Our Facebook page has been shut down by the simple means of depriving us of a space to post something.

The space at the top of the page which normally carries the invitation to “Write something …” has been removed.

Perhaps we have only been suspended and not shut out.

We wait to see.

We have of course complained through the means the company provides. We have heard nothing back.

This follows a gradual shrinking of our “reach” (the number of Facebook subscribers they send our posts to) from thousands to tens – and the removal of many of our posts.

We are being treated by Facebook the way they treat all (?) conservative sites to some degree. But how many are completely silenced?

Later:

The space to write something on the page has been restored to us – whether in response to our complaint or not, we have no idea.

… through an Australian living and working in the United States, Professor Philip Alston.

The UN – aka Evil HQ – despises and condemns this free republic.

Dan Calabrese writes (to the citizens of the United States) at Canada Free Press:

You should all be ashamed of yourselves. The United Nations says so.

Six months ago, the UN sent a “human rights investigator” to find out if the poor are worse off under Donald Trump, which of course he and the UN had already decided was the case before he ever got here. He spent a little time here, visited a few run-down areas, and referenced some obsolete census data. Philip Alston, U.N. special rapporteur on extreme poverty, called on U.S. authorities to provide solid social protection and address underlying problems, rather than “punishing and imprisoning the poor”.

While welfare benefits and access to health insurance are being slashed, President Donald Trump’s tax reform has awarded “financial windfalls” to the mega-rich and large companies, further increasing inequality, he said in a report.

Which was, of course, totally untrue. Everyone except the super-rich benefit from the tax cuts.

U.S. policies since President Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty in the 1960s have been “neglectful at best”, he said.

“But the policies pursued over the past year seem deliberately designed to remove basic protections from the poorest, punish those who are not in employment and make even basic health care into a privilege to be earned rather than a right of citizenship,” Alston said.

Almost 41 million people live in poverty, 18.5 million of them in extreme poverty, and children account for one in three poor, he said. The United States has the highest youth poverty rate among industrialized countries, he added.

“Its citizens live shorter and sicker lives compared to those living in all other rich democracies, eradicable tropical diseases are increasingly prevalent and it has the world’s highest incarceration rate … and the highest obesity levels in the developed world,” Alston said.

Oh, happy is the country whose problem is that its people are too fat!

However, the data from the U.S. Census Bureau he cited covers only the period through 2016, and he gave no comparative figures on the extent of poverty before and after Trump came into office in January 2017.

The Australian, a veteran U.N. rights expert and New York University law professor, will present his report to the United Nations Human Rights Council later this month.

It is based on his mission in December to several U.S. states, including rural Alabama, a slum in downtown Los Angeles, California, and the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico.

Actually bothering to rebut this point-by-point would be an exercise in absurdity, but the defining fact here is that this fool wants to blame Trump for all this while citing December 2016 census data to support all his points.

As for his view of the problems and the cause/effect, let’s just say Americans have been debating for centuries the best economic and societal policies to employ, and the debate continues, but apparently that’s all over now that a “UN human rights investigator” has pronounced from on high how things are.

Remember, this is the same UN that has allowed the likes of Syria, Iran and Cuba to serve as members of its Human Rights Commission, and that blames Israel for every bit of violence that occurs in the Middle East. The UN is a complete joke. Can someone tell me again why we bother to pay for the privilege of membership in this schlock organization?

A very bad joke. A very bad institution.

The UN must be destroyed!

Is Bill Clinton’s reputation now mud forever?

Mark Steyn comments, as always brilliantly, wittily, accurately:

The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.  – Tom Wolfe

There was a time not very long ago when loneliness was mitigated for many individuals by their being a part of a family.

Now it is not the fashion among the peoples of the civilized (which is to say the Western) world to marry. And it is even less the “done thing” for people to have children.

In general, the childless are surely destined to be more lonely in their old age than parents and grandparents.

Yet to the president of the Family Division of the High Court of Justice for England and Wales, the end of traditional family life is a Good Thing.

Random relationships – parody “families” –  are better for individual happiness, he seems to think.

Jack Montgomery reports at Breitbart:

Sir James Munby, President of the Family Division of the High Court of Justice for England and Wales , has said society should “welcome and applaud” the collapse of traditional nuclear-family life.

“What is the family?” asked the wealthy 69-year-old in a lecture at the University of Liverpool. “Time was when most people probably thought the answer was not merely clear but obvious. Today it is more complex,” he suggested.

“In contemporary Britain the family takes an almost infinite variety of forms. Many marry according to the rites of non-Christian faiths. People live together as couples, married or not, and with partners who may not always be of the other sex. Children live in households where their parents may be married or unmarried. They may be brought up by a single parent, by two parents or even by three parents. Their parents may or may not be their natural parents. They may be children of parents with very different religious, ethnic or national backgrounds, and they may be the children of polygamous marriages,” he suggested — likely in reference to the explosion in Islamic polygamy in Britain, which is flourishing in spite of the country’s long-standing anti-bigamy laws.

So polygamy is okay with Munby. (Under sharia law, if parents are divorced, the father gets the sole custody of the children when they have passed their infancy.)

“The fact is that many adults and children, whether through choice or circumstance, live in families more or less removed from what, until comparatively recently, would have been recognised as the typical nuclear family,” the judge continued. “This, I stress, is not merely the reality; it is, I believe, a reality which we should welcome and applaud.”

The shocking statement is not the first controversial commentary on the state of British family life by England’s most senior family judge.

In 2014, Sir James gave an equally charged speech in which he issued a damning and partisan indictment of “Victorian values” and railed against “the dominant influence wielded by the Christian churches” in the past.

We have no quarrel with him when he rails against the Christian churches. We do it too. But let’s get back to families.

To whom will the multitudes of the barren look for companionship and comfort in their old age? If they survive very long, their friends – if they had them – will have died; or if not, they will have have reached the years of dependence themselves.

Will the Lonely Old look to the cold comfort of the state?

Sir James Munby, who is strongly against begetting children, does not answer that question.

He also celebrated the role played by the contraceptive pill and abortion on demand in removing “the fear of unwanted pregnancy and the fear of the consequences of contraceptive failure” transforming sex into “something to be enjoyed, if one wished, for purposes having nothing to do with procreation” by the end of the 1960s.

“A fundamental link – the connection between sex and procreation – was irretrievably broken,” he gloated.

In the Munby mind, procreation is to be avoided.

We ask our readers: What are your thoughts on this?

We do not hold Ernest Hemingway in high esteem (or any) as a novelist, but many do. Will this information about the man himself come as a shock to them?

Humberto Fontova writes at Townhall:

“There’s no politics here ….In fact, there’s no clear no evidence that Hemingway was a Castro enthusiast, or critic,” says Sandra Spanier, an English professor at Penn State University who is the editor of the Hemingway Letters Project. “He felt that it was important, as a guest living in another country, that he be apolitical,” Spanier said in an interview. (Los Angeles Times story on the restoration of Ernest Hemingway’s mansion Finca Vigia near Havana, Cuba, May 30 [2018].)

Got it, amigos? According to the Los Angeles Times a former KGB agent living in a KBG-founded and mentored Soviet satrapy while singing its praises makes him antiseptically “apolitical”.

What?….some of you weren’t aware that declassified Soviet documents proved that Ernest Hemingway officially signed up with the KGB as “Agent Argo” in 1941?

Well, don’t take it from me. After all I’m a “rabidly right-wing Cuban exile!” Instead take it from the crypto-commie (but well-sourced) UK Guardian.

But you just loved The Old Man and the Sea? And especially Gary Cooper as Robert Jordan and Ingrid Bergman as Maria in For Whom the Bell Tolls? So you just can’t bring yourself to believe something so shockingly repulsive about one of your favorite authors Ernest Hemingway?

OK, fine.  I understand. Then try this: “According to transcripts of NKVD files prepared by a Russian historian who subsequently fled to the West, Hemingway “was recruited for our work on ideological grounds” by an operative named Jacob Golos.

Turns out that Papa failed pathetically at his KGB assignment.  But hey, it’s the thought that counts!  And the thought was to be a member of the most murderous organization in modern history during its most murderous phase. (Stalin’s NKVD under Lavrenti Beria.) A singular honor, surely!

“There’s no clear evidence that Hemingway was a Castro enthusiast,” sniffs the Los Angeles Times. Oh, really? Well chew on these a bit:

“Castro’s revolution is very pure and beautiful. I’m encouraged by it. The Cuban people now have a decent chance for the first time. The Cubans getting shot all deserve it.” – Ernest Hemingway, 1960.

Quite fittingly, when Soviet diplomat Anastas Mikoyan finished his courtesy calls on Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in Havana in 1960 — this long-time Stalin and Beria confidant made it a point to call on Ernest Hemingway. …

Hemingway knew full well what was going on behind the scenes of Castro and Che’s “pure and beautiful” revolution. Accounts of “Papa” Hemingway’s eager presence at many of the Katyn-like massacres of untried Cubans comes courtesy of Hemingway’s own friend, the late George Plimpton (not exactly an “embittered rabidly right-wing Cuban exile!”) who worked as editor of the Paris Review, (not exactly a “McCarthyite scandal sheet”.)

In 1958 George Plimpton interviewed Hemingway in Cuba for one of the Paris Review’s most famous pieces. They became friends and the following year Hemingway again invited Plimpton down to his Finca Vigia just outside Havana. An editor at The Paris Review during the 1990’s, while relating how this high-brow publication passed on serializing the manuscript that became Che Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries, reveals “Papa’s” unwitting role in the rejection.

“I took the paper-clipped excerpt upstairs to the Boss (Plimpton),” writes James Scott Linville, “and said I had something strange and good. As I started to tell him about it, his smile faded. I stopped my pitch and said, ‘Boss, what’s the matter?'”

“James, I’m sorry.” Linville recalls Plimpton replying. A sad look came over him, and he said, “Years ago, after we’d done the interview, Papa invited me down again to Cuba. It was right after the revolution.

“There’s something you should see,” Hemingway told Plimpton while preparing a shaker of drinks for the outing.

They got in the car with a few others and drove some way out of town. They got out, set up chairs and took out the drinks, as if they were going to watch the sunset. Soon, a truck arrived. This, explained George, was what they’d been waiting for. It came, as Hemingway knew, the same time each day. It stopped and some men with guns got out of it. In the back were a couple of dozen others who were tied up. Prisoners. The men with guns hustled the others out of the back of the truck, and lined them up. Then they shot them. They put the bodies back into the truck.

And so it started. Within a few years 16,000 men and boys (some of them U.S. citizens) would fill mass graves after scenes like the ones that so charmed Papa Hemingway with his thermos of specially-prepared Daiquiris. The figure for the Castroite murder tally is not difficult to find. Simply open “The Black Book of Communism,” written by French scholars and published in English by Harvard University Press (neither exactly an outpost of “embittered rabidly right-wing Cuban exiles!”) …

“Pure and beautiful” indeed, Mr “apolitical” Hemingway.

To live in Castro’s Cuba and not be outraged, would not be a condition of mind describable as “apolitical”, but “inhumane”.

An inhumane novelist, Ernest Hemingway.

The Obama administration was against increasing US oil production; against drilling in new fields; against fracking. Obama would rather Americans bought oil from other countries, in particular Muslim countries of the Middle East.

President Trump – intent on making America great again – has a different policy. It is enormously successful.

The New York Post reports:

In February, oil output hit 10.2 million barrels per day and gas production hit 87.6 billion cubic feet per day. The fact that US oil and gas companies are producing such prodigious quantities of energy — and by doing so, are saving consumers billions of dollars per year — should be headline news. …

The shale revolution has turned the US into an energy superpower. The combination of horizontal drilling, hydraulic fracturing and other technologies … has resulted in “the fastest and biggest addition to world energy supply that has ever occurred in history”.

How big is that addition? Over the past decade, merely the increase — I repeat, just the increase — in US oil and gas production is equal to seven times the total energy production of every wind turbine and solar project in the United States.

Climate-change activists like to claim that renewable energy can power the entire economy and that we should “do the math”. I couldn’t agree more — on the math part. In 2008, US oil production was about 5.2 million barrels per day. Today, it’s about 10.2 million barrels per day. In 2008, domestic gas production averaged about 55.1 billion cubic feet per day. Today, it’s about 87.6 billion cubic feet per day.

That’s an increase of about 32.5 billion cubic feet per day, which is equivalent to about 5.5 million barrels of oil per day. Thus, over the past decade, US oil and gas output has jumped by about 10.5 million barrels of oil equivalent per day.

Let’s compare that to domestic solar and wind production which, since 2008, has increased by 4,800 percent and 450 percent, respectively. While those percentage increases are impressive, the total energy produced from those sources remains small when compared to oil and gas.

In 2017, according to the Energy Information Administration, US solar production totaled about 77 terawatt-hours and wind production totaled about 254 terawatt-hours, for a combined total of 331 terawatt-hours. That’s the equivalent of about 1.5 million barrels of oil per day.

Simple division (10.5 divided by 1.5) shows that since 2008, the increase in energy production from oil and gas is equal to seven times the energy output of all domestic solar and wind.

This surge in hydrocarbon production has resulted in huge benefits to the US economy. Over the past half-decade, foreign and domestic companies have invested about $160 billion in new chemical-manufacturing facilities in the United States. A 2016 study by IHS found that lower natural-gas prices have created about 1.4 million jobs and increased disposable income by about $156 billion.

Or, to put it another way, the Invisible Hand – not of a Deity, not of Nature, but of Free Economic Man (in the generic sense of “man”) – looks after land and sea best.* 

From the Conservative Tribune:

You have no doubt heard environmentalists say on multiple occasions that humans are utterly destroying the world’s forested areas, a terrible development that will dramatically increase the catastrophic effects of global warming and devastate the earth as we know it.

That assertion was put forward recently in a BBC report on the prospects of survival for Koala Bears in Australia, in which Deborah Tabart of the Australian Koala Foundation declared that “85 percent of the world’s forests are now gone”.

That shocking statistic likely came from a 2014 article by GreenActionNews, which asserted that 80 percent of the world’s forested areas had been destroyed, largely through human activity such as deforestation — a problem that would likely get worse unless regulations to restrict the rate of deforestation were implemented around the globe.

But a recent article in HumanProgress took great issue with the assertion that the world’s forested areas are disappearing, and offered up facts to dispute the claim.

For starters, roughly 4 billion hectares of forested areas exist around the globe, which in its entirety encompasses approximately 14.8 billion hectares of land, both above and beneath the earth’s oceans and seas.

If 4 billion hectares of forest were to remain after 80 percent of forests had been destroyed, that would mean 135 percent of the earth would have been covered by forests, and some 5.2 billion hectares of forest would have been removed from the oceans and seas.

Obviously those numbers don’t add up. The world’s plethora of deserts, frozen tundra, grasslands and swamps obviously disprove the notion that the entirety of the earth’s land surface was once covered by forests.

Furthermore, the GreenActionNews piece suggests the world’s remaining intact forest areas were “unevenly distributed”, as the five most forest-rich nations were Brazil, Canada, China, Russia and the United States. Though obviously not a precise correlation, it shouldn’t be surprising that a significant portion of the world’s forests are found in five of the world’s largest nations by landmass. Indeed, for every 7.6 million hectares of forest lost worldwide per year, some 4.3 million hectares of forest were added, meaning the globe was losing its forested areas by a rate of only 0.08 percent per year, hardly as dramatic as environmentalists would have you believe.

Making matters worse for the leftist environmentalists, the areas where afforestation or reforestation were occurring were happening in economically developed regions of the world. In fact, regions that have embraced forms of capitalist economic systems, like North America and Europe, have actually increased their forested areas in recent decades, in some places to more than pre-industrialization levels.

This phenomenon is also occurring in many still developing regions and has come to be known as the “Environmental Kuznets curve,” which posits that economic development will initially lead to environmental degradation, but as economies grow and improve that degradation will eventually reverse course.

That usually occurs around the same time a nation reaches approximately $4,500 GDP per capita, which has been dubbed the “forest transition” point, which is when forested areas begin to increase instead of shrink. The phenomenon also appears to apply to a nation’s biodiversity as well, such that animal species initially feared as nearing extinction will tend to stabilize their populations and begin to bounce back in more economically developed regions.

Thus, it would appear that — contrary to the assertions of radical environmentalists — a rapidly developing economy and urbanization are actually good overall for the environment, as rich nations can afford to spend money on environmental protection policies and more people living in cities means more land outside those cities can be returned to its original state of nature.

Bear in mind that radical environmentalism is, at its core, just an offshoot of Marxism and the marxist obsession with inequality would rather see all humankind be equally miserable in poverty than see some people rise farther and faster than others through capitalism.

While it is true that forest areas are declining in some regions of the world, they are actually being replaced and growing in others, typically those that have adopted a form of capitalism as their economic model.

Sorry environmentalists, but that is a form of inequality that we can manage to live with.

*From the Encyclopaedia Britannica:

Invisible hand, metaphor, introduced by the 18th-century Scottish philosopher and economist Adam Smith … characterizes the mechanisms through which beneficial social and economic outcomes may arise from the accumulated self-interested actions of individuals, none of whom intends to bring about such outcomes.

Tommy Robinson was arrested on Friday, May 25, 2018, outside Leeds Crown Court for live-streaming interviews with people who were there to protest the prostitution of underage girls by the Muslim men who were on trial that day in the court. He did nothing wrong, nothing illegal. He had even asked a police officer where he could and couldn’t stand to do his interviews.

He was arrested because Theresa May runs a police state in which any criticism of Muslims is a greater offense than the pimping of underage girls. Within an hour, Tommy was arrested, tried, and sentenced to thirteen months in prison. Some reports say the charge was “disturbance of the peace”, some say “contempt of court”. He is likely to be put among the general population of the prison, where Muslims will beat him – possibly to death.

The court also forbade the reporting of his arrest and sentence.

But the word got out. And this has so incensed the British people – or some of them – at last, that his arrest was followed by riots in Whitehall.

The leader of the Freedom Party in the Netherlands, Geert Wilders, made a public protest (see the video here), and  raised the matter in the Dutch parliament, asking the Dutch foreign minister to take action on behalf of Tommy Robinson. A member of the German Bundestag offered Tommy political asylum in Germany.

Bruce Bawer writes at Gatestone:

The swiftness with which injustice was meted out to Tommy Robinson is stunning. No, more than that: it is terrifying.

Without having access to his own lawyer, Robinson was summarily tried and sentenced to 13 months behind bars. He was then transported to Hull Prison.

Meanwhile, the judge who sentenced Robinson also ordered British media not to report on his case. Newspapers that had already posted reports of his arrest quickly took them down. All this happened on the same day.

In Britain, rapists enjoy the right to a full and fair trial, the right to the legal representation of their choice, the right to have sufficient time to prepare their cases, and the right to go home on bail between sessions of their trial. No such rights were offered, however, to Tommy Robinson.

Tommy Robinson now belongs among the great national heroes of the British people.

What is also clear is that Celsus is more than just disdainful. He is worried. Pervading his writing is a clear anxiety that this religion—a religion that he considers stupid, pernicious and vulgar—might spread even further and, in so doing, damage Rome. Over 1,500 years later, the eighteenth-century English historian Edward Gibbon would draw similar conclusions, laying part of the blame for the fall of the Roman Empire firmly at the door of the Christians. The Christians’ belief in their forthcoming heavenly realm made them dangerously indifferent to the needs of their earthly one. Christians shirked military service, the clergy actively preached pusillanimity, and vast amounts of public money were spent not on protecting armies but squandered instead on the “useless multitudes” of the Church’s monks and nuns. They showed, Gibbon felt, an “indolent, or even criminal, disregard for the public welfare.  

The Catholic Church and its “useless multitudes” were, in return, magnificently unimpressed by Gibbon’s arguments, and they promptly placed his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, its list of banned books.

Even in liberal England, the atmosphere became fiercely hostile to the historian. Gibbon later said that he had been shocked by the response to his work. “Had I believed,” he wrote, “that the majority of English readers were so fondly attached even to the name and shadow of Christianity . . . I might, perhaps, have softened the two invidious chapters, which would create many enemies, and conciliate few friends.”

Celsus did not soften his attack either. This first assault on Christianity was vicious, powerful and, like Gibbon, immensely readable. Yet unlike Gibbon, today almost no one has heard of Celsus and fewer still have read his work. Because Celsus’s fears came true. Christianity continued to spread, and not just among the lower classes. Within 150 years of Celsus’s attack, even the emperor of Rome professed himself a follower of the religion.

(From The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World by Catherine Nixey)

Now in America as then in Germany?:

In the decade preceding the First World War, Germany, the country most advanced on the path toward bureaucratic regimentation, witnessed the appearance of a phenomenon hitherto unheard of: the youth movement. Turbulent gangs of untidy boys and girls roamed the country, making much noise and shirking their school lessons. In bombastic words they announced the gospel of a golden age. All preceding generations, they emphasized, were simply idiotic; their incapacity has converted the earth into a hell. But the rising generation is no longer willing to endure gerontocracy, the supremacy of impotent and imbecile senility. Henceforth the brilliant youths will rule. They will destroy everything that is old and useless, they will reject all that was dear to their parents, they will substitute new real and substantial values and ideologies for the antiquated and false ones of capitalist and bourgeois civilization, and they will build a new society of giants and supermen.

The inflated verbiage of these adolescents was only a poor disguise for their lack of any ideas and of any definite program. They had nothing to say but this: We are young and therefore chosen; we are ingenious because we are young; we are the carriers of the future; we are the deadly foes of the rotten bourgeois and Philistines. And if somebody was not afraid to ask them what their plans were, they knew only one answer: Our leaders will solve all problems.

It has always been the task of the new generation to provoke changes. But the characteristic feature of the youth movement was that they had neither new ideas nor plans. They called their action the youth movement precisely because they lacked any program which they could use to give a name to their endeavors. In fact they espoused entirely the program of their parents. They did not oppose the trend toward government omnipotence and bureaucratization. Their revolutionary radicalism was nothing but the impudence of the years between boyhood and manhood; it was a phenomenon of a protracted puberty. It was void of any ideological content. …

The bulk of them  … had one aim only: to get a job as soon as possible with the government. Those who were not killed in the wars and revolutions are today pedantic and timid bureaucrats in the innumerable offices of the German Zwangswirtschaft. They are obedient and faithful slaves of Hitler. But they will be no less obedient and faithful handy men of Hitler’s successor, whether he is a German nationalist or a puppet of Stalin. 

From Bureaucracy, by Ludwig von Mises (1945). 

(Hat-tip Robert Kantor)