to see how the World Bank will help that cause if led by an open critic of economic growth like Jim Yong Kim. … It’s hard to see how its reputation will be redeemed by a World Bank president who seems to believe that the greatest danger to the global poor comes from the only proven strategy to improve the quality of their lives.

AP reports:

Pakistani acid attack victim Fakhra Younus had endured more than three dozen surgeries over more than a decade to repair her severely damaged face and body when she finally decided life was no longer worth living. … [She] jumped from the sixth floor of a building in Rome, where she had been living and receiving treatment. …

She had been a dancer. Her husband, Bilal Khar, a “law-maker”, poured the acid over her.

It must have been excruciatingly painful, and it hideously disfigured her.

Bilal Khar was brought to trial and acquitted.

“Many believe he used his connections to escape the law’s grip –  a common occurrence in Pakistan.”

His father was Ghulam Mustafa Khar, who had been governor of Pakistan’s largest province, Punjab.

The couple was married for three years, but Younus eventually left him because he …  physically and verbally abused her….

He came to her mother’s house, found her lying asleep and “poured acid all over her”.

He will suffer no punishment. He walks a free man.

More than 8,500 acid attacks, forced marriages and other forms of violence against women were reported in Pakistan in 2011 … The figure is likely an undercount…

Here is part of a half-good half-bad speech by Richard Dawkins at the recent Left-dominated “Reason Rally“:

What a magnificent, inspiring sight! I was expecting great things even in fine weather. In the rain – look at this: This is the most incredible sight I can remember ever seeing.

What? A few thousand wet lefties the most incredible sight Dawkins can remember ever seeing? A man who has looked deeply into the workings of evolution?

Well, we suppose he meant he had never seen so many atheists gathered together. But was it incredible that they should do so? Lefties are by definition collectivists.

The sharper, critical thinkers among you may have discerned that I don’t come from these parts. I see myself as an emissary from a benighted country that does not have a constitutional separation between church and state. Indeed it doesn’t have a written constitution at all. We have a head of state who’s also the head of the Church of England. The church is deeply entwined in British public life. The American Constitution is a precious treasure, the envy of the world. The First Amendment of the Constitution, which enshrines the separation between church and state, is the model for secular constitutions the world over and deserves to be imitated the world over.

So far, so good.

How sad it would be if in the birthplace of secular constitutions the very principle of secular constitutions were to be betrayed in a theocracy. But it’s come close to that.

If he was referring to the possibility that the fundamentalist Catholic, Rick Santorum, may become president, we agree it is something to dread (though we think even he would be preferable to Obama).

How could anyone rally against reason? How is it necessary to have a rally for reason? Reason means basing your life on evidence and on logic, which is how you deduce the consequences of evidence.

Like the Left doesn’t do, sir!

In a hundred years’ time, it seems to me inconceivable that anybody could want to have a rally for reason. By that time, we will either have blown ourselves up or we’ll have become so civilized that we no longer need it.

When I was in school, we used to sing a hymn. It went, “It is a thing most wonderful, almost too wonderful to be.” After that the hymn rather went off the rails, but those first two lines have inspired me. It is a thing most wonderful that on this once barren rock orbiting a rather mediocre star on the edge of a rather ordinary galaxy, on this rock a remarkable process called evolution by natural selection has given rise to the magnificent diversity of complexity of life. The elegance, the beauty and the illusion of design which we see all around us has given rise in the last million years or so to a species – our species – with a brain big enough to comprehend that process, to comprehend how we came to be here, how we came to be here from extremely simple beginnings where the laws of physics are played out in very simple ways.  The laws of physics have never been violated, but the laws of physics are filtered through this incredible process called evolution by natural selection  to give rise to a brain that is capable of understanding the process, a brain which is capable of measuring the age of the universe between 13 and 14 billion years, of measuring the age of the Earth between 4 and 5 billion years, of knowing what matter is made of, knowing what we are made of, made of atoms brought together by this mechanical, automatic, unplanned, unconscious process: evolution by natural selection.

We have no quarrel with any of that. We’re ready at all times to sing the praises of the laws of physics and glorify having the consciousness to know them – and to express gratitude to the likes of Darwin and Dawkins for explaining them to us.

But now he slips off the rails of reason.

That’s not just true; it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful because it’s true.

No, no. He’s not reasoning. Truth is not beauty, and beauty is not truth. Truth applies only to statements: so yes, Darwin’s statements are true. Beauty remains in the eye of the beholder, has to do with feelings only, and is superfluous to the laws of physics.

And it’s almost too good to be true. How is it conceivable that the laws of physics should conspire together without guidance, without direction, without any intelligence to bring us into the world? Now we do have intelligence. Intelligence comes into the world, comes into the universe late. It’s come into the world through our brains and maybe other brains in the universe. Now at last – finally – after 4 billion years of evolution we have the opportunity to bring some intelligent design into the world.

That we understand, and we applaud him for saying it.

Then he opposes “Intelligent Design” (a euphemism for God) with the intelligent design that human beings are capable of, and we appreciate that too.

But there are areas where the application of design is not intelligent:

We need intelligent design. We need to intelligently design our morals, our ethics, our politics, our society.

Design society!  There speaks the collectivist, the socialist. Dawkins, the brilliant exponent of evolution, there abandons reason. Politically he  is on the side of the emotions, has the Left’s moral vanity, its conviction that it knows what’s best for all of us and will force its design on us whether we like it or not.

We need to intelligently design the way we run our lives, not look back to scrolls – I was going to say ancient scrolls, they’re not even very ancient, about 800 BC the book of Genesis was written. I am often accused of expressing contempt and despising religious people. I don’t despise religious people; I despise what they stand for. I like to quote the British journalist Johann Hari who said, “I have so much respect for you that I cannot respect your ridiculous ideas.”

Fine, but it isn’t the case that the only alternative to religion is socialism.

… Science makes us see what we couldn’t see before. Religion does its best to snuff out even that light which we can see.

So we’re here to stand up for reason, to stand up for science, to stand up for logic, to stand up for the beauty of reality and the beauty of the fact that we can understand reality.

I hope that this meeting will be a turning point. I’m sure many people have said that already. I like to think of a physical analogy of a critical mass. There are too many people in this country who have been cowed into fear of coming out as atheists or secularists or agnostics. We are far more numerous than anybody realizes. We are approaching a tipping point, we’re approaching that critical mass, where the number of people who have come out becomes so great that suddenly everybody will realize, “I can come out, too.” That moment is not far away now. And I think that with hindsight this rally in Washington will be seen as a very significant tipping point on the road.

We share his wish for more atheists to make themselves known – especially to us – but we don’t think the wet lefty rally in Washington will prove a tipping point.

And I will particularly appeal to my scientific colleagues most of whom are atheists if you look at the members of the National Academy of Sciences about 90 percent of them are non-believers an exact mirror image of the official figures of the country at large. If you look at the Royal Society of London, the equivalent for the British Commonwealth, again about 90 percent are atheists. But they mostly keep quiet about it. They’re not ashamed of it. They can’t be bothered to come out and express what they feel. They think religion is just simply boring. They’re not going to bother to even stand up and oppose it. They need to come out.

Religion is an important phenomenon.

Yes, dangerously important in it’s baneful effects.

Forty percent of the American population, according to opinion polls, think the world – the universe, indeed – is less than 10,000 years old. That’s not just an error, that’s a preposterous error. I’ve done the calculation before and it’s the equivalent of believing that the width of North America from Washington to San Francisco is equal to about eight yards….

Will any bible literalist hear and take heed? We’d like to hear his/her response.

We just ran a poll by a foundation in Britain in which we took those people who ticked a Christian box in the census … We just took the people who ticked the Christian box and we asked them “Why did you tick the Christian box?” And the most popular answer to that question was “Oh, well, I like to think of myself as a good person.” But we all like to think of ourselves as good people. Atheists do, Jews do, Muslims do. So when you meet somebody who claims to be Christian, ask her, ask him “What do you *really* believe?” And I’ll think you’ll find that in many cases, they give you an answer which is no more convincing than that “I like to be a good person.”

Also if he substituted “Leftist” for “Christian”, he’d be right on the nail. 

He questions the sincerity of the religious:

So when I meet somebody who claims to be religious, my first impulse is: “I don’t believe you. I don’t believe you until you tell me do you really believe – for example, if they say they are Catholic – do you really believe that when a priest blesses a wafer it turns into the body of Christ? Are you seriously telling me you believe that? Are you seriously saying that wine turns into blood?” Mock them! Ridicule them! In public!

Don’t fall for the convention that we’re all too polite to talk about religion. Religion is not off the table. Religion is not off limits. Religion makes specific claims about the universe which need to be substantiated and need to be challenged and, if necessary, need to be ridiculed with contempt.

Yes. Religion and collectivism should be constantly ridiculed with contempt.