All those that seek to have a better world and think Obama is the answer do not realize that what he is out to kill is possibility - their possibility, anyone who isn't already at the peak of political power or financial power. He think that money is evil or at least an enormous threat except in their hands. They damn it. They tax it.
As an end in itself money leaves a person empty. With no end for which to use it - be it his family's future, an invention, a shot for the moon, why bother trying to earn money. But this is just the point. Most people do have ends in mind.
Political power is also an empty game when it has as its end the maintenance of its own power. And this is the phenomenon we are now seeing with the Democrats in Washington. Whatever illustrious value the Democrat Party has had in the past, this is not it. Corrupt to the core, we are seeing them cut off all avenues for their competitors to effectively challenge them. Cutting off the money is key.
The other key areas where people must be dis-empowered if those in power are to maintain their grip is in information and the process of thinking itself, which involves education. There are many other fronts in this battle but Victor Davis Hanson puts his finger on one of them.
What's Behind War Targeting Wannabe Rich?
By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON Posted 12/24/2009 06:17 PM ET
There is class warfare going on in this country — but it's not against the established rich. It's against those who are trying to become wealthy.
President Obama has declared that those who make over $200,000 will pay higher income taxes. Caps on payroll taxes are supposed to come off as well for the upper class. Envisioned estate taxes will take 45% of individual inheritances valued over $3.5 million. Many states have also hiked their income taxes on the upper brackets.
Again, most of those targeted are not the already rich — a Warren Buffett or Bill Gates — but millions of the wannabe rich. They may have achieved larger-than-average annual incomes, but they're not the multimillionaire speculators on Wall Street who nearly wrecked the American economy in search of huge bonuses and payoffs.
Most are instead professionals and small-business owners who take enormous risks in hopes of being well-off and passing their wealth on to their children.
Oddly, much of the populist rhetoric about the need to gouge the newly affluent is voiced by the entrenched wealthy, who don't have to care how high taxes go, given their own vast fortunes.
Take Bill Gates Sr., who is clamoring for higher estate taxes on inheritances. Such advocacy comes easy for him. After all, he is the father of the richest man in the world — someone who clearly needs no inheritance.
Billionaires also often set up charitable foundations to ensure that their estates are channeled to their own preferences rather than simply given over to a needy U.S. Treasury. In contrast, moderately affluent business owners or farmers often leave enough property for their heirs to pay death taxes, but not enough to set up tax-exempt charitable foundations.
Warren Buffett also wants higher income taxes on the wealthy. He once confessed that thanks to all sorts of write-offs, he had paid only about 17% of his gross income in federal taxes, a lower rate than many employees in his office.
But Buffett, like Bill Gates Jr., is worth many billions of dollars. In truth, he has so much money that no amount of taxes would affect him much. A combined tax bite of 60% of his annual income would still leave Buffett each year with millions. Yet the same rate could cripple a business owner making $300,000 in annual income.
Often those in government claim that their higher-taxes proposals are simply targeting the affluent like themselves — proof of their own selflessness. President Obama, for example, has complained that the well-off like him could afford to pay more.
But unlike politicians in Washington, most upscale Americans in private enterprise do not receive free government perks and lavish pensions. Nor are they guaranteed lucrative post-political lobbying and speaking careers.
Focusing tax hikes on those who in some years make between $200,000 and $500,000 makes no sense in a recession for a variety of reasons. They are neither the speculators who caused the panic of 2008 nor the Washington politicians who are bankrupting the country.
Instead, most are small-business owners who hire the majority of the nation's employees. But faced with the talk of higher taxes, more regulations and hostile rhetoric, they will remain confused, and so retrench rather than expand.
With the proposed new income, payroll and health care tax rates, along with increased state and local taxes, many business owners fear that 60% to 70% of their income will go to the government. That does not seem a good way to persuade small businesses to hire more workers in hopes of greater rewards.
Income is also not the only barometer of affluence. Two-hundred thousand dollars is quite a lot of annual money in Kansas, but does not always go so far in San Jose, where modest houses often cost well over half a million dollars. For those whose children do not qualify for need-based scholarships, a private liberal-arts education can easily set a parent back $200,000 per child over four years.
Why the war against the productive classes who want to be rich?
Maybe it is because they are not as numerous as the proverbial middle class. Perhaps they do not earn our empathy that is properly accorded to the poor. They surely lack the status and insider connections that accrue to the very rich.
Yet continue to punish and demonize them, and the country will grind to a halt — as we are seeing now.
Friday, December 25, 2009
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Seasons' Greetings
There's something magical about Christmas - about creating a wild fantasy during the days of the most darkness and the cold nasty weather. How wonderful.
Enjoy your holiday.
Principlex
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
The Best is Yet to Be
For the man who owns himself as his purpose, "The best is yet to be,..." --Robert Browning
Have a happy holiday season.
Principlex
Friday, December 11, 2009
Dictatorship - The Anti-Industrial Coup
Here is all the evidence you need to know that we live under a dictatorship. The reality of that is getting clearer and clearer. This analysis is produced by Robert Tracinski of the TIA Daily, a daily analysis of current events from an objectivist perspective. SCB
The Anti-Industrial Coup
Intellectual climate change seems to be transforming Australia first. For example, a prominent new article in The Australian summarizes recent scientific findings that refute the basic assumptions behind the global warming hysteria.
"What this means is that the IPCC model for climate sensitivity is not supported by experimental observation on ancient ice ages and recent satellite data.
"So are we justified in concluding that the concentration of atmospheric CO2 is not the only or major driver of current climate change? And if so, how should we re-shape our ETS legislation?
"I don't know the answer to these questions, but as Nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynman observed: 'It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.'"
In America, the biggest sign so far of the political impact of Climategate is a new op-ed in the Washington Post by Sarah Palin using Climategate as a springboard to dismiss global warming and call for the US to stay home from the Copenhagen conference.
Palin is not significant because she carries any scientific authority. She is significant because her public statements on this are a bellwether for the political right.
Until a few months ago, the typical position on global warming within the right could be described as "moderately skeptical." There was doubt that we could know about global warming with certainty or that we could do anything about, but the view that global warming is flat-out wrong—much less that it is a fraud—was still considered somewhat extreme. And that's how someone like John McCain, a global-warming believer, could still get the Republican nomination.
Attitudes were already beginning to harden a bit, but Climategate was a major turning point. The left has ignored the scandal as best it can, and I am not sure how much independent voters have been permitted to hear about it in the press. But it is now the mainstream position within the right that global warming is a fraud, a hoax, a dishonest power grab.
This is important because it means that one major political party—which just might regain a majority in Congress next year—is willing to fight against cap and trade.
And we'll need such a congressional majority. Before he left for Copenhagen, President Obama pledged to enact reductions in carbon dioxide emissions. Congressional leaders immediately reminded him that he couldn't act without the approval of Congress. The Obama administration's response was to declare: yes, we can.
They have announced their intention to stage an anti-industrial coup, using the authority of the EPA to impose a "command-and-control" global warming dictatorship on the American economy. They are then using this as a threat against Congress: pass cap-and-trade legislation, or we'll impose something even worse by executive decree.
The only answer to this is strong action by Congress to reassert its power by explicitly denying the EPA any legal authority to regulate carbon dioxide. But to do that will require a Republican majority with the confidence to reject global warming as a fraud and a threat to liberty. And that is precisely what we may get in 2010.
"Administration Warns of 'Command-and-Control' Regulation Over Emissions," FoxNews.com, December 9
The Obama administration is warning Congress that if it doesn't move to regulate greenhouse gases, the Environmental Protection Agency will take a "command-and-control" role over the process in a way that could hurt business.
The warning, from a top White House economic official who spoke Tuesday on condition of anonymity….
[W]hile administration officials have long said they prefer Congress take action on climate change, the economic official who spoke with reporters Tuesday night made clear that the EPA will not wait and is prepared to act on its own.
And it won't be pretty.
"If you don't pass this legislation, then...the EPA is going to have to regulate in this area," the official said. "And it is not going to be able to regulate on a market-based way, so it's going to have to regulate in a command-and-control way, which will probably generate even more uncertainty."…
The economic official explained that congressional action could be better for the economy, since it would provide "compensation" for higher energy prices, especially for small businesses dealing with those higher energy costs. Otherwise, the official warned that the kind of "uncertainty" generated by unilateral EPA action would be a huge "deterrent to investment," in an economy already desperate for jobs….
Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., ranking Republican on the House Select Committee for Energy Independence and Global Warming, said Tuesday he is going to attend the Copenhagen conference to inform world leaders that despite any promises made by President Obama, no new laws will be passed in the United States until the "scientific fascism" ends.
"I call it 'scientific fascism,'" Sensenbrenner said during a press conference with fellow climate change skeptics. Sensenbrenner said, "The UN should throw a red flag" on scientists who support global warming to the exclusion of dissent.
The Anti-Industrial Coup
Intellectual climate change seems to be transforming Australia first. For example, a prominent new article in The Australian summarizes recent scientific findings that refute the basic assumptions behind the global warming hysteria.
"What this means is that the IPCC model for climate sensitivity is not supported by experimental observation on ancient ice ages and recent satellite data.
"So are we justified in concluding that the concentration of atmospheric CO2 is not the only or major driver of current climate change? And if so, how should we re-shape our ETS legislation?
"I don't know the answer to these questions, but as Nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynman observed: 'It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.'"
In America, the biggest sign so far of the political impact of Climategate is a new op-ed in the Washington Post by Sarah Palin using Climategate as a springboard to dismiss global warming and call for the US to stay home from the Copenhagen conference.
Palin is not significant because she carries any scientific authority. She is significant because her public statements on this are a bellwether for the political right.
Until a few months ago, the typical position on global warming within the right could be described as "moderately skeptical." There was doubt that we could know about global warming with certainty or that we could do anything about, but the view that global warming is flat-out wrong—much less that it is a fraud—was still considered somewhat extreme. And that's how someone like John McCain, a global-warming believer, could still get the Republican nomination.
Attitudes were already beginning to harden a bit, but Climategate was a major turning point. The left has ignored the scandal as best it can, and I am not sure how much independent voters have been permitted to hear about it in the press. But it is now the mainstream position within the right that global warming is a fraud, a hoax, a dishonest power grab.
This is important because it means that one major political party—which just might regain a majority in Congress next year—is willing to fight against cap and trade.
And we'll need such a congressional majority. Before he left for Copenhagen, President Obama pledged to enact reductions in carbon dioxide emissions. Congressional leaders immediately reminded him that he couldn't act without the approval of Congress. The Obama administration's response was to declare: yes, we can.
They have announced their intention to stage an anti-industrial coup, using the authority of the EPA to impose a "command-and-control" global warming dictatorship on the American economy. They are then using this as a threat against Congress: pass cap-and-trade legislation, or we'll impose something even worse by executive decree.
The only answer to this is strong action by Congress to reassert its power by explicitly denying the EPA any legal authority to regulate carbon dioxide. But to do that will require a Republican majority with the confidence to reject global warming as a fraud and a threat to liberty. And that is precisely what we may get in 2010.
"Administration Warns of 'Command-and-Control' Regulation Over Emissions," FoxNews.com, December 9
The Obama administration is warning Congress that if it doesn't move to regulate greenhouse gases, the Environmental Protection Agency will take a "command-and-control" role over the process in a way that could hurt business.
The warning, from a top White House economic official who spoke Tuesday on condition of anonymity….
[W]hile administration officials have long said they prefer Congress take action on climate change, the economic official who spoke with reporters Tuesday night made clear that the EPA will not wait and is prepared to act on its own.
And it won't be pretty.
"If you don't pass this legislation, then...the EPA is going to have to regulate in this area," the official said. "And it is not going to be able to regulate on a market-based way, so it's going to have to regulate in a command-and-control way, which will probably generate even more uncertainty."…
The economic official explained that congressional action could be better for the economy, since it would provide "compensation" for higher energy prices, especially for small businesses dealing with those higher energy costs. Otherwise, the official warned that the kind of "uncertainty" generated by unilateral EPA action would be a huge "deterrent to investment," in an economy already desperate for jobs….
Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., ranking Republican on the House Select Committee for Energy Independence and Global Warming, said Tuesday he is going to attend the Copenhagen conference to inform world leaders that despite any promises made by President Obama, no new laws will be passed in the United States until the "scientific fascism" ends.
"I call it 'scientific fascism,'" Sensenbrenner said during a press conference with fellow climate change skeptics. Sensenbrenner said, "The UN should throw a red flag" on scientists who support global warming to the exclusion of dissent.
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Government Power Grab of the Private Sector
Michelle Bachmann tells of a new bill initiated by the Obama Administration to completely and arbitrarily control the business sector of our society. This is done completely stealthily and we do not even know that this is going on. Listen to the interview here.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Progressivism is a Gigantic Fraud!
Indy Tea Lover penned this overdue indictment of Progressivism and the Progressives. Thank you, RV.
Monday, December 7, 2009
The Cold Heart of Obamacare
If this passes, you, your parents, your friends and the same for me will likely die by Obama and the Democrats’ hand. This bill cannot and will not improve health care for people – above all the poor. It’s purpose is to end the control that you have over your own life. Call your Representative and Senators and up the ante with them. Whatever it takes to stop this incredible injustice must happen now.
We know that freedom provides for an abundant life. Government control, on the other hand, causes the opposite. This bill is definitely a program to control, control, control you to death. SCB
The Cold Heart of Obamacare
by Nat Hentoff
Nat Hentoff is a nationally renowned authority on the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights. He is a member of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and the Cato Institute, where he is a senior fellow.
_____________________________________________________
Much of the press coverage of the Democrats' health-care legislation, now fiercely embattled in Congress, focuses on the public option, the actual long-term costs and tax increases, and the amendment barring funding for abortions, but the cold heart of Obamacare is its overpowering of the doctor-patient relationship — eventually resulting in the premature ending of many Americans' lives for being too costly.
To call the dangers of this legislation "death panels" obscures the real-life consequences to Americans, not only the elderly, of a federal government-run health-care bureaucracy. In the Senate bill, for instance, Medicare doctors whose treatments of certain, mostly elderly, patients costs more than a set government figure each year, will be punished by losing part of their own incomes.
Not only Medicare doctors will be monitored for their cost effectiveness. In the House bill, as Cato Institute's health-care specialist Michael Tanner explains (New York Post, Nov. 8), "111 government agencies, boards, commissions and other bureaucracies — all overseen by a new health-care czar," the commissioner of Health Care Choices, will keep watch on what the president has called excessive, wasteful health-care expenditures.
Moreover, President Obama has made clear that eventually he desires a U.S. equivalent of the British National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), a commission that decides which drugs and procedures for patients are within the national budget for health care. The current baseline expenditure for each Briton, according to Michael Tanner, is $44,305 per year.
In this country, bureaucrats keeping tabs on patients — without actually seeing them and their condition — will mean, as Tanner notes, that "every time a doctor decides on a treatment, he or she would have to ask: 'Does the government think I'm doing this too much? Will I be penalized if I order this test?'" (Disclosure: As a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, I have access to its continuing research.)
President Obama and his supporters in Congress insist that clinical studies prove how many needless and expensive tests and procedures are so often performed. But these are collective statistics. Individual patients are left out.
Harvard Medical School faculty members Jerome Groopman and Pamela Hartzband bring the individual back into this crucial debate in "Sorting Fact From Fiction on Health Care" (Wall Street Journal, Aug. 31): "Data from clinical studies provide averages from populations and may not apply to individual patients.
"Clinical studies routinely exclude patients with more than one medical condition and often the elderly or people on multiple medications. Conclusions about what works and what doesn't work change much too quickly for policymakers to dictate clinical practice." Everyone, regardless of political party, should keep in mind:
"If doctors and hospitals are rewarded for complying with government-mandated treatment measures or penalized if they do not comply, clearly federal bureaucrats are directing health decisions."
If congressional Democrats succeed in passing their health-care "reform" measure to send to the White House for President Obama's signature, then they and he are determining your health decisions.
Also remember that these functionaries making decisions about your treatment and, in some cases, about the extent of your life span, have never met you. They do not know your name, have not spoken directly to your doctor and, of course, haven't the slightest idea of what your wishes are. Is this America?
Another doctor whose byline in the New York Post I try never to miss is Mark K. Siegel, a practicing internist and an associate professor of medicine at NYU Langone Medical Center. In "Destroying the Doctor-Patient Bond" (New York Post, Aug. 3), he points to Section 123 of the House bill that "establishes a Health Benefits dvisory Committee, chaired by the surgeon general, which makes recommendations to the HHS secretary on what should be covered and what shouldn't.
"These rulings from on high," Dr. Siegel warns, "are problematic, since useful treatments or tests for one patient are not appropriate for another. Appeals are bound to be time consuming and largely ineffective. This is the government interfering directly with the practice of medicine."
Is this what presidential candidate Barack Obama meant by "Change we can believe in"? Even if you voted for him, is this the change you will believe in if your doctor is overruled by the government in his or her treatment decisions about you?
Remember those federal bureaucrats recently ruling on breast-cancer screening? Dr. James Thrall, chairman of the American College of Radiology and a Harvard Medical School professor, said the resulting furor of dissent by doctors showed (Wall Street Journal, Nov. 18) that rulings "based on costs and large group averages, not individuals" lead him to fear that "we are entering an era of deliberate decisions where we choose to trade people's lives for money."
Is there anything you want to say to your representatives in the House or Senate before the final vote is taken? If you don't act urgently now, you may become part of another collective statistic — American annual death rates.
I'm scared, and I do mean to scare you.
We do not elect the president and Congress to decide how short our lives will be. That decision is way above their pay grades.
___________________________________________________
Hentoff, Nat (2009, December 6). The Cold Heart of Obamacare. Retrieved December 7, 2009, from The Cato Institute Web site: http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=11024
Sunday, December 6, 2009
If You Run Across an Environmentalist, Run for Your Life!
I found these quotes at this website. This, plus the collapse of all credibility and integrity of the Global Warming project fostered by the UN through the IPCC, is completely and finally damning insofar as any value in the environmentalist movement. Whatever the honest hopes of that impulse is or was, they cannot find expression through the intellectually and morally corrupt spokesmen and leaders of the environmentalist movement.
Life is always self-limiting. It doesn't need the hand of a grand human planner to tell it how to do that.
Contrary to common misconception, resources are not limited and will never become limited. Man's survival depends on recombining what he finds in nature in order to make things which satisfy his needs. Everything is constantly undergoing transformation but it never goes out of existence. Our limit at any point in time exists in our knowledge to transform resources into useful, need-satisfying products.
Although it may look like we are creating waste, the truth is we have just changed the form of the resources we used. They are available as a resource to be used in the satisfaction of still other human needs. The process never stops.
The thing environmentalist fear most is human success and because they are so terrified of it, they must enslave, i.e., control their way or else, or destroy human life rather than bear dealing with the success that free minds and free markets produce. Of course there will be problems - life consists of problems - but those will then be dealt with by means of ever advancing knowledge. SCB
Here are the quotes of the spokesmen and leaders of The Environmentalist Religion. In reading them, I'm amazed at how well they would have fit into the Nazi regime. Then it was a hatred of any human non-Aryan. Today it is hatred of any human.
_______________________________________________________
“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
- Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Programme
“A massive campaign must be launched to de-develop the United States. De-development means bringing our
economic system into line with the realities of ecology and the world resource situation.”
- Paul Ehrlich, Professor of Population Studies
“The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States. We can’t let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the US. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are.”
- Michael Oppenheimer, Environmental Defense Fund
“Global Sustainability requires the deliberate quest of poverty, reduced resource consumption and set levels of mortality control.”
- Professor Maurice King
“We must make this an insecure and inhospitable place for capitalists and their projects. We must reclaim the roads and plowed land, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers and return to wilderness millions of acres of presently settled land.”
- David Foreman, co-founder of Earth First!
“Complex technology of any sort is an assault on human dignity. It would be little short of disastrous for us to
discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy, because of what we might do with it.”
- Amory Lovins, Rocky Mountain Institute
“The prospect of cheap fusion energy is the worst thing that could happen to the planet.”
- Jeremy Rifkin, Greenhouse Crisis Foundation
“Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.”
- Prof Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University
“Our insatiable drive to rummage deep beneath the surface of the earth is a willful expansion
of our dysfunctional civilization into Nature.”
- Al Gore, Earth in the Balance
“The big threat to the planet is people: there are too many, doing too well economically and burning too much oil.”
– Sir James Lovelock, BBC Interview
“My three main goals would be to reduce human population to about 100 million worldwide, destroy the industrial infrastructure and see wilderness, with it’s full complement of species, returning throughout the world.”
-Dave Foreman, co-founder of Earth First!
“Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class - involving high meat intake,
use of fossil fuels, appliances, air-conditioning, and suburban housing - are not sustainable.”
- Maurice Strong, Rio Earth Summit
“All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changed attitudes and
behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.”
- Club of Rome, The First Global Revolution
“Mankind is the most dangerous, destructive, selfish and unethical animal on the earth.”
- Michael Fox, vice-president of The Humane Society
“Humans on the Earth behave in some ways like a pathogenic micro-organism, or like the cells of a tumor.”
- Sir James Lovelock, Healing Gaia
“The Earth has cancer and the cancer is Man.”
- Club of Rome, Mankind at the Turning Point
"A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells, the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people. We must shift our efforts from the treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions."
- Prof. Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb
"A reasonable estimate for an industrialized world society at the present North American material standard of living would be 1 billion. At the more frugal European standard of living, 2 to 3 billion would be possible."
- United Nations, Global Biodiversity Assessment
“A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.”
- Ted Turner, founder of CNN and major UN donor
“… the resultant ideal sustainable population is hence more than 500 million but less than one billion.”
- Club of Rome, Goals for Mankind
"One America burdens the earth much more than twenty Bangladeshes. This is a terrible thing to say in order to stabilize world population, we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it's just as bad not to say it."
- Jacques Cousteau, UNESCO Courier
“If I were reincarnated I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.”
- Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, patron of the World Wildlife Fund
“I suspect that eradicating small pox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.”
- John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal
“The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing.”
- Christopher Manes, Earth First!
"Childbearing should be a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license. All potential parents should be required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing."
- David Brower, first Executive Director of the Sierra Club
“In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill.”
- Club of Rome, The First Global Revolution
“We need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination… So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts… Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.”
- Stephen Schneider, Stanford Professor of Climatology, lead author of many IPCC reports
“Unless we announce disasters no one will listen.”
- Sir John Houghton, first chairman of IPCC
“It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.”
- Paul Watson, co-founder of Greenpeace
"We've got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy."
- Timothy Wirth, President of the UN Foundation
"No matter if the science of global warming is all phony, climate change provides the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world."
-Christine Stewart, former Canadian Minister of the Environment
"The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity. It is also our greatest opportunity to lift Global Consciousness to a higher level."
- Al Gore, accepting the Nobel Peace Prize
"The only way to get our society to truly change is to frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe."
- emeritus professor Daniel Botkin
"We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis."
- David Rockefeller, Club of Rome executive manager
"Humanity is sitting on a time bomb. If the vast majority of the world's scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send out entire planet's climate system into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced - a catastrophe of our own making."
- Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth
"By the end of this century, climate change will reduce the human population to a few breeding pairs surviving near the Arctic."
- Sir James Lovelock, Revenge of Gaia
"Climate Change will result in a catastrophic, global sea level rise of seven meters. That's bye-bye most of Bangladesh, Netherlands, Florida and would make London the new Atlantis."
- Greenpeace International
"Climate change is real. Not only is it real, it's here, and its effects are giving rise to a frighteningly new global phenomenon - the man-made natural disaster."
- Barack Obama, US Presidential Candidate
"We are close to a time when all of humankind will envision a global agenda that encompasses a kind of Global Marshall Plan to address the causes of poverty and suffering and environmental destruction all over the earth."
- Al Gore, Earth in the Balance
"In Nature organic growth proceeds according to a Master Plan, a Blueprint. Such a 'master plan' is missing from the process of growth and development of the world system. Now is the time to draw up a master plan for sustainable growth and world development based on global allocation of all resources and a new global economic system. Ten or twenty years from today it will probably be too late."
- Club of Rome, Mankind at the Turning Point
"The concept of national sovereignty has been immutable, indeed a sacred principle of international relations. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the new imperatives of global environmental cooperation."
- UN Commission on Global Governance report
"Democracy is not a panacea. It cannot organize everything and it is unaware of its own limits. These facts must be faced squarely. Sacrilegious though this may sound, democracy is no longer well suited for the tasks ahead. The complexity and the technical nature of many of today's problems do not always allow elected representatives to make competent decisions at the right time."
- Club of Rome, The First Global Revolution
"In my view, after fifty years of service in the United National system, I perceive the utmost urgency and absolute necessity for proper Earth government. There is no shadow of a doubt that the present political and economic systems are no longer appropriate and will lead to the end of life evolution on this planet. We must therefore absolutely and urgently look for new ways."
- Dr. Robert Muller, UN Assistant Secretary General
"Nations are in effect ceding portions of their sovereignty to the international community and beginning to create a new system of international environmental governance as a means of solving otherwise unmanageable crises."
- Lester Brown, WorldWatch Institute
"A keen and anxious awareness is evolving to suggest that fundamental changes will have to take place in the world order and its power structures, in the distribution of wealth and income."
- Club of Rome, Mankind at the Turning Point
"Adopting a central organizing principle means embarking on an all-out effort to use every policy and program, every law and institution, to halt the destruction of the environment."
- Al Gore, Earth in the Balance
"Effective execution of Agenda 21 will require a profound reorientation of all human society, unlike anything the world has ever experienced - a major shift in the priorities of both governments and individuals and an unprecedented redeployment of human and financial resources. This shift will demand that a concern for the environmental consequences of every human action be integrated into individual and collective decision-making at every level."
- UN Agenda 21
"The earth is literally our mother, not only because we depend on her for nurture and shelter but even more because the human species has been shaped by her in the womb of evolution. Our salvation depends upon our ability to create a religion of nature."
- Rene Dubos, board member Planetary Citizens
Life is always self-limiting. It doesn't need the hand of a grand human planner to tell it how to do that.
Contrary to common misconception, resources are not limited and will never become limited. Man's survival depends on recombining what he finds in nature in order to make things which satisfy his needs. Everything is constantly undergoing transformation but it never goes out of existence. Our limit at any point in time exists in our knowledge to transform resources into useful, need-satisfying products.
Although it may look like we are creating waste, the truth is we have just changed the form of the resources we used. They are available as a resource to be used in the satisfaction of still other human needs. The process never stops.
The thing environmentalist fear most is human success and because they are so terrified of it, they must enslave, i.e., control their way or else, or destroy human life rather than bear dealing with the success that free minds and free markets produce. Of course there will be problems - life consists of problems - but those will then be dealt with by means of ever advancing knowledge. SCB
Here are the quotes of the spokesmen and leaders of The Environmentalist Religion. In reading them, I'm amazed at how well they would have fit into the Nazi regime. Then it was a hatred of any human non-Aryan. Today it is hatred of any human.
_______________________________________________________
“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
- Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Programme
“A massive campaign must be launched to de-develop the United States. De-development means bringing our
economic system into line with the realities of ecology and the world resource situation.”
- Paul Ehrlich, Professor of Population Studies
“The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States. We can’t let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the US. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are.”
- Michael Oppenheimer, Environmental Defense Fund
“Global Sustainability requires the deliberate quest of poverty, reduced resource consumption and set levels of mortality control.”
- Professor Maurice King
“We must make this an insecure and inhospitable place for capitalists and their projects. We must reclaim the roads and plowed land, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers and return to wilderness millions of acres of presently settled land.”
- David Foreman, co-founder of Earth First!
“Complex technology of any sort is an assault on human dignity. It would be little short of disastrous for us to
discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy, because of what we might do with it.”
- Amory Lovins, Rocky Mountain Institute
“The prospect of cheap fusion energy is the worst thing that could happen to the planet.”
- Jeremy Rifkin, Greenhouse Crisis Foundation
“Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.”
- Prof Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University
“Our insatiable drive to rummage deep beneath the surface of the earth is a willful expansion
of our dysfunctional civilization into Nature.”
- Al Gore, Earth in the Balance
“The big threat to the planet is people: there are too many, doing too well economically and burning too much oil.”
– Sir James Lovelock, BBC Interview
“My three main goals would be to reduce human population to about 100 million worldwide, destroy the industrial infrastructure and see wilderness, with it’s full complement of species, returning throughout the world.”
-Dave Foreman, co-founder of Earth First!
“Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class - involving high meat intake,
use of fossil fuels, appliances, air-conditioning, and suburban housing - are not sustainable.”
- Maurice Strong, Rio Earth Summit
“All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changed attitudes and
behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.”
- Club of Rome, The First Global Revolution
“Mankind is the most dangerous, destructive, selfish and unethical animal on the earth.”
- Michael Fox, vice-president of The Humane Society
“Humans on the Earth behave in some ways like a pathogenic micro-organism, or like the cells of a tumor.”
- Sir James Lovelock, Healing Gaia
“The Earth has cancer and the cancer is Man.”
- Club of Rome, Mankind at the Turning Point
"A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells, the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people. We must shift our efforts from the treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions."
- Prof. Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb
"A reasonable estimate for an industrialized world society at the present North American material standard of living would be 1 billion. At the more frugal European standard of living, 2 to 3 billion would be possible."
- United Nations, Global Biodiversity Assessment
“A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.”
- Ted Turner, founder of CNN and major UN donor
“… the resultant ideal sustainable population is hence more than 500 million but less than one billion.”
- Club of Rome, Goals for Mankind
"One America burdens the earth much more than twenty Bangladeshes. This is a terrible thing to say in order to stabilize world population, we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it's just as bad not to say it."
- Jacques Cousteau, UNESCO Courier
“If I were reincarnated I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.”
- Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, patron of the World Wildlife Fund
“I suspect that eradicating small pox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.”
- John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal
“The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing.”
- Christopher Manes, Earth First!
"Childbearing should be a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license. All potential parents should be required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing."
- David Brower, first Executive Director of the Sierra Club
“In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill.”
- Club of Rome, The First Global Revolution
“We need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination… So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts… Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.”
- Stephen Schneider, Stanford Professor of Climatology, lead author of many IPCC reports
“Unless we announce disasters no one will listen.”
- Sir John Houghton, first chairman of IPCC
“It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.”
- Paul Watson, co-founder of Greenpeace
"We've got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy."
- Timothy Wirth, President of the UN Foundation
"No matter if the science of global warming is all phony, climate change provides the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world."
-Christine Stewart, former Canadian Minister of the Environment
"The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity. It is also our greatest opportunity to lift Global Consciousness to a higher level."
- Al Gore, accepting the Nobel Peace Prize
"The only way to get our society to truly change is to frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe."
- emeritus professor Daniel Botkin
"We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis."
- David Rockefeller, Club of Rome executive manager
"Humanity is sitting on a time bomb. If the vast majority of the world's scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send out entire planet's climate system into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced - a catastrophe of our own making."
- Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth
"By the end of this century, climate change will reduce the human population to a few breeding pairs surviving near the Arctic."
- Sir James Lovelock, Revenge of Gaia
"Climate Change will result in a catastrophic, global sea level rise of seven meters. That's bye-bye most of Bangladesh, Netherlands, Florida and would make London the new Atlantis."
- Greenpeace International
"Climate change is real. Not only is it real, it's here, and its effects are giving rise to a frighteningly new global phenomenon - the man-made natural disaster."
- Barack Obama, US Presidential Candidate
"We are close to a time when all of humankind will envision a global agenda that encompasses a kind of Global Marshall Plan to address the causes of poverty and suffering and environmental destruction all over the earth."
- Al Gore, Earth in the Balance
"In Nature organic growth proceeds according to a Master Plan, a Blueprint. Such a 'master plan' is missing from the process of growth and development of the world system. Now is the time to draw up a master plan for sustainable growth and world development based on global allocation of all resources and a new global economic system. Ten or twenty years from today it will probably be too late."
- Club of Rome, Mankind at the Turning Point
"The concept of national sovereignty has been immutable, indeed a sacred principle of international relations. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the new imperatives of global environmental cooperation."
- UN Commission on Global Governance report
"Democracy is not a panacea. It cannot organize everything and it is unaware of its own limits. These facts must be faced squarely. Sacrilegious though this may sound, democracy is no longer well suited for the tasks ahead. The complexity and the technical nature of many of today's problems do not always allow elected representatives to make competent decisions at the right time."
- Club of Rome, The First Global Revolution
"In my view, after fifty years of service in the United National system, I perceive the utmost urgency and absolute necessity for proper Earth government. There is no shadow of a doubt that the present political and economic systems are no longer appropriate and will lead to the end of life evolution on this planet. We must therefore absolutely and urgently look for new ways."
- Dr. Robert Muller, UN Assistant Secretary General
"Nations are in effect ceding portions of their sovereignty to the international community and beginning to create a new system of international environmental governance as a means of solving otherwise unmanageable crises."
- Lester Brown, WorldWatch Institute
"A keen and anxious awareness is evolving to suggest that fundamental changes will have to take place in the world order and its power structures, in the distribution of wealth and income."
- Club of Rome, Mankind at the Turning Point
"Adopting a central organizing principle means embarking on an all-out effort to use every policy and program, every law and institution, to halt the destruction of the environment."
- Al Gore, Earth in the Balance
"Effective execution of Agenda 21 will require a profound reorientation of all human society, unlike anything the world has ever experienced - a major shift in the priorities of both governments and individuals and an unprecedented redeployment of human and financial resources. This shift will demand that a concern for the environmental consequences of every human action be integrated into individual and collective decision-making at every level."
- UN Agenda 21
"The earth is literally our mother, not only because we depend on her for nurture and shelter but even more because the human species has been shaped by her in the womb of evolution. Our salvation depends upon our ability to create a religion of nature."
- Rene Dubos, board member Planetary Citizens
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Obama's Torture
Note that quilted face working overtime to control the right placement of the chin and the lips. Here we see what Obama looks like tortured - by conditions of his own creation.
We have a man who has always been an outsider. He hates the United States and the grounds on which it was founded. "Every man an end in himself? Are you kidding? A Code of Individual Rights? Hate it! I think we should take what you've earned, Joe, and give it to your neighbor down the street who deserves a chance. It's only fair."
Rather, he nurtured from early in his life the story that he is a victim and he created in speech after speech how everyone in this country except white people are victims. Not only that, America is a hideous country that exploits the entire globe. All the third world countries are worse off because of the US. Reverend Wright was great support for twenty years for this position. "The solution is to take your money away and give it to the 3rd world countries." (This, of course, is straight-up Marxism, hand-maiden to poverty wherever it is believed and tried.)
Most people, including people who would not consider themselves victims even though he includes them in his race/ethnic categories, don't really buy his story. Apparently they do buy that they should be concerned about other people and take some kind of direct action through the government in order to right circumstances gone wrong. And yes, he is a good speaker, an orator in fact, seems intelligent, reasonable and is good looking.
There's only one problem. He got elected and he's no longer the outsider. He's in charge and he has a country to lead, a country which historically and by virtue of its constitution, he doesn't like. He only feels comfortable with his buddies who also don't like the country.
Having to speak to cadets who have chosen in the most overt and obvious action possible to serve a country they love, is too much a clash for him to overcome. Thus the picture of the tortured Obama.
This picture symbolizes Obama's conflict. He knows that the United States cannot survive with a leader as he is. And he knows that he will have to sacrifice these men to keep up the pretense. Even though the cadets were told to welcome him enthusiastically, they couldn't. They were cool.
They are not anxious to be thrown onto the pyre of perfidy.
He never used the word victory in his speech about fighting a war. Is this not a better indicator that he does not love this country? Is he willing to send America's sons and daughters to be killed - for nothing?
What we see is the same thing we have seen from the beginning of this man's presidency. He is small-minded and partisan, born of willful outsider-ness, and as a consequence is completely blocked from rising to the larger context required to be a leader. The root element missing from Obama is an integrated view of existence - a philosophy that corresponds to the way the world works that he can rely on to answer the questions "Where am I?" "How do I know?" and "What should I do?" Although he sounds intelligent, he actually isn't able to be. Wrong teachers, wrong influences, wrong philosophy. It doesn't work and he is their product. And since he is the gatekeeper for his life, as we all are for our lives, he is responsible.
Obama has never been able to overtly define himself. He has always known he couldn't because if he did so, he would be marginalized. Regardless of how innately bright the man is, he is driven to small-mindedness (better known as unintelligence) as part of the constant distraction that must be maintained to keep us from knowing who he is. (I actually question that he knows who he is. I think he's so used to being a nobody grounded in victimhood reaction, that he has never defined himself except superficially - a look, a face, a talent for talking and saying nothing.
I can say this: This man has no talent for political leadership. He is not a person who can provide guidance for people that leaves them calm and knowing how to get along. He could not draw a line to delineate one thing from another if his life depended on it. Why in the hell do you think he voted "present" 132 times in the Illinois Senate? If his "talents" don't move the nation, his time will be up. I think he is already starting to feel the effects of such a reality.)
Back when he was a Senator, thinking ahead to the presidency, he was on the Hate Bush bandwagon as were most of the Democrats. Because everything Bush was bad including his war in Iraq, Obama declared Afghanistan the good war. (He couldn't have won the election had he declared himself against both wars so he chose to play politics.) His small-mindedness landed him in front of the cadets at West Point.
I will say the fact that he is tortured by all of this is to his credit. For those of us wondering if he has a conscience, whether there is any there there, this is the first sign that there may be some stunted root of one in there someplace. But I have to say, he has me on the edge of my seat. Will this man melt down? Do we have a resignation in our future? Obama's look in this picture did bring Nixon to mind. Hmmm.
We have a man who has always been an outsider. He hates the United States and the grounds on which it was founded. "Every man an end in himself? Are you kidding? A Code of Individual Rights? Hate it! I think we should take what you've earned, Joe, and give it to your neighbor down the street who deserves a chance. It's only fair."
Rather, he nurtured from early in his life the story that he is a victim and he created in speech after speech how everyone in this country except white people are victims. Not only that, America is a hideous country that exploits the entire globe. All the third world countries are worse off because of the US. Reverend Wright was great support for twenty years for this position. "The solution is to take your money away and give it to the 3rd world countries." (This, of course, is straight-up Marxism, hand-maiden to poverty wherever it is believed and tried.)
Most people, including people who would not consider themselves victims even though he includes them in his race/ethnic categories, don't really buy his story. Apparently they do buy that they should be concerned about other people and take some kind of direct action through the government in order to right circumstances gone wrong. And yes, he is a good speaker, an orator in fact, seems intelligent, reasonable and is good looking.
There's only one problem. He got elected and he's no longer the outsider. He's in charge and he has a country to lead, a country which historically and by virtue of its constitution, he doesn't like. He only feels comfortable with his buddies who also don't like the country.
Having to speak to cadets who have chosen in the most overt and obvious action possible to serve a country they love, is too much a clash for him to overcome. Thus the picture of the tortured Obama.
This picture symbolizes Obama's conflict. He knows that the United States cannot survive with a leader as he is. And he knows that he will have to sacrifice these men to keep up the pretense. Even though the cadets were told to welcome him enthusiastically, they couldn't. They were cool.
They are not anxious to be thrown onto the pyre of perfidy.
He never used the word victory in his speech about fighting a war. Is this not a better indicator that he does not love this country? Is he willing to send America's sons and daughters to be killed - for nothing?
What we see is the same thing we have seen from the beginning of this man's presidency. He is small-minded and partisan, born of willful outsider-ness, and as a consequence is completely blocked from rising to the larger context required to be a leader. The root element missing from Obama is an integrated view of existence - a philosophy that corresponds to the way the world works that he can rely on to answer the questions "Where am I?" "How do I know?" and "What should I do?" Although he sounds intelligent, he actually isn't able to be. Wrong teachers, wrong influences, wrong philosophy. It doesn't work and he is their product. And since he is the gatekeeper for his life, as we all are for our lives, he is responsible.
Obama has never been able to overtly define himself. He has always known he couldn't because if he did so, he would be marginalized. Regardless of how innately bright the man is, he is driven to small-mindedness (better known as unintelligence) as part of the constant distraction that must be maintained to keep us from knowing who he is. (I actually question that he knows who he is. I think he's so used to being a nobody grounded in victimhood reaction, that he has never defined himself except superficially - a look, a face, a talent for talking and saying nothing.
I can say this: This man has no talent for political leadership. He is not a person who can provide guidance for people that leaves them calm and knowing how to get along. He could not draw a line to delineate one thing from another if his life depended on it. Why in the hell do you think he voted "present" 132 times in the Illinois Senate? If his "talents" don't move the nation, his time will be up. I think he is already starting to feel the effects of such a reality.)
Back when he was a Senator, thinking ahead to the presidency, he was on the Hate Bush bandwagon as were most of the Democrats. Because everything Bush was bad including his war in Iraq, Obama declared Afghanistan the good war. (He couldn't have won the election had he declared himself against both wars so he chose to play politics.) His small-mindedness landed him in front of the cadets at West Point.
I will say the fact that he is tortured by all of this is to his credit. For those of us wondering if he has a conscience, whether there is any there there, this is the first sign that there may be some stunted root of one in there someplace. But I have to say, he has me on the edge of my seat. Will this man melt down? Do we have a resignation in our future? Obama's look in this picture did bring Nixon to mind. Hmmm.
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