The weekly magazine Charlie Hebdo laughed at all religions. It mocked religion as such, mercilessly. It dared to mock the nastiest religion of them all, Islam, defying its vengefulness. It was doing a great job for civilization.

Because of the killing of the journalists and cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo yesterday in Paris, we repeat part of our post, Religion and the crippling of the mind – an existential threat (January 2, 2013):

Human survival depends on progress, and progress depends on the criticism of ideas.

Religions are the most dangerous sets of ideas because they are the most dogmatic. Dogma chains and cripples the mind. It denies knowledge and prevents discovery and innovation. The only possible form of argument between opposing dogmas is violence. Religions must be questioned.

Any idea that requires a law to protect it from criticism is ipso facto a bad idea.

The Organization of Islamic Cooperation [formerly the Organization of the Islamic Conference], the United Nations, and the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, are actively engaged in trying to silence criticism of Islam. If their campaign succeeds it will greatly advance Islam’s jihad, its war to impose universal Islamic rule.

The victory of Islam would put humanity under a death sentence.  

And this is also a good time to repeat an even earlier post, The need to knock Islam (September 3, 2011):

The greatness of the West began with doubting. The idea that every belief, every assumption, should be critically examined started the might of Europe. When those old Greek thinkers who founded our civilization learnt and taught that no one has a monopoly of truth or ever will have, they launched the intellectual adventure that has carried the human race – not without a long interval in the doldrums – literally to the skies.

Socrates taught the utility of suspicion. He is reputed to have said, “The highest form of human excellence is to question oneself and others.” He was not, however, the first to use doubt for discovery. Thales of Miletos, who was born 155 years before Socrates, dared to doubt that religion’s explanatory tales about how the world came to be as it is were to be trusted, and he began exploring natural phenomena in a way that we recognize as scientific. He is often called the Father of Science. With him and his contemporary, Anaximander, who argued with him by advancing alternative ideas, came the notion – for the first time as far as we know – that reason could fathom and describe how the universe worked.

Science is one of the main achievements of the West, but it is not the only product of constructive doubt that made for its greatness. Doubt as a habit of mind or tradition of thinking meant that new, foreign, even counter-intuitive ideas were not dismissed. Europe, before and after it stagnated in the doldrums of the long Catholic Christian night (and even to some extent during those dark centuries), was hospitable to ideas wherever they came from.

Totally opposed to this intellectual openness were the churches with their dogma. Those who claim that the achievements of our civilization are to be credited to Christianity (or in the currently fashionable phrase to “the Judeo-Christian tradition”) have a hard case to make. It was the rediscovery of the Greek legacy in the Renaissance in the teeth of Christian dogmatism, and the new freedom from religious persecution exploited by the philosophers of the Enlightenment that re-launched the West on its intellectual progress, to become the world’s nursery of innovation and its chief factory of ideas.

Our civilization cannot survive without this openness. Critical examination is the breath that keeps it alive. But it is in danger of suffocation. It is more threatened now than it has been for the last four hundred years by dogmatisms: Marxism, environmentalism, religion – above all Islam which absolutely forbids criticism.

The Founding Fathers of the United States perfectly understood the necessity for an open market of ideas. Every citizen of the republic, they laid down, must be free to declare his beliefs, to argue his case, to speak his mind, to examine ideas as publicly as he chose without fear of being silenced.

Islam is now the major threat to the West. Its ideas are the very opposite of those on which the USA was founded. It is an ideology of intolerance and cruelty. It forbids the free expression of thought. By its very nature, even if it were not now on a mission of world conquest (which it is), it is the enemy of the West.

The best way to defeat it is by criticizing it, constantly and persistently, in speech and writing, on the big screen and the small screen, in the schools and academies, in all the media of information and comment, in national and international assemblies.

If the weapon of words is forbidden, the only alternative will be guns. 

First, there is the UN resolution  called “Agenda 21”. It’s a plan – among Greens, Marxists, world-government enthusiasts and similar ideologues such as animal rights champions, specimens of which may be viewed weekdays in Turtle Bay – to put an end to single family homes. (Family housing is  “non-sustainable” according to the authors.) Adults will live singly in small compact  – ie  cramped – units, with uniform provision of all the needs the Agenda bureaucrats allow you: a single bed, limited storage for approved clothes and a few other licensed things; facilities for washing and excreting (though the water supply, like heating and lighting, will be  tightly controlled), a table or desk, a chair, TV, personal computer maybe (but monitored and sometimes censored) … Communal space  for bicycles but not for private cars.

Anyway, that’s our visualization of the plan, based on what we know of Agenda 21 and observation of our City Council’s housing developments going up along the railway track near the station. Readers can torment their own imaginations with their personal take on the collectivization program.

For more about it, put “Agenda 21” into our search slot. Also go here to read  how New York is implementing Agenda 21’s  “micro-apartment” or “stack ’em and pack ’em” housing policy.

But to come to the point: The sole occupier of a micro-apartment will be the Single Adult (defined as over 18 or perhaps younger). Copious copulation will be promoted with free condoms et cetera, but reproduction will be discouraged. If children are conceived, the unfortunate “mother” will be advised and helped to have an abortion. Indeed, the child she has conceived can be got rid of at any time up to some days, weeks, months, or even years after it is born (length of time in which killing will be permitted – or ordered – is yet to be determined). If the “mother” persists in giving birth to a child and keeping it alive, the state will take it over – though just when is no doubt a question being studied at vast expense by a panel of idiots even as we speak – and raise it with other children, none being advantaged over the others by any special treatment. (Stop that hugging and kissing!)

In the unlikely circumstance that the state will need more children than have been born,  in vitro babies transplanted into synthetic “wombs” will be scheduled.

Plainly, mothering will simply not be needed. Mothers will be redundant to requirement. Fathers too, for that matter.

What to do about marriage? Fortunately (for the Agenda) it is a dying institution. There was hope that the practice of getting married would have died out completely in our town by the time our local micro-apartment blocks were ready for occupation, but those who hoped are now reconciled to disappointment on that score.

What happened to “save”  the institution was the legalization of gay marriage.

For a story about an opponent of same-sex marriage being brought round to accepting it because to him any marriage is better than none, see an opinion piece by Kathleen Parker here in the Washington Post. Such views are not those of the Agenda, but can be accommodated because  …

After some hesitation, and a lot of sotto voce grumbling, the Agenda planners suddenly came down unanimously in favor of gay marriage on the grounds that such marriages are by their nature barren.

Again no mothers, you see. So all’s well.

“No mothers here” is the policy. “Scrap Mom” is the pithy slogan. You’ll see it soon on T-shirts.

The time will come when the word “mother” will be used only as an insult. Not surprisingly, the necessary attitude to this campaign, the Abolition of Mother, is preponderant among those who use the word “mother” as half a noun, the other half being an obscenity, and who apply it indiscriminately to any of the twenty-three genders now officially listed in the Handbook of Political Correctness. (No kidding with that number, by the way.)

Next, with the homemaking mothering woman abolished, there is the question of what to do with women – of whatever gender. The popular answer to that question, among Agenda 21 fans – is:  put them in the Army. They can be sent abroad. They can be put in harm’s way. They can do what men – of whatever gender – are doing. And do it of course for equal pay – for as long as there will be wages rather than money-rationing equal for all regardless of occupation, or none.

In some states, the phasing out of families is already well underway. (As Victor Davis Hanson points out in an article we quoted yesterday: “California now has an enormous number of single-person households, childless couples, and one-child families.”) In Europe only very uncool persons have kids. And Muslims.

Will the Agenda 21 bureaucrats get round to discouraging Muslims from marrying and reproducing? Or will they shirk it? We wait with a not entirely innocent curiosity to find out. Of course Muslims  will have to be moved eventually into micro-apartments – with the addition of a prayer mat and an arrow pointing to Mecca – if the great objective is to be achieved.

The great objective? A world of orphans.

And not too many of them. Humans – the Agenda people teach us – are bad for the earth. And Gaia is a jealous goddess.

Environmentalism does not posit the existence of a superhuman being, though some of its acolytes personify the earth as Gaia – the Greek name for an ancient earth goddess – and worship of the earth is implicit in the cult. But it is a religion, as much arising out of superstition, propounding an orthodoxy and demanding strict adherence to it with threats of penalty for disobedience, as any other religion. And it is being imposed on the United States in defiance of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

These are extracts from an article by Paul Driessen at Townhall:

Climate alarmists are meeting in Doha, Qatar, to hammer out a new international treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol that expires this year. The US Environmental Protection Agency is poised to unleash its first wave of carbon dioxide regulations. And Congress is teaming up with the White House to legislate taxes on hydrocarbon use and CO2 emissions … 

This serious triple threat to our energy, economy, jobs, living standards, health and welfare is justified by assertions that the actions will stabilize Earth’s climate and prevent a litany of global warming horrors.

Our planet’s climate has never been stable, and never will be. There is no empirical evidence that carbon dioxide drives climate change, or that greenhouse gases have supplanted the complex and interrelated natural forces that have produced big and little ice ages, floods and droughts, stormy and quiescent periods throughout the ages.

Even as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have risen from 280 parts per million before 1880 to 391 ppm (0.0391%) today, average global temperatures have flat-lined for 16 years; hurricane and tornado frequency and intensity have fallen to new lows; Antarctic sea ice continues to expand, while Arctic ice caps were reduced, not by warming, but by huge storms; and the rate of sea level rise remains steady.

While alarmists insist that Hurricane Sandy was “unprecedented” and proof that “climate change is real,” it is just one of many major storms that have battered New York and eastern Canada over the years.

Moreover, every ton of painful, economy-crippling US carbon dioxide reductions would be offset by 100 tons from India, China and elsewhere, and atmospheric CO2 concentrations would continue to climb.

But these inconvenient truths are irrelevant to climate campaigners, who are using “dangerous manmade climate change” as the best pretext ever devised to control energy use and economies. They simply hypothesize, model and assert that every observed weather and climate phenomenon is due to human CO2 emissions. Warmer or colder, wetter or drier, more ice or less, more storms, fewer storms, occasional big storms – if not now, someday, sooner or later. It’s exactly what climate alarmists predicted.

This is not science. It is political science, rooted in a loathing of hydrocarbons, economic growth and humanity.

It is ideological, religious – the only state-sanctioned, state-supported religion permitted today.

And like the super pontiffs of every other religion, its high priests grow rich by exploiting the superstition of the believers. Fortunes are being made out of the myth of manmade global warming.

Well-connected political cronies take hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars for “green energy” and “global warming prevention” programs, funnel it to soon-to-be-bankrupt companies, keep a few million for themselves, and launder a few hundred thousand back to the politicians who brokered the deals. Obama campaign bundlers … received more than $21,000 of corporate welfare for each dollar they donated to the Obama reelection campaign. Big Green environmentalist groups also garner countless millions in taxpayer lucre.

The consequences for average workers [of Doha, EPA, and the carbon tax] and their families are dire. … The effects [of even one] will be disastrous. If all three are imposed … the impacts will be utterly devastating.

Ignoring these facts, extensive other evidence for natural climate change, and the numerous scientists who reject their manmade climate catastrophe claims, advocates of a new Doha climate treaty, EPA “CO2 endangerment” rules, and “carbon taxes” insist these actions are needed to avoid ecological calamities.

They are adamant in contending that carbon taxes will somehow benefit the economy, create jobs and balance out-of-control spending. One is reminded of Will Rogers insightful quip: “Suppose you were an idiot – and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”

Every one of these actions is intended to increase the cost of the hydrocarbon energy that powers our economy. But raising the cost of transportation fuels, electricity, lighting, heating, air conditioning, and thus of food, materials and equipment will severely impact the bottom line for factories, utilities, offices, farms, shops, airlines, shippers, hospitals, schools …

And even , as the writer points out, government itself.

The poorest families may get rebates for their increased energy costs … institutions will not. They will be forced to reduce wages and benefits, hire fewer full-time employees, lay people off, outsource operations to countries where energy costs are lower, or even close their doors.

Only government will never close its doors, sad to say.

Taxes paid by companies and employees will dwindle. Instead of paying taxes, newly jobless workers will collect unemployment and welfare – from shrinking government coffers. … [Shrinking because] these anti-hydrocarbon policies also mean the US Treasury will be deprived of hundreds of billions in lease bonuses, royalties, taxes and other revenues that it would realize from the development of our nation’s vast oil, natural gas and coal deposits. Instead, the United States will be forced to pay billions more for imported oil, often from dictatorial, unethical, environmentally reckless countries.

Environmentalism will impoverish all nations.

New hydrocarbon energy restrictions and green energy demands will deprive Third World families and communities of abundant, reliable, affordable energy, obstruct human rights progress, and keep entire nations impoverished. They will kill millions more from lung infections (from burning wood and dung), intestinal diseases (from contaminated water), malaria and other diseases of poverty and eco-imperialism.

“Eco-imperialism” is a word that should become common currency.

There are always people – too many of them – who want to rule the lives of others. They like to find big excuses for imposing their will on the rest of us. Today the most powerful of these types are the environmentalists. They’ve found the biggest excuse ever. A force majeure. If we don’t do as they say, the earth will burn up and  … what? All living things will perish? The new eschatology.

Within a hundred years of Christianity being made the state religion by the Emperor Theodosius in 380, Rome fell (476), and the western Roman Empire came to an end. The Christian ethos was against fighting to preserve civilization. A thousand years of darkness descended on Europe.

Will it take a hundred years for  – let’s coin a word for this new religion – Gaianity to reduce the declining West to poverty and stagnation, ripe for Islam to conquer?

We must not let it happen.

A tense drama, more full of nerve-racking suspense than the most gripping cliff-hanger any thriller-writer or epic movie-maker has ever conceived, is being enacted right now, in reality, on the world stage.

It is potentially the most devastating tragedy of all recorded history; more destructive than the terrible plagues that ravaged populations in the Dark and Middle Ages; more totally and irredeemably catastrophic for humankind than all the wars ever fought put together.

And yet, at the same time, it is a prodigious comedy, a gargantuan farce.

Here’s the plot:

Two tribes are scheming to change the world, each to something nearer to their heart’s desire.

The one is the tribe of the Masters. They are self-annointed kings, tsars, chieftains, tyrants. They know what’s right for humankind. They believe themselves to be brilliantly cunning. Their aim is to re-organize all the nations of the world and hold them in perpetual control. Their hope is that everyone now living, and everyone born from this time on, will be kept in a place performing a task or suffering a destiny that the Masters will assign to him or her, and none will dare to disobey.

The other is the tribe of the Loonies. They are child-like romantics, fantasists, fanatics, wild-eyed maniacs, psychopaths. They know what’s right for the Earth. They believe themselves to be irresistibly persuasive. Their aim is to reduce the population of the world, by any and all effective means, however ruthless, to about one tenth of the present number. Their hope is that those (very thin) persons permitted to survive, and to breed to the extent the Loonies may allow, will live in caves on wild berries and such vegetation as they can scratch from the soil beneath their feet; in helpless fear of man-eating beasts of prey; having no cures for pain or illness; no literacy; no possessions other than something that cuts, something that holds water, something that wraps, and sandals perhaps. (About sandals they haven’t yet made up their minds; they are doing some studies.) They are against civilization because they believe it is unfair to flora and fauna, to rocks and stones and trees, to oceans and rivers. So for as long as we humans are necessary to the earth at all – and that may not be very long – we must go back to the life of the savage (“solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”, as Thomas Hobbes described it).

The Masters would not allow the world’s population to shrink to a tenth of its present size. They have no liking for beasts of prey. They require literacy because they plan to indoctrinate. They can use medical science for their own ends. They must be able to depend on the assured continuation of the human race since they need to have people in their power. In sum, they do not share the vision of the Loonies. They despise it. But they understand that their plan will not appeal to many people, whereas the vision of the Loonies unaccountably attracts a lot of sympathy. They do not argue against it. They listen to the Loonies describe their vision and nod as if in sympathy. They need the Loonies.

The Loonies need the Masters to start the process of depriving people of their ability to support and defend themselves.

If the Masters attain their objective, they will eliminate the Loonies. If the Loonies attain their objective, there will be no Masters. Each side knows this. Neither says it. Each side believes that it is able to make use of the other and then dispense with it, and each believes it will prevail.

So they meet, usually at a place in North America called Turtle Bay, but sometimes in cities on other continents, such as Kyoto, Copenhagen, Rio. And they smile at each other, and whisper to each other, and nod and nod. They compose documents and issue them. The Masters having the power of governments behind them, spread the Loonies’ message that human life must change, that the earth must be saved from the alleged depredations of civilization, that people must be forced to serve the planet. And many people are persuaded that the planet needs to be saved from dangers imagined by the Loonies, and so accept the need for re-organization and concerted action which the Masters propose. And the Masters are careful to make cautious demands for changes that will not look and feel as transformational as they or the Loonies have in mind.

Together, thus far, they are making progress. The first act, Separate Plotting, is long over. The second act, Conspiracy and Co-operation – highly amusing to those in the audience who realize the bluff that’s going on from each side – is underway. The third act, Success and Subjugation, will bring all people everywhere under world government by the Masters. The fourth act will be a fierce battle to decide the denouement of the drama: Communism or Savagery, depending on which tribe will be the ultimate victor.

Whichever side wins, the human race will lose. 

Now we must show you that though we may embroider a little we are not merely fantasizing or grossly exaggerating.

The United Nations, the headquarters of the Masters, has a “Sustainable Development” program which is called Agenda 21. It is a socialist program concerned with the use of land and natural resources, the size of populations and the distribution of wealth, the organization of communities. It is being stealthily implemented in the name of environmental protection, with the hope that Western electorates will not notice that it is a socialist agenda.

In the name of preserving the environment, populations are being “nudged”  by states and local authorities to move from the countryside into towns and cities. Suburbs are marked for demolition. This will require the  expropriation of private property by the state.

And what will be done with the emptied countryside?

The Loonies have a program for it, and a word to describe it: “RE-WILDING“.

The following quotations and factual information come from an article by Kelly O’Connell at Canada Free Press:

‘Re-wilding” — or returning huge tracts of land to wilderness and re-establishing wild animals on it is –

One of the most dramatically anti-human ideas ever conceived, defined  [as] “the scientific argument for restoring big wilderness based on the regulatory roles of large predators,” [by] Soul and Reed Noss in their landmark 1998 Wild Earth article Rewilding and Biodiversity….

The goal is to provide large carnivorous animals with “big parcels of land so the elite caste might macro-manage earth according to their dictates.”

The term “rewilding” was coined by Dave Foreman, founder of Earth First! — one of the most radical and violent environmentalists in history. Foreman’s book, Rewilding North America: a Vision for Conservation in the 21st Century, is a primary codex for those seeking a radical reduction of humanity’s presence on earth.

The Rewilding Institute elucidates Dave Foreman’s book:

Three major scientific arguments constitute rewilding, justifying emphasis on large predators.

1. The structure, resilience, and diversity of ecosystems are maintained by “top-down” ecological (trophic) interactions initiated by top predators.

Translation: Trophic means having to do with what animals eat. Big animals that eat other animals are (the Loonies believe, and have persuaded the Masters) essential for the maintenance of “ecosystems”.

2. Wide-ranging predators usually require large cores of protected landscape for foraging, seasonal movements, and other needs; they justify bigness.

Translation: Because big beasts are the best ecosystem preservers, they must be given all they need to do their work, and they need lots of space.

3. Connectivity is also required because core reserves are typically not large enough in most regions; they must be linked to insure long-term viability of wide-ranging species…

Translation: Their spaces, however large, must lead into one another over the whole of a continent.

The US Congress –  no doubt “nudged” by the UN – was convinced that this was the way forward. It passed the Wildlife Corridors Conservation Act 0f 2010, calling for “wild animal bridges and tunnels, and increasing roadless areas.”

Implication: Roads must be taken away,  and bridges and tunnels (whether in existence or having to be specially built) must be provided for the use of animals. (Though why, if they have the whole of the wild, and there are no roads, they will needs tunnels or bridges is a puzzle. Perhaps the Loonies want them to be able to get though mountains and over rivers, the grass being always greener, and the prey always plumper, on the other side of any barrier.)

Of course, reintroducing large carnivores where they do not live at present, “will drive out humans“. But this is not a problem. It is in fact “the ultimate intent of the re-wilding project, as its planners admit”.

Quotation from Loonies – probably Soul and Reed:

“If native large carnivores have been killed out of a region, their reintroduction and recovery is the heart of a conservation strategy. Wolves, cougars, lynx, wolverines, grizzly and black bears, jaguars, sea otters, and other top carnivores need restoration throughout North America in ecologically effective densities in their natural ranges where suitable habitat remains or can be restored. Without the goal of rewilding for large areas with large carnivores, we are closing our eyes to what conservation really means — and demands.”

This the Masters can probably organize. But it will not be enough to satisfy the Loonies, zealots for whom the restoration of a pre-civilized world requires the resurrection of extinct species. Not possible? Well, they think it may be. The idea is –

– to find DNA materials to recreate extinct animal groups. For example, under this plan, well-preserved extinct animals — such as glacier-bound woolly mammoths, recently disappeared passenger pigeons, or the La Brea Tarpits’ saber toothed cats – could be raised as fetuses from scratch.

On this Science Daily published A Plan for Reintroducing Megafauna to North America:

“Dozens of megafauna (large animals over 100 pounds) — such as giant tortoises, horses, elephants, and cheetah — went extinct in North America 13,000 years ago during the end of the Pleistocene [Period]. As is the case today in Africa and Asia, these megafauna likely played keystone ecological roles via predation, herbivory, and other processes.”

So they must be resurrected.

In the American Naturalist, 12 scientists provide a detailed proposal for the restoration of North America’s lost megafauna. Using the same species from different locales or closely related species as analogs, their project “Pleistocene Rewilding” is conceived as carefully managed experiments in an attempt to learn about and partially restore important natural processes to North American ecosystems [which were] present for millennia until humans played a significant role in their demise 13,000 years ago. …

The Loonies much prefer wooly mammoths to human beings.

French explorer Bernard Buigues and Larry Agenbroad [of] Northern Arizona University hope that Jarkov Wooly Mammoth sitting inside a 23-ton block of ice will contain flesh samples with some perfectly preserved DNA. That and some proven cloning technology could resurrect a long-gone species.

What Buigues and his team would do is something similar to the process that created the famous sheep Dolly: extracting the nucleus of one adult mammoth cell and inserting it into an empty egg cell. The embryo would then be implanted in the uterus of an Asian elephant, the mammoth’s closest living relative, a surrogate mother that would gestate it as its own but without transferring to the baby any of the elephant’s genes.

A certain number of trained human beings will be necessary to do this work. They will be allowed the necessary equipment, such as sedatives for Asian elephants while they are being operated on. But the rest of humanity will not have so much as a white coat. The reduced masses will have to huddle close, to leave as much space as possible for the hairy mammoths and other “megafauna”.

The Wildlands Project would claim 50% of the North American continent for “wild land”, protected from “human use”, in order to preserve “biological diversity”.

“Moral and ethical guidelines for the Wildlands Project are based on the philosophy of Deep Ecology”, according to which:

• Personal possessions must be kept to a minimum. 
• All life, human and non-human, has equal value.
• Consumption of resources above what is absolutely vital for human needs is immoral.
• Human population must be reduced
• Western civilization must radically change its present economic, technological, and ideological structures.
• Believers have an obligation to try to implement the necessary changes.

To a certain extent the Masters and the Loonies are able to agree on ideals, but what the Masters see as means, the Loonies see as ends.

Both want to “sow chaos into human history to cause anarchy”.

The Masters would then step in to restore order.

The Loonies, however, would want  anarchy to continue as long as human beings continued – which shouldn’t be very long. According to them:

Rewilding is the process of undoing domestication. In [the philosophy of] green anarchism and anarcho-primitivism, humans are said to be “domesticated” by civilization. Supporters of such human rewilding argue that through the process of domestication, our wildness has been tamed and taken from us. Rewilding, then, is about overcoming our domestication and returning to our innate wildness. Though often associated with primitive skills and relearning knowledge of wild plants and animals, it emphasizes primal [ie primitive] living as a holistic reality rather than just a number of skills or specific type of knowledge. Rewilding is most associated with green anarchy and anarcho-primitivism or anti-civilization anarchy in general. 

But this is not what the Masters envisage. They need the human race to be not just “domesticated” and “tamed”, but firmly ordered.  By them.

As the probable outcome of the drama becomes clear to the audience, people will ask themselves which fate they would rather embrace:

Living in serfdom enforced by the gulag, the lash, and the firing squad – which is to say, in an illusion of security,

or  –

Scratching a bare living out of the soil until dying soon of famine or incurable disease, or in the jaws of a predator beast – which is to say in an illusion of freedom.

It would be best to reject both now, and destroy the UN while we can.

Could there be something happening in the world today that is even more threatening to life and liberty than Islam and its jihad?

There could be, there is, and its name is Agenda 21.

It emanates from that powerhouse of evil, the United Nations. It was initiated and is driven by votaries of a dark mysticism.  They call themselves shamans. They freely confess – no, they boast – that they are working to establish totalitarian world government; that they aim to reduce the population of the world to half a billion and keep it at that number; that those suffered to live must return to a primitive existence deriving bare sustenance from such resources as their local habitat provides, own nothing, and worship the earth goddess Gaia with prescribed ritual.

That is their vision of a new world order, the ultimate objective. It is to be attained step by step, starting with the enforcing of environmental regulations (among them the phasing out of the motor vehicle); emptying the suburbs and bringing people into the cities to be closely and austerely housed; returning the countryside to wilderness, which involves the destruction of roads …

Is this just absurd alarmism? Surely no plotters, even in the UN, could really bring this off, could they? They haven’t really started doing these things have they? Who are these shadowy figures who can exert irresistible influence on the political powers of this world?

We quote from The Green Agenda, a (Christian) site established to expose the movement for world government and explain how it is being put into effect, chiefly through the implementation of Agenda 21. It has links to the documents themselves.  

Agenda 21 spreads it tentacles from Governments, to federal and local authorities, and right down to community groups. Chapter 28 of Agenda 21 specifically calls for each community to formulate its own Local Agenda 21: “Each local authority should enter into a dialogue with its citizens, local organizations, and private enterprises to formulate ‘a Local Agenda 21.’ Through consultation and consensus-building, local authorities would learn from citizens and from local, civic, community, business and industrial organizations and acquire the information needed for formulating the best strategies.” – Agenda 21, Chapter 28, sec 1.3

Interestingly, in April 1991, fourteen months before Earth Summit, Prince Charles held a private two day international conference aboard the royal yacht Britannia, moored off the coast of Brazil. His goal was to bring together key international figures in an attempt to achieve a degree of harmony between the various countries that would gather at the Summit. Al Gore was present, along with senior officials from the United Nations and the World Bank.

At the summit 179 nations officially signed Agenda 21 and many more have followed since. Nearly 12,000 local and federal authorities have legally committed themselves to the Agenda. In practice this means that all their plans and policies must begin with an assessment of how the plan or policy meets the requirements of Agenda 21, and no plans or policies are allowed to contradict any part of the Agenda. Local authorities are audited by UN inspectors and the results of the audits are placed on the UN website. You can see how many local authorities in your country were bound by Agenda 21 in 2001 here. The number has increased significantly since then.

The official opening ceremony was conducted by the Dalai Lama and centered around a Viking long-ship that was constructed to celebrate the summit and sailed to Rio from Norway. The ship was appropriately named Gaia. A huge mural of a beauiful woman holding the earth within her hands adorned the entrance to the summit. Al Gore led the US delegation where he was joined by 110 Heads of State, and representatives of more than 800 NGO’s.

Maurice Strong, Club of Rome member, devout Bahai, founder and first Secretary General of UNEP [UN Environment Program], has been the driving force behind the birth and imposition of Agenda 21.

He chaired the Earth Summit, and outside, while he did,  –

His wife Hanne and 300 followers called the Wisdom-Keepers, continuously beat drums, chanted prayers to Gaia, and tended sacred flames in order to “establish and hold the energy field” for the duration of the summit. …

In the course of his opening speech Maurice Strong made these remarks:

“The concept of national sovereignty has been an immutable, indeed sacred, principle of international relations. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the new imperatives of global environmental cooperation. It is simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by individual nation states … The global community must be assured of environmental security.”

“We must transform our attitudes, and adopt a renewed respect for the superior laws of Divine Nature.”

“Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class – involving high meat intake, use of fossil fuels, appliances, air-conditioning, and suburban housing – are not sustainable. A shift is necessary which will require a vast strengthening of the multilateral system, including the United Nations.”

“Global management” is required in order to keep the earth clean and pure. Or it is necessary to keep the earth clean and pure in order to impose “global management”. Take your pick, because it is never made clear which is the means and which the end. In any case, they’re after “global management” (which we believe is the end). They will manage your life because they know best. You will do as they say. For “sustainability“. And to serve the Higher Good. Which is the nursing of the planet. The serving of the planet. The worshiping of the planet.

And the preservation of everything that lives on it. Even human beings within strict limits. This is called “biodiversity“.

The Global Biodiversity Assessment of the State of the Earth, prepared by the UN Environmental Programme (UNEP) –

armed UN leaders with the “ecological basis, and moral authority” they needed to validate their global management system. The GBA concludes … that “the root causes of the loss of biodiversity are embedded in the way societies use resources. This world view is characteristic of large scale societies, heavily dependent on resources brought from considerable distances. It is a world view that is characterized by the denial of sacred attributes in nature.”

For this the inscribers of this idiotic document blame Christianity, Judaism, and Islam – of which we are not defenders; but it’s not as if they themselves are against religious superstition – far from it:

“Eastern cultures with religious traditions such as Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism did not depart as drastically from the perspective of humans as members of a community of beings including other living and non-living elements.”

The UN was delighted with this tosh. Maurice Strong was honored and rewarded:

Following the Earth Summit Maurice Strong was named Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations, and was appointed to the position of Chief Policy Advisor by Kofi Annan. He was also a member of the UN’s Commission on Global Governance, and the key architect of the Kyoto Protocol.

Did you know that the UN has a Commission on Global Governance? Do Western governments know it? If so, why is the UN allowed to continue in existence?

Just as the dirty mystic Rasputin was able to influence the rulers of Russia, so Maurice Strong is able to influence the would-be rulers of the world in the UN. A parliament of fools if ever there was one.

Strong and his wife have also established the Manitou Foundation, providing land in Colorado to an eclectic mix of religious groups, including the Crestone Mountain Zen Center, the Spiritual Life Institute (a Catholic Carmelite monastery), the Haidakhandi Universal Ashram, the Sri Aurobindo Learning Center, Mangala Shri Bhuti (Tibetan Buddhists), and Karma Thegsum Tashi Gomang (Indian mystics). The Strongs have located their spiritual centre in the Colorado mountains because:”The Strongs learned that since antiquity indigenous peoples had revered this pristine wilderness as a place for conducting their vision quests and receiving shamanic trainings. It is prophesied that the world’s religious traditions would gather here and help move the world toward globally conscious co-existence and co-creation.”

But while these multifarious dupes and charlatans wait for their “vision quests” and “shamanic trainings”, their drumming, their sacred flames, and their invocations to return the human race to primitive savagery, the collective political steps to the same end are being taken conscientiously by national and local government in accordance with Agenda 21.

So what exactly does Agenda 21 contain? It consists of 115 different and very specific programs designed to facilitate, or to force, the transition to Sustainable Development. The objective, clearly enunciated by the leaders of the Earth Summit, is to bring about a change in the present system of independent nations. The agenda is broken up into 8 “programme areas for action”:  Agriculture,  Biodiversity and Ecosystem Management, Education, Energy and Housing, Population, Public Health, Resources and recycling, Transportation, Sustainable Economic Development.

A link to the entire document is provided, but as the author says, it would take a few days to read all of this “blueprint for the 21st century”. The first six paragraphs are quoted for those with less time at their disposal. There the assertion is made that it “reflects a global consensus and political commitment at the highest level on development and environment cooperation”.

This is nonsense of course. There is no global consensus. As for a political commitment “at the highest level”, if this means that the likes of Prince Charles, Prince Philip, Angela Merkel, Mikhail Gorbachev, Tony Blair, have swallowed the ballyhoo without even chewing it, then yes.

It also asserts that “the developmental and environmental objectives of Agenda 21 will require a substantial flow of new and additional financial resources to developing countries, in order to cover the incremental costs for the actions they have to undertake to deal with global environmental problems and to accelerate sustainable development. Financial resources are also required for strengthening the capacity of international institutions for the implementation of Agenda 21.” That means taxing us, and global redistribution of our money.

The author (whose name we have not discovered) stresses that “Agenda 21 is … an attempt to impose a global centrally planned quasi-government administered by the United Nations. Under Agenda 21 all central government and local authority signatories are required to conform strictly to a common prescribed standard and hence this is just communism resurrected in a new guise.”

She also says that “Agenda 21 has [already] gained a stranglehold on global regulatory and planning processes”.

We think this is true, at least to some significant extent.

In our town the City Council is certainly putting Agenda 21 into effect. Small-unit housing is being built near railway stations. It is not family accomodation, but most suitable for single occupants. (Families are to be discouraged from living together. The family as such is bad for the environment and for collective organization.) There will be places to park bicycles but not cars. Private transport is being discouraged. “Smart meters” will inform the Authorities how warm or how cool the occupant keeps his/her austere little space. How much heat, light and water you use will not only be monitored, but controlled.

Hundreds of cities in many if not all the states have embarked, or plan to embark, on the same sort of program. (Unless they’re going bankrupt. It may be that economic crisis, bad as it is, could save us from something worse.)

President Obama is against the existence of the suburbs, where individual families live in privately-owned houses. He wants to concentrate population in the cities. (Some have written about this –   eg. see here – but have not put it into its proper context, which is the implementation of Agenda 21.) The government can, has, and will use the eminent domain clause of the fifth amendment to expropriate private property.

It is more than likely happening in your town. Your property is under threat. Your way of life is being decided for you.

Not only do we have Christians, we even have some Democrats on our side in confronting this horrifying movement. 

Watch this video made by Democrats Against UN Agenda 21. It is long but informative. The worst news about what state and local government are doing to us comes after the 50 minute mark, but don’t skip too much before that. The shocking information needs the explanation and context.

 

The UN must be destroyed.

 

These statements were made in speeches at the 2012 UN Earth Summit in Rio. We have taken them from a collection at Climate Depot:

Climate Depot’s Executive Editor Marc Morano:

Failure here is good for the world’s poor people. Failure is the only option for this conference if you care about the environment and poor people. Carbon based energy has been one of the greatest liberators of mankind in the history of our planet. James Lovelock, the father of the modern green movement [and founder of the cult of Gaia] says “sustainable development” is “meaningless drivel”. I’ll go further and say we need to redefine sustainable development as oil, gas, coal — energy that works and energy that lifts people out of poverty.

CFACT Executive Director Craig Rucker:

While we stand here, 1.4 billion people are suffering in poverty… Any hope they have of rising out of poverty is being threatened by the negotiations here at Rio+20. … There is no imminent eco-disaster. We must not sell the potential prosperity of the poor for the dirty rags of sustainable development. Human beings must come first. In fact, history has shown that the environment is best protected when humans prosper. It is no coincidence that the regions of the world with the best air and the purest water are the also the ones that have the most advanced economies and used conventional development to get there. On the other hand, the poor cannot afford to care for the environment when every day is a matter of survival. Nature suffers when people suffer.

CFACT President David Rothbard:

People are not pollution. People are not a disease. People are the greatest natural resource on the Earth … The way to help the environment is to lift people up out of poverty. Unleash their abilities through political and economic freedom. Not a top down approach, not one environmental crisis after another designed to have people give over more of their political rights, more of their economic freedom to unelected bureaucrats or government regulators. But allowing people to flourish so that people and nature can flourish together.

Lord Christopher Monckton:

Having failed with “global warming” … they have now come up with “sustainable development”. This means pretty much whatever you want to mean.You can say it is about gender equality and women’s empowerment – mentioned at least 5 times in pre-session draft negotiating texts. It’s about all kinds of fashionable left-wing Marxist and other socialist causes. It is not in fact about the environment and it is not about development.

The Rio+20 Earth Summit – we’re happy to say – failed in its own terms: a failure for the anti-human cohorts of Big Green and the Church of Gaia.

But if it marks an end to the concocting by Big Green of “one environmental crisis after another designed to have people give over more of their political rights, more of their economic freedom to unelected bureaucrats or government regulators”, and a redefining of sustainable development “as oil, gas, coal — energy that works and energy that lifts people out of poverty”, then its failure can be counted as a triumph for humankind.

The UN must be destroyed.

Lately there seems to be more  discussion than usual, at websites devoted to political comment, on the emotionally charged, interrelated subjects of abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, and eugenics.

Eugenicists want to breed a better human species – better according to their own taste – by selecting desirable specimens for reproduction and systematically killing off the rest.

Such a program is acceptable to environmentalists, who want the earth to have a much smaller human population. Some of these go much further. Believing that the globe we live on is more important (to whom?) than ourselves, they wish and plan for there to be no human beings on it at all. For we are willy-nilly contaminators and destroyers of the natural world, which will flourish best without us, and only without us be perfectly preserved (for what?).

Dealing with these subjects, This Week in Eugenics! is a fascinating and important article (read the whole thing) by Zombie at PajamasMedia. Among other facts and connections, he supplies this:

John Holdren, the Science Czar of the United States, has long expressed an intense admiration — one that bordered on hero-worship — of a man named Harrison Brown, a respected scientist from an earlier generation who spent his later years writing about overpopulation and ecological destruction. In fact, as Holdren has pointed out several times (including very recently), it was Harrison Brown’s most famous book, The Challenge of Man’s Future, which transformed the young Holdren’s personal philosophy and which inspired him to later embark on a career in science and population policy which in many ways mirrored that of his idol Brown.

Holdren’s regard for Brown was so high that in 1986 he edited and co-wrote an homage to Brown entitled Earth and the Human Future: Essays in Honor of Harrison Brown, in which Holdren showers Brown with accolades and unrestrained applause.

At first glance, there’s nothing remarkable or amiss with this picture: one respected scientist giving credit to and paying tribute to another. Happens all the time. Except in this case, something is amiss. Grievously amiss. Because Harrison Brown, whatever good qualities Holdren might have seen in him, was also an unapologetic eugenicist who made horrifying recommendations for “sterilizing the feeble-minded” and other “unfit” substandard humans whom he thought should be “pruned from society.” …

Quotes from both Brown and Holdren:

“The feeble-minded, the morons, the dull and backward, and the lower-than-average persons in our society are outbreeding the superior ones at the present time. … Is there anything that can be done to prevent the long-range degeneration of human stock? Unfortunately, at the present time there is little, other than to prevent breeding in persons who present glaring deficiencies clearly dangerous to society and which are known to be of a hereditary nature. Thus we could sterilize or in other ways discourage the mating of the feeble-minded. We could go further and systematically attempt to prune from society, by prohibiting them from breeding, persons suffering from serious inheritable forms of physical defects, such as congenital deafness, dumbness, blindness, or absence of limbs. … A broad eugenics program would have to be formulated which would aid in the establishment of policies that would encourage able and healthy persons to have several offspring and discourage the unfit from breeding at excessive rates.” — Harrison Brown, in The Challenge of Man’s Future

“Harrison Brown’s most remarkable book, The Challenge of Man’s Future, was published more than three decades ago. By the time I read it as a high school student a few years later, the book had been widely acclaimed…. The Challenge of Man’s Future pulled these interests together for me in a way that transformed my thinking about the world and about the sort of career I wanted to pursue. … As a demonstration of the power of (and necessity for) an interdisciplinary approach to global problems, the book was a tour de force…. Thirty years after Harrison Brown elaborated these positions, it remains difficult to improve on them as a coherent depiction of the perils and challenges we face. Brown’s accomplishment in writing The Challenge of Man’s Future, of course, was not simply the construction of this sweeping schema for understanding the human predicament; more remarkable was (and is) the combination of logic, thoroughness, clarity, and force with which he marshalled data and argumentation on every element of the problem and on their interconnections. It is a book, in short, that should have reshaped permanently the perceptions of all serious analysts….” — John Holdren, in Earth and the Human Future: Essays in Honor of Harrison Brown

This man remains the Science Czar of the United States, appointed by Obama. My previous exposés of Holdren (the whole “forced abortions and mass sterilization” thing) were so widely linked that they entered the mainstream consciousness; but to my mind this lesser-known eugenics-related scandal — the connection between Holdren and Harrison Brown — is even more shocking. And yet he blithely jets around the world as a representative of the United States, as if none of this had ever been revealed.

As most of us are dull a good deal of our time in this vale of tears, and all of us are backward in something or other, and even the most intelligent among us act stupidly now and then; and as deafness, dumbness, blindness, and limblessness do not affect this state of affairs one way or the other (remember Homer was a blind man), the question is not who will be the victims of this sweeping schema for understanding the human predicament and permanently solving global problems since plainly we all qualify, but who will be the arbiters of our fate. 

Only exceptional, brilliant people, or at least people who believe themselves to be exceptionally brilliant, ponder and define “the human predicament”, and come up with a remedy for it. It takes a lot of leisure – probably as much as a tenured professorship provides, or an appointment as an adviser to a president – to devote oneself to defining and analyzing “the human predicament” with “logic, thoroughness, clarity and force”, and then to solve it tout court. Or if not that, anyway a lot of chutzpah.

Is it in the hands of such persons that we should willingly entrust ourselves, for them to decide whether we may continue our existence individually or en masse? How many of us want John Holdren and his like to guard over us? As many, one might suppose, as want Obama to be our “keeper’ (which he claims to be, having been called he says to that high service by his Christian faith). We’ll only know the answer in 2012 when we find out what proportion of the electorate, informed at last that Obama is one of the would-be arbiters of human fate, will vote for him to serve a second term.

We often quote Melanie Phillips, chiefly her columns in the Spectator, because we often think she is right. We also admire and are grateful for her courageous writing against – among other controversial subjects – the Islamic conquest of Europe, most notably in her book Londonistan.

In her new book, The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle Over God, Truth, and Power, she  expresses opinions on religion and science that we  do not agree with, though we find quite a lot of other ideas in it that we like.

She writes of “the climate of unreason”. Unfortunately, with this book she is contributing to it.

Here is what she writes about ‘Islamism’  – a concept invented by non-Muslims to avoid offending Muslims, or their own sense of fairness, or both, when they’re speaking critically of what Muslims do and believe:

I have used the word “Islamist” to denote those who wish to impose Islam upon unbelievers and to extinguish individual freedom and human rights among Muslims. There are, however, scholars who hold that Islam is an inherently coercive ideology and that therefore “Islamist” is a meaningless word that creates a false distinction. It is not my purpose here to enter that particular argument. I use the term “Islamist” not to make a theological point but to allow for the acknowledgment of those Muslims who support freedom and human rights and who threaten no one – and who are themselves principal victims of the jihad. I believe it is very important to acknowledge the existence of such Muslims who have a peaceable interpretation of their religion, just as its is very important not to sanitize and thus misrepresent the doctrines and history of Islam as a religion of conquest.”

While we welcome her plain assertion that Islam is a religion of conquest, we can only wonder who these Muslims can be who embrace the religion but not its ideology of conquest and forced submission, since that is what it is about and all that it is about.

She goes on:

The book explores the remarkable links and correspondences between left-wing “progressives” and Islamists, environmentalists and fascists, militant atheists and fanatical religious believers. All are united by the common desire to bring about through human agency the perfection of the world, an agenda which history teaches us leads invariably – and paradoxically – to tyranny, terror and crimes against humanity.

Again we are largely  in agreement with her, but are surprised by the inclusion of atheists in her list. “Militant” atheists, she says. Perhaps on the model of “Islamists” she could have constructed the word “atheism-ists” to distinguish them from those atheists “who support freedom and human rights and who threaten no one”.

Who are these militant atheists? Where are they placing their bombs? We know that there are atheist progressives, atheist fascists, and atheist environmentalists (just as there are atheist conservatives, atheist libertarians, atheists altruists), but we had not noticed that it is atheism they are trying to impose on the rest of the world. Collectivism, yes. Poverty, yes. World government, yes. But atheism – who says so, when and where, and above all, how? Her book, though it deals with some left-wing atheists whose political views we strongly disagree with, does not tell us.

PART ONE.  ETHICAL EATING: THE THEORY

One of the latest fads of the elite who know what’s best for the rest of us is “ethical eating”.

The Financial Times recently carried a long article about it. Reviewing three books on the subject, the author, Simon Kuper, castigates us for eating beef, chicken, rice, and salad:

Suppose that you and your partner go out for dinner tonight. You order steak and salad while your partner has chicken with rice. Now inspect your plates. Your cow spent almost all its life in a shed, burping methane that heats the planet. It was then slaughtered, often incompetently: it may have been still alive when its head was skinned and its legs cut off. Your “salad”, doused in dressing, is really “fat with a little lettuce”.

Your partner’s chicken lived for six weeks, diseased and crammed so closely with other birds that it cracked several bones. After torture, came slaughter: the bird was shoved into a truck, taken to the slaughterhouse, and shackled upside down. It died screaming and excreting on itself in terror. The rice comes from plants bred by scientists in the 1960s. Both your meals are lathered in the extra fat, sugar, salt and chemicals to which you have become addicted. Enjoy your meal. …

“… if you’re self-indulgent and sadistic, and care not a whit for the planet”, is not said in as many words, but strongly implied.

The author goes on:

People are increasingly wondering whether they should enjoy today’s food. …

Millions of animals experience horrible deaths after worse lives. Constantly sick, they give us our flu pandemics. They occupy and degrade nearly a third of the world’s land, use up and pollute water, and warm the planet. According to the United Nations [and who could possibly doubt them?], animal agriculture is the single biggest cause of climate change. It contributes 40 per cent more to global warming than all forms of transport combined…. Certainly, in rich countries, logic should impel us to close factory farms and turn meat back into a luxury food such as caviar and truffles, to be eaten on special occasions only. …

In the past [when the expectation of life was less than half what it is now, but let not that spoil the argument], “Americans typically chewed a mouthful of food as many as 25 times … now the average American chews only 10 times.” The industry has mastered what it calls “hedonics”: how to make food feel and taste delicious. The new food is also addictive, like drugs. … Many Americans now suffer from “conditioned hypereating”, wolfing down fat, sugar and salt as a habit.

Our betters despise us for that.

“Elites want elite foods,” the FT article asserts. “healthy ethical food.” Do they? Or do they just want the rest of us to eat saltless, unsweetened, undressed mouthfuls of hunted or gathered foods that need to be chewed 25 times?

This sort of moralizing is a great luxury. It should be classed with truffles and caviar.  At the same time, it’s all intensely puritan. The old puritans wanted to drain pleasure out of life for the good of your soul. The new puritans want to do the same for the good of your body.

Environmentalists go even further. They don’t want us to eat at all. The existence of the human race annoys them. We eat. We cook. We make things. Almost everything we do endangers the planet. The planet must be saved from us. For what? The animals, presumably.

Don’t they eat too?

Yes, but you see they’re good, we’re bad. We humans are a disgusting, cruel, greedy species that the earth and all the other creatures would be better off without.

They really do think this way.

If it were the obsession of a few madmen it would be merely a curiosity. But it is the settled opinion of thousand of our species, many of whom have the power to regulate our lives.

Since we cannot be eliminated, or not immediately, we must at least be regulated.

*

PART TWO.  HEALTHY EATING: GOVERNMENT STEPS IN

The solution that our betters propose to the “problem” of us eating what we like, is as always a collectivist one. Government should, say the food police, compel us to eat what it deems good for us, good for our health. Healthy eating by force. The new ethics.

This is from Canada Free Press, by David Pietrusza:

The Invisible Hand moves amber waves of grain from farm to factory to freezer.

We all get fed.

Until now.

This month, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand decided she would allocate another $1 billion the federal treasury on building 2,100 grocery stores nationwide. [Capitalism has been called ‘the incredible bread machine’. It works as long as it’s not interfered with. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand doesn’t know this, and wouldn’t believe or even understand it if it were spelled out for her.] She is an Obama mainstream kook. Her “Healthy Food Financing Initiative” is merely upping the ante on a proposal already found buried in Barack Obama’s 2011 budget to expend $345 billion on a similar fool’s errand.

The idea, if it may be termed that, is to provide grants and loans to fund groceries in so-called “food deserts,” areas “under-served” by the right kind of food emporia, those not providing “fresh” food and thereby fueling the national “obesity epidemic.” …

“By building new grocery stores in underserved areas across the state,” says Gillibrand, up for election this year, “we can give people the opportunity to live longer, healthier lives, save billions in health care costs, and create tens of thousands of good-paying jobs.”

Getting specific, Gillibrand estimates that her act will “create” 26,000 of those “good-paying jobs.” It’s funny how expropriating money from the private sector to fund tin-horn politicians’s hobby-horses always “creates good-paying jobs.”

Much of the rationale for combating these alleged “food deserts” relies on data as bogus as the “facts” that support the current global warming (er, excuse me, “climate change”) hysteria. Michelle Obama [she who heads the food police] has recently contended that 23.5 million people—included 6.5 million children—now live in these “food deserts,” defined by Ms. Obama as “communities without a supermarket.” Oddly enough, many of these folks are not poverty-stricken. Some are quite well to do. And thanks to the genius of Henry Ford and American capitalism many of them still own cars, so living that distance from a supermarket, translates into driving a whole 4.5 minutes more to a supermarket. …

And that translates into another federal crisis — another federal program.

But beyond jobs and geography, there is health. There is always health, nowadays.

“This initiative,” contends Brooklyn Congresswoman Nydia Vasquez, “is about empowering families to make healthier food choices so they live longer.” [A  perfect example of Obamaspeak, that!]

Let’s see what happens when a government “empowers” people to make the choices it wants them to make.

*

PART THREE.  NO EATING: THE END ACHIEVED

One government that tries to make the people do what it knows is best for them is in North Korea.

How has Kim Jong-il’s food solution work out for the North Koreans? These extracts come from Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, by Barbara Demick :

Kim Jong-Il had taken an even harder line against individual enterprise than his father. “In a socialist society, even the food problem should be solved in a socialist way. Telling people to solve to solve the food problems on their own creates egotism among people,” he said in a December 1996 speech, one of the few in which he acknowledged the food crisis. Other than vegetables grown at home, food was not supposed to be sold on the market. To sell rice or any other grain was strictly forbidden; North Korea considered it illegal and immoral, a stab in the heart of Communist ideology. Any private endeavor fell under the rubric of “economic crime” and the penalties could include deportation to a labor camp, and, if corruption was alleged, possible execution.

North Korea started running out of food, and as people went hungry, they didn’t have the energy to work and so output plunged even further. The economy was in free fall…

All staples are grown on collective farms. The state confiscates the entire harvest … [As famine intensified] the North Korean government offered a variety of explanations, from the patently absurd to the barely plausible. People were told [for instance] that the United States had instituted a blockade against North Korea that was keeping out food …

Enduring hunger became part of one’s patriotic duty. …

How do you tell a mother her child needs more food when there is nothing more to give? Dr Kim would write out a slip admitting the child to the hospital, knowing she had no cure for this condition. The hospital didn’t have any food either …

[Many] victims of the North Korean famine … did not go passively to their deaths. When the public distribution system was cut off, they were forced to tap their deepest wells of creativity to feed themselves. They devised traps out of buckets and string to catch small animal in the field, draped nets over their balconies to snare sparrows. They educated themselves in the nutritive properties of plants. … They stripped the sweet inner bark of pine trees to grind into a fine powder that could be used in place of flour. They pounded acorns into a gelatinous paste …

North Koreans learned to swallow their pride and hold their noses. They picked kernels of undigested corn out of the [old] excrement of farm animals. Shipyard workers developed a technique by which they scraped the bottoms of the cargo holds where food had been stored, then spread the foul-smelling gunk on the pavement to dry so that they could collect from it tiny grains of uncooked rice and other edibles. …

If you got out to the mountains, you could maybe find dandelion or other weeds so tasty that people ate them even in good times. Occasionally, Mrs Song [one of the author’s sources] would find rotten cabbage leaves … She would take the day’s pickings home and mix it with whatever food she had enough money to buy. Usually it was ground cornmeal – the cheap kind made from the husks and cobs. If she couldn’t afford that, she would buy a still cheaper powder made out of the ground inner bark of the pine, sometimes extended with a little sawdust. … [Nothing] could disguise the god-awful taste. She had to pound away and chop endlessly to get the grasses and the barks into a soft-enough pulp to be digestible. … All she could make was a porridge that was flavorless and textureless. … a porridge mad out of bean and corn stalks … was bitter and dry, and stuck in her throat like the twigs of a bird’s nest…

In the year after Kim Il-sung’s death the only animal product she consumed was frog… North Korea’s frog population would soon be wiped out by overhunting. …

In a famine, people don’t necessarily starve to death. Often some other ailment gets them first. Chronic malnutrition impairs the body’s ability to fight infection and the hungry become increasingly susceptible to tuberculosis and typhoid. The starved body is too weak to metabolize anti-biotics, even if they are available, and normally curable illnesses suddenly become fatal. Wild fluctuations of body chemistry can trigger strokes and heart attacks…

The killer [starvation] has a natural progression. It goes first for the most vulnerable – children under five. They come down with a cold and it turns into pneumonia; diarrhea turns into dysentery. Before the parents even think about getting help, the child is dead. Next the killer turns to the aged … then makes its way through people in the prime of their lives. Men, because they have less body fat, usually perish before women. The strong and athletic are especially vulnerable because their metabolisms burn more calories…

The killer targets the most innocent, the people who would never steal food, lie, cheat, break the law, or betray a friend. …

By 1998, an estimated 600,000 people had died as a result of the famine, as much as 10 percent of the population. … Exact figures would be nearly impossible to tally since North Korean hospitals could not report starvation as a cause of death.

Between 1996 and 2005, North Korea would receive $2.4 billion worth of food aid, much of it from the United States… While big ships laden with donated grains from the U.N. World Food Programme started docking at Chongjin’s port in 1998, the relief was off-loaded into trucks by the military and driven away. Some food reached orphanages and kindergartens, but much of it ended up in military stockpiles or sold on the black market. …

Death was a virtual certainty for people who didn’t show some private initiative. A human being needs at least 500 calories per day on average to survive; a person subsisting on a diet of what could be foraged in the woods would not survive more than three months. …

Hyuck [a homeless boy] found a small and friendly stray [dog], wagging its tail as it followed him into his friend’s yard. Hyuck shut the gate behind them. He and his friend grabbed the animal and shoved it into a bucket of water, holding down the lid. [It took about ten minutes to die.] They skinned it and barbecued it. Dog meat was part of the traditional Korean diet, but Hyuck liked animals and felt bad, though not so bad that he didn’t try it again – although by mid 1996 dogs too were scarce. …

Among the homeless population, a disproportionate number were children or teenagers. In some cases, their parents had gone off in search of jobs or food. But there was another, even stranger, explanation. Facing a food shortage, many North Koreans families conducted a brutal triage of their own households – they denied themselves and often elderly grandparents food in order to keep the younger generation alive. That strategy produced an unusual number of orphans, as the children were often the last ones left of entire families that had perished…

In the first years of the food shortage, the children at the train station survived by begging food, but before long there were simply too many of them and too few people with food to spare…

When begging failed, the children … formed themselves into gangs to steal together …

It was a dangerous life… There were strange stories going around about adults who … would drug children, kill them, and butcher them for meat. Behind the station near the railroad tracks were vendors who cooked soup and noodles over small burners, and it was said that the grey chunks of meat floating in the broth were human flesh. …

The stories got more and more horrific. Supposedly, one father went so insane with hunger that he ate his own baby. … It does appear that there were at least two cases … in which people were arrested and executed for cannibalism…

Even without cannibals … the children couldn’t survive long on the streets…

People … spoke of the large number of bodies scattered around the station and on the trains …

At the station, employees from the cleaning staff regularly made round through the public areas, loading bodies onto a wooden handcart… Some days they removed as many as thirty bodies from the station…

“Why doesn’t the government just leave us alone to live our lives?” the women at the [black] market would grumble among themselves.

THAT IS THE QUESTION.

The American Dictator (yes, he’s the one we mean) is doing his utmost to keep Africa in poverty and despair.

Roy Innis, national chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality, writes today at Townhall:

“I see Africa as a … partner with America on behalf of the future we want for all of our children,” President Obama declared in Ghana last July.

However, three months later, the President signed an executive order requiring that the Overseas Private Investment Corporation and other federal agencies reduce greenhouse gas emissions associated with their projects by 30% over the next ten years. The order undermines the ability of Sub-Saharan African nations to achieve energy, economic and human rights progress. 

Ghana is trying to build a 130-MW gas-fired power plant, to bring electricity’s blessings to more of its people, schools, hospitals and businesses. Today, almost half of Ghanaians never have access to electricity, or get it only a few hours a week, leaving their futures bleak.

Most people in Ghana are forced to cook and heat with wood, crop wastes or dung, says Franklin Cudjoe, director of the Imani (Hope) Center for Policy and Education, in Accra. The indoor air pollution from these fires causes blindness, asthma and severe lung infections that kill a million women and young children every year. Countless more Africans die from intestinal diseases caused by eating unrefrigerated, spoiled food.

But when Ghana turned to its United States “partner” and asked OPIC to support the $185-million project, OPIC refused to finance even part of it – thus adding as much as 20% to its financing cost. Repeated across Africa, these extra costs for meeting “climate change prevention” policies will threaten numerous projects, and prolong poverty and disease for millions.

Sub-Saharan Africa is home to 800 million people, 80% of whom live on less than $2.50 per day. Over 700 million people – twice the population of the USA and Canada combined – rarely or never have access to the lifesaving, prosperity-creating benefits of electricity …

Even in South Africa, the most advanced nation in this region, 25% of the populace still has no electricity. Pervasively insufficient electrical power has meant frequent brownouts that have hampered factory output and forced gold and diamond mines to shut down, because of risks that miners would suffocate in darkness deep underground. The country also suffers from maternal mortality rates 36 times higher than in the US, and tuberculosis rates 237 times higher.

And yet President Obama told his Ghanaian audience last July that Africa is gravely “threatened” by global warming, which he argues “will spread disease, shrink water resources and deplete crops,” leading to more famine and conflict. Africa, he says, can “increase access to power, while skipping – leapfrogging – the dirtier phase of development,” by using its “bountiful” wind, solar, geothermal and biofuels energy.

The President made these remarks before the scandalous “Climategate” emails were made public, and headline-grabbing claims about melting glaciers, burning Amazon rainforests and disappearing African agriculture were shown to be mere speculation and exaggeration from climate activists…

Literally thousands of scientists disagree with claims that we face an imminent manmade global warming disaster, or that warming is connected to disease or harvests. Africa has faced drought, famine and disease since before Biblical times, and armed conflict is far more likely where a lack of electricity perpetuates poverty, scarcity and dashed hopes.

Wind and solar power are too costly, intermittent and land-intensive to meet the needs of emerging economies…

That is why rapidly-developing nations like China and India are building power plants at the rate of one per week… Nearly all this electricity must be based on coal.

Wind power is constrained by high cost and limited reliability. Nuclear energy faces major cost and political obstacles. To electrify India in the absence of coal, the country would have to find 14 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, build 250 nuclear power plants, or construct the equivalent of 450 Hoover Dams, Penn State University professor Frank Clemente calculates. Those alternatives are unrealistic.

Blessed with abundant supplies of coal, South Africa has applied for a World Bank loan to continue building its 4,800-megawatt Medupi power plant. The Medupi plant would be equipped with the latest in “supercritical clean coal,” pollution control and “carbon capture” technologies. However, the project and loan have run into a buzz saw of opposition, led by the Center for American Progress, Africa Action, Friends of the Earth and Sierra Club. These radical groups claim to champion justice and better health for Africa, but oppose the very technologies that would make that possible…

The proposed Ghana and South Africa power plants already leapfrog dirtier development phases, by providing state-of-the-art pollution control technology. The energy alternatives President Obama envisions would do little to address the desperate crises that threaten Africans’ health, welfare and lives.

China and India are showing Africa the way forward. Those of us in already developed countries should support Africa’s aspirations – and help it address real health and environmental problems, by using affordable, dependable energy that truly is the lifeblood of modern societies, and the key to a better future for children everywhere.