Environmentalists Live Up To Their Philosophy

Now Playing: Far Cry, the new Rush single, because..."There's a Rush lyric for every situation in life."

This morning I discovered that my car had been vandalized, obviously (due to the nature of the crime,) because I have an "EcoSickle" sticker displayed on the back:


I seem to remember that somewhere in America's past there was this thing called "the First Amendment to the Constitution" and that it upheld the right of American individuals to speak their minds freely. Apparently that principle is not acceptible to some - particularly those who demonstrably have no valid counter-argument to present...

"It's a far cry from the world we thought we'd inherit," indeed.

Without further lingering on the vestigial, nihilist Left's evil and corruption - "there's nothing as boring as depravity," as a great lady once said - suffice it to say that, consistent with reality as I've just experienced it, I've opted for the more precise version:



I am an American.

I will not be silenced.


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Last night I returned to Six Flags with some friends after a full decade, and...that place has changed. I think that most O-people who are fond of thrill rides, extreme sports, etc., are familiar with the question "Why would you put your life at risk unnecessarily?" First off, if "putting your life at risk" sounds overblown, I invite you to have a ride on this monster called "Déjà Vu" - with your eyes wide open. The expression "death staring you in the face" doesn't even scratch the surface...

Not to overstate the case, but there are at least two things of value to be gained from...hmmm, what to call it... extreme recreation:

First, what struck me last night is that there are few experiences that more vividly and directly fuse one's very life with human reason. It is only through the science of engineering that it is possible for the delicate human body to be flung around three dimensional space with such speed and violence - at a degree of safety so complete that we can defy death almost casually. There is only one reason why we can trust those fantastic machines to drop us hundreds of feet at speeds approaching 100 mph, through loops and rolls, backward and forward, upside-down and rightside-up, to hold us suspended those hundreds of feet above ground with nothing between us and certain death but a mechanical harness. It's because we know that the structural engineers who designed it all worked from rationally-proven theory, did the math, tested the structural specifications, and built accordingly.

The only thing that comes close to this vivid a technology/body integration - for me, anyway - is the simple contemplation of an airliner's wings and Bernoulli's Principle while flying tens of thousands of feet above the Earth.

Secondly, there is a palpable psychological benefit to managing the kind of raw fear - a.k.a. panic - that a mega-coaster is designed to instill in its riders. Every ride is at once loads of fun and, more deeply, a simple exercise in instantly-gratified courage. Along with a pronounced stagger, you will emerge from something like "Déjà Vu" with the conviction that absolutely nothing less will scare you again, ever. 8^D

...Certainly not an eco-fascist with an anger management problem - which I presume to be a redundancy.

Addendum, Sun. April 29

If you haven't already, set aside twenty bucks and an hour and watch The Great Global Warming Swindle, Martin Durkin's thorough debunking of the vast fraud perpetrated by Gore and the lucrative Climate Armageddon industry. If all you've seen and/or heard about the issue is Gore's Academy-Award-winning opinion piece, you have only seen one fraudulent and distorted side of the story - in what is really a full-on attack on the industrial civilization that's keeping you alive.

The Virginia Tech Massacre & "Gun Control": The Unasked Question

Now Playing: The instrumental "Captain Nemo," from Michael Schenker - Live in Tokyo '97, via DVD.

There's something I've been waiting to hear from commentators - in vain, so far - from conservatives like Prager, Limbaugh and Hewitt to the leftists (not likely) at places like CNN and MSNBC...

Thirty-two individual lives were snuffed out a week ago, right in the middle of an institution of higher education, right in the middle of what is supposed to be the most civilized nation on Earth - in large part because they were ordered by their employees in government to accept the role of defenseless sheep.

Keep in mind that that death toll was the destructive action of a single murderer, blissfully unconcerned with the possibility of any kind of armed opposition.

Q: What if a group of ten or fifteen armed terrorists were to infiltrate a crowded campus, mall, airport or the like? A single murderer snuffed out thirty-two lives before anyone "officially" armed was able to arrive and do battle with him; extrapolate the death toll if a highly-trained, coordinated squad of several murderers were to mount a similar attack. How many hundreds would be slaughtered?

We, the American populace, remain defenseless as sheep thanks to a combination of sheer complacency and the government's unjust and unjustifiable constraints on our Constitutional rights.

The instant demands from the countercultural left for yet more of such constraints are now a matter of record. They are also unconscionable. They bring to mind something rocker and Constitutional rights activist Ted Nugent said a couple years ago in a speech at FreedomFest [paraphrased]: How dare these people tell us to our faces that we must remain defenseless as babies before deadly predators, that we must forfeit our Constitutional rights and indeed our very lives, for the sake of their corrupt ideology?

I will repeat the call for action that I made in a September 2005 post on the illegal post-Katrina gun confiscation in New Orleans: Contact your elected representation and demand a restoration of the "bear" portion of our Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms, then go out and shop for a firearm, learn to use and maintain it, and urge everyone you care about to do the same.

We Americans need to start thinking like the Israelis. The people of that nation have, through the necessity imposed on them by perennial attacks from surrounding regimes, gotten into the habit of doing what America's Founders admonished us to do: Consider the ownership and bearing of arms to be a matter of personal and civic responsibility. We should do so not out of a kind of siege mentality - though given the intellectual state of our political "leaders" we should expect a coming escalation of terrorist attacks on American soil - but because we ought never to have abandoned that responsibility. To suggest it in today's context only sounds like advocacy of a "siege mentality" because we have spent so many years living as complacent sheep while corrupt elected officials gut our Bill of Rights. That's "Bill of Rights," guys, not Bill of "Privileges," which "privileges" can be taken from us at whim. That we have allowed the corrupt likes of the Bradys, Feinkensteins, Waxmans to get away with this - and the McCains, Feingolds, Shayses and Meehans to wipe their backsides with our priceless First Amendment - is shameful and must be reversed if America is to survive as a nation of free individuals.

Again, the mechanism at work here is so obvious as to preclude the possibility that the anti-gun leftists are merely mistaken: Unarmed people are largely helpless against an armed assailant, while even a single armed civilian can stop such a murderer dead in his tracks; several armed civilians can reduce exponentially an armed murderer's odds of killing before he himself is put down. The left's knee-jerk demands for yet more Second Amendment violations are motivated by something entirely other than "public safety." The vicious irony of that premise ought to be crystal clear just now.

By way of a refresher, what are some of the relevant attitudes expressed by our Founders? A sample:

"The Constitution of most of our states, and the United States, assert that all power is inherent in the people, that they may exercise it by themselves; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed; that they are entitled to freedom of person, freedom of religion, freedom of prosperity, and freedom of the press."
- Thomas Jefferson, proposed Virginia Constitution, June 1776

"No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms."
- Thomas Jefferson, proposed Virginia constitution, June 1776

"Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: first, a right to life, secondly to liberty, thirdly to property; together with the right to defend them in the best manner they can."
- Samuel Adams, "The Rights of the Colonists," Nov. 1772

"Arms in the hands of citizens may be used at the individual discretion, in private self-defense."
- John Adams, "A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America" 1787-88

"To preserve liberty it is essential that the whole body of people always possess arms and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them."
- Richard Henry Lee, Additional Letters from the Federal Farmer #53, 1788.

"Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are ruined. The great object is that every man be armed. Every man who is able may have a gun."
- Patrick Henry, Virginia ratification convention for the U.S. Constitution.

"Arms discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property. Horrid mischief would ensue were the law-abiding deprived the use of them."
- Thomas Paine, "Thoughts on Defensive War" 1775

"To ensure peace, security, and happiness, the rifle and pistol are equally indispensable. The very atmosphere of firearms everywhere restrains evil interference - they deserve a place of honor with all that is good."
- George Washington, The Federalist #53.

"A free people ought to be armed. When firearms go, all goes, we need them by the hour. Firearms stand next in importance to the Constitution itself. They are the American people's liberty teeth and keystone under independence."
- George Washington, Boston Independence Chronicle, January 14, 1790.

Finally, I urge you to put your money where your ideals are and become a member of one or more of the organizations that are fighting to restore our confiscated Second Amendment rights:

* The Second Amendment Foundation - the organization that brought a successful lawsuit against New Orleans city officials for their post-Katrina gun confiscations, and which is at work on several others;

* The Liberty Belles;

* Ted Nugent Kamp For Kids

* Gun Owners of America;

* and of course the National Rifle Association.

Happy Industrial Revolution Day!

Now Playing: Dove c'e Musica, Eros Ramazzotti's great, jazzier followup to "Tutte Storie"

Indeed - 'hope you all had a chance to raise a toast and give a quiet "thank you" to every smokestack, freeway, automobile, cellphone, skyscraper, and - oyeah - computer that the retro-Medievalists were out protesting, hypocritically, this weekend. Well, presumably - I didn't watch the news today. 'Matter of fact, I've tuned out on news all weekend, so as to focus on more enjoyable aspects of life.

I had intended on performing my usual one-man I.R. Day demonstration, which consists of taking my usual umpty-mile run with my now-threadbare "Laissez Faire" t-shirt on prominent display - but it was (ahem!) too cold outside.

What...?

Also fitting is a rerun of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" that's playing on the tube at the moment (so I'm cutting this short...) Endlessly vilified by leftwing culture pundits as an iconic expression of '80s enthusiasm for reason, science, technology, civilization and unabashed humanism - which of course it is, in spades - TNG increasingly amazes me with what it managed to convey philosophically. Hats off to the late Mr. Roddenberry and all involved in TNG's production, and may someone in Hollywood one day match that level of excellence.

Enough already! Stay tuned!

Rampage Notes

Now Playing: Far Cry, the first single from the new Rush disc, "Snakes and Arrows," due out May 1 - can't stop listening to this tune...

I had intended to do a post on the increasingly-fascistic tone of the Democrat-Socialist Party, but that particular type of rampaging irrationality was eclipsed earlier this week by a more direct counterpart...

There's been wall-to-wall commentary on the Virginia Tech massacre, and an incredible amount of it consists of variants on the line "Nobody can make sense of this." I never know what exactly is meant by that and I doubt whether those uttering it do either. There is perhaps no making sense of exactly what went on (if anything,) between the ears of the predatory animal who committed the crimes, but yes, in fact we can make sense of this.

What we know about this particular predator is that a.) like most other such mass-murderers he was ruled by emotion rather than reason, and b.) like most other such mass-murderers he directed blame at others, not himself, for whatever frustrations he was experiencing in life. At some point this human turned that inner chaos outward, and transformed himself into an animal.

So long as human beings possess the faculty of volition (which would be: permanently, since it's hard-wired into our cognitive apparatus,) some will choose evil and choose to inflict that evil on other people. It's a metaphysical given, "sono cose della vita," as the Elton John of Italy once put it.

In that sense the presence of evil is forever outside of our control. What remains within our control is twofold:

On one level, we have it within our power to cultivate the attitude that training in self-defense is as vital to one's education as basic grammar and mathematics. This is something I picked up from writings either by or about ('forget which) Miyamoto Musashi, the 17th century sword-saint of Japan. What stuck in my mind was Miyamoto's attitude - common-sensical but rather alien to modern America - that going through life incapable of defending one's own physical person with reasonable competence is flatly irresponsible. Yes, one hopes and works for a level of civilized society in which physical conflict is never encountered, but in context of the aforementioned "metaphysical given," Miyamoto's is a good attitude to adopt, I think.

No, a legally disarmed student or teacher has limited options against an armed assailant, but a fighting chance can tip a life-or-death difference to the "life" side, as the now-legendary actions of unarmed passengers aboard United Flight 93 on September 11, 2001 demonstrated. Had Virginia Tech not fought only a year ago to forbid lawfully-licensed gun owners from carrying their weapons onto the Virginia Tech campus, readily-available training in weapons and live-fire combat would doubtlessly have saved dozens of lives before they were snuffed out.

What remains within our control on another, "macro" level, is precisely that work of establishing - or re-establishing - a civilization in which man lives and acts as man, not as a predatory animal. That, of course, is the province of philosophy and of its application in politics, in art, in the entire fabric of Western Civilization. The fact that the word "philosophy" will inspire in half of the people around you a blank stare, and in the other half vague thoughts of old men in white flowing beards and robes on mountaintops, contemplating their toenails - is suggestive of some of the elements that have made homicidal rampages far more common than they ought to be.

Western Civilization's intellectual foundation has been undermined for decades by the corrupt skepticism/subjectivism/relativism axis in philosophy - which has manifested itself more recently as the "PC" (Philosophically Corrupt) movement, now fully entrenched in academia, media and culture-at-large. The skeptics have been teaching generations the standard line "nothing can be known with certainty"; the subjectivists and relativists have followed up with "facts are only opinions" and "every idea is as valid as any other."

As a result, not only has the distinction between good and evil been intentionally blurred, the very idea of making such a distinction is militantly suppressed by the "PC" brownshirts marching around today's colleges and universities. The graduates of these schools now run key institutions within our culture, so our culture has become fertile ground for people who, having been indoctrinated with the idea that reason is powerless to apprehend the perpetually-uncertain, gravitate to the more readily-perceivable faculty of emotion as a mode of cognition. The result is creatures who grant to their emotions the status of ethical determinants and act according to their emotional whims du jour. The results are massacres like this one and the one that happened at Littleton, Colorado some eight years ago.

In addition, the standard collectivist idea that we are all undifferentiated appendages of a collective blob means that our cultural valuation of individualism - of the priceless nature of an individual human life - has been nearly obliterated. Therefore, in modern America there are far fewer cultural inhibitions to barbaric behavior than existed prior to the '60s decade, when the philosophical dry rot first began to take hold in America.

So expect more of this, and expect it to get much worse before it gets better.

Gingrich: Treason on Principle or just Gross Ignorance?

Now Playing: Nothing. Not in a musical mood just now...

While Tuesday's headlines were awash in the Imus racism flap (more on that in a minute,) a far more ominous story flitted beneath the radar entirely: Today (Tuesday Apr 10) Newt Gingrich, erstwhile star of the conservatives, rolled out a contemptible betrayal of principle in a D.C. debate against John Kerry on "global warming".

Gingrich, a man who for years has posed as one of the voices of core GOP principles, apparently knows as little about said principles as he does about basic debating strategy or about Martin Durkin's evisceration of the Gore eco-sermon. Right out of the chute he concedes the false premises of the anti-capitalist movement: Human activity is (somehow) causing "global warming"; government can mitigate the impending doom by using brute force to compel people to sacrifice themselves to the new god; and there is nothing ethically wrong with this picture. This is of course great news for arch-leftist Kerry, for winning a debate, even when your own argument is nonexistent, becomes child's play if your opponent signs onto all of your core points without a peep of dissent. Witness this exchange:

"'What would you say to Sen. Inhofe and others in the Senate who are resisting even science?[sic] What's your message to them here today?' Kerry asked.

'My message, I think is that the evidence is sufficient that we should move towards the most effective possible steps to reduce carbon loading in the atmosphere —'

'And do it urgently, now?' Kerry interrupted.

'Urgently, yes,' Gingrich said."

I suppose we can thank Mr. Gingrich for clearing up any lingering doubts as to his grasp of principle in defense of Western Civilization, and for decrementing the 2008 GOP's likely Presidential candidate field by a factor of one.

While Kerry maintains the standard Democrat-Socialist Party line, Gingrich goes on to elaborate on his "differing view" (contradicting his own "Urgently" contention): Instead of destroying industrial civilization via an immediate putsch, he says, what's needed is the more gradual tightening of a noose with yet more technocratic manipulation of the economy.

One would be hard-pressed to come up with a fictional encapsulation of the mechanism by which evil ideas triumph that was more dead-on accurate than this. Bravo, Mr. Gingrich! It's a perfect, textbook example of everything the GOP's "leadership" has been doing dead wrong since roughly November 1994. Gingrich needs to hear from us, now.

_/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/

- On other anti-industrialism fronts, Dr. William Gray, professor emeritus of atmospheric science at Colorado State University, slammed Al Gore as "a gross alarmist" who "doesn't know what he's talking about" in an AP interview Saturday the 7th. Note: The AP story is interesting in its bias, in that its author Cain Burdeau makes several veiled insinuations that Gray is an old, dotty crank, by way of an ad hominem. As the great percussionist and lyricist Neil Peart put it, "You can twist perceptions / Reality won't budge";

- It turns out that the famous "poor helpless stranded polar bears" photo that "global warming" cultists splattered on the front pages of major newspapers like the New York Daily Socialist Worker...ermm..Times, London's "Times" and "Daily Mail," the international "Herald Tribune" and Canada's "Ottowa Citizen," as well as being referenced, infamously, by Herr Gore himself as heart-rending evidence of "global warming's" destructive effects, was...yet another fraud perpetrated by the "global warming scary story" crowd. The photo, depicting cute, cuddly polar bears supposedly stranded on a dwindling ice floe miles from shore due to "global warming":



...was in fact taken two and a half years earlier by an Australian marine biology student on a field trip - in the dead of August, when ice floes...typically melt.

D'OH!

- Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology at M.I.T. - and one of those featured in The Great Global Warming Swindle - has gotten an excellent article published in the April 16 issue of Newsweek International. Conspicuous is the fact that the American edition of Newsweek for some odd reason hasn't seen fit to publish the same article... At any rate, Lindzen's article "Why So Gloomy?" is an excellent recap of several of the slam-dunk points made in "Swindle," along with a number of equally persuasive points (to a mind open to reason,) such as the nonexistence of an "optimal temperature" toward which to strive (if indeed human activity could change anything in either direction,) and the fact that global warming, if it were to occur, would be of vast benefit, not detriment, to virtually all life on Earth - a point touched on by Pepperdine economist George Reisman in his landmark 1990 essay The Toxicity of Environmentalism;


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Finally, though I'm loath to cover trivia generally falling within the province of tabloids, there was...the racism flap involving talk radio host Don Imus.

Yeah, his comments were mindless, offensive in the extreme against people having nothing to do with politics, and yeah, the man has clearly got some problems with race, and clearly he's an idiot. 'Part of a large club on that last, I think. But am I the only one getting the irony of...racists Jessie "Hymietown" Jackson and Alfred Brawley-Sharpton posing as his moral judges? "Birds of a feather," indeed.

You know, I think they all deserve each other. I say we deposit the three of them on a small island somewhere, so they can live out their days frothing at each other about the comparative wavelengths of light reflected by their pigmentation. "As important as your shoe size," indeed.

Next...

Time To Get Serious About Eco-Fascism

Now Playing: Live On by the Kenny Wayne Shepherd Band, 1999

The reason I'm dedicating so much time to the ecofascism / "global warming" issue is the level of apparent complacency about it that I see. A general sense I'm picking up, even among those opposed to Gore & Co.'s lunacy, is that this is a side issue that will go away or do little harm if adopted in part (i.e., if just a little poison is accepted as a compromise with food.)

These people mean what they say and we had better get serious about defeating them. The environmental movement - as distinguished from a rational and just desire for keeping man's environment clean and healthy - is sheer anti-humanist nihilism cloaked in a veneer of benevolence. This new, concerted eco-fascist push is as great or greater a threat to America, to Western Civilization, to individual rights and human life in general, as is Islamic terrorism. The latter is at least tacitly acknowledged as a serious evil, while environmentalism has been packaged as benign, indoctrinated into generations of school kids from kindergarten onward, and generally given a free pass - more often enthusiastic support - by media and academia. I find no reason to assume that these eco-fascists are only kidding. They intend to write their toxic ideology into binding law affecting every one of us and are busy, as you read this, working to make it happen.

The most important thing that can be done in the here-and-now to defuse Gore & Co.'s ecofascist suicide bomb is to get Martin Durkin's film "The Great Global Warming Swindle" as widely disseminated as possible. The best-case scenario would be to convince its producers to finance a full-blown theatrical run and media blitz in North America and Europe, followed at an appropriate period by a DVD release and similar promotion. At least as many people who were exposed to Gore's propaganda need to see Durkin's film, at the very least to be exposed to the side of the controversy that has been heretofore squelched. As an additional idea, the film's theatrical release could be promoted with a public challenge to the Gore camp for a side-by-side screening - "and may the rational ideas win." Given Gore's hasty and telling retreat from his own commitment to be interviewed by Skeptical Environmentalist author Bjorn Lomborg, I fully expect they'll refuse any similar challenge, but in either case the result will be the same.

I recommend contacting BBC4, the British television channel that originally aired the film, with popular demand that the film be produced in theatrical, later DVD, formats, so as to reach the widest possible audiences.


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For those who may scoff at my assertion that the environmentalist movement is raw anti-humanism and politically fascist in form, the following quotes provide a vivid and disturbing picture of the consistent hatred of humanity permeating that movement. Indicative of their brazen self-assuredness is the fact that past and present environmentalist leaders have made little or no attempt to conceal their true beliefs about humanity:

1. "Honorable representatives of the great saurians of older creation, may you long enjoy your lilies and rushes, and be blessed now and then with a mouthful of terror-stricken man by way of a dainty."
- A benediction to alligators by John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, quoted with approval as "a good epigram" by environmentalist Bill McKibben in "The End of Nature" (New York: Random House, 1989) pg. 176

2. "We have wished...for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us back into the stone age..."
- Environmentalist Stewart Brand in "The Whole Earth Catalog"

3. "You think Hiroshima was bad, let me tell you, mister, Hiroshima wasn't bad enough!"
- Faye Dunaway as the voice of "Mother Earth/Gaia" in the 1991 WTBS series "Voice of the Planet"

4. "Given the total, absolute, and final disappearance of Homo Sapiens, then, not only would the Earth's Community of Life continue to exist but...the ending of the human epoch on Earth would most likely be greeted with a hearty 'Good riddance!'"
- Paul W. Taylor, ethics professor at City University, NYC, in "Respect for Nature" (Princeton Univ Press, 1989) pg. 115

5. "If you'll give the idea a chance...you might agree that the extinction of Homo Sapiens would mean survival for millions if not billions of other Earth-dwelling species."
- The "Voluntary Extinction Movement," quoted by Daniel Seligman in "Down With People," in Fortune magazine, September 23, 1991

6. "The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable, but a good thing..."
- Editorial in The Economist, December 28, 1988

7. "A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people...We must shift our efforts from treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. ...We must have population control...by compulsion if voluntary methods fail."
- Paul Ehrlich, "The Population Bomb" (Ballantine Books 1968) pg. xi, pg. 166

8. "...Man is no more important than any other species...It may well take our extinction to set things straight."
- David Foreman, "Earth First!" spokesman, quoted by M. John Fayhee in Backpacker magazine, September 1988, pg. 22

9. "I see no solution to our ruination of Earth except for a drastic reduction of the human population."
- David Foreman, "Earth First!", quoted by Gregg Easterbrook in The New Republic, April 30, 1990, pg. 18

10. "If radical environmentalists were to invent a disease to bring human populations back to sanity, it would probably be something like AIDS."
- Earth First! periodical, quoted in "Access to Energy," Vol.17 No.4, December 1989

11. "As radical environmentalists, we can see AIDS not as a problem but a necessary solution."
- Earth First! periodical, quoted in "Planet Stricken" by Alan Pell Crawford and Art Levine, Vogue magazine, September 1989, pg. 710

12. "I founded Friends of the Earth to make the Sierra Club look reasonable. Then I founded the Earth Island Institute to make Friends of the Earth look reasonable. Earth First! now makes us look reasonable. We're still waiting for someone to come along and make Earth First! look reasonable."
- "Mainstream" environmentalist David Brower, quoted by Virginia Postrel in Reason magazine, April 1990, pg. 24

13. "We are not interested in the utility of a particular species, or free-flowing river, or ecosystem to mankind. They have...more value - to me - than another human body, or a billion of them...Until such time as Homo Sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along."
- David M. Graber, National Park Service biologist, in a review of Bill McKibben's "The End of Nature," in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, October 22, 1989, pg. 9

14. "Childbearing [should be] a punishable crime against society...all potential parents [should be] required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing."
- Herr David Brower, founder of Friends of the Earth, quoted in "The Coercive Utopians" by Rael Jean Isaac and Erich Isaac (1985 Regnery Gateway Inc.)

15. "I got the impression that instead of going out to shoot birds, I should go out and shoot the kids who shoot birds."
- Paul Watson, founder of "Greenpeace," quoted in "Access to Energy" Vol.17 No.4, December 1989

16. "We, in the Green movement, aspire to a cultural model in which the killing of a forest will be considered more contemptible and more criminal than the sale of 6-year old children to Asian brothels."
- Carl Amery of the Green Party, quoted in "Mensch & Energie," April 1983

17. "A reporter asked Dr. Wurster whether or not the ban on the use of DDT would not encourage the use of the very toxic materials, Parathion, Azedrin and Methylparathion, the organo-phosphates, [and] nerve gas derivatives. And he said 'Probably'. The reporter then asked him if these organo-phosphates did not have a long record of killing people. And Dr. Wurster, reflecting the views of a
number of other scientists, said 'So what? People are the cause of all the problems; we have too many of them; we need to get rid of some of them; and this is as good a way as any.'"
- Victor J. Yannacone, Jr., lawyer and co-founder of the Environmental Defense Fund, on EDF co-founder Dr. Charles Wurster, at a May 20, 1970 speech at the Union League Club in New York City. Published in the Congressional Record as Serial No.92-A of Hearings on Federal Pesticide Control Act of 1971, pg.266-267

The subsequent eco-terrorist activities, with a toll in the millions of dollars and several human lives, are a matter of public record; literally millions have lost their lives to malaria annually - environmentalism's Malaria Holocaust - since the environmental movement succeeded in banning DDT in the early '70s. Even as people continue to drop dead of a disease that had been nearly eradicated by the '60s, the environmentalists are now using the malaria resurgence they themselves engineered as another catastrophe that will result from..."global warming." These anti-humanists have no consciences.

Ponder the fact that the core premises of any given movement determine its direction, and ponder those instances in recent history in which citizens thought a "benign" version of an ideology that explicitly calls for the slaughter of human beings might be practicable despite its intellectual leaders' stated attitudes and intentions. In the case of Weimar Germany early in the 20th century, the people
heard and read what was being promoted by the haters of humanity, accepted with enthusiasm the ethics of self-sacrificial duty and the politics of collectivism, dismissed the acts promoted in accordance with that philosophy as "the recklessness of a few extremists" - then discovered far too late that the "extremism" was a consistent expression of the movement's core principles.

The results, as they say...

And then there's Mr. Santayana's famous quote...

The Vulture Theory and Western Civilization's Stumbling Gait

Now Playing: "Heretics" by Shawn Lane, Jonas Hellborg, Jeff Sipe, from "Time Is The Enemy" (1996)

Once-Great Britain's craven submission to the recent Iranian act of war is like a dear friend in the throes of some wasting disease. Worse still is the knowledge that the disease is a contagion and that we (meaning: America,) have caught it too. Blogger Stephen Browne has written a couple of excellent post-mortems, or mortem-posts, that encapsulate Britain's descent from proud empire to groveling dog. [April 01 and April 02 posts, "Now who rules the waves" and "The British Fleet" respectively.]

America has scarcely done better - it's just performed its own submissive belly-up with a little more bluster. As I've written to the Administration and to my Congressional buffoons, Iran's Mr. Ahmad-in-a-jar should have been staring at large, smoldering craters where his nuclear weapons facilities used to be, some 18 to 24 months ago, courtesy the United States Armed Forces. The momentum for action, which peaked just after confirmation of that weapons program hit the news, has been lost, but it could and should be undertaken regardless. A followup communique thereafter, along the lines of Walter Williams' suggestion, would be to politely inform the Iranian regime that any future attempts to rebuild nuclear weapons facilities will meet an identical fate. We needn't even engage in war per se, just some thorough precision bombing to take some dangerous toys away from a psychotic punk.

Instead, our President sits on his hands pending the actual vaporization of Israeli cities or perhaps an American harbor or two - any of which scenarios will become not just possible but probable should Iran's juggernaut finally acquire nukes. That is an eventuality we cannot afford, and...wasn't President Bush's initial statement something like "Iran must not be allowed to have nuclear weapons"? Idle banter, apparently.

The humiliation that Iran would (and should) suffer as a result - and which it should have suffered from the British the moment Iran began abducting its sailors - would achieve a destabilization of Ahmadinejad's regime that would essentially eliminate it as the prime supporter of the Iraq insurgency; it would also leave him vulnerable to ouster by an Iranian populace that is reportedly quite disgusted with his lunacy.

That's three birds with one stone just for starters but....naaaaah. We'd first need principled leadership from at least the White House, but Bush has shown himself to be a follower, not a leader. And Congress? No comment. Grab these links and use them - those insular, monarchic politicians seem to have forgotten their mission. Remind them.

The standard-issue vulture is the quintessential coward, yet it survives as a species by sensing mortal weakness in creatures it wouldn't ordinarily dare come near. America, its allies and Western Civilization as a whole have attracted the attention of at least three such scavengers, and so far the great and noble animal has only managed an apathetic stare at them.

Let's meet Vulture #1: America elected perhaps the worst President in its history in 1976; a mere three years later the same fool acted as midwife to a brand-spankin' new vulture, Islamic terrorism. By allowing the newborn monster to sink its claws into America for 444 days that fool injected the political equivalent of steroids into the scavenger, so as to ensure it would grow up big and strong. It did. A seemingly endless succession of capitulations, hand-slaps, blind-eye-turns, empty posturing and toothless "responses" in the years since had led to the attacks of September 11, 2001. It only took some three years thereafter for America to slip into a "That was then, this is now" apathy, compounded by a relapse into that bizarre drug-induced '60s neurosis called "pacifism";

Vulture #2: As outlined here in recent posts, the reconstituted anti-capitalist movement has shifted into overdrive and has taken the 2006 election rout as a green flag - pun if you want one - for a full-scale fascistic putsch directed at the whole of the modern industrial world;

Vulture #3: There is disturbing evidence that vestigial Marxists are again gaining a foothold in Central and South America, some of which regression is being promoted under the auspices of Communist China - though it is unclear what ratio of economic to military comprises China's motives; the same noxious ideology remains a corrosive element in American academia and politics; their ultimate target is of course Americanism, anathema to collectivists of every stripe.

The common perch for these three king-sized vultures is philosophical default, which has left Britain, America and the rest of the semi-civilized world incapable even of mustering a healthy sense of self-preservation.

Vultures, again, have an uncanny ability to perceive mortal weaknesses in their prey - hence today's headlines.

I say we aim at that perch they're sitting on first...

The Sky Is Falling, Aauugh! - redux

Now Playing: "Cut To The Chase" by Rush (again,) from the disc "Counterparts" which I've heinously neglected in recent years...

The global-warming-panic community is in high gear these days...



...what with Gore's environmentalist revision of "Reefer Madness" winning impressive publicity awards, noted climate scientists like Leonardo DiCaprio poised to enlighten us plebes on pre-Enlightenment ideals, and the SCOTUS laying the legal groundwork for a massive spiral of state controls over every facet of human existence, presumably breathing included;

Noted economist Walter Williams has penned a new article titled Global Warming Heresy which nicely chronicles some of the disturbing actions taken by the global warming faithful to silence dissent from scientists. One of those on the receiving end, Richard Lindzen of MIT, identified that very phenomenon a year ago in a Wall Street Opinion Journal article titled Climate of Fear;

As posted previously, British filmmaker Martin Durkin has blown a largish hole right smack in the middle of the Global Warming / Environmentalist / Reconstituted Anti-Capitalist movement with the long-overdue and vastly important documentary film The Great Global Warming Swindle. If you've not yet seen Durkin's film, I strongly urge turning off the phone, clearing away an hour and a quarter, kicking back and watching it. We should consider - and demand of our elected officious - Durkin's film to be a mandatory prerequisite to any discussion, not to mention legislation, on the subject of climate change. So far only one badly-distorted side of this vital issue has been presented.

Two more vital articles on the subject: In a February 12 article titled Reasons for Skepticism on Global Warming, Chapman University ethics professor Tibor Machan underscores a key point - also illustrated in Durkin's documentary: The global warming movement has grown into a vast international industry, thus there is a correspondingly-vast financial incentive to promote a perpetual environmental panic.

I can think of another powerful motive, which I will address in a few days...

Robert C. Balling Jr., climatology professor for the University of Arizona, wrote a point-by-point review last year of the major inaccuracies in Gore's sermon, titled An Inconvenient Truth: An Inaccurate Depiction of the State of Global Warming Science - at which the leftwing eco-faithful promptly lobbed a predictable ad hominem to the effect that Balling has received funding from coal and oil interests and therefore can be ignored.

More to come, stay tuned...