The Invitation by Oriah
It doesn’t interest me
what you do for a living.
I want to know
what you ache for
and if you dare to dream
of meeting your heart’s longing.
It doesn’t interest me
how old you are.
I want to know
if you will risk
looking like a fool
for love
for your dream
for the adventure of being alive.
It doesn’t interest me
what planets are
squaring your moon...
I want to know
if you have touched
the centre of your own sorrow
if you have been opened
by life’s betrayals
or have become shrivelled and closed
from fear of further pain.
I want to know
if you can sit with pain
mine or your own
without moving to hide it
or fade it
or fix it.
I want to know
if you can be with joy
mine or your own
if you can dance with wildness
and let the ecstasy fill you
to the tips of your fingers and toes
without cautioning us
to be careful
to be realistic
to remember the limitations
of being human.
It doesn’t interest me
if the story you are telling me
is true.
I want to know if you can
disappoint another
to be true to yourself.
If you can bear
the accusation of betrayal
and not betray your own soul.
If you can be faithless
and therefore trustworthy.
I want to know if you can see Beauty
even when it is not pretty
every day.
And if you can source your own life
from its presence.
I want to know
if you can live with failure
yours and mine
and still stand at the edge of the lake
and shout to the silver of the full moon,
“Yes.”
It doesn’t interest me
to know where you live
or how much money you have.
I want to know if you can get up
after the night of grief and despair
weary and bruised to the bone
and do what needs to be done
to feed the children.
It doesn’t interest me
who you know
or how you came to be here.
I want to know if you will stand
in the centre of the fire
with me
and not shrink back.
It doesn’t interest me
where or what or with whom
you have studied.
I want to know
what sustains you
from the inside
when all else falls away.
I want to know
if you can be alone
with yourself
and if you truly like
the company you keep
in the empty moments.
By Oriah © Mountain Dreaming,
from the book The Invitation
published by HarperONE, San Francisco,
1999 All rights reserved
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Moderate to Extremism
How the Western Pursuit of Muslim Moderates Actually Promotes Extremism
By Daniel Greenfield Monday, April 5, 2010
The term Moderate Muslim is a misnomer, because it is the equivalent of describing him as a Secular Catholic or a Liberal Conservative. Muslims who pride themselves on sticking to the Koran view extremism as a virtue, not a fault. Islam’s reform movements that succeeded were not movements that made Islam more liberal, but that made it stricter, harsher and more unfeeling.
Aside from the original Sunni-Shiite schism, which has its basis more in power politics than in theology, the spectrum within Islam itself always runs to the more extreme. A new alternative mosque that succeeds is likely to be a place more conservative and more hostile to the outside world. A new Islamic movement is usually one that calls for more blood and guts, and a lot less women walking around on the street. A movement that fails to do that rarely survives or essentially is forced outside of Islam if it does.
And so what the West’s pursuit of moderate Muslims really does is push them toward more extreme views. A Muslim ruler who develops closer ties with the West is forced to compensate for it by moving further to the extreme in order to avoid being vulnerable to domestic charges that he is a bad Muslim. It is no surprise then that Saudi Arabia, America’s closest ally in the Muslim world, is also the most extremist Muslim country on the planet, that is behind the growing push to the extreme around the world.
Expansion and spread of increasingly radicalized mosques and imams
The Saudi Royal Family’s balancing act trades American support for them and their oil off by supporting the expansion and spread of increasingly radicalized mosques and imams. This is supposed to hold future Bin Ladens at bay. Meanwhile American politicians praise the country where women aren’t allowed to drive and non-Muslims can’t even set foot in Mecca for its commitment to moderate Islam.
The Western pursuit of moderate Muslims alone helps create more enthusiasm for pushing Islam further to the extreme. Once Western leaders define a Muslim group as moderate, new more extreme groups are quickly spawned in order to set a new bar for “True Islam”, as opposed to the compromise variety that the infidels praise. For example when Israel and the US announced that they had successfully made a deal with Arafat, the rise of Hamas was all but assured. When the UK or the US tries to treat Islamists as mainstream, not only do the Islamists become more extreme, but they develop new and more extreme rival groups.
So the pursuit of Muslim moderates not only pushes them into even greater extremes, but it spawns a host of new more extreme groups looking to capitalize on setting an even more extreme standard that will be praised for its faithfulness to the Koran. While the West tries to pretend it is bringing Muslims in from the cold, in fact it is turning up the heat.
While the term “Islamic Extremism” is commonly bandied about, the fact of the matter is that Islam possess an endless reservoir of “extremism”, simply because it’s always possible for a cleric to dig up more stringencies, and denounce those who don’t keep them as heretics. Somalia and Afghanistan, where Islamists beheaded Muslims for watching soccer games, teaching girls to cut hair, men for not having beards or for playing music—demonstrate just how boundless the reserve of extremism is. With historical bans on everything from playing chess to owning a dog to playing a musical instrument—there is always a new extreme to push toward.
Islam is legitimized not through faith, but through violence
Islam is legitimized not through faith, but through violence, the “martyrdom” and “resistance” of Islamic terrorists and guerrilla groups fighting to enforce not only Islam, but their most radical interpretation of it on everyone. Thus the Saudi royal family and its various front groups that covertly conduct a political, immigration and armed Jihad are called “moderate”, but only by way of comparison to those like Bin Laden who want a completely armed Jihad. While by our standards the Saudis are heavily complicit in terrorism and Islamism, by Islamist standards, they’re weak and compromised. Because the standard set by Mohammed may allow for warfare by deception and falsehood, but it only truly glorifies war.
The tragic case of Israel’s attempts to make peace with its Muslim neighbors should have served as the “canary in the cage” for Western leaders. Because each time Israel has tried to make peace with neighbouring countries, it has actually driven them further away. Sadat’s cleverness at putting the cold peace that existed between Israel and Egypt on paper in exchange for land several times the current size of Israel, masked by friendly rhetoric, cost him his life. Mubarak, like virtually every Arab Muslim leader who maintains relations with Israel, must do so heavily disguised, and in between blasts of hateful rhetoric you might expect from Der Sturmer. The alternative would be to follow Sadat to the grave, or risk a Muslim Brotherhood takeover of the country.
Since the peace treaties were signed with their respective countries, the populations of Egypt and Jordan now hate Israel and Jews more than ever because they feel “humiliated” that their countries maintain any relations whatsoever with Israel, instead of constantly trying to destroy them. This is not the view of some tiny minority of extremists, or even huge majority of extremists. It is the virtually universal view in both countries, cutting across all political boundaries, from left to right. It represents an absolute consensus. Because the only thing Muslims, both devout and secular, can agree on, is the destruction of the infidel.
In the 90’s, Israel attempted to resolve the terrorist campaign and the Palestinian Arab issue by signing a peace accord with Arafat. Not only did Arafat not keep the accord, but he actually dramatically ramped up the violence against Israel, once he was in power. Not only that he introduced a radical curriculum which helped create an entire generation of suicide bombers and terrorists who were taught and raised by the Palestinian Authority to hate and kill Jews. But for the mere fact that Arafat negotiated with Israel, even though he never kept his agreements and continued to engage in terrorism—Hamas became popular as the true voice of Islam, for its refusal to even negotiate with Israel. Once Israel withdrew from Gaza, Hamas took over and said that it was willing to have a temporary truce with Israel, after which it would once again resume trying to destroy Israel and drive the Jews into the sea. At which point, Al Queda opened a local office and denounced Hamas for selling out to the Jews, and promised to represent the true voice of the Islamic resistance.
There could be no better illustration of the self-destructiveness of trying to negotiate not only with terrorists, but with Islamic ones in particular. Even the process of trying to negotiate with them, increases both the violence and the extremism on their side.
While liberal commentators and pundits writing about the War on Terror frequently claim that fighting terrorists creates more terrorists, killing terrorists actually reduces the overall number of terrorists. By contrast trying to negotiate with terrorists, actually creates large numbers of them, and promotes the spread of terrorism in far more devastating ways, because it promotes increased extremism, gives rise to new terrorist groups and does nothing to actually thin out their ranks.
Islam cannot be mainstreamed, because it does not accommodate itself, it expects to be accommodated
Islam cannot be mainstreamed, because it does not accommodate itself, it expects to be accommodated. To the true believer, Islam exists as a force over the lives of men, or it is nothing at all. For the Muslim, living in a country without Islam law means living in a country with injustice. And living in a country with Islamic law, means that the injustice that does exist must be blamed on a watered down version of Islam, to which the solution as always is the sword, the cane and the rule of the Religious Police. There is no moderating such a mindset. Not when religion is indivisible from seizing power to enforce the most rigid version of the Islamic code available at a given moment.
But any attempt to mainstream Islam makes it appear compromised. A Muslim leader who is willing to shake hands with an infidel is already suspect in the eyes of many, for he appears to be accommodating an infidel, and thereby humiliating Islam. So a Muslim leader who does shake hands with an infidel, must be careful to denounce infidels loudly and thereby prove that he is more extreme than the extremists. This creates two-faced “moderates” who say one thing in English and another thing in Arabic, trying to play both sides at the same time. And the result leaves many Western leaders baffled, or incapable of believing that the same charming fellow they had tea with last week, just endorsed the Taliban and suggested that it’s time to bring back stoning for adultery in the UK. In the liberal model the two seem to be worlds apart. But in the Muslim model, they’re just realpolitik.
Western pundits and politicians who insist on applying their model of extremism and moderation to Islam are as foolish as an explorer trying to find a straight line route through a cave system. Western countries have socially and politically enacted a thermometer style model of beliefs that are lukewarm, not too hot and not too cold, which are mainstream and accepted. Within Islam the socially accepted part of the thermometer is as hot as you can get. But even more perversely, “hot” is defined relative to any attempt at moderation. So every time, Western countries attempt to cool down Islam to a more moderate temperature, they only succeed in making it hotter.
We can see the results all around us. In such a hothouse atmosphere, negotiation quickly becomes appeasement. The old extremism becomes the new moderation, and the old moderation becomes the new heresy. Peace yields violence. Attempts at finding common ground give birth to terror. The entire thing is irrational and downright crazy from the Western perspective, which has failed to understand that its attempt at reason and tolerance are not making things better—they are only feeding the flames and making the entire situation much worse. Western liberals accuse everyone else of condescending and imposing their own worldview on Islam, but in fact it is they who are doing so, by failing to understand that their clumsy attempt to find common ground is actually escalating the situation.
Moderation in Islam has never come from without, but from within, from Muslim rulers who were worried about the destabilizing effects of Islamism on their power. But such a state of affairs has never lasted, because sooner or later, Islam returns to its roots, and channels anger, dissatisfaction, greed and power into a weapon. Because those are the roots of Islam, to serve as the private army of Mohammed, to make war on the world in the name of imposing its will on it. There can be no peace with Islam. Only temporary truces. Ages of weakness. But in the end the tide goes out again. And the storm comes. And with it war.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Daniel Greenfield Bio
Daniel Greenfield Most recent columns
Daniel Greenfield is a New York City based writer and freelance commentator. “Daniel comments on political affairs with a special focus on the War on Terror and the rising threat to Western Civilization. He maintains a blog at Sultanknish.blogspot.com.
Daniel can be reached at: sultanknish@yahoo.com
Comment;
Again, I applaud Mr. Greenfield for being willing (and quite able) to speak out against one of the evils of our time (in fact, for 1400 years now).
There is NO such thing as a moderate moslem. The quickest way to decide that is to ask your moderate a few quotations:
On the day when the moslem extremist holds his sword over my forcibly bowed neck and offers me to convert or to die, what can you say, from the Koran, that will stop his hand and spare my life?
If he kills me, will you cry out in protest, or keep silent for fear he will come after you and your family next?
If he kills me, will you feel some peace in it, since the Earth is rid of one more unbeliever?
If you did protest my death on moral grounds, don't you fear that Al'lah will be angry with you for ignoring the words of the Prophet which instructs believers to kill all infidels?
If I convert, will you feel relieved and joyful, or will you protest that I was not given a moral chance to decide, since death was my only alternative?
If I kill your moslem comrade, because he threatened my life, will you feel outrage that one of Al'lah's special people was killed, or will you fell I am justified in acting in my own self defense?
Does Islam allow you to ask, or even answer, these questions?
Watch your "moderates" face, as you ask these questions and you'll see that his silence answers them all too well. The mental, moral, and emotional culture of Islam guarantees that there is no such thing as a moslem moderate.
And, in the last 7 days, when suicide killers of others in Russia make us all face, once again, the horror of Islamic spread, we must ask, How can good (or God, if you prefer) be in a religion that turns human beings into vicious wild animals? They must be treated like bests. If you value your life and the lives of your children, Islam must be destroyed.
Posted by Paul Beaird on 04/05 at 12:51 PM | #
By Daniel Greenfield Monday, April 5, 2010
The term Moderate Muslim is a misnomer, because it is the equivalent of describing him as a Secular Catholic or a Liberal Conservative. Muslims who pride themselves on sticking to the Koran view extremism as a virtue, not a fault. Islam’s reform movements that succeeded were not movements that made Islam more liberal, but that made it stricter, harsher and more unfeeling.
Aside from the original Sunni-Shiite schism, which has its basis more in power politics than in theology, the spectrum within Islam itself always runs to the more extreme. A new alternative mosque that succeeds is likely to be a place more conservative and more hostile to the outside world. A new Islamic movement is usually one that calls for more blood and guts, and a lot less women walking around on the street. A movement that fails to do that rarely survives or essentially is forced outside of Islam if it does.
And so what the West’s pursuit of moderate Muslims really does is push them toward more extreme views. A Muslim ruler who develops closer ties with the West is forced to compensate for it by moving further to the extreme in order to avoid being vulnerable to domestic charges that he is a bad Muslim. It is no surprise then that Saudi Arabia, America’s closest ally in the Muslim world, is also the most extremist Muslim country on the planet, that is behind the growing push to the extreme around the world.
Expansion and spread of increasingly radicalized mosques and imams
The Saudi Royal Family’s balancing act trades American support for them and their oil off by supporting the expansion and spread of increasingly radicalized mosques and imams. This is supposed to hold future Bin Ladens at bay. Meanwhile American politicians praise the country where women aren’t allowed to drive and non-Muslims can’t even set foot in Mecca for its commitment to moderate Islam.
The Western pursuit of moderate Muslims alone helps create more enthusiasm for pushing Islam further to the extreme. Once Western leaders define a Muslim group as moderate, new more extreme groups are quickly spawned in order to set a new bar for “True Islam”, as opposed to the compromise variety that the infidels praise. For example when Israel and the US announced that they had successfully made a deal with Arafat, the rise of Hamas was all but assured. When the UK or the US tries to treat Islamists as mainstream, not only do the Islamists become more extreme, but they develop new and more extreme rival groups.
So the pursuit of Muslim moderates not only pushes them into even greater extremes, but it spawns a host of new more extreme groups looking to capitalize on setting an even more extreme standard that will be praised for its faithfulness to the Koran. While the West tries to pretend it is bringing Muslims in from the cold, in fact it is turning up the heat.
While the term “Islamic Extremism” is commonly bandied about, the fact of the matter is that Islam possess an endless reservoir of “extremism”, simply because it’s always possible for a cleric to dig up more stringencies, and denounce those who don’t keep them as heretics. Somalia and Afghanistan, where Islamists beheaded Muslims for watching soccer games, teaching girls to cut hair, men for not having beards or for playing music—demonstrate just how boundless the reserve of extremism is. With historical bans on everything from playing chess to owning a dog to playing a musical instrument—there is always a new extreme to push toward.
Islam is legitimized not through faith, but through violence
Islam is legitimized not through faith, but through violence, the “martyrdom” and “resistance” of Islamic terrorists and guerrilla groups fighting to enforce not only Islam, but their most radical interpretation of it on everyone. Thus the Saudi royal family and its various front groups that covertly conduct a political, immigration and armed Jihad are called “moderate”, but only by way of comparison to those like Bin Laden who want a completely armed Jihad. While by our standards the Saudis are heavily complicit in terrorism and Islamism, by Islamist standards, they’re weak and compromised. Because the standard set by Mohammed may allow for warfare by deception and falsehood, but it only truly glorifies war.
The tragic case of Israel’s attempts to make peace with its Muslim neighbors should have served as the “canary in the cage” for Western leaders. Because each time Israel has tried to make peace with neighbouring countries, it has actually driven them further away. Sadat’s cleverness at putting the cold peace that existed between Israel and Egypt on paper in exchange for land several times the current size of Israel, masked by friendly rhetoric, cost him his life. Mubarak, like virtually every Arab Muslim leader who maintains relations with Israel, must do so heavily disguised, and in between blasts of hateful rhetoric you might expect from Der Sturmer. The alternative would be to follow Sadat to the grave, or risk a Muslim Brotherhood takeover of the country.
Since the peace treaties were signed with their respective countries, the populations of Egypt and Jordan now hate Israel and Jews more than ever because they feel “humiliated” that their countries maintain any relations whatsoever with Israel, instead of constantly trying to destroy them. This is not the view of some tiny minority of extremists, or even huge majority of extremists. It is the virtually universal view in both countries, cutting across all political boundaries, from left to right. It represents an absolute consensus. Because the only thing Muslims, both devout and secular, can agree on, is the destruction of the infidel.
In the 90’s, Israel attempted to resolve the terrorist campaign and the Palestinian Arab issue by signing a peace accord with Arafat. Not only did Arafat not keep the accord, but he actually dramatically ramped up the violence against Israel, once he was in power. Not only that he introduced a radical curriculum which helped create an entire generation of suicide bombers and terrorists who were taught and raised by the Palestinian Authority to hate and kill Jews. But for the mere fact that Arafat negotiated with Israel, even though he never kept his agreements and continued to engage in terrorism—Hamas became popular as the true voice of Islam, for its refusal to even negotiate with Israel. Once Israel withdrew from Gaza, Hamas took over and said that it was willing to have a temporary truce with Israel, after which it would once again resume trying to destroy Israel and drive the Jews into the sea. At which point, Al Queda opened a local office and denounced Hamas for selling out to the Jews, and promised to represent the true voice of the Islamic resistance.
There could be no better illustration of the self-destructiveness of trying to negotiate not only with terrorists, but with Islamic ones in particular. Even the process of trying to negotiate with them, increases both the violence and the extremism on their side.
While liberal commentators and pundits writing about the War on Terror frequently claim that fighting terrorists creates more terrorists, killing terrorists actually reduces the overall number of terrorists. By contrast trying to negotiate with terrorists, actually creates large numbers of them, and promotes the spread of terrorism in far more devastating ways, because it promotes increased extremism, gives rise to new terrorist groups and does nothing to actually thin out their ranks.
Islam cannot be mainstreamed, because it does not accommodate itself, it expects to be accommodated
Islam cannot be mainstreamed, because it does not accommodate itself, it expects to be accommodated. To the true believer, Islam exists as a force over the lives of men, or it is nothing at all. For the Muslim, living in a country without Islam law means living in a country with injustice. And living in a country with Islamic law, means that the injustice that does exist must be blamed on a watered down version of Islam, to which the solution as always is the sword, the cane and the rule of the Religious Police. There is no moderating such a mindset. Not when religion is indivisible from seizing power to enforce the most rigid version of the Islamic code available at a given moment.
But any attempt to mainstream Islam makes it appear compromised. A Muslim leader who is willing to shake hands with an infidel is already suspect in the eyes of many, for he appears to be accommodating an infidel, and thereby humiliating Islam. So a Muslim leader who does shake hands with an infidel, must be careful to denounce infidels loudly and thereby prove that he is more extreme than the extremists. This creates two-faced “moderates” who say one thing in English and another thing in Arabic, trying to play both sides at the same time. And the result leaves many Western leaders baffled, or incapable of believing that the same charming fellow they had tea with last week, just endorsed the Taliban and suggested that it’s time to bring back stoning for adultery in the UK. In the liberal model the two seem to be worlds apart. But in the Muslim model, they’re just realpolitik.
Western pundits and politicians who insist on applying their model of extremism and moderation to Islam are as foolish as an explorer trying to find a straight line route through a cave system. Western countries have socially and politically enacted a thermometer style model of beliefs that are lukewarm, not too hot and not too cold, which are mainstream and accepted. Within Islam the socially accepted part of the thermometer is as hot as you can get. But even more perversely, “hot” is defined relative to any attempt at moderation. So every time, Western countries attempt to cool down Islam to a more moderate temperature, they only succeed in making it hotter.
We can see the results all around us. In such a hothouse atmosphere, negotiation quickly becomes appeasement. The old extremism becomes the new moderation, and the old moderation becomes the new heresy. Peace yields violence. Attempts at finding common ground give birth to terror. The entire thing is irrational and downright crazy from the Western perspective, which has failed to understand that its attempt at reason and tolerance are not making things better—they are only feeding the flames and making the entire situation much worse. Western liberals accuse everyone else of condescending and imposing their own worldview on Islam, but in fact it is they who are doing so, by failing to understand that their clumsy attempt to find common ground is actually escalating the situation.
Moderation in Islam has never come from without, but from within, from Muslim rulers who were worried about the destabilizing effects of Islamism on their power. But such a state of affairs has never lasted, because sooner or later, Islam returns to its roots, and channels anger, dissatisfaction, greed and power into a weapon. Because those are the roots of Islam, to serve as the private army of Mohammed, to make war on the world in the name of imposing its will on it. There can be no peace with Islam. Only temporary truces. Ages of weakness. But in the end the tide goes out again. And the storm comes. And with it war.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CFP Tools
Share8
| More
(2) Reader Feedback | Subscribe | Print friendly | Contact Us | Send this page to a friend! |
Daniel Greenfield Bio
Daniel Greenfield Most recent columns
Daniel Greenfield is a New York City based writer and freelance commentator. “Daniel comments on political affairs with a special focus on the War on Terror and the rising threat to Western Civilization. He maintains a blog at Sultanknish.blogspot.com.
Daniel can be reached at: sultanknish@yahoo.com
Comment;
Again, I applaud Mr. Greenfield for being willing (and quite able) to speak out against one of the evils of our time (in fact, for 1400 years now).
There is NO such thing as a moderate moslem. The quickest way to decide that is to ask your moderate a few quotations:
On the day when the moslem extremist holds his sword over my forcibly bowed neck and offers me to convert or to die, what can you say, from the Koran, that will stop his hand and spare my life?
If he kills me, will you cry out in protest, or keep silent for fear he will come after you and your family next?
If he kills me, will you feel some peace in it, since the Earth is rid of one more unbeliever?
If you did protest my death on moral grounds, don't you fear that Al'lah will be angry with you for ignoring the words of the Prophet which instructs believers to kill all infidels?
If I convert, will you feel relieved and joyful, or will you protest that I was not given a moral chance to decide, since death was my only alternative?
If I kill your moslem comrade, because he threatened my life, will you feel outrage that one of Al'lah's special people was killed, or will you fell I am justified in acting in my own self defense?
Does Islam allow you to ask, or even answer, these questions?
Watch your "moderates" face, as you ask these questions and you'll see that his silence answers them all too well. The mental, moral, and emotional culture of Islam guarantees that there is no such thing as a moslem moderate.
And, in the last 7 days, when suicide killers of others in Russia make us all face, once again, the horror of Islamic spread, we must ask, How can good (or God, if you prefer) be in a religion that turns human beings into vicious wild animals? They must be treated like bests. If you value your life and the lives of your children, Islam must be destroyed.
Posted by Paul Beaird on 04/05 at 12:51 PM | #
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Sustainable Develoment
Sound the Alarm Against Sustainable Development
by Tom DeWeese
March 1, 2010
NewsWithViews.com
After more than 15 years of trying to warn Americans about the dangers of Sustainable Development, finally, many in the freedom movement are beginning to understand that it is the root of most of the issues we are fighting today. But it is a vast, complicated issue that is difficult to comprehend — even for those of us who have been studying it for so long. It is critical that all freedom-loving Americans grasp the true destructive force of evil that is Sustainable Development.
To that end, I am herein reprinting an interview I gave recently to the Internet news site “The Post & Email.” I know I have been focusing a lot of my articles on this issue lately, but I think this interview is one of the most comprehensive explanations I have yet given. But it is also very simple to understand.
[…]
Here is a more revealing quote: “Nature has an integral set of different values (cultural, spiritual and material) where humans are one strand in nature’s web and all living creatures are considered equal. Therefore the natural way is the right and human activities should be molded along nature’s rhythms.” from the UN’s Biodiversity Treaty presented at the 1992 UN Earth Summit.
This quote lays down the ground rules for the entire Sustainable Development agenda. It says humans are nothing special — just one strand in the nature of things or, put another way, humans are simply biological resources. Sustainablist policy is to oversee any issue in which man reacts with nature — which, of course, is literally everything. And because the environment always comes first, there must be great restrictions over private property ownership and control. This is necessary, Sustainablists say, because humans only defile nature.
By Tom DeWeese
August 6, 2004
NewsWithViews.com
On July 23, 2004, Tom DeWeese, president of the American Policy Center, addressed the fifth annual Freedom 21 Conference in Reno, Nevada. The following is the first of two parts of his address on the agenda, the threat, and the defeat of "Sustainable Development." ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
My friends, we come here today from many walks of life. A wide variety of reasons got each of us started on the road to activism.
Some of us started simply because we noticed something funny about our child's curriculum in school. Some of us were outraged by government trying to take away our guns. A good many of us suddenly found government agents and members of private groups plotting to take away our land. Some have had their livestock confiscated. Some have found themselves facing jail just for doing what their fathers and grandfathers have done on the same land for decades.
Some of us just wanted to be allowed to go to church, pray to God and celebrate Christmas without being fined for it. A few of us would even like to be able to go to a restaurant and order food we like - even if it is greasy, fattening and full of carbs and calories.
All of us just want to live in an America where our rights and pursuit of happiness is protected. And so we fight. And now we've found ourselves here today in a room with hundreds of others in the same boat.
I have one thing to tell you. You are not going to win. Because the other side has cut us up into little pieces. They've divided us and conquered us.
They've succeeded because you think your fight is against gun control. Because you think your fight is against bad schools. Because you think your fight is against the Endangered Species Act and roadless programs, and wetlands regulations, and water rights and Heritage Areas. Because you think your fight is against Democrats and not Republicans. Because you think it's a fight between evil liberals and good guy conservatives.
You're wrong. Your fight is against a well-planned, well orchestrated agenda for the complete transformation of America. And unless you learn that fact now, today... and unless you fully educate yourselves to every aspect of that agenda and fight it on the proper terms… then you cannot win!
I'm here to tell you that every one of these issues you are facing is interrelated. There is an agenda being implemented before your very eyes. It's called Sustainable Development.
And I will tell you now, if you want to keep your guns, your property, your children and your God… if you love liberty… Then Sustainable Development is your enemy!
So what is Sustainable Development? Imagine an America in which a specific "ruling principle" is created to decide proper societal conduct for every citizen.
That principle would be used to consider everything you eat, what you wear, the kind of homes you live in, the method of transportation used to get to work, the way you dispose of waste, perhaps the number of children you may have, even your education and employment decisions.
Sustainable Development is that "ruling principle" for the implementation of what former Vice President Al Gore said we must all suffer through in order to purify our nation from the horrors of the Twentieth Century's industrial revolution.
In his book, "Earth in the Balance," Gore called it a "wrenching transformation of society." Those are pretty powerful words that should concern anyone who values liberty. It's a warning that the rules are changing. That a new power elite is taking control.
Perhaps you are beginning to notice such changes as you go about your daily routine, but haven't understood where those changes, and the ideas behind them, are coming from. But Sustainable Development is a very difficult concept to grasp. It's written in an almost foreign language - designed to mislead and refrain from alarming you.
Let me put it in the simplest language I possibly can. The Atkins Diet is not sustainable. Now, why do I say that? Because on page 350 of the UN's Global Biodiversity Assessment Report it says that the grazing of livestock, including cows, sheep, goats and horses is not sustainable. One reason for that concept is because Sustainablists contend that the animals pollute and damage the banks of streams.
Getting us to stop eating beef is a major effort needed to fully implement the Sustainable Agenda. Since they are cowards who fear your reaction to an outright banning of eating meat, they have to try to trick you into thinking that not eating meat is your idea. So they use scare tactics. For years they have told you that eating meat raises your cholesterol. Fat is bad for you. Meat causes heart attacks. With PeTA's help they were succeeding in turning us all into little sissies eating salads.
Then along comes Dr. Atkins who shows us that a low carb beef diet will help you lose weight in a healthy way. Suddenly the nation has gone Atkins crazy. Beef sales are sky rocketing. The Sustainablists are in a tail spin. They've lost control of your eating habits.
Now watch what they are doing to get you back on track. Suddenly reports are being published in leading women's magazines about Atkins being dangerous to your health. Lawsuits have begun to pop up against the diet.
Do you see how it works? That's how the Sustainable Development agenda is implemented. Behavior modification based on fear. Freedom of choice is not part of Sustainable Development. And so I repeat, - the Atkins Diet is not sustainable.
Now, perhaps you'll understand why there are Sustainable Development papers, guidelines and regulations to impose the ruling principle:
On our public education system - to prepare our children to live in a sustainable world.
On our economy - to create partnerships between business and government, making sure business becomes a tool to help implement the policies.
On the environment - leading to controls on private property and business.
On health care - the new drive against obesity is leading directly toward controls on what we eat.
On farming - Sustainable Development policies affect farmers' ability to produce more crops by regulating or banning precious chemicals, biotechnology and genetic engineering in the name of environmental protection.
On our social and cultural environment - where political correctness is controlling policy hiring practices, immigration policy, multiculturalism, marriage laws, etc.
On our mobility - with emphasis on carpools and public transportation and away from the freedom of personal transportation.
And on public safety - where the rule of law and the court system is being challenged by new regulations that affect the right to privacy and unreasonable search and seizures.
It's important to understand that these leading issues we face today are not just random concerns that find their way into the forefront of political debate. They are all interconnected to the policies of Sustainable Development.
And you must understand that Sustainable Development is the official policy of the government of the United States of America - and every state, city and small burg in the nation.
It is completely bi-partisan. It is being equally implemented by Republicans and Democrats. No matter the outcome of any election - the Sustainable Development agenda moves forward unabated.
What we are telling you here today, my friends, is that Sustainable Development isn't just some land use policy. It is a complete transformation of American society; away from the rule of law; away from the ideals of property ownership, free enterprise, free travel and even free association.
Sustainable Development. It's a life plan. Planned by someone else. Not you.
And Sustainable Development is not a myth, or a theory or a conspiracy - as I've heard some in our own movement call it.
Since the 1970's literally hundreds of issue papers, charters, guidelines and treaties have been presented at scores of international meetings, each becoming a building block in the creation of what would eventually become Sustainable Development.
Finally in 1992 the UN's Earth Summit in Brazil brought all of these ideas together in two major documents called "Agenda 21" and the "Biodiversity Treaty." Here the ideas were officially presented to world leaders that all government on every level, needed to be transformed into top-down control over housing, food production, energy, water, private property education, population control, gun control, transportation, social welfare, medical care, and literally every aspect of our lives.
To get the full picture, add to these the UN's Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women, both of which create UN-mandates on abortion, child rearing and government interference on families.
In 1993 President Clinton created the President's Council on Sustainable Development. From that Council came a flood of policy papers and recommendations to enforce it as government policy.
And the Clinton Administration didn't need Congress to get into the act. All Cabinet officials had to do was change some wording of existing programs and reroute already-approved funding to begin to implement the agenda - without Congress and without debate. Former Commerce Secretary Ron Brown told a meeting of the President's Council that he could implement 67% of the Sustainable Development agenda in his agency with no new legislation. Other agencies like Interior, EPA, HUD and more did the same thing. To help it all along, Clinton issued a blizzard of Executive Orders.
The American Heritage Rivers Initiative was born that way. So were roadless policies designed to stop logging in national forests. National parks have become core biosphere reserves designed to shut out any human activity. And the buffer zones around them are designed to shut off existing human activity, allowing the core to continually grow like a cancer tumor.
Any possible excuse to control human development or activities began to sprout up - from rails-to trails bikeways - to wet lands regulations - to historic preservation projects. Endangered species, real or made up, have been used to close down industry and steal private lands. Valuable natural resources have been locked away in national parks and preserves. Subscribe to the NewsWithViews Daily News Alerts!
Enter Your E-Mail Address:
In this way an international agenda to transform the world into global governance under Sustainable Development policy took hold and became official policy of the United States of America.
© 2004 Tom DeWeese - All Rights Reserved
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Tom DeWeese is the publisher/editor of The DeWeese Report and president of the American Policy Center, an activist, grassroots think tank headquartered in Warrenton, VA. The Center maintains an Internet site at www.americanpolicy.org.
by Tom DeWeese
March 1, 2010
NewsWithViews.com
After more than 15 years of trying to warn Americans about the dangers of Sustainable Development, finally, many in the freedom movement are beginning to understand that it is the root of most of the issues we are fighting today. But it is a vast, complicated issue that is difficult to comprehend — even for those of us who have been studying it for so long. It is critical that all freedom-loving Americans grasp the true destructive force of evil that is Sustainable Development.
To that end, I am herein reprinting an interview I gave recently to the Internet news site “The Post & Email.” I know I have been focusing a lot of my articles on this issue lately, but I think this interview is one of the most comprehensive explanations I have yet given. But it is also very simple to understand.
[…]
Here is a more revealing quote: “Nature has an integral set of different values (cultural, spiritual and material) where humans are one strand in nature’s web and all living creatures are considered equal. Therefore the natural way is the right and human activities should be molded along nature’s rhythms.” from the UN’s Biodiversity Treaty presented at the 1992 UN Earth Summit.
This quote lays down the ground rules for the entire Sustainable Development agenda. It says humans are nothing special — just one strand in the nature of things or, put another way, humans are simply biological resources. Sustainablist policy is to oversee any issue in which man reacts with nature — which, of course, is literally everything. And because the environment always comes first, there must be great restrictions over private property ownership and control. This is necessary, Sustainablists say, because humans only defile nature.
By Tom DeWeese
August 6, 2004
NewsWithViews.com
On July 23, 2004, Tom DeWeese, president of the American Policy Center, addressed the fifth annual Freedom 21 Conference in Reno, Nevada. The following is the first of two parts of his address on the agenda, the threat, and the defeat of "Sustainable Development." ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
My friends, we come here today from many walks of life. A wide variety of reasons got each of us started on the road to activism.
Some of us started simply because we noticed something funny about our child's curriculum in school. Some of us were outraged by government trying to take away our guns. A good many of us suddenly found government agents and members of private groups plotting to take away our land. Some have had their livestock confiscated. Some have found themselves facing jail just for doing what their fathers and grandfathers have done on the same land for decades.
Some of us just wanted to be allowed to go to church, pray to God and celebrate Christmas without being fined for it. A few of us would even like to be able to go to a restaurant and order food we like - even if it is greasy, fattening and full of carbs and calories.
All of us just want to live in an America where our rights and pursuit of happiness is protected. And so we fight. And now we've found ourselves here today in a room with hundreds of others in the same boat.
I have one thing to tell you. You are not going to win. Because the other side has cut us up into little pieces. They've divided us and conquered us.
They've succeeded because you think your fight is against gun control. Because you think your fight is against bad schools. Because you think your fight is against the Endangered Species Act and roadless programs, and wetlands regulations, and water rights and Heritage Areas. Because you think your fight is against Democrats and not Republicans. Because you think it's a fight between evil liberals and good guy conservatives.
You're wrong. Your fight is against a well-planned, well orchestrated agenda for the complete transformation of America. And unless you learn that fact now, today... and unless you fully educate yourselves to every aspect of that agenda and fight it on the proper terms… then you cannot win!
I'm here to tell you that every one of these issues you are facing is interrelated. There is an agenda being implemented before your very eyes. It's called Sustainable Development.
And I will tell you now, if you want to keep your guns, your property, your children and your God… if you love liberty… Then Sustainable Development is your enemy!
So what is Sustainable Development? Imagine an America in which a specific "ruling principle" is created to decide proper societal conduct for every citizen.
That principle would be used to consider everything you eat, what you wear, the kind of homes you live in, the method of transportation used to get to work, the way you dispose of waste, perhaps the number of children you may have, even your education and employment decisions.
Sustainable Development is that "ruling principle" for the implementation of what former Vice President Al Gore said we must all suffer through in order to purify our nation from the horrors of the Twentieth Century's industrial revolution.
In his book, "Earth in the Balance," Gore called it a "wrenching transformation of society." Those are pretty powerful words that should concern anyone who values liberty. It's a warning that the rules are changing. That a new power elite is taking control.
Perhaps you are beginning to notice such changes as you go about your daily routine, but haven't understood where those changes, and the ideas behind them, are coming from. But Sustainable Development is a very difficult concept to grasp. It's written in an almost foreign language - designed to mislead and refrain from alarming you.
Let me put it in the simplest language I possibly can. The Atkins Diet is not sustainable. Now, why do I say that? Because on page 350 of the UN's Global Biodiversity Assessment Report it says that the grazing of livestock, including cows, sheep, goats and horses is not sustainable. One reason for that concept is because Sustainablists contend that the animals pollute and damage the banks of streams.
Getting us to stop eating beef is a major effort needed to fully implement the Sustainable Agenda. Since they are cowards who fear your reaction to an outright banning of eating meat, they have to try to trick you into thinking that not eating meat is your idea. So they use scare tactics. For years they have told you that eating meat raises your cholesterol. Fat is bad for you. Meat causes heart attacks. With PeTA's help they were succeeding in turning us all into little sissies eating salads.
Then along comes Dr. Atkins who shows us that a low carb beef diet will help you lose weight in a healthy way. Suddenly the nation has gone Atkins crazy. Beef sales are sky rocketing. The Sustainablists are in a tail spin. They've lost control of your eating habits.
Now watch what they are doing to get you back on track. Suddenly reports are being published in leading women's magazines about Atkins being dangerous to your health. Lawsuits have begun to pop up against the diet.
Do you see how it works? That's how the Sustainable Development agenda is implemented. Behavior modification based on fear. Freedom of choice is not part of Sustainable Development. And so I repeat, - the Atkins Diet is not sustainable.
Now, perhaps you'll understand why there are Sustainable Development papers, guidelines and regulations to impose the ruling principle:
On our public education system - to prepare our children to live in a sustainable world.
On our economy - to create partnerships between business and government, making sure business becomes a tool to help implement the policies.
On the environment - leading to controls on private property and business.
On health care - the new drive against obesity is leading directly toward controls on what we eat.
On farming - Sustainable Development policies affect farmers' ability to produce more crops by regulating or banning precious chemicals, biotechnology and genetic engineering in the name of environmental protection.
On our social and cultural environment - where political correctness is controlling policy hiring practices, immigration policy, multiculturalism, marriage laws, etc.
On our mobility - with emphasis on carpools and public transportation and away from the freedom of personal transportation.
And on public safety - where the rule of law and the court system is being challenged by new regulations that affect the right to privacy and unreasonable search and seizures.
It's important to understand that these leading issues we face today are not just random concerns that find their way into the forefront of political debate. They are all interconnected to the policies of Sustainable Development.
And you must understand that Sustainable Development is the official policy of the government of the United States of America - and every state, city and small burg in the nation.
It is completely bi-partisan. It is being equally implemented by Republicans and Democrats. No matter the outcome of any election - the Sustainable Development agenda moves forward unabated.
What we are telling you here today, my friends, is that Sustainable Development isn't just some land use policy. It is a complete transformation of American society; away from the rule of law; away from the ideals of property ownership, free enterprise, free travel and even free association.
Sustainable Development. It's a life plan. Planned by someone else. Not you.
And Sustainable Development is not a myth, or a theory or a conspiracy - as I've heard some in our own movement call it.
Since the 1970's literally hundreds of issue papers, charters, guidelines and treaties have been presented at scores of international meetings, each becoming a building block in the creation of what would eventually become Sustainable Development.
Finally in 1992 the UN's Earth Summit in Brazil brought all of these ideas together in two major documents called "Agenda 21" and the "Biodiversity Treaty." Here the ideas were officially presented to world leaders that all government on every level, needed to be transformed into top-down control over housing, food production, energy, water, private property education, population control, gun control, transportation, social welfare, medical care, and literally every aspect of our lives.
To get the full picture, add to these the UN's Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women, both of which create UN-mandates on abortion, child rearing and government interference on families.
In 1993 President Clinton created the President's Council on Sustainable Development. From that Council came a flood of policy papers and recommendations to enforce it as government policy.
And the Clinton Administration didn't need Congress to get into the act. All Cabinet officials had to do was change some wording of existing programs and reroute already-approved funding to begin to implement the agenda - without Congress and without debate. Former Commerce Secretary Ron Brown told a meeting of the President's Council that he could implement 67% of the Sustainable Development agenda in his agency with no new legislation. Other agencies like Interior, EPA, HUD and more did the same thing. To help it all along, Clinton issued a blizzard of Executive Orders.
The American Heritage Rivers Initiative was born that way. So were roadless policies designed to stop logging in national forests. National parks have become core biosphere reserves designed to shut out any human activity. And the buffer zones around them are designed to shut off existing human activity, allowing the core to continually grow like a cancer tumor.
Any possible excuse to control human development or activities began to sprout up - from rails-to trails bikeways - to wet lands regulations - to historic preservation projects. Endangered species, real or made up, have been used to close down industry and steal private lands. Valuable natural resources have been locked away in national parks and preserves. Subscribe to the NewsWithViews Daily News Alerts!
Enter Your E-Mail Address:
In this way an international agenda to transform the world into global governance under Sustainable Development policy took hold and became official policy of the United States of America.
© 2004 Tom DeWeese - All Rights Reserved
Sign Up For Free E-Mail Alerts
E-Mails are used strictly for NWVs alerts, not for sale
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tom DeWeese is the publisher/editor of The DeWeese Report and president of the American Policy Center, an activist, grassroots think tank headquartered in Warrenton, VA. The Center maintains an Internet site at www.americanpolicy.org.
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Moderate Unicorns
A_Plague_on_Both_Houses replied to comment from Alarmed Pig Farmer | February 26, 2010 1:17 PM | Reply
Moderate Unicorns
In medieval times, people created fairy tales and magical creatures to make sense of their world. One of the most endearing is the unicorn, a horse with a single horn that symbolized purity and wholesomeness. In our modern times, people in Europe and the United States consider themselves more sophisticated and rational than people from the Middle Ages, but we still create myths, albeit more subtle ones.
Daily we hear reports of violent acts committed by Islamic terrorists on every inhabited continent. We try to wish it away with the myth of the ‘Moderate Muslim’, telling ourselves the Islamic agenda has been’ hijacked’ by a ‘tiny minority of extremists’ and that soon the huge, silent, moderate majority of Muslims will take charge and change things. However, post 9/11 very few authoritative Muslims have condemned terrorist actions. We are still waiting for moderates to stand and deliver, identifying and removing extremist thugs from their mosques and their communities. Waiting for this self-correction is our modern version of unicorn hunting.
Moderate Muslims will not be able to wrest control of the agenda for several reasons. First of all, Mohammed, the Messenger of Allah’s eternal word, was not moderate. Since Mohammed is 'The Perfect Example for Men in all times and places', ( Qur'an 33.21), moderates have no legitimacy when admonishing other Muslims to stop the extremist acts Mohammed himself did. Also, the Qur’an condones violence and coercion to further the Islamic agenda. People whom we call moderates are labeled hypocrites by Allah Himself in the Qur’an. Moderates will always lose the argument because, as ex-Muslim author Ibn Warraq says, “There may be moderates in Islam but Islam itself is not moderate.”
That is why we must remain firm in talking about islam, so as to learn, and allow muslims to debate with in them selves, and if they want to leave Islam, then a people who in part will understand and support where the apostates come from
Islamic expert Daniel Pipes and others estimate ten percent of the Islamic world to be militant. In 1933 when the Nazi party took control of Germany it had 2 million members, comprising only three percent of Germany’s sixty-six million citizens. A tiny minority of extremists can control a vast number of moderates, making them irrelevant.
Placing hope in ‘The Moderate Muslim’ is like searching for unicorns in the forest.
Zack Highstreet - A Plague on Both Houses
Moderate Unicorns
In medieval times, people created fairy tales and magical creatures to make sense of their world. One of the most endearing is the unicorn, a horse with a single horn that symbolized purity and wholesomeness. In our modern times, people in Europe and the United States consider themselves more sophisticated and rational than people from the Middle Ages, but we still create myths, albeit more subtle ones.
Daily we hear reports of violent acts committed by Islamic terrorists on every inhabited continent. We try to wish it away with the myth of the ‘Moderate Muslim’, telling ourselves the Islamic agenda has been’ hijacked’ by a ‘tiny minority of extremists’ and that soon the huge, silent, moderate majority of Muslims will take charge and change things. However, post 9/11 very few authoritative Muslims have condemned terrorist actions. We are still waiting for moderates to stand and deliver, identifying and removing extremist thugs from their mosques and their communities. Waiting for this self-correction is our modern version of unicorn hunting.
Moderate Muslims will not be able to wrest control of the agenda for several reasons. First of all, Mohammed, the Messenger of Allah’s eternal word, was not moderate. Since Mohammed is 'The Perfect Example for Men in all times and places', ( Qur'an 33.21), moderates have no legitimacy when admonishing other Muslims to stop the extremist acts Mohammed himself did. Also, the Qur’an condones violence and coercion to further the Islamic agenda. People whom we call moderates are labeled hypocrites by Allah Himself in the Qur’an. Moderates will always lose the argument because, as ex-Muslim author Ibn Warraq says, “There may be moderates in Islam but Islam itself is not moderate.”
That is why we must remain firm in talking about islam, so as to learn, and allow muslims to debate with in them selves, and if they want to leave Islam, then a people who in part will understand and support where the apostates come from
Islamic expert Daniel Pipes and others estimate ten percent of the Islamic world to be militant. In 1933 when the Nazi party took control of Germany it had 2 million members, comprising only three percent of Germany’s sixty-six million citizens. A tiny minority of extremists can control a vast number of moderates, making them irrelevant.
Placing hope in ‘The Moderate Muslim’ is like searching for unicorns in the forest.
Zack Highstreet - A Plague on Both Houses
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Nothing became Everything
Kiwiblog
Scott (490) Says:
February 24th, 2010 at 11:18 am
The theory of evolution boils down to this — in the beginning for no particular reason, nothing exploded and became everything. For no particular reason everything became planets and stars and became an orderly universe with laws we can understand. For no particular reason intelligent life evolved, with thinking and morals. But thinking and morals is really all just a joke. We are the products of a heartless universe who does not care about us. The universe is one giant killing machine that allows only the fittest to survive. There is no moral code, love is but a figment of our imagination, there is no free will, no afterlife, nothing of any value whatsoever.
But here we are — thinking, feeling, loving, caring. Darwinism makes no sense. It does not explain the human condition nor can it form the basis of a workable moral society.
Neither can it be scientifically proved. How was the gap from nonlife to life bridged? How did nothing explode? Where is even one good example of evolution in action? I don’t know of any.
Evolution is a fairytale resting on a fantasy. The fantasy is we can escape from moral responsibility towards God by believing he isn’t there.
Genesis 1:31 God looked over all He had made and He saw that it was very good.
Scott (490) Says:
February 24th, 2010 at 11:18 am
The theory of evolution boils down to this — in the beginning for no particular reason, nothing exploded and became everything. For no particular reason everything became planets and stars and became an orderly universe with laws we can understand. For no particular reason intelligent life evolved, with thinking and morals. But thinking and morals is really all just a joke. We are the products of a heartless universe who does not care about us. The universe is one giant killing machine that allows only the fittest to survive. There is no moral code, love is but a figment of our imagination, there is no free will, no afterlife, nothing of any value whatsoever.
But here we are — thinking, feeling, loving, caring. Darwinism makes no sense. It does not explain the human condition nor can it form the basis of a workable moral society.
Neither can it be scientifically proved. How was the gap from nonlife to life bridged? How did nothing explode? Where is even one good example of evolution in action? I don’t know of any.
Evolution is a fairytale resting on a fantasy. The fantasy is we can escape from moral responsibility towards God by believing he isn’t there.
Genesis 1:31 God looked over all He had made and He saw that it was very good.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Social Gospel Redistrilbution
I Have Some Questions for Jim Wallis, the American Evangelical Community's Most Famous Promoter (There Are Very Few) of the Left-Wing Social Gospel Movement. He Never Answers These Questions. He Pretends I Do Not Exist. But I Do Exist, Unlike His Answers.
Gary North
"Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote." (Exodus 20:15, as modified by the Social Gospel)
Jim Wallis supports the economic conclusions of the Social Gospel. This is the #1 fact of his ministry and activism.
The Social Gospel is a theological defense of the welfare state. The welfare state relies on a system of compulsory taxation that is backed up by the threat of government violence against taxpaying residents within its jurisdiction.
The welfare state threatens residents and citizens with the following penalties for resisting the tax collector: (1) the confiscation of their assets, (2) fines, and (3) imprisonment. The welfare state's law-enforcement agents are armed and are empowered by law to shoot anyone who physically resists the tax collector.
The welfare state exists only because voters have authorized the confiscation of private property through violence by the state. In the name of helping the poor, middle-class voters extract most of the money: tax-funded education, Social Security, and Medicare. The welfare state is therefore the implementation of covetousness by politics.
Humorist P. J. O'Rourke has described the ethics of welfare state.
There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who portrays himself as "caring" and "sensitive" because he wants to expand the government's charitable programs is merely saying that he's willing to try to do good with other people's money. Well, who isn't? And a voter who takes pride in supporting such programs is telling us that he'll do good with his own money -- if a gun is held to his head.
The Social Gospel defends this system of compulsory wealth-redistribution in the name of Jesus. It teaches that Jesus implicitly favored economic aid to the poor in the form of government policies that can be enforced only by the threat of systematic violence.
No New Testament account of Jesus offers evidence that He recommended such a view of Christian civil government. This inconvenient fact is regarded as a slight impediment by Social Gospelers, but nothing too serious. They insist that this is what Jesus really meant to say, even though He never actually said it, and despite the fact that the Old Testament adamantly denies such a view of civil justice. God through Moses warned:
Ye shall do no unrighteousness in judgment: thou shalt not respect the person of the poor, nor honour the person of the mighty: but in righteousness shalt thou judge thy neighbour. (Leviticus 19:15)
When you hear the words Social Gospel, immediately think "Pastors' justification of armed government agents acting on behalf of certain special-interest voting blocs to take wealth away from other groups of citizens in order to benefit these special interests." This is exactly what the Social Gospel has always been. The central moral, judicial, and political issue of the Social Gospel is compulsion.
The Social Gospel movement is committed to guns and butter: the government's guns and your butter. The more guns the government has, the less butter you will have.
The Social Gospel's version of Jesus is a long-haired guy in sandals leading a mob of newly registered voters. He is packing a .44 magnum. His motto: "Go ahead, taxpayer. Make my day."
The Social Gospel asks this question: What Would Jesus Steal? Its answer: "As much as He can convince politicians to vote for."
The Social Gospel first began getting a hearing in the United States in the 1880s. It was adopted in 1908 by the newly created, Rockefeller-funded Federal Council of Churches. It came to prominence in the mainline churches in the 1920s, and it was adopted as gospel by most younger pastors of the mainline Protestant churches during the Great Depression of the 1930s. These denominations all began to lose members in the 1960s, a process that continues today.
The Social Gospel for decades was given lip-service by non-church attending politicians who sought support for their tax-and-spend policies. With the visible decline in membership of the mainline Protestant denominations after 1960, whose leadership and seminaries had gone modernist (anti-biblical) theologically, the secular humanists who dominate American politics began to ignore the (now-renamed) National Council of Churches. The Social Gospel lost influence politically and intellectually.
Fundamentalists' Adolescent Rebellion
After 1960, a small percentage of fundamentalist high school graduates who went off to college went through a late-teen rebellion against their parents. Their peers had begun this rebellion two years earlier, while they were still in high school. The late-comers rebelled, conveniently, at their parents' (and often taxpayers') expense. At numerous little denominational colleges, they were exposed to the Social Gospel. In large tax-funded universities, they were exposed to Keynesianism, Fabian socialism, and (after 1965) Marxism.
They wanted to discover a moral justification for their adolescent rebellion against their parents' social outlook. They soon decided that these new-found philosophies of coercive taxation and endless government expansion offered them what they perceived as the high moral ground. They absorbed, temporarily, the slogans of the political Left.
Ten years after graduation, most of them lived in the suburbs, worked for corporations, went to church in seeker-sensitive middle-class independent churches, and voted Republican.
Nevertheless, a few of them remained true to the ideals of their collegiate indoctrination. They announced as "morally Christian" the political demand that all levels of government send out revenue agents to put either a metaphorical or literal gun in your belly and tell you to hand over your wallet. The preachers advocate this in the name of the poor, but in fact they are acting on behalf of the careers of a growing army of college-educated, upper-middle-class bureaucrats, who administer every modern welfare state and extract close to half of the tax money allocated to the poor. This policy, pastors insist, is an inescapable implication of the teachings of Jesus.
There are very few of these people today. They rarely have enough adherents in any city to form even a single evangelical church whose pastor preaches the Social Gospel from the pulpit. They are distrusted in fundamentalist churches, regarded as eccentrics in evangelical churches, and almost the only members under age 60 in liberal churches.
A series of spokesmen have come forward to represent this tiny, politically impotent special-interest group. Ron Sider arrived in 1977 with Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger. He faded rapidly in the mid-1980s, to be replaced by sociologist Tony Campolo. Campolo's close connection with President Clinton as one of his spiritual counselors backfired during the Monica Lewinsky scandal in 1998. Campolo then rapidly disappeared from the evangelical scene. Today, Jim Wallis is the best-known representative.
Jim Wallis: Evangelist
In his book, God's Politics (HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), he describes his adolescent rebellion against his parents' fundamentalism (pp. 34-35). He went to college and got involved in the civil rights movement. This transformed his thinking, as he readily admits. He says that he later returned to the faith of his youth. It would be far more accurate to say that he came back as a self-conscious agent of the Social Gospel radicals who created the civil rights movement, in order to do "evangelism" work among the still-alienated children of fundamentalism.
Wallis is a part-time instructor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government (p. 21). Harper published his book -- one of the major mainstream media publishers. It is owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Jim Wallis is in fact an Establishment insider who is playing the role of a prophetic outsider. He is to "prophetic Christianity" what Jimmy Carter was to "prophetic politics." A man can make a career of this if he is skilled at positional marketing. (For more information, click here.) Jim Wallis is a highly skilled practitioner of positional marketing.
Wallis is editor of Sojourners, a magazine of considerable prominence in liberal political circles. Don't get me wrong. Political liberals do not actually read Sojourners, but they know it is out there, softening up the hearts and minds of an ecclesiastically isolated and politically marginal group of evangelicals. To do what? To vote for the next Democratic candidate for President.
Sojourners was not always called Sojourners. It was called Post-American. For a detailed history of his extreme left wing activities in the 1970s, click here.
Jim Wallis still holds to Ron Sider's original vision, which Sider modified into a vague moralism in the 1997 edition of his book. (On Ron Sider, see David Chilton's book, Productive Christians in an Age of Guilt-Manipulators, which is available free on-line.)
Jim Wallis totally misunderstands at least two things: economic theory and what the Bible specifically teaches about economics. I say this as someone who has published over 9,000 pages of verse-by-verse commentaries on the economics of the Bible. I have done my homework. Jim Wallis has not done his.
In God's Politics, Mr. Wallis says that he is getting invitations to be interviewed by evangelical radio talk show hosts, which he says is a new phenomenon for him (pp. 225-26). I have therefore prepared a series of questions for these talk show hosts to ask Mr. Wallis when they get the opportunity.
Jim Wallis lectures and teaches at Harvard, which appreciates his message in God's Politics. This is understandable. Mr. Wallis' politics and economics match the conclusions of the liberal political establishment. This is why he has great difficulty getting a hearing among Bible-believing Christians. No one can successfully play the role of John the Baptist for both Harvard and the Bible Belt, but he tries.
Christian economist William Anderson, once a big Jim Wallis fan, has exposed the fallacies of his economics and his ethical position on property rights: here and here.
In September, 2006, Jim Wallis began a blog dialog on his positions. His challenger? None other than Ralph Reed, a former $30,000 per month adviser for bankrupt Enron and a former co-lobbyist with convicted felon Jack Abramoff. How could anyone lose any debate with a political activist with Reed's reputation? The moral high ground is ten feet below sea level.
In February 2009, his ship finally came in: a boatload of taxpayers' money to hand out to the Democrats' constituents. He will be the guy in charge of the screening system. (It would be unfair to call him a bag man. Or would it?) The story is here.
You may not be a talk show host. Nevertheless, you may find these questions relevant. They will give you an introduction to the Social Gospel, as well as to what the Bible actually teaches about economics, which is radically opposed to the Social Gospel.
Why Is It God's Way to Allow the Government Control Over Health Care -- Life or Death -- by Taxing and Rationing?
Gary North
Here is Sojourners' proposed letter to be sent to Congressmen to get them to vote for Obama's health insurance bill. . . . keep reading
What Is the Common Ground Between Murdered Babies and Live Babies?
Gary North
When two things cannot both exist at the same time, we must choose. . . . keep reading
Why Is It Kingdom Work to Get Congress to Take Money from Other Groups and Give It to Your Group?
Gary North
There was a rally of pressure groups for wealth redistribution in Washington, D.C. in the first week of May. Jim Wallis was there. . . . keep reading
How Do You Determine What Is a Person's Fair Share of Taxes, Other Than by the Ballot Box and a Gun?
Gary North
Protestant evangelical Jim Wallis, the Social Gospel's #1 advocate today, says it's only fair that the rich should pay more -- as if they haven't since 1914. He is now advising Obama. . . . keep reading
Isn't It Risky to Become a Cheerleader for a New President Based on His First Major Speech?
Gary North
Aren't you making the same mistake that Reaganites made with Reagan in 1981? What if the same problems remain in 2012, the national debt rises by 50%, and double-digit price inflation returns? . . . keep reading
Why Is an Additional $787 Billion Federal Government Deficit the Christian Way of Helping the Poor?
Gary North
It comes as no surprise that Jim Wallis favors the proposed $787 billion economic stimulus law. It also comes as no surprise that he does not approve of the tax cuts in the bill. . . . keep reading
Why Are You, Rather Than James Dobson or Jerry Falwell, the Most Representative Spokesman for "The Religious Community"?
Gary North
Jim Wallis speaks of the "Religious Community" -- capitalized -- but he never defines it. There is a reason for this: What he calls "The Religious Community" is not the enormous group that is represented by Dobson and Falwell. It is a tiny Left-wing political action group. . . . keep reading
Why Is It Immoral for the Government to Cut Taxes for the Rich When the Rich Pay Most of the Taxes?
Gary North
Jim Wallis promotes the myth that tax cuts for the rich are unfair to the poor. The fact is, the poor pay almost no taxes. Cutting taxes for the rich does not hurt the poor. . . . keep reading
Why Is the Social Security Tax (FICA) a Biblical Requirement, When the Bible Speaks of Taking Care of Our Own Parents?
Gary North
Jim Wallis takes the commandment regarding taking care of our parents and turns it into a moral justification for taxing strangers to take care of our parents. Paul even forbids the church to care for widows who have relatives to pay for them. The State has no legitimate role here. . . . keep reading
Why Do You Invoke the Jubilee Year Law, When That Law Rested on Israel's Genocide of Canaan?
Gary North
Of all Mosaic economic laws for a liberal not to invoke, it is the Jubilee law. Not only did it rest judicially on genocide, it authorized inter-generational slavery. It was annulled by Jesus. Yet the evangelical Social Gospel crowd always invokes the Jubilee Year to defend wealth-redistribution. . . . keep reading
Why Do You Keep Hoping that Federal Money Won't Undermine the Independence of Every Private Agency That Takes It?
Gary North
There is no more reliable slogan than this one: "He who pays the piper calls the tune." Welfare State liberals have never believed this. They always believe that their constituents can take taxpayers' money and not be called to dance to the government's tune. . . . keep reading
Why Don't You Trust the Poor and Private Charities to Provide an Escape Hatch from Poverty Without Government Money?
Gary North
Welfare State liberals do not trust the poor to find solutions on their own without the helping hand of a government bureaucrat, preferably Federal. They define "family" as "a parent, a child, and a government bureaucrat." . . . keep reading
Why Didn't Clinton's 1997 Reductions in Federal Welfare Funding Cause the Predicted "Hurricane" for the Poor?
Gary North
In 1997, Jim Wallis warned of a "hurricane": a looming reduction of Federal welfare money. The sky was about to fall. Of course, it didn't. Poor people are resourceful, contrary to welfare State liberals. They adjusted. Welfare State liberals have yet to adjust. . . . keep reading
Why Do You Confuse the State, an Agency of Violence, With Society, the Product of Voluntary Activities and Liberty?
Gary North
Jim Wallis, like all Social Gospel welfare statists, confuses the State with society. He calls on the State to improve society by taking money from the rich and give it to the poor (minus 50% for handling). . . . keep reading
Which Evangelical Leaders Have Joined With You in Your Social Gospel Crusades?
Gary North
Jim Wallis lives in a fantasy world. He actually believes that American evangelicals are showing moral leadership in the fight against global poverty, HIV/AIDS, human trafficking, and sustainability of God's earth. Has he ever watched Trinity Broadcasting Network? . . . keep reading
If You Are Opposed to War, Why Did You Call on the United Nations to Invade Iraq?
Gary North
Basic to Jim Wallis's positional marketing strategy is to identify himself as a peace-loving man who is opposed to war. But his commitment to economic coercion always trumps his position as a peace activist. The man is committed to organized violence. . . . keep reading
More Headlines
Gary North
"Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote." (Exodus 20:15, as modified by the Social Gospel)
Jim Wallis supports the economic conclusions of the Social Gospel. This is the #1 fact of his ministry and activism.
The Social Gospel is a theological defense of the welfare state. The welfare state relies on a system of compulsory taxation that is backed up by the threat of government violence against taxpaying residents within its jurisdiction.
The welfare state threatens residents and citizens with the following penalties for resisting the tax collector: (1) the confiscation of their assets, (2) fines, and (3) imprisonment. The welfare state's law-enforcement agents are armed and are empowered by law to shoot anyone who physically resists the tax collector.
The welfare state exists only because voters have authorized the confiscation of private property through violence by the state. In the name of helping the poor, middle-class voters extract most of the money: tax-funded education, Social Security, and Medicare. The welfare state is therefore the implementation of covetousness by politics.
Humorist P. J. O'Rourke has described the ethics of welfare state.
There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who portrays himself as "caring" and "sensitive" because he wants to expand the government's charitable programs is merely saying that he's willing to try to do good with other people's money. Well, who isn't? And a voter who takes pride in supporting such programs is telling us that he'll do good with his own money -- if a gun is held to his head.
The Social Gospel defends this system of compulsory wealth-redistribution in the name of Jesus. It teaches that Jesus implicitly favored economic aid to the poor in the form of government policies that can be enforced only by the threat of systematic violence.
No New Testament account of Jesus offers evidence that He recommended such a view of Christian civil government. This inconvenient fact is regarded as a slight impediment by Social Gospelers, but nothing too serious. They insist that this is what Jesus really meant to say, even though He never actually said it, and despite the fact that the Old Testament adamantly denies such a view of civil justice. God through Moses warned:
Ye shall do no unrighteousness in judgment: thou shalt not respect the person of the poor, nor honour the person of the mighty: but in righteousness shalt thou judge thy neighbour. (Leviticus 19:15)
When you hear the words Social Gospel, immediately think "Pastors' justification of armed government agents acting on behalf of certain special-interest voting blocs to take wealth away from other groups of citizens in order to benefit these special interests." This is exactly what the Social Gospel has always been. The central moral, judicial, and political issue of the Social Gospel is compulsion.
The Social Gospel movement is committed to guns and butter: the government's guns and your butter. The more guns the government has, the less butter you will have.
The Social Gospel's version of Jesus is a long-haired guy in sandals leading a mob of newly registered voters. He is packing a .44 magnum. His motto: "Go ahead, taxpayer. Make my day."
The Social Gospel asks this question: What Would Jesus Steal? Its answer: "As much as He can convince politicians to vote for."
The Social Gospel first began getting a hearing in the United States in the 1880s. It was adopted in 1908 by the newly created, Rockefeller-funded Federal Council of Churches. It came to prominence in the mainline churches in the 1920s, and it was adopted as gospel by most younger pastors of the mainline Protestant churches during the Great Depression of the 1930s. These denominations all began to lose members in the 1960s, a process that continues today.
The Social Gospel for decades was given lip-service by non-church attending politicians who sought support for their tax-and-spend policies. With the visible decline in membership of the mainline Protestant denominations after 1960, whose leadership and seminaries had gone modernist (anti-biblical) theologically, the secular humanists who dominate American politics began to ignore the (now-renamed) National Council of Churches. The Social Gospel lost influence politically and intellectually.
Fundamentalists' Adolescent Rebellion
After 1960, a small percentage of fundamentalist high school graduates who went off to college went through a late-teen rebellion against their parents. Their peers had begun this rebellion two years earlier, while they were still in high school. The late-comers rebelled, conveniently, at their parents' (and often taxpayers') expense. At numerous little denominational colleges, they were exposed to the Social Gospel. In large tax-funded universities, they were exposed to Keynesianism, Fabian socialism, and (after 1965) Marxism.
They wanted to discover a moral justification for their adolescent rebellion against their parents' social outlook. They soon decided that these new-found philosophies of coercive taxation and endless government expansion offered them what they perceived as the high moral ground. They absorbed, temporarily, the slogans of the political Left.
Ten years after graduation, most of them lived in the suburbs, worked for corporations, went to church in seeker-sensitive middle-class independent churches, and voted Republican.
Nevertheless, a few of them remained true to the ideals of their collegiate indoctrination. They announced as "morally Christian" the political demand that all levels of government send out revenue agents to put either a metaphorical or literal gun in your belly and tell you to hand over your wallet. The preachers advocate this in the name of the poor, but in fact they are acting on behalf of the careers of a growing army of college-educated, upper-middle-class bureaucrats, who administer every modern welfare state and extract close to half of the tax money allocated to the poor. This policy, pastors insist, is an inescapable implication of the teachings of Jesus.
There are very few of these people today. They rarely have enough adherents in any city to form even a single evangelical church whose pastor preaches the Social Gospel from the pulpit. They are distrusted in fundamentalist churches, regarded as eccentrics in evangelical churches, and almost the only members under age 60 in liberal churches.
A series of spokesmen have come forward to represent this tiny, politically impotent special-interest group. Ron Sider arrived in 1977 with Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger. He faded rapidly in the mid-1980s, to be replaced by sociologist Tony Campolo. Campolo's close connection with President Clinton as one of his spiritual counselors backfired during the Monica Lewinsky scandal in 1998. Campolo then rapidly disappeared from the evangelical scene. Today, Jim Wallis is the best-known representative.
Jim Wallis: Evangelist
In his book, God's Politics (HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), he describes his adolescent rebellion against his parents' fundamentalism (pp. 34-35). He went to college and got involved in the civil rights movement. This transformed his thinking, as he readily admits. He says that he later returned to the faith of his youth. It would be far more accurate to say that he came back as a self-conscious agent of the Social Gospel radicals who created the civil rights movement, in order to do "evangelism" work among the still-alienated children of fundamentalism.
Wallis is a part-time instructor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government (p. 21). Harper published his book -- one of the major mainstream media publishers. It is owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Jim Wallis is in fact an Establishment insider who is playing the role of a prophetic outsider. He is to "prophetic Christianity" what Jimmy Carter was to "prophetic politics." A man can make a career of this if he is skilled at positional marketing. (For more information, click here.) Jim Wallis is a highly skilled practitioner of positional marketing.
Wallis is editor of Sojourners, a magazine of considerable prominence in liberal political circles. Don't get me wrong. Political liberals do not actually read Sojourners, but they know it is out there, softening up the hearts and minds of an ecclesiastically isolated and politically marginal group of evangelicals. To do what? To vote for the next Democratic candidate for President.
Sojourners was not always called Sojourners. It was called Post-American. For a detailed history of his extreme left wing activities in the 1970s, click here.
Jim Wallis still holds to Ron Sider's original vision, which Sider modified into a vague moralism in the 1997 edition of his book. (On Ron Sider, see David Chilton's book, Productive Christians in an Age of Guilt-Manipulators, which is available free on-line.)
Jim Wallis totally misunderstands at least two things: economic theory and what the Bible specifically teaches about economics. I say this as someone who has published over 9,000 pages of verse-by-verse commentaries on the economics of the Bible. I have done my homework. Jim Wallis has not done his.
In God's Politics, Mr. Wallis says that he is getting invitations to be interviewed by evangelical radio talk show hosts, which he says is a new phenomenon for him (pp. 225-26). I have therefore prepared a series of questions for these talk show hosts to ask Mr. Wallis when they get the opportunity.
Jim Wallis lectures and teaches at Harvard, which appreciates his message in God's Politics. This is understandable. Mr. Wallis' politics and economics match the conclusions of the liberal political establishment. This is why he has great difficulty getting a hearing among Bible-believing Christians. No one can successfully play the role of John the Baptist for both Harvard and the Bible Belt, but he tries.
Christian economist William Anderson, once a big Jim Wallis fan, has exposed the fallacies of his economics and his ethical position on property rights: here and here.
In September, 2006, Jim Wallis began a blog dialog on his positions. His challenger? None other than Ralph Reed, a former $30,000 per month adviser for bankrupt Enron and a former co-lobbyist with convicted felon Jack Abramoff. How could anyone lose any debate with a political activist with Reed's reputation? The moral high ground is ten feet below sea level.
In February 2009, his ship finally came in: a boatload of taxpayers' money to hand out to the Democrats' constituents. He will be the guy in charge of the screening system. (It would be unfair to call him a bag man. Or would it?) The story is here.
You may not be a talk show host. Nevertheless, you may find these questions relevant. They will give you an introduction to the Social Gospel, as well as to what the Bible actually teaches about economics, which is radically opposed to the Social Gospel.
Why Is It God's Way to Allow the Government Control Over Health Care -- Life or Death -- by Taxing and Rationing?
Gary North
Here is Sojourners' proposed letter to be sent to Congressmen to get them to vote for Obama's health insurance bill. . . . keep reading
What Is the Common Ground Between Murdered Babies and Live Babies?
Gary North
When two things cannot both exist at the same time, we must choose. . . . keep reading
Why Is It Kingdom Work to Get Congress to Take Money from Other Groups and Give It to Your Group?
Gary North
There was a rally of pressure groups for wealth redistribution in Washington, D.C. in the first week of May. Jim Wallis was there. . . . keep reading
How Do You Determine What Is a Person's Fair Share of Taxes, Other Than by the Ballot Box and a Gun?
Gary North
Protestant evangelical Jim Wallis, the Social Gospel's #1 advocate today, says it's only fair that the rich should pay more -- as if they haven't since 1914. He is now advising Obama. . . . keep reading
Isn't It Risky to Become a Cheerleader for a New President Based on His First Major Speech?
Gary North
Aren't you making the same mistake that Reaganites made with Reagan in 1981? What if the same problems remain in 2012, the national debt rises by 50%, and double-digit price inflation returns? . . . keep reading
Why Is an Additional $787 Billion Federal Government Deficit the Christian Way of Helping the Poor?
Gary North
It comes as no surprise that Jim Wallis favors the proposed $787 billion economic stimulus law. It also comes as no surprise that he does not approve of the tax cuts in the bill. . . . keep reading
Why Are You, Rather Than James Dobson or Jerry Falwell, the Most Representative Spokesman for "The Religious Community"?
Gary North
Jim Wallis speaks of the "Religious Community" -- capitalized -- but he never defines it. There is a reason for this: What he calls "The Religious Community" is not the enormous group that is represented by Dobson and Falwell. It is a tiny Left-wing political action group. . . . keep reading
Why Is It Immoral for the Government to Cut Taxes for the Rich When the Rich Pay Most of the Taxes?
Gary North
Jim Wallis promotes the myth that tax cuts for the rich are unfair to the poor. The fact is, the poor pay almost no taxes. Cutting taxes for the rich does not hurt the poor. . . . keep reading
Why Is the Social Security Tax (FICA) a Biblical Requirement, When the Bible Speaks of Taking Care of Our Own Parents?
Gary North
Jim Wallis takes the commandment regarding taking care of our parents and turns it into a moral justification for taxing strangers to take care of our parents. Paul even forbids the church to care for widows who have relatives to pay for them. The State has no legitimate role here. . . . keep reading
Why Do You Invoke the Jubilee Year Law, When That Law Rested on Israel's Genocide of Canaan?
Gary North
Of all Mosaic economic laws for a liberal not to invoke, it is the Jubilee law. Not only did it rest judicially on genocide, it authorized inter-generational slavery. It was annulled by Jesus. Yet the evangelical Social Gospel crowd always invokes the Jubilee Year to defend wealth-redistribution. . . . keep reading
Why Do You Keep Hoping that Federal Money Won't Undermine the Independence of Every Private Agency That Takes It?
Gary North
There is no more reliable slogan than this one: "He who pays the piper calls the tune." Welfare State liberals have never believed this. They always believe that their constituents can take taxpayers' money and not be called to dance to the government's tune. . . . keep reading
Why Don't You Trust the Poor and Private Charities to Provide an Escape Hatch from Poverty Without Government Money?
Gary North
Welfare State liberals do not trust the poor to find solutions on their own without the helping hand of a government bureaucrat, preferably Federal. They define "family" as "a parent, a child, and a government bureaucrat." . . . keep reading
Why Didn't Clinton's 1997 Reductions in Federal Welfare Funding Cause the Predicted "Hurricane" for the Poor?
Gary North
In 1997, Jim Wallis warned of a "hurricane": a looming reduction of Federal welfare money. The sky was about to fall. Of course, it didn't. Poor people are resourceful, contrary to welfare State liberals. They adjusted. Welfare State liberals have yet to adjust. . . . keep reading
Why Do You Confuse the State, an Agency of Violence, With Society, the Product of Voluntary Activities and Liberty?
Gary North
Jim Wallis, like all Social Gospel welfare statists, confuses the State with society. He calls on the State to improve society by taking money from the rich and give it to the poor (minus 50% for handling). . . . keep reading
Which Evangelical Leaders Have Joined With You in Your Social Gospel Crusades?
Gary North
Jim Wallis lives in a fantasy world. He actually believes that American evangelicals are showing moral leadership in the fight against global poverty, HIV/AIDS, human trafficking, and sustainability of God's earth. Has he ever watched Trinity Broadcasting Network? . . . keep reading
If You Are Opposed to War, Why Did You Call on the United Nations to Invade Iraq?
Gary North
Basic to Jim Wallis's positional marketing strategy is to identify himself as a peace-loving man who is opposed to war. But his commitment to economic coercion always trumps his position as a peace activist. The man is committed to organized violence. . . . keep reading
More Headlines
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Truth or Dare ?
Zenster said...
As I noted in GoV’s “The Would-Be Witnesses” article:
If the truth can't be told, then it's not much of a defense now, is it?.
Pat Condell takes this idea and rips away any pretense or obfuscation.
Condell, in his usual succinct manner sums it up even more tersely when he says, “… let’s be clear, this is a heresy trial by any other name.”
Just how pathetic is it when the vanguards of supposedly “progressive”, post-modern idealists instead fall back upon the weakest elements found in the sort of religious traditions they have so vigorously sought to vilify and belittle?
The Dutch judges and most modern Liberals all display a pseudo-religious belief in their most sacred cow of cows, Multiculturalism. Even as this warped ideology demands that their children be slain upon the blood-stained altar of Politically Correctness, they grimly march forth, determined to act like the most superstitious and barely post-pagan believers that they presume to mock.
In such a milieu, Wilders is quite the heretic, his words are the very worst sort of blasphemy and the truth a long-forgotten echo of the reality they have unanimously resolved to ignore. For a moment, let’s forget this sort of willful blindness and examine the disconnection from reality required to achieve the pseudo-religious mentality displayed by these Dutch judges.
Their behavior consists of Magical Thinking™. As if, through acceptance and appeasement, all Muslims will suddenly abandon their jihadist imperative and somehow disregard the ease with which such a contemptible foe could be subjugated. These budding social engineers delude themselves into thinking that modern technological society can uplift even the most barbaric savages. All the while neglecting how it is an enlightened and civilized culture that gave birth to the very tools they think these Neanderthals will abruptly wield with deft precision. For fear of denying this basic fact, they are prepared to commit actual suicide by falling upon Islam’s sword of their own volition.
They’re like somebody who’s prepared to chop off their own hand to avoid being seen scratching their @ss in public.
2/05/2010 3:25 PM
As I noted in GoV’s “The Would-Be Witnesses” article:
If the truth can't be told, then it's not much of a defense now, is it?.
Pat Condell takes this idea and rips away any pretense or obfuscation.
[00:44] They’ve accused him [Wilders] of being divisive and inflammatory and, yes, sometimes the truth can be divisive and inflammatory if its been suppressed for long enough and has become sufficiently taboo as it clearly has in the Netherlands.
Because according to the prosecution, it doesn’t even matter that what he says is true what matters is that it’s illegal. Well, when the truth is against the law then there’s something seriously wrong with the law.
Because when the truth is no defense then there is no defense and the law has no anchor so it will drift wherever the wind of political expedience blows and this week it blew straight into a crooked courtroom in Amsterdam where justice will now be made to fight for its life, starved of the oxygen of truth that gives it life.
Condell, in his usual succinct manner sums it up even more tersely when he says, “… let’s be clear, this is a heresy trial by any other name.”
Just how pathetic is it when the vanguards of supposedly “progressive”, post-modern idealists instead fall back upon the weakest elements found in the sort of religious traditions they have so vigorously sought to vilify and belittle?
The Dutch judges and most modern Liberals all display a pseudo-religious belief in their most sacred cow of cows, Multiculturalism. Even as this warped ideology demands that their children be slain upon the blood-stained altar of Politically Correctness, they grimly march forth, determined to act like the most superstitious and barely post-pagan believers that they presume to mock.
In such a milieu, Wilders is quite the heretic, his words are the very worst sort of blasphemy and the truth a long-forgotten echo of the reality they have unanimously resolved to ignore. For a moment, let’s forget this sort of willful blindness and examine the disconnection from reality required to achieve the pseudo-religious mentality displayed by these Dutch judges.
Their behavior consists of Magical Thinking™. As if, through acceptance and appeasement, all Muslims will suddenly abandon their jihadist imperative and somehow disregard the ease with which such a contemptible foe could be subjugated. These budding social engineers delude themselves into thinking that modern technological society can uplift even the most barbaric savages. All the while neglecting how it is an enlightened and civilized culture that gave birth to the very tools they think these Neanderthals will abruptly wield with deft precision. For fear of denying this basic fact, they are prepared to commit actual suicide by falling upon Islam’s sword of their own volition.
They’re like somebody who’s prepared to chop off their own hand to avoid being seen scratching their @ss in public.
2/05/2010 3:25 PM
Monday, February 1, 2010
cult of indiscriminateness
Why is discrimination bad?
Have you watched
Evan Sayet's “Regurgitating the Apple: How Modern Liberals “Think”"?
Here is a brief snippet from Sayet's enormously entertaining lecture which captures the essence of this issue :
What happens is, they are indoctrinated into what I call a “cult of indiscriminateness.” The way the elite does this is by teaching our children, starting with the very young, that rational and moral thought is an act of bigotry; that no matter how sincerely you may seek to gather the facts, no matter how earnestly you may look at the evidence, no matter how disciplined you may try to be in your reasoning, your conclusion is going to be so tainted by your personal bigotries, by your upbringing, by your religion, by the color of your skin, by the nation of your great-great-great-great-great grandfather’s birth; that no matter what your conclusion, it is useless. It is nothing other than the reflection of your bigotries, and the only way to eliminate bigotry is to eliminate rational thought. There’s a brilliant book out there called The Closing of the American Mind by Professor Allan Bloom. Professor Bloom was trying to figure out in the 1980s why his students were suddenly so stupid, and what he came to was the realization, the recognition, that they’d been raised to believe that indiscriminateness is a moral imperative because its opposite is the evil of having discriminated. I paraphrase this in my own works: “In order to eliminate discrimination, the Modern Liberal has opted to become utterly indiscriminate.”
Have you watched
Evan Sayet's “Regurgitating the Apple: How Modern Liberals “Think”"?
Here is a brief snippet from Sayet's enormously entertaining lecture which captures the essence of this issue :
What happens is, they are indoctrinated into what I call a “cult of indiscriminateness.” The way the elite does this is by teaching our children, starting with the very young, that rational and moral thought is an act of bigotry; that no matter how sincerely you may seek to gather the facts, no matter how earnestly you may look at the evidence, no matter how disciplined you may try to be in your reasoning, your conclusion is going to be so tainted by your personal bigotries, by your upbringing, by your religion, by the color of your skin, by the nation of your great-great-great-great-great grandfather’s birth; that no matter what your conclusion, it is useless. It is nothing other than the reflection of your bigotries, and the only way to eliminate bigotry is to eliminate rational thought. There’s a brilliant book out there called The Closing of the American Mind by Professor Allan Bloom. Professor Bloom was trying to figure out in the 1980s why his students were suddenly so stupid, and what he came to was the realization, the recognition, that they’d been raised to believe that indiscriminateness is a moral imperative because its opposite is the evil of having discriminated. I paraphrase this in my own works: “In order to eliminate discrimination, the Modern Liberal has opted to become utterly indiscriminate.”
Friday, January 29, 2010
Lord Monckton
Lord Monckton in Australia
(Please spread this message widely) 12 Jan. 2010
Viscount Monckton of Brenchley (Christopher Lord Monckton) has agreed to come on a lecture tour in Australia in late January 2010. In addition to the lunch at 6/112 Millswyn St, South Yarra he will be lecturing as follows:
• Sydney January 27th, Sheraton on the Park, 5:30 pm
• Newcastle January 28th, Banquet Room, City Hall, 12:30 pm
• Brisbane January 29th, Irish Club, 3:00 pm
• Noosa January 30th, The J , 2:00 pm
• Melbourne February 1st, Sofitel Hotel, 5:30 pm
• Canberra Feb. 3rd, program yet to be determined
• Adelaide Feb. 4th, Intercontinental Hotel, 7:30 pm
• Perth Feb. 8th, Parmelia Hilton, 5:30 pm
There has so far been an almost overwhelming response to this tour. This doubtless reflects the Copenhagen fiasco and the revelations of manipulations of data and attacks on sceptics by the Hadley Centre. Already, the “believers” are undertaking ad hominen attacks on Monckton.
The sponsors, Messrs Smit and Smeed, are seeking to get as many “agnostics” and “true believers” along to Monckton’s lectures. So if you have any such friends, please persuade them to come along.
As you can understand, the cost of this exercise will be very substantial and if you have not as yet made a donation and wish to do so, your donations should be directed to:
Westpac Bank – Lord Monckton Tour account Bank BSB: 035612
Account: 253068
The sponsors can be contacted as follows:
Case Smit BSc CIH(ret) CP(Env) FAusIMM
John Smeed D.MechE FIEAust CPEng RPEQ Noosaville Qld. 4566 (currently in Melbourne) Noosa Heads, Qld. 4567
0418 521 304 0417 269 216
case.smit@gmail.com johnsmeed@adna.com.au
Attached below is a presentation Monkton delivered in the UK:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stij8sUybx0&feature=player_embedded
Attached below is an interview with a Greenpeace protester:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzkB5DuveDE
His response to Rudd re his criticisms of him and the “junket” party that attended Copenhagen.
Climate change: Lord Monkton’s Personal Briefing to Australia’s Prime Minister (Debunks Copenhagen)
Posted on Monday, 4 January 2010 1:00:47 PM by Robert A. Cook, PE
A letter sent from: The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley
1 January 2010
His Excellency Mr. Kevin Rudd,
Prime Minister, Commonwealth of Australia.
Prime Minister,
Climate change: proposed personal briefing
Your speech on 6 November 2009 to the Lowy Institute, in which you publicly expressed some concern at my approach to the climate question, has prompted several leading Australian citizens to invite me come on tour to explain myself in a series of lectures in Australia later this month. I am writing to offer personal briefings on why “global warming” is a non-problem to you and other party leaders during my visit. For convenience, I am copying this letter to them, and to the Press.
Your speech mentioned my remarks about the proposal for world “government” in the early drafts of what had been intended as a binding Copenhagen Treaty. These proposals were not, as you suggested, a “conspiracy theory” from the “far right” with “zero basis in evidence”. Your staff will find them in paragraphs 36-38 of the main text of Annex 1 to the 15 September draft of the Treaty. The word “government” appears twice at paragraph 38. After much adverse publicity in democratic countries, including Australia, the proposals were reluctantly dropped before Copenhagen.
You say I am one of “those who argue that any multilateral action is by definition evil”. On the contrary: my first question is whether any action at all is required, to which – as I shall demonstrate – the objective economic and scientific answer is No. Even if multilateral action were required, which it is not, national governments in the West are by tradition democratically elected. Therefore, a fortiori, transnational or global governments should also be made and unmade by voters at the ballot-box. The climate ought not to be used as a shoddy pretext for international bureaucratic-centralist dictatorship. We committed Europeans have had more than enough of that already with the unelected but all-powerful Kommissars of the hated EU, who make nine-tenths of our laws by decree (revealingly, they call them “Directives” or “Commission Regulations”). The Kommissars (that is the official German word for them) inflict their dictates upon us regardless of what the elected European or any other democratic Parliament says or wishes. Do we want a worldwide EU? No.
You say I am one of “those who argue that climate change does not represent a global market failure”. Yet it is only recently that opinion sufficient to constitute a market signal became apparent in the documents of the IPCC, which is, however, a political rather than a scientific entity. There has scarcely been time for a “market failure”. Besides, corporations are falling over themselves to cash in on the giant financial fraud against the little guy that carbon taxation and trading have already become in the goody-two-shoes EU – and will become in Australia if you get your way.
You say I was one of “those who argue that somehow the market will magically solve the problem”. In fact I have never argued that, though in general the market is better at solving problems than the habitual but repeatedly-failed dirigisme of the etatistes predominant in the classe politique today.
The questions I address are a) whether there is a climate problem at all; and b) even if there is one, and even if per impossibile it is of the hilariously-overblown magnitude imagined by the IPCC, whether waiting and adapting as and if necessary is more cost-effective than attempting to mitigate the supposed problem by trying to reduce the carbon dioxide our industries and enterprises emit.
Let us pretend, solum ad argumentum, that a given proportionate increase in CO2 concentration causes the maximum warming imagined by the IPCC. The IPCC’s bureaucrats are careful not to derive a function that will convert changes in CO2 concentration directly to equilibrium changes in temperature. I shall do it for them.
We derive the necessary implicit function from the IPCC’s statement to the effect that equilibrium surface warming ΔT at CO2 doubling will be (3.26 ± ln 2) C°. Since the IPCC, in compliance with Beer’s Law, defines the radiative forcing effect of CO2 as logarithmic rather than linear, our implicit function can be derived at once. The coefficient is the predicted warming at CO2 doubling divided by the logarithm of 2, and the term (C/C0) is the proportionate increase in CO2 concentration. Thus,
ΔT = (4.7 ± 1) ln(C/C0) | Celsius degrees
We are looking at the IPCC’s maximum imagined warming rate, so we simply write –
ΔT = 5.7 ln(C/C0) | Celsius degrees
Armed with this function telling us the maximum equilibrium warming that the IPCC predicts from any given change in CO2 concentration, we can now determine, robustly, the maximum equilibrium warming that is likely to be forestalled by any proposed cut in the current upward path of CO2 emissions. Let me demonstrate.
By the end of this month, according to the Copenhagen Accord, all parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change are due to report what cuts in emissions they will make by 2020. Broadly speaking, the Annex 1 parties, who will account for about half of global emissions over the period, will commit to reducing current emissions by 30% by 2020, or 15% on average in the decade between now and 2020.
Thus, if and only if every Annex 1 party to the Copenhagen Accord complies with its obligations to the full, today’s emissions will be reduced by around half of that 15%, namely 7.5%, compared with business as usual. If the trend of the past decade continues, with business as usual we shall add 2 ppmv/year, or 20 ppmv over the decade, to atmospheric CO2 concentration. Now, 7.5% of 20 ppmv is 1.5 ppmv.
We determine the warming forestalled over the coming decade by comparing the business-as-usual warming that would occur between now and 2020 if we made no cuts in CO2 emissions with the lesser warming that would follow full compliance with the Copenhagen Accord. Where today’s CO2 concentration is 388 ppmv –
Business as usual: ΔT = 5.7 ln(408.0/388) = 0.29 C°
– Copenhagen Accord: ΔT = 5.7 ln(406.5/388) = 0.27 C°
= “Global warming” forestalled, 2010-2020: 0.02 C°
One-fiftieth of a Celsius degree of warming forestalled is all that complete, global compliance with the Copenhagen Accord for an entire decade would achieve. Yet the cost of achieving this result – an outcome so small that our instruments would not be able to measure it – would run into trillions of dollars. Do your Treasury models demonstrate that this calculation is in any way erroneous? If they do, junk them.
You say “formal global and national economic modelling” shows “that the costs of inaction are greater than the costs of acting”. You ask for my “equivalent evidence basis to Treasury modelling published by the Government of the industry and employment impacts of climate change”. I respond that the rigorous calculation that I have described, which your officials may verify for themselves, shows that whatever costs may be imagined to flow from anthropogenic “global warming” will scarcely be mitigated at all, even by trillions of dollars of expenditure over the coming decade.
Every economic analysis except that of the now-discredited Lord Stern, with its near-zero discount rate and its absurdly inflated warming rates, comes to the same ineluctable conclusion: adaptation to climate change, in whatever direction, as and if necessary, is orders of magnitude more cost-effective than attempts at mitigation. In a long career in policy analysis in and out of government, I have never seen so cost-ineffective a proposed waste of taxpayers’ money as the trillions which today’s scientifically-illiterate governments propose to spend on attempting – with all the plausibility of King Canute – to stop the tide from coming in.
Remember that I have done this calculation on the basis that everyone who should comply with the Copenhagen Accord actually does comply. Precedent does not look promising. The Kyoto Protocol, the Copenhagen Accord’s predecessor, has been in operation for more than a decade, and it was supposed to reduce global CO2 emissions by 2012. So far, after billions spent on global implementation of Kyoto, global CO2 emissions have risen compared with when Kyoto was first signed.
Remember too that we have assumed the maximum warming that the CO2 imagines might occur in response to a given proportionate increase in CO2 concentration. Yet even the IPCC’s central estimate of CO2’s warming effect, according to an increasing number of serious papers in the peer-reviewed literature, is a five-fold exaggeration. If those papers are right, after a further decade of incomplete compliance and billions squandered, warming forestalled may prove to be just a thousandth of a degree.
Now ask yourself this. Are you, personally, and your advisers, personally, and your administration’s officials, personally, willing to make the heroically pointless sacrifices that you so insouciantly demand of others in the name of Saving The Planet For Future Generations? I beg leave to think not. At Flag 1 I have attached what I have reason to believe is a generally accurate list of the names and titles of the delegation that you led to Copenhagen to bring back the non-result whose paltriness, pointlessness and futility we have now rigorously demonstrated. There are 114 names on the list. One hundred and fourteen. Enough to fill a mid-sized passenger jet. Half a dozen were all that was really necessary – and perhaps one from each State in Australia. If you and your officials are not willing to tighten your belts when a tempting foreign junket at taxpayers’ expense is in prospect, why, pray, should the taxpayers tighten theirs?
You say that climate-change “deniers” – nasty word, that, and you should really have known better than to use it – are “small in number but too dangerous to be ignored”, and “well resourced”. In fact, governments, taxpayer-funded organizations, taxpayer-funded teachers, and taxpayer-funded environmental groups have spent something like 50,000 times as much on “global warming” propaganda as their opponents have spent on debunking this new and cruel superstition. And that is before we take account of the relentless prejudice of the majority of the mainstream news media.
How, then, it is that we, the supposed minority who will not admit that the emperor of “global warming” is adequately clad, are somehow prevailing? How is it that we are convincing more and more of the population not to place any more trust in the “global warming” theory? The answer is that the “global warming” theory is not true, and no amount of bluster or braggadocio, ranting or rodomontade will make it true.
You say that our aim, in daring to oppose the transient fashion for apocalypticism, is “to erode just enough of the political will that action becomes impossible”. No. Our aim is simply to ensure that the truth is widely enough understood to prevent the squandering of precious resources on addressing the non-problem of anthropogenic “global warming”. The correct policy response to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing. No interventionist likes to do nothing. Nevertheless, the do-nothing option, scientifically and economically speaking, is the right option.
You say that I and others like me base our thinking on the notion that “the cost of not acting is nothing”. Well, after a decade and a half with no statistically-significant “global warming”, and after three decades in which the mean warming rate has been well below the ever-falling predictions of the UN’s climate panel, that notion has certainly not been disproven in reality.
However, the question I address is not that but this. Is the cost of taking action many times greater than the cost of not acting? The answer to this question is Yes.
Millions are already dying of starvation in the world’s poorest nations because world food prices have doubled in two years. That abrupt, vicious doubling was caused by a sharp drop in world food production, caused in turn by suddenly taking millions of acres of land out of growing food for people who need it, so as to grow biofuels for clunkers that don’t. The scientifically-illiterate, economically-innumerate policies that you advocate – however fashionable you may conceive them to be – are killing people by the million.
You say my logic “belongs in a casino, not a science lab”. Yet it is you who are gambling with poor people’s lives, and it is you – or, rather, they – who are losing: and losing not merely their substance but their very existence. The biofuel scam is born of the idiotic notion – a notion you uncritically espouse – that increasing by less than 1/2000 this century the proportion of the Earth’s atmosphere occupied by CO2 may prove catastrophic. At a time when so many of the world’s people are already short of food, the UN’s right-to-food rapporteur, Herr Ziegler, has roundly and rightly condemned the biofuel scam as nothing less than “a crime against humanity”.
The scale of the slaughter is monstrous, with food riots (largely unreported in the Western news media, and certainly not mentioned by you in your recent speech) in a dozen regions of the Third World over the past two years. Yet this cruel, unheeded slaughter is founded upon a lie: the claim by the IPCC that it is 90% certain that most of the “global warming” since 1950 is manmade. This claim – based not on science but on a show of hands among political representatives, with China wanting a lower figure and other nations wanting a higher figure – is demonstrably, self-servingly false. Peer-reviewed analyses of changes in cloud cover over recent decades – changes almost entirely unconnected with changes in CO2 concentration – show that it was this largely-natural reduction in cloud cover from 1983-2001 and a consequent increase in the amount of short-wave and UV solar radiation reaching the Earth that accounted for five times as much warming as CO2 could have caused.
Nor is the IPCC’s great lie the only lie. If you will allow me to brief you and your advisers, I will show you lie after lie after lie after lie in the official documents of the IPCC and in the speeches of its current chairman, who has made himself a multi-millionaire as a “global warming” profiteer.
However, if you will not make the time to hear me for half an hour before you commit your working people to the futile indignity of excessive taxation and pointless over-regulation without the slightest scientific or economic justification, and to outright confiscation of their farmland without compensation on the fatuous pretext that the land is a “carbon sink”, then I hope that you will at least nominate one of the scientists on your staff to address the two central issues that I have raised in this letter: namely, the egregious cost-ineffectiveness of attempting to mitigate “global warming” by emissions reduction, and the measured fact, well demonstrated in the scientific literature, that a largely-natural change in cloud cover in recent decades caused five times as much “global warming” as CO2. It is also a measured fact that, while those of the UN’s computer models that can be forced with an increase in sea-surface temperatures all predict a consequent fall in the flux of outgoing radiation at top of atmosphere, in observed reality there is an increase. In short, the radiation that is supposed to be trapped here in the troposphere to cause “global warming” is measured as escaping to space much as usual, so that it cannot be causing more than around one-fifth of the warming the IPCC predicts.
My list of the Copenhagen junketers from Australia’s governing class is attached. All those taxpayer dollars squandered, just to forestall 0.02 C° of “global warming” in ten years. Yet, in the past decade and a half, there has been no “global warming” at all. Can you not see that it would be kinder to your working people to wait another decade and see whether global temperatures even begin to respond as the IPCC has predicted? What is the worst that can happen if you wait? Just 0.02 C° of global warming that would not otherwise have occurred. It’s a no-brainer.
Yours faithfully,
VISCOUNT MONCKTON OF BRENCHLEY
These are the people – including one “Gaia” who went as an official “political advisor” to the Australian Climate Change Committee delegation – who spent roughly 15,000.00 per person to stand in the dark blizzard freezing because the UN IPCC spent two years planning an international conference for 45,000 delegates in a room capable of holding only 15,000 people.
No wonder they can’t stand real science. Math. Or algebra. Economics ….
THE RUDD GOVERNMENT’S COPENHAGEN JUNKET LIST
December 2009
The following 114 officials or representatives of the Australian Government and of State administrations attended the UN climate conference at Copenhagen in December 2009 –
1. Kevin Michael Rudd, Prime Minister
2. Penelope Wong, Minister, Clim. Chg. & Water
3. Louise Helen Hand, Ambassador for Clim. Chg.
4. David Fredericks, Dep. Chf. of Staff, Dept. of the Prime Minister
5. Philip Green Oam, Sen. Policy Advr., Foreign Affairs Dept.
6. Andrew Charlton, Sen. Advr., Prime Minister’s Dept.
7. Lachlan Harris, Sen. Press Sec., Prime Minister’s Office
8. Scott Dewar, Sen. Advr., Prime Minister’s Office
9. Clare Penrose, Advr., Prime Minister’s Office
10. Fiona Sugden, Media Advr., Prime Minister’s Office
11. Lisa French, Prime Minister’s Office12. Jeremy Hilman, Advr., Prime Minister’s Office
13. Tarah Barzanji, Advr., Prime Minister’s Office
14. Kate Shaw, Exec. Sec., Prime Minister’s Office
15. Gaile Barnes, Exec. Asst., Prime Minister’s Office
16. Gordon de Brouwer, Dep. Sec. Prime Minister’s Dept.
17. Patrick Suckling, 1st Asst. Sec., Intl. Div., Prime Minister’s Office\
18. Rebecca Christie, Prime Minister’s Office
19. Michael Jones, Official Photographer, Prime Minister & Cabinet
20. Stephan Rudzki
21. David Bell, Federal Agent, Aus. Federal Police
22. Kym Baillie, Aus. Federal Police
23. David Champion, Aus. Federal Police
24. Matt Jebb, Federal Agent Aus. Federal Police
25. Craig Kendall, Federal Agent, Aus. Federal Police
26. Squadron Leader Ian Lane, Staff Offr., VIP Operations
27. John Olenich, Media Advr., to Minister Wong, Office of Clim. Chg. & Water
28. Kristina Hickey, Advr. to Minister Wong, Office of Clim. Chg. & Water
29. Martin Parkinson, Sec., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
30. Howard Bamsey, Special Envoy for Clim. Chg., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
31. Robert Owen-Jones, Asst. Sec., Intl. Div., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
32. Clare Walsh Asst. Sec., Intl. Div., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
33. Jenny Elizabeth Wilkinson, Policy Advr., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
34. Elizabeth Peak, Princ. Legal Advr., Intl. Clim. Law, Dept. of Clim. Chg.
35. Kristin Tilley, Dir., Multilat. Negots., Intl. Div., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
36. Andrew Ure, Actg. Dir., Multilat. Negots., Intl. Div., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
37. Annemarie Watt, Dir., Land Sector Negots., Intl. Div., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
38. Kushla Munro, Dir., Intl. Forest Carbon Sectn. Intl. Div., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
39. Kathleen Annette Rowley, Dir., Strategic & Tech. Analysis, Dept. of Clim. Chg.
40. Anitra Cowan Asst. Dir., Multilat. Negots., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
41. Sally Truong, Asst. Dir., Multilat. Negots., Intl. Div. Dept. of Clim. Chg.
42. Jane Wilkinson, Asst. Dir., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
43. Tracey Mackay, Asst. Dir., Intl. Div., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
44. Laura Brown, Asst. Dir., Multilat. Negots., Intl. Div., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
45. Tracey-Anne Leahey, Delegation Mgr., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
46. Nicola Loffler, Sen. Legal Advr., Intl. Clim. Law, Dept. of Clim. Chg.
47. Tamara Curll, Legal Advr., Intl. Clim. Law, Dept. of Clim. Chg.
48. Jessica Allen, Legal Support Offr., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
49. Sanjiva de Silva, Legal Advr., Intl. Clim. Law, Dept. of Clim. Chg.
50. Gaia Puleston, Political Advr., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
51. Penelope Morton, Policy Advr., UNFCCC Negots., Intl. Div., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
52. Claire Elizabeth Watt, Policy Advr., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
53. Amanda Walker, Policy Offr., Multilat. Negots., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
54. Alan David Lee, Policy Advr., Land Sector Negots., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
55. Erika Kate Oord, Aus. Stakeholder Mgr., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
56. Jahda Kirian Swanborough, Comms. Mgr., Ministerial Comms., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
57. H.E. Sharyn Minahan, Ambassador, Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
58. Julia Feeney, Dir., Clim. Chg. & Envir., Dept. of Foreign Affairs & Trade
59. Chester Geoffrey Cunningham, 2nd Sec., DFAT, Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to Germany
60. Rachael Cooper, Exec. Offr., Clim. Chg. & Envir., Dept. of Foreign Affairs & Trade
61. Rachael Grivas, Exec. Offr., Envir. Branch, Dept. of Foreign Affairs & Trade
62. Moya Collett, Desk Offr., Clim. Chg. & Envir. Sectn., Dept. of Foreign Affairs & Trade
63. Rob Law, Dept. of Foreign Affairs & Trade
64. Robin Davies, Asst. Dir. Gen., Sustainable Devel. Gp., Aus. Agency for Intl. Devel.
65. Deborah Fulton, Dir., Policy & Global Envir., Aus. Agency for Intl. Devel.
66. Katherine Vaughn, Policy Advr., Policy & Global Envir., Aus. Agency for Intl. Devel.
67. Brian Dawson, Policy Advr., Aus. Agency for Intl. Devel.
68. Andrew Leigh Clarke, Dep. Sec., Dept. of Res. Devel., Western Aus.
69. Bruce Wilson, Gen. Mgr., Envir. Energy & Envir. Div., Dept. of Resrc. Devel., W. Aus.
70. Jill McCarthy, Policy Advr., Dept. of Resrc., Energy & Tourism
71. Simon French, Policy Advr., Dept. of Agriculture, Fisheries & Forestry
72. Ian Michael Ruscoe, Policy Advr., Dept. of Agriculture, Fisheries & Forestry
73. David Walland, Acting Supt., Nat. Clim. Centre, Bureau of Meteorology
74. Damien Dunn Sen. Policy Advr., Aus. Treasury
75. Helen Hawka Fuhrman, Policy Offr., Renewable Energy Policy & Partnerships
76. Scott Vivian Davenport, Chf., Economics, NSW Dept. of Industry & Invest.
77. Graham Julian Levitt, Policy Mgr., Clim. Chg., NSW Dept. of Industry & Invest.
78. Kate Jennifer Jones, Minister, Clim. Chg. & Sustainability, Qld. Govt.
79. Michael William Dart, Princ. Policy Advr., Office of Kate Jones, MP, Qld. Govt.
80. Matthew Anthony Jamie Skoien, Sen. Dir., Office of Clim. Chg. Qld. Govt.
81. Michael David Rann, Premier, S. Aus. Dept. of Premier & Cabinet, S. Aus.
82. Suzanne Kay Harter, Advr., Dept. of Premier & Cabinet, S. Aus.
83. Paul David Flanagan, Mgr., Comms., Govt. of S. Aus.
84. Timothy O’Loughlin, Dep. Chf. Exec., Sust. & Wkfc. Mgmt., S. Aus. Dept. of Premier
85. Nyla Sarwar M.Sc, student, Linacre College, University of Oxford
86. Gavin Jennings, Minister, Envir. & Clim. Chg. & Innovation, Victorian Govt.
87. Sarah Broadbent, Sustainability Advr.
88. Rebecca Falkingham, Sen. Advr., Victoria Govt./Office of Clim. Chg.
89. Simon Camroux, Policy Advr., Energy Supply Ass. of Aus. Ltd.
90. Geoff Lake, Advr., Aus. Local Govt. Ass.
91. Sridhar Ayyalaraju, Post Visit Controller, Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
92. Tegan Brink Dep. Visit Controller & Security Liaison Offr., Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
93. Melissa Eu Suan Goh, Trspt. Liaison Offr. & Consul, Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
94. Lauren Henschke, Support Staff, Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
95. Maree Fay, Accommodation Liaison Offr., Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
96. Patricia McKinnon, Comms. Offr., Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
97. Eugene Olim, Passport/Baggage Liaison Offr., Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
98. Belinda Lee Adams
99. Jacqui Ashworth, Media Liaison Offr., Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
100. Patricia Smith, Media Liaison Offr., Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
101. Martin Bo Jensen, Research & Public Dipl. Offr., Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
102. Mauro Kolobaric, Consular Support, Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
103. Susan Flanagan, Consular Support, Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
104. Stephen Kanaridis, IT Support Offr., Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
105. George Reid, Support Staff, Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
106. Ashley Wright, Support Staff, Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
107. Jodie Littlewood, Support Staff, Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
108. Thomas Millhouse, Support Staff, Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
109. Timothy Whittley, Support Staff Driver, Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
110. Julia Thomson, Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
111. Donald Frater, Chf. of Staff to Minister Wong Office of Clim. Chg. & Water
112. Jacqui Smith, Media Liaison, Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
113. Greg French, Sen. Legal Advr. (Envir.), Dept. of Foreign Affairs & Trade
114. Jeremy Hillman, Advr., Prime Minister’s Office
From The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley in Copenhagen at the SPPI blog:
Today the gloves came off and the true purpose of the “global warming” scare became nakedly visible. Hugo Chavez, the Socialist president of Venezuela, blamed “global warming” on capitalism – and received a standing ovation from very nearly all of the delegates, lamentably including those from those of the capitalist nations of the West that are on the far Left – and that means too many of them.
Previously Robert Mugabe, dictator of Rhodesia, who had refused to leave office when he had been soundly defeated in a recent election, had also won plaudits at the conference for saying that the West ought to pay him plenty of money in reparation of our supposed “climate debt”.
Inside the conference center, “world leader” after “world leader” got up and postured about the need to Save The Planet, the imperative to do a deal, the necessity to save the small island nations from drowning, etc., etc., etc.
Outside, in the real world, it was snowing, and a foretaste of the Brave New World being cooked up by “world leaders” in their fantasy-land was already evident. Some 20,000 observers from non-governmental organizations – nearly all of them true-believing Green groups funded by taxpayers – had been accredited to the conference.
However, without warning the UN had capriciously decided that all but 300 of them were to be excluded from the conference today, and all but 90 would be excluded on the final day.
Of course, this being the inept UN, no one had bothered to notify those of the NGOs that were not true-believers in the UN’s camp. So Senator Steve Fielding of Australia and I turned up with a few dozen other delegates, to be left standing in the cold for a couple of hours while the UN laboriously worked out what to do with us.
In the end, they decided to turn us away, which they did with an ill grace and in a bad-tempered manner. As soon as the decision was final, the Danish police moved in. One of them began the now familiar technique of manhandling me, in the same fashion as one of his colleagues had done the previous day.
Once again, conscious that a police helicopter with a high-resolution camera was hovering overhead, I thrust my hands into my pockets in accordance with the St. John Ambulance crowd-control training, looked my assailant in the eye and told him, quietly but firmly, to take his hands off me.
He complied, but then decided to have another go. I told him a second time, and he let go a second time. I turned to go and, after I had turned my back, he gave me a mighty shove that flung me to the ground and knocked me out.
I came to some time later (not sure exactly how long), to find my head being cradled by my friends, some of whom were doing their best to keep the police thugs at bay while the volunteer ambulance-men attended to me.
I was picked up and dusted me off. I could not remember where I had left my telephone, which had been in my hand at the time when I was assaulted. I rather fuzzily asked where it was, and one of the police goons shouted, “He alleges he had a mobile phone.”
In fact, the phone was in my coat pocket, where my hand had been at the time of the assault. The ambulance crew led me away and laid me down under a blanket for 20 minutes to get warm, plying me with water and keeping me amused with some colorfully colloquial English that they had learned.
I thanked them for their kindness, left them a donation for their splendid service, and rejoined my friends. A very senior police officer then came up and asked if I was all right. Yes, I said, but no thanks to one of his officers, who had pushed me hard from behind when my back was turned and had sent me flying.
The police chief said that none of his officers would have done such a thing. I said that several witnesses had seen the incident, which I intended to report. I said I had hoped to receive an apology but had not received one, and would include that in my report. The policeman went off looking glum, and with good reason.
To assault an accredited representative of a conference your nation is hosting, and to do it while your own police cameramen are filming from above, and to do it without any provocation except my polite, non-threatening request that I should not be manhandled, is not a career-enhancing move, as that police chief is about to discover to his cost.
Nor does this incident, and far too many like it, reflect the slightest credit on Denmark. We must make reasonable allowance for the fact that the unspeakable security service of the UN, which is universally detested by those at this conference, was ordering the Danish police about. The tension between the alien force and the indigenous men on the ground had grown throughout the conference.
However, the Danish police were far too free with their hands when pushing us around, and that is not acceptable in a free society. But then, Europe is no longer a free society. It is, in effect, a tyranny ruled by the unelected Kommissars of the European Union. That is perhaps one reason why police forces throughout Europe, including that in the UK, have become far more brutal than was once acceptable in their treatment of the citizens they are sworn to serve.
It is exactly this species of tyranny that the UN would like to impose upon the entire planet, in the name of saving us from ourselves – or, as Ugo Chavez would put it, saving us from Western capitalist democracy.
A few weeks ago, at a major conference in New York, I spoke about this tendency towards tyranny with Dr. Vaclav Klaus, the distinguished economist and doughty fighter for freedom and democracy who is President of the Czech Republic.
While we still have one or two statesmen of his caliber, there is hope for Europe and the world. Unfortunately, he refused to come to Copenhagen, telling me that there was no point, now that the lunatics were firmly in control of the asylum.
However, I asked him whether the draft Copenhagen Treaty’s proposal for what amounted to a communistic world government reminded him of the Communism under which he and his country had suffered for so long.
He thought for a moment – as statesmen always do before answering an unusual question – and said, “Maybe it is not brutal. But in all other respects, what it proposes is far too close to Communism for comfort.”
Today, as I lay in the snow with a cut knee, a bruised back, a banged head, a ruined suit, and a written-off coat, I wondered whether the brutality of the New World Order was moving closer than President Klaus – or any of us – had realized.
(Please spread this message widely) 12 Jan. 2010
Viscount Monckton of Brenchley (Christopher Lord Monckton) has agreed to come on a lecture tour in Australia in late January 2010. In addition to the lunch at 6/112 Millswyn St, South Yarra he will be lecturing as follows:
• Sydney January 27th, Sheraton on the Park, 5:30 pm
• Newcastle January 28th, Banquet Room, City Hall, 12:30 pm
• Brisbane January 29th, Irish Club, 3:00 pm
• Noosa January 30th, The J , 2:00 pm
• Melbourne February 1st, Sofitel Hotel, 5:30 pm
• Canberra Feb. 3rd, program yet to be determined
• Adelaide Feb. 4th, Intercontinental Hotel, 7:30 pm
• Perth Feb. 8th, Parmelia Hilton, 5:30 pm
There has so far been an almost overwhelming response to this tour. This doubtless reflects the Copenhagen fiasco and the revelations of manipulations of data and attacks on sceptics by the Hadley Centre. Already, the “believers” are undertaking ad hominen attacks on Monckton.
The sponsors, Messrs Smit and Smeed, are seeking to get as many “agnostics” and “true believers” along to Monckton’s lectures. So if you have any such friends, please persuade them to come along.
As you can understand, the cost of this exercise will be very substantial and if you have not as yet made a donation and wish to do so, your donations should be directed to:
Westpac Bank – Lord Monckton Tour account Bank BSB: 035612
Account: 253068
The sponsors can be contacted as follows:
Case Smit BSc CIH(ret) CP(Env) FAusIMM
John Smeed D.MechE FIEAust CPEng RPEQ Noosaville Qld. 4566 (currently in Melbourne) Noosa Heads, Qld. 4567
0418 521 304 0417 269 216
case.smit@gmail.com johnsmeed@adna.com.au
Attached below is a presentation Monkton delivered in the UK:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stij8sUybx0&feature=player_embedded
Attached below is an interview with a Greenpeace protester:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzkB5DuveDE
His response to Rudd re his criticisms of him and the “junket” party that attended Copenhagen.
Climate change: Lord Monkton’s Personal Briefing to Australia’s Prime Minister (Debunks Copenhagen)
Posted on Monday, 4 January 2010 1:00:47 PM by Robert A. Cook, PE
A letter sent from: The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley
1 January 2010
His Excellency Mr. Kevin Rudd,
Prime Minister, Commonwealth of Australia.
Prime Minister,
Climate change: proposed personal briefing
Your speech on 6 November 2009 to the Lowy Institute, in which you publicly expressed some concern at my approach to the climate question, has prompted several leading Australian citizens to invite me come on tour to explain myself in a series of lectures in Australia later this month. I am writing to offer personal briefings on why “global warming” is a non-problem to you and other party leaders during my visit. For convenience, I am copying this letter to them, and to the Press.
Your speech mentioned my remarks about the proposal for world “government” in the early drafts of what had been intended as a binding Copenhagen Treaty. These proposals were not, as you suggested, a “conspiracy theory” from the “far right” with “zero basis in evidence”. Your staff will find them in paragraphs 36-38 of the main text of Annex 1 to the 15 September draft of the Treaty. The word “government” appears twice at paragraph 38. After much adverse publicity in democratic countries, including Australia, the proposals were reluctantly dropped before Copenhagen.
You say I am one of “those who argue that any multilateral action is by definition evil”. On the contrary: my first question is whether any action at all is required, to which – as I shall demonstrate – the objective economic and scientific answer is No. Even if multilateral action were required, which it is not, national governments in the West are by tradition democratically elected. Therefore, a fortiori, transnational or global governments should also be made and unmade by voters at the ballot-box. The climate ought not to be used as a shoddy pretext for international bureaucratic-centralist dictatorship. We committed Europeans have had more than enough of that already with the unelected but all-powerful Kommissars of the hated EU, who make nine-tenths of our laws by decree (revealingly, they call them “Directives” or “Commission Regulations”). The Kommissars (that is the official German word for them) inflict their dictates upon us regardless of what the elected European or any other democratic Parliament says or wishes. Do we want a worldwide EU? No.
You say I am one of “those who argue that climate change does not represent a global market failure”. Yet it is only recently that opinion sufficient to constitute a market signal became apparent in the documents of the IPCC, which is, however, a political rather than a scientific entity. There has scarcely been time for a “market failure”. Besides, corporations are falling over themselves to cash in on the giant financial fraud against the little guy that carbon taxation and trading have already become in the goody-two-shoes EU – and will become in Australia if you get your way.
You say I was one of “those who argue that somehow the market will magically solve the problem”. In fact I have never argued that, though in general the market is better at solving problems than the habitual but repeatedly-failed dirigisme of the etatistes predominant in the classe politique today.
The questions I address are a) whether there is a climate problem at all; and b) even if there is one, and even if per impossibile it is of the hilariously-overblown magnitude imagined by the IPCC, whether waiting and adapting as and if necessary is more cost-effective than attempting to mitigate the supposed problem by trying to reduce the carbon dioxide our industries and enterprises emit.
Let us pretend, solum ad argumentum, that a given proportionate increase in CO2 concentration causes the maximum warming imagined by the IPCC. The IPCC’s bureaucrats are careful not to derive a function that will convert changes in CO2 concentration directly to equilibrium changes in temperature. I shall do it for them.
We derive the necessary implicit function from the IPCC’s statement to the effect that equilibrium surface warming ΔT at CO2 doubling will be (3.26 ± ln 2) C°. Since the IPCC, in compliance with Beer’s Law, defines the radiative forcing effect of CO2 as logarithmic rather than linear, our implicit function can be derived at once. The coefficient is the predicted warming at CO2 doubling divided by the logarithm of 2, and the term (C/C0) is the proportionate increase in CO2 concentration. Thus,
ΔT = (4.7 ± 1) ln(C/C0) | Celsius degrees
We are looking at the IPCC’s maximum imagined warming rate, so we simply write –
ΔT = 5.7 ln(C/C0) | Celsius degrees
Armed with this function telling us the maximum equilibrium warming that the IPCC predicts from any given change in CO2 concentration, we can now determine, robustly, the maximum equilibrium warming that is likely to be forestalled by any proposed cut in the current upward path of CO2 emissions. Let me demonstrate.
By the end of this month, according to the Copenhagen Accord, all parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change are due to report what cuts in emissions they will make by 2020. Broadly speaking, the Annex 1 parties, who will account for about half of global emissions over the period, will commit to reducing current emissions by 30% by 2020, or 15% on average in the decade between now and 2020.
Thus, if and only if every Annex 1 party to the Copenhagen Accord complies with its obligations to the full, today’s emissions will be reduced by around half of that 15%, namely 7.5%, compared with business as usual. If the trend of the past decade continues, with business as usual we shall add 2 ppmv/year, or 20 ppmv over the decade, to atmospheric CO2 concentration. Now, 7.5% of 20 ppmv is 1.5 ppmv.
We determine the warming forestalled over the coming decade by comparing the business-as-usual warming that would occur between now and 2020 if we made no cuts in CO2 emissions with the lesser warming that would follow full compliance with the Copenhagen Accord. Where today’s CO2 concentration is 388 ppmv –
Business as usual: ΔT = 5.7 ln(408.0/388) = 0.29 C°
– Copenhagen Accord: ΔT = 5.7 ln(406.5/388) = 0.27 C°
= “Global warming” forestalled, 2010-2020: 0.02 C°
One-fiftieth of a Celsius degree of warming forestalled is all that complete, global compliance with the Copenhagen Accord for an entire decade would achieve. Yet the cost of achieving this result – an outcome so small that our instruments would not be able to measure it – would run into trillions of dollars. Do your Treasury models demonstrate that this calculation is in any way erroneous? If they do, junk them.
You say “formal global and national economic modelling” shows “that the costs of inaction are greater than the costs of acting”. You ask for my “equivalent evidence basis to Treasury modelling published by the Government of the industry and employment impacts of climate change”. I respond that the rigorous calculation that I have described, which your officials may verify for themselves, shows that whatever costs may be imagined to flow from anthropogenic “global warming” will scarcely be mitigated at all, even by trillions of dollars of expenditure over the coming decade.
Every economic analysis except that of the now-discredited Lord Stern, with its near-zero discount rate and its absurdly inflated warming rates, comes to the same ineluctable conclusion: adaptation to climate change, in whatever direction, as and if necessary, is orders of magnitude more cost-effective than attempts at mitigation. In a long career in policy analysis in and out of government, I have never seen so cost-ineffective a proposed waste of taxpayers’ money as the trillions which today’s scientifically-illiterate governments propose to spend on attempting – with all the plausibility of King Canute – to stop the tide from coming in.
Remember that I have done this calculation on the basis that everyone who should comply with the Copenhagen Accord actually does comply. Precedent does not look promising. The Kyoto Protocol, the Copenhagen Accord’s predecessor, has been in operation for more than a decade, and it was supposed to reduce global CO2 emissions by 2012. So far, after billions spent on global implementation of Kyoto, global CO2 emissions have risen compared with when Kyoto was first signed.
Remember too that we have assumed the maximum warming that the CO2 imagines might occur in response to a given proportionate increase in CO2 concentration. Yet even the IPCC’s central estimate of CO2’s warming effect, according to an increasing number of serious papers in the peer-reviewed literature, is a five-fold exaggeration. If those papers are right, after a further decade of incomplete compliance and billions squandered, warming forestalled may prove to be just a thousandth of a degree.
Now ask yourself this. Are you, personally, and your advisers, personally, and your administration’s officials, personally, willing to make the heroically pointless sacrifices that you so insouciantly demand of others in the name of Saving The Planet For Future Generations? I beg leave to think not. At Flag 1 I have attached what I have reason to believe is a generally accurate list of the names and titles of the delegation that you led to Copenhagen to bring back the non-result whose paltriness, pointlessness and futility we have now rigorously demonstrated. There are 114 names on the list. One hundred and fourteen. Enough to fill a mid-sized passenger jet. Half a dozen were all that was really necessary – and perhaps one from each State in Australia. If you and your officials are not willing to tighten your belts when a tempting foreign junket at taxpayers’ expense is in prospect, why, pray, should the taxpayers tighten theirs?
You say that climate-change “deniers” – nasty word, that, and you should really have known better than to use it – are “small in number but too dangerous to be ignored”, and “well resourced”. In fact, governments, taxpayer-funded organizations, taxpayer-funded teachers, and taxpayer-funded environmental groups have spent something like 50,000 times as much on “global warming” propaganda as their opponents have spent on debunking this new and cruel superstition. And that is before we take account of the relentless prejudice of the majority of the mainstream news media.
How, then, it is that we, the supposed minority who will not admit that the emperor of “global warming” is adequately clad, are somehow prevailing? How is it that we are convincing more and more of the population not to place any more trust in the “global warming” theory? The answer is that the “global warming” theory is not true, and no amount of bluster or braggadocio, ranting or rodomontade will make it true.
You say that our aim, in daring to oppose the transient fashion for apocalypticism, is “to erode just enough of the political will that action becomes impossible”. No. Our aim is simply to ensure that the truth is widely enough understood to prevent the squandering of precious resources on addressing the non-problem of anthropogenic “global warming”. The correct policy response to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing. No interventionist likes to do nothing. Nevertheless, the do-nothing option, scientifically and economically speaking, is the right option.
You say that I and others like me base our thinking on the notion that “the cost of not acting is nothing”. Well, after a decade and a half with no statistically-significant “global warming”, and after three decades in which the mean warming rate has been well below the ever-falling predictions of the UN’s climate panel, that notion has certainly not been disproven in reality.
However, the question I address is not that but this. Is the cost of taking action many times greater than the cost of not acting? The answer to this question is Yes.
Millions are already dying of starvation in the world’s poorest nations because world food prices have doubled in two years. That abrupt, vicious doubling was caused by a sharp drop in world food production, caused in turn by suddenly taking millions of acres of land out of growing food for people who need it, so as to grow biofuels for clunkers that don’t. The scientifically-illiterate, economically-innumerate policies that you advocate – however fashionable you may conceive them to be – are killing people by the million.
You say my logic “belongs in a casino, not a science lab”. Yet it is you who are gambling with poor people’s lives, and it is you – or, rather, they – who are losing: and losing not merely their substance but their very existence. The biofuel scam is born of the idiotic notion – a notion you uncritically espouse – that increasing by less than 1/2000 this century the proportion of the Earth’s atmosphere occupied by CO2 may prove catastrophic. At a time when so many of the world’s people are already short of food, the UN’s right-to-food rapporteur, Herr Ziegler, has roundly and rightly condemned the biofuel scam as nothing less than “a crime against humanity”.
The scale of the slaughter is monstrous, with food riots (largely unreported in the Western news media, and certainly not mentioned by you in your recent speech) in a dozen regions of the Third World over the past two years. Yet this cruel, unheeded slaughter is founded upon a lie: the claim by the IPCC that it is 90% certain that most of the “global warming” since 1950 is manmade. This claim – based not on science but on a show of hands among political representatives, with China wanting a lower figure and other nations wanting a higher figure – is demonstrably, self-servingly false. Peer-reviewed analyses of changes in cloud cover over recent decades – changes almost entirely unconnected with changes in CO2 concentration – show that it was this largely-natural reduction in cloud cover from 1983-2001 and a consequent increase in the amount of short-wave and UV solar radiation reaching the Earth that accounted for five times as much warming as CO2 could have caused.
Nor is the IPCC’s great lie the only lie. If you will allow me to brief you and your advisers, I will show you lie after lie after lie after lie in the official documents of the IPCC and in the speeches of its current chairman, who has made himself a multi-millionaire as a “global warming” profiteer.
However, if you will not make the time to hear me for half an hour before you commit your working people to the futile indignity of excessive taxation and pointless over-regulation without the slightest scientific or economic justification, and to outright confiscation of their farmland without compensation on the fatuous pretext that the land is a “carbon sink”, then I hope that you will at least nominate one of the scientists on your staff to address the two central issues that I have raised in this letter: namely, the egregious cost-ineffectiveness of attempting to mitigate “global warming” by emissions reduction, and the measured fact, well demonstrated in the scientific literature, that a largely-natural change in cloud cover in recent decades caused five times as much “global warming” as CO2. It is also a measured fact that, while those of the UN’s computer models that can be forced with an increase in sea-surface temperatures all predict a consequent fall in the flux of outgoing radiation at top of atmosphere, in observed reality there is an increase. In short, the radiation that is supposed to be trapped here in the troposphere to cause “global warming” is measured as escaping to space much as usual, so that it cannot be causing more than around one-fifth of the warming the IPCC predicts.
My list of the Copenhagen junketers from Australia’s governing class is attached. All those taxpayer dollars squandered, just to forestall 0.02 C° of “global warming” in ten years. Yet, in the past decade and a half, there has been no “global warming” at all. Can you not see that it would be kinder to your working people to wait another decade and see whether global temperatures even begin to respond as the IPCC has predicted? What is the worst that can happen if you wait? Just 0.02 C° of global warming that would not otherwise have occurred. It’s a no-brainer.
Yours faithfully,
VISCOUNT MONCKTON OF BRENCHLEY
These are the people – including one “Gaia” who went as an official “political advisor” to the Australian Climate Change Committee delegation – who spent roughly 15,000.00 per person to stand in the dark blizzard freezing because the UN IPCC spent two years planning an international conference for 45,000 delegates in a room capable of holding only 15,000 people.
No wonder they can’t stand real science. Math. Or algebra. Economics ….
THE RUDD GOVERNMENT’S COPENHAGEN JUNKET LIST
December 2009
The following 114 officials or representatives of the Australian Government and of State administrations attended the UN climate conference at Copenhagen in December 2009 –
1. Kevin Michael Rudd, Prime Minister
2. Penelope Wong, Minister, Clim. Chg. & Water
3. Louise Helen Hand, Ambassador for Clim. Chg.
4. David Fredericks, Dep. Chf. of Staff, Dept. of the Prime Minister
5. Philip Green Oam, Sen. Policy Advr., Foreign Affairs Dept.
6. Andrew Charlton, Sen. Advr., Prime Minister’s Dept.
7. Lachlan Harris, Sen. Press Sec., Prime Minister’s Office
8. Scott Dewar, Sen. Advr., Prime Minister’s Office
9. Clare Penrose, Advr., Prime Minister’s Office
10. Fiona Sugden, Media Advr., Prime Minister’s Office
11. Lisa French, Prime Minister’s Office12. Jeremy Hilman, Advr., Prime Minister’s Office
13. Tarah Barzanji, Advr., Prime Minister’s Office
14. Kate Shaw, Exec. Sec., Prime Minister’s Office
15. Gaile Barnes, Exec. Asst., Prime Minister’s Office
16. Gordon de Brouwer, Dep. Sec. Prime Minister’s Dept.
17. Patrick Suckling, 1st Asst. Sec., Intl. Div., Prime Minister’s Office\
18. Rebecca Christie, Prime Minister’s Office
19. Michael Jones, Official Photographer, Prime Minister & Cabinet
20. Stephan Rudzki
21. David Bell, Federal Agent, Aus. Federal Police
22. Kym Baillie, Aus. Federal Police
23. David Champion, Aus. Federal Police
24. Matt Jebb, Federal Agent Aus. Federal Police
25. Craig Kendall, Federal Agent, Aus. Federal Police
26. Squadron Leader Ian Lane, Staff Offr., VIP Operations
27. John Olenich, Media Advr., to Minister Wong, Office of Clim. Chg. & Water
28. Kristina Hickey, Advr. to Minister Wong, Office of Clim. Chg. & Water
29. Martin Parkinson, Sec., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
30. Howard Bamsey, Special Envoy for Clim. Chg., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
31. Robert Owen-Jones, Asst. Sec., Intl. Div., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
32. Clare Walsh Asst. Sec., Intl. Div., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
33. Jenny Elizabeth Wilkinson, Policy Advr., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
34. Elizabeth Peak, Princ. Legal Advr., Intl. Clim. Law, Dept. of Clim. Chg.
35. Kristin Tilley, Dir., Multilat. Negots., Intl. Div., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
36. Andrew Ure, Actg. Dir., Multilat. Negots., Intl. Div., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
37. Annemarie Watt, Dir., Land Sector Negots., Intl. Div., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
38. Kushla Munro, Dir., Intl. Forest Carbon Sectn. Intl. Div., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
39. Kathleen Annette Rowley, Dir., Strategic & Tech. Analysis, Dept. of Clim. Chg.
40. Anitra Cowan Asst. Dir., Multilat. Negots., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
41. Sally Truong, Asst. Dir., Multilat. Negots., Intl. Div. Dept. of Clim. Chg.
42. Jane Wilkinson, Asst. Dir., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
43. Tracey Mackay, Asst. Dir., Intl. Div., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
44. Laura Brown, Asst. Dir., Multilat. Negots., Intl. Div., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
45. Tracey-Anne Leahey, Delegation Mgr., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
46. Nicola Loffler, Sen. Legal Advr., Intl. Clim. Law, Dept. of Clim. Chg.
47. Tamara Curll, Legal Advr., Intl. Clim. Law, Dept. of Clim. Chg.
48. Jessica Allen, Legal Support Offr., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
49. Sanjiva de Silva, Legal Advr., Intl. Clim. Law, Dept. of Clim. Chg.
50. Gaia Puleston, Political Advr., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
51. Penelope Morton, Policy Advr., UNFCCC Negots., Intl. Div., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
52. Claire Elizabeth Watt, Policy Advr., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
53. Amanda Walker, Policy Offr., Multilat. Negots., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
54. Alan David Lee, Policy Advr., Land Sector Negots., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
55. Erika Kate Oord, Aus. Stakeholder Mgr., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
56. Jahda Kirian Swanborough, Comms. Mgr., Ministerial Comms., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
57. H.E. Sharyn Minahan, Ambassador, Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
58. Julia Feeney, Dir., Clim. Chg. & Envir., Dept. of Foreign Affairs & Trade
59. Chester Geoffrey Cunningham, 2nd Sec., DFAT, Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to Germany
60. Rachael Cooper, Exec. Offr., Clim. Chg. & Envir., Dept. of Foreign Affairs & Trade
61. Rachael Grivas, Exec. Offr., Envir. Branch, Dept. of Foreign Affairs & Trade
62. Moya Collett, Desk Offr., Clim. Chg. & Envir. Sectn., Dept. of Foreign Affairs & Trade
63. Rob Law, Dept. of Foreign Affairs & Trade
64. Robin Davies, Asst. Dir. Gen., Sustainable Devel. Gp., Aus. Agency for Intl. Devel.
65. Deborah Fulton, Dir., Policy & Global Envir., Aus. Agency for Intl. Devel.
66. Katherine Vaughn, Policy Advr., Policy & Global Envir., Aus. Agency for Intl. Devel.
67. Brian Dawson, Policy Advr., Aus. Agency for Intl. Devel.
68. Andrew Leigh Clarke, Dep. Sec., Dept. of Res. Devel., Western Aus.
69. Bruce Wilson, Gen. Mgr., Envir. Energy & Envir. Div., Dept. of Resrc. Devel., W. Aus.
70. Jill McCarthy, Policy Advr., Dept. of Resrc., Energy & Tourism
71. Simon French, Policy Advr., Dept. of Agriculture, Fisheries & Forestry
72. Ian Michael Ruscoe, Policy Advr., Dept. of Agriculture, Fisheries & Forestry
73. David Walland, Acting Supt., Nat. Clim. Centre, Bureau of Meteorology
74. Damien Dunn Sen. Policy Advr., Aus. Treasury
75. Helen Hawka Fuhrman, Policy Offr., Renewable Energy Policy & Partnerships
76. Scott Vivian Davenport, Chf., Economics, NSW Dept. of Industry & Invest.
77. Graham Julian Levitt, Policy Mgr., Clim. Chg., NSW Dept. of Industry & Invest.
78. Kate Jennifer Jones, Minister, Clim. Chg. & Sustainability, Qld. Govt.
79. Michael William Dart, Princ. Policy Advr., Office of Kate Jones, MP, Qld. Govt.
80. Matthew Anthony Jamie Skoien, Sen. Dir., Office of Clim. Chg. Qld. Govt.
81. Michael David Rann, Premier, S. Aus. Dept. of Premier & Cabinet, S. Aus.
82. Suzanne Kay Harter, Advr., Dept. of Premier & Cabinet, S. Aus.
83. Paul David Flanagan, Mgr., Comms., Govt. of S. Aus.
84. Timothy O’Loughlin, Dep. Chf. Exec., Sust. & Wkfc. Mgmt., S. Aus. Dept. of Premier
85. Nyla Sarwar M.Sc, student, Linacre College, University of Oxford
86. Gavin Jennings, Minister, Envir. & Clim. Chg. & Innovation, Victorian Govt.
87. Sarah Broadbent, Sustainability Advr.
88. Rebecca Falkingham, Sen. Advr., Victoria Govt./Office of Clim. Chg.
89. Simon Camroux, Policy Advr., Energy Supply Ass. of Aus. Ltd.
90. Geoff Lake, Advr., Aus. Local Govt. Ass.
91. Sridhar Ayyalaraju, Post Visit Controller, Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
92. Tegan Brink Dep. Visit Controller & Security Liaison Offr., Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
93. Melissa Eu Suan Goh, Trspt. Liaison Offr. & Consul, Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
94. Lauren Henschke, Support Staff, Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
95. Maree Fay, Accommodation Liaison Offr., Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
96. Patricia McKinnon, Comms. Offr., Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
97. Eugene Olim, Passport/Baggage Liaison Offr., Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
98. Belinda Lee Adams
99. Jacqui Ashworth, Media Liaison Offr., Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
100. Patricia Smith, Media Liaison Offr., Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
101. Martin Bo Jensen, Research & Public Dipl. Offr., Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
102. Mauro Kolobaric, Consular Support, Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
103. Susan Flanagan, Consular Support, Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
104. Stephen Kanaridis, IT Support Offr., Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
105. George Reid, Support Staff, Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
106. Ashley Wright, Support Staff, Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
107. Jodie Littlewood, Support Staff, Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
108. Thomas Millhouse, Support Staff, Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
109. Timothy Whittley, Support Staff Driver, Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
110. Julia Thomson, Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
111. Donald Frater, Chf. of Staff to Minister Wong Office of Clim. Chg. & Water
112. Jacqui Smith, Media Liaison, Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
113. Greg French, Sen. Legal Advr. (Envir.), Dept. of Foreign Affairs & Trade
114. Jeremy Hillman, Advr., Prime Minister’s Office
From The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley in Copenhagen at the SPPI blog:
Today the gloves came off and the true purpose of the “global warming” scare became nakedly visible. Hugo Chavez, the Socialist president of Venezuela, blamed “global warming” on capitalism – and received a standing ovation from very nearly all of the delegates, lamentably including those from those of the capitalist nations of the West that are on the far Left – and that means too many of them.
Previously Robert Mugabe, dictator of Rhodesia, who had refused to leave office when he had been soundly defeated in a recent election, had also won plaudits at the conference for saying that the West ought to pay him plenty of money in reparation of our supposed “climate debt”.
Inside the conference center, “world leader” after “world leader” got up and postured about the need to Save The Planet, the imperative to do a deal, the necessity to save the small island nations from drowning, etc., etc., etc.
Outside, in the real world, it was snowing, and a foretaste of the Brave New World being cooked up by “world leaders” in their fantasy-land was already evident. Some 20,000 observers from non-governmental organizations – nearly all of them true-believing Green groups funded by taxpayers – had been accredited to the conference.
However, without warning the UN had capriciously decided that all but 300 of them were to be excluded from the conference today, and all but 90 would be excluded on the final day.
Of course, this being the inept UN, no one had bothered to notify those of the NGOs that were not true-believers in the UN’s camp. So Senator Steve Fielding of Australia and I turned up with a few dozen other delegates, to be left standing in the cold for a couple of hours while the UN laboriously worked out what to do with us.
In the end, they decided to turn us away, which they did with an ill grace and in a bad-tempered manner. As soon as the decision was final, the Danish police moved in. One of them began the now familiar technique of manhandling me, in the same fashion as one of his colleagues had done the previous day.
Once again, conscious that a police helicopter with a high-resolution camera was hovering overhead, I thrust my hands into my pockets in accordance with the St. John Ambulance crowd-control training, looked my assailant in the eye and told him, quietly but firmly, to take his hands off me.
He complied, but then decided to have another go. I told him a second time, and he let go a second time. I turned to go and, after I had turned my back, he gave me a mighty shove that flung me to the ground and knocked me out.
I came to some time later (not sure exactly how long), to find my head being cradled by my friends, some of whom were doing their best to keep the police thugs at bay while the volunteer ambulance-men attended to me.
I was picked up and dusted me off. I could not remember where I had left my telephone, which had been in my hand at the time when I was assaulted. I rather fuzzily asked where it was, and one of the police goons shouted, “He alleges he had a mobile phone.”
In fact, the phone was in my coat pocket, where my hand had been at the time of the assault. The ambulance crew led me away and laid me down under a blanket for 20 minutes to get warm, plying me with water and keeping me amused with some colorfully colloquial English that they had learned.
I thanked them for their kindness, left them a donation for their splendid service, and rejoined my friends. A very senior police officer then came up and asked if I was all right. Yes, I said, but no thanks to one of his officers, who had pushed me hard from behind when my back was turned and had sent me flying.
The police chief said that none of his officers would have done such a thing. I said that several witnesses had seen the incident, which I intended to report. I said I had hoped to receive an apology but had not received one, and would include that in my report. The policeman went off looking glum, and with good reason.
To assault an accredited representative of a conference your nation is hosting, and to do it while your own police cameramen are filming from above, and to do it without any provocation except my polite, non-threatening request that I should not be manhandled, is not a career-enhancing move, as that police chief is about to discover to his cost.
Nor does this incident, and far too many like it, reflect the slightest credit on Denmark. We must make reasonable allowance for the fact that the unspeakable security service of the UN, which is universally detested by those at this conference, was ordering the Danish police about. The tension between the alien force and the indigenous men on the ground had grown throughout the conference.
However, the Danish police were far too free with their hands when pushing us around, and that is not acceptable in a free society. But then, Europe is no longer a free society. It is, in effect, a tyranny ruled by the unelected Kommissars of the European Union. That is perhaps one reason why police forces throughout Europe, including that in the UK, have become far more brutal than was once acceptable in their treatment of the citizens they are sworn to serve.
It is exactly this species of tyranny that the UN would like to impose upon the entire planet, in the name of saving us from ourselves – or, as Ugo Chavez would put it, saving us from Western capitalist democracy.
A few weeks ago, at a major conference in New York, I spoke about this tendency towards tyranny with Dr. Vaclav Klaus, the distinguished economist and doughty fighter for freedom and democracy who is President of the Czech Republic.
While we still have one or two statesmen of his caliber, there is hope for Europe and the world. Unfortunately, he refused to come to Copenhagen, telling me that there was no point, now that the lunatics were firmly in control of the asylum.
However, I asked him whether the draft Copenhagen Treaty’s proposal for what amounted to a communistic world government reminded him of the Communism under which he and his country had suffered for so long.
He thought for a moment – as statesmen always do before answering an unusual question – and said, “Maybe it is not brutal. But in all other respects, what it proposes is far too close to Communism for comfort.”
Today, as I lay in the snow with a cut knee, a bruised back, a banged head, a ruined suit, and a written-off coat, I wondered whether the brutality of the New World Order was moving closer than President Klaus – or any of us – had realized.
Friday, January 8, 2010
Victm Fear or Criminal Fear
Let all heed the words of the late great Jeff Cooper, father of the Modern Technique of the Pistol (emphases original):
"Apart from the odds that you will be killed anyway if you submit to threats of violence, it would seem – espcially in today’s world of permissive atrocity – that it may be your social duty to resist. ... If violent crime is to be curbed, it is only the intended victim who can do it. The felon does not fear the police, and he fears neither judge nor jury. Therefore what he must be taught to fear is his victim. ...
"George Patton told his officers, ‘Don’t worry about your flanks. Let the enemy worry about his flanks. It is high time for society to stop worrying about the criminal, and to let the criminal start worrying about society. And by society I mean you."
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