Daily Blurb #5

Is China Preparing For War With the United States?

Reports that China has developed the prototype of a stealth bomber is getting people in our Defense establishment hot under the collar – and for good reason.  While China has never approached anything near parity with the U.S. in military capacity, the fact that it is now developing its own military technology, sometimes well in advance of the United States, is certainly cause for concern.  There is of course an argument that the trade ties between the United States and the Republic of China and the mutually assured destruction of both economies should war erupt, would prevent a military confrontation.  But this is  no longer convincing.  One just has to read the the books of Niall Ferguson to understand how nations quickly abandon their own better economic instincts when it comes to wars of aggrandisement.

And China’s ambitions in the Western Pacific are very much about self-aggrandisment.  In August, in its annual report to Congress,  the U.S. Department of Defense claimed that China was ramping up investment in an array of areas including nuclear weapons, long-range missiles, submarines, aircraft carriers and cyber warfare. The military report said China was “already looking at contingencies beyond Taiwan” including through a longstanding project to build a far-reaching missile that could potentially strike US carriers deep in the Pacific.

It should come as little surprise.  The revitalization of the Middle Kingdom of the  Ming and Qing dynasties, wherein China reduced all the nations surrounding it to vassal states, is not merely a part of Chinese folklore, but a central tenet of  political discourse and national business strategy.  Is war likely tomorrow, or next year or even in ten years?  Perhaps not.  But we would be foolish to believe that it could never happen or that expenditures in military technology represent no threat to the global  supremacy of the U.S. military.

Obama’s Day of Reckoning Over Settlements

In a few days the Obama Administration will be tested on exactly how much of an obstacle it believes the 120 settlements in Samaria and Judea represent to the peace process.  This month, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is taking his campaign to the UN Security Council, where the Palestinians will introduce a draft resolution that would declare Israeli “settlements” in Jerusalem to be “illegal.” The draft demands a halt to all construction in the eastern half of Israel’s capital city.   The Palestinians understand exactly what this means:   “We drafted it using the same words that Secretary Clinton is using and so we don’t see why the U.S. would veto it,” Abbas said.

The Obama Administration, as of today, stands equivocal on how it intends to address this flagrant attack on the notion of a negotiated settlement. On December 29, Mark C. Toner, the State Department spokesman had this to say on the matter at a press conference in Foggy Bottom:

” QUESTION: Hi, Mark. I’m wondering about this report of the draft resolution that may go before the UN Security Council on – by supporters of Palestinians condemning the Israeli settlements. What would the U.S. response be to that?

MR. TONER: Well, every U.S. Administration has been for decades has been clear on this. We don’t accept the legitimacy of continued settlement activity, and in fact, we believe continued expansion is corrosive to peace efforts, as well as to Israel’s future. We believe, fundamentally, that direct negotiations are the only path through which the parties will ultimately reach the framework agreement that is our goal, our mutual goal. And final status issues can only be resolved through negotiations between the parties and not by recourse to the UN Security Council, so we’ve consistently opposed any attempt to take these kinds of issues to the Council, because we believe that these kinds of efforts don’t move us any closer to our goal, which is of two states living side by side in peace and security.

QUESTION: Would the U.S. go so far as to use its veto power?

MR. TONER: Again, it’s a hypothetical at this point, Cami, but I think I made our position pretty clear. Any more questions?

This has never been a “hypothetical” for any other U.S. Administration and the government’s position on the matter is far from clear.   One-sided U.N. resolutions against Israel have ALWAYS been vetoed by the U.S. at the United Nations.   The failure of the Obama Administration to signal its intentions regarding such a draft resolution is truly a first and a worrying development.

Pundits in Washington and New York are now speculating about what any abstention on the part of the United States could mean for  Israel and the Middle East.  Some have suggested that it will confirm what many for some time have considered the truth – that the Obama Administration’s intends to become  the first openly hostile Administration to the Jewish state.  I would go further.  It would open the gates to the next Middle East war, encouraging Israel’s enemies to believe that it has been abandoned by its main diplomatic champion and that open season has been declared.

The Administration’s insistence on settlement freezes as preconditions to negotiations has proven rash as the Palestinians and their Arab allies have used it to craftily drive a wedge between Israel and its American ally.  If Obama wants to prove he cares more about peace in the Middle East than he does about punishing Israel for its settlement policies, then he must immediately signal to the Arab world that his country will not stand idly by while Israel is made the fall guy for his Administration’s own diplomatic failures and mistakes.   That would be the mature and responsible approach.  But I wouldn’t count on it.

Meet Fred Singer

On Wednesday night , January 5 in Bel Air,  AFA presented  Fred Singer, the renown and ebullient climatologist who has spent the past 30 years debunking anthropogenic global warming and transforming skepticism on that subject into a high art.   Singer’s book Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Years and the unmatched research from his own organization, the Nongovernmental International  Panel on Climate Change ( NIPCC) which produced the 850 page study  Climate Change Reconsidered, form the basis of  the scientific response to the deeply flawed and highly politicized work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations agency whose four reports over the past 19 years have been used to sound the clarion call for cutting global carbon emissions.

Singer, an avuncular and engaging speaker with a stentorian voice, described how the global warming debate gained world wide traction as environmentalists came to dominate world forums on issues of economic development.   Whereas he believes there is abundant evidence for increases in world temperatures over the past 150 years,  he stated that the evidence that man has substantially contributed to that warming is still very much in contention and should be debated.  The more likely explanation, he said, is that we are now in the midst of a global warming cycle that repeats every 400 or so years and has much more to do with solar activity than with anything humans do or don’t do on Earth.

It was a powerful presentation, delivered  with a wry sense of humor and a warmth that belied  Dr. Singer’s reputation as a curmudgeon.  I highly recommend Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Years and hope to bring Dr. Singer back  to Los Angeles in June for our next summer conference Big Footprint: Is Green the New Tyranny?

Daily Blurb #2

The Shame of President Moshe Katzav

I first met Moshe Katzav 20 years ago when I shepherded him around Los Angeles for the Israel Bonds organization. He  was then a minister in the Shamir Government and a very high ranking member of the Likud Party.   He struck me as a soft spoken and particularly decent man who was still filled to the brim with Zionist idealism.  I wasn’t then surprised when he was chosen over several other candidates to become Israel’s eighth president in 2002.  His personality and demeanor – restrained, humble and avuncular, seemed to fit the job description and matched the dignified air of  many of his predecessors.

How shocking it is then to witness his fall from grace and the revelations of his consistent pattern of womanizing and sexual harassment over the course of many years.  His conviction two days ago in a Tel Aviv court on charges of rape and sexual harassment brings unparalleled disgrace to the institution of the presidency, an office whose occupants have usually been considered beyond reproach.  Certainly Katzav’s predecessor, Ezer Weizmann, did great injury to the office when he was forced to resign over corruption charges dating back to his own time as a party politician.

But there has never been anything in Israel quite like this.  It says a great deal about the quality of the men who lead the Jewish nation when so many of them are unable to exhibit sexual restraint – and I include Benjamin Netanyahu, Ehud Olmert, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Mordechai- all well known womanizers, in that category.  It is a statement of profound sorrow that there is such little regard for dignified conduct among those men who regularly proclaim the Jewish people ” a light unto the world.”

The Future of Guantanomo

Karl Rove provided a particularly biting response in the WSJ to Barack Obama’s statement on December 22 that the prison facility on the Cuban coast is  “probably the No. 1 recruitment tool for al Qaeda and its affiliates.”  Rove rips into that assertion by producing abundant evidence, drawn from al Qaeda’s own communications,  that Guantanomo barely registers as a blip on the terror organization’s radar. ” Far more numerous and more extensive in these documents, ” Rove writes, ” are complaints about the existence of Israel, the U.S. military presence in the Middle East, Western notions of democracy and freedom, Western culture, and the fact that al Qaeda’s leaders see America as the obstacle to their achieving a restoration of the Golden Age of Islam.”

Obama’s own deadline for closing the facility passed nearly twelve months ago and the matter is obviously weighing on his mind.  The trouble is that neither he, nor anyone else in his administration has come up with an adequate replacement for the facility. No other country wants the inmates and the temptation to try all of them in American civil courts is fraught with the danger of clever lawyers securing hung juries on technicalities.   Beyond that, of course, is the absolute lie that Guantanomo exists as some kind of gulag where prisoners are systematically humiliated and deprived of basic human rights.  Marc A. Thiessen quite adequately dispatched this notion in his impressively well researched book Courting Disaster:  How the CIA Kept America Safe , an argument for the Bush Administration’s  terrorist detention policies which has received no  rebuttal by the liberal press.

As the months pass, it seems clear that the Bush detention policies are being vindicated because there are no adequate alternatives.  Perhaps this realization will also drive home the awareness of the seriousness of the threat the Bush Administration once faced from terror operatives and the continuing seriousness in which any American administration must perceive that challenge.

The Weather

Los Angeles is poised to experience the wettest winter in its history;  Blizzards, some of the worst in living memory, have shut down flights throughout the East Coast of the United States; Heathrow Airport in the U.K., the busiest airport hub in the world, was forced to shut down for three days as passengers curled up on terminal floors awaiting rescheduled flights; in Australia half of the State of Queensland – an area the size of Germany and France combined – is under water, experiencing the wost flooding the country’s history.  Everywhere you look this winter there are record freezing temperatures, incessant rain and tales of tragedy from an inclemency that shows little sign of abating.

Is the weather  itself then answering the question of global warming?   Well, it depends who you ask.   Most climatologists still maintain that there is a global warming trend of about 1 degree celsius over the past 150 years.   But that this is tied to natural activity in the sun and its own cycles and that the earth regularly passes through warming phases which have nothing to do with human activity.  There are others, of course, who declare that the frigid weather around the world is actual evidence of global warming since warmer ocean currents, caused by the melting of the polar ice caps,  force colder air into the atmosphere which leads to condensation and storms.  The National Wildlife Federation has even gone so far to state in a recent report that the world is experiencing milder winters, which is a result, naturally, of global warming

Pat Michaels, a climatologist and senior fellow at the Cato Institute  doesn’t think so.  ” You can make up any analogy you want, but the fact is that computer models don’t show such change , ”   “It is,”  said Michaels,  “the core problem of climatology:  It is attempting to explain everything even when everything becomes contradictory.”  Myron Ebell, director of the Center of Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute adds: ” They make this stuff up as they go along,”

What the current global weather patterns place in evidence is the fact that if  the weather is notoriously difficult for computer models  to predict,  then our future climate may be as well.   The hubris of the scientists at the IPCC ( Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and Al Gore and his acolytes aside, it might be time to admit that in fact there is a substantial debate on this issue and that both science and the world’s population in general could substantially benefit from its broader exploration.

The World’s Raging Gushers

The new immigration law in Arizona, the Greek bail out plan and the attempt to control the Louisiana oil spill all seem to share at least one thing in common.  They are all desperate measures to plug raging gushers – human, financial and environmental – which threaten to swamp the lives and economies of millions of people in the West.

Lets examine each in turn.

Arizona

In Arizona, Governor Jan Brewer signed Senate Bill 1070 with the intent of addressing a problem that the Federal government has proved itself singularly incompetent to handle.   For 20 years the Arizona border has been a porous sieve, with tens of thousands of Hispanics finding a way to avoid border patrols and surveillance from federal authorities.  With the tightening of border controls in California and Texas, the illegal  immigration rush has been funneled into the two desert states of Arizona and New Mexico, which have traditionally proven much harder to police.  A Department of Homeland Security high tech fence has not worked out and is now in hiatus pending a review.   Washington D.C., meanwhile, has engaged in a heated debate over the way of dealing with the status of illegal immigrants already in the United States.  But it is doing nothing to address the means of circumventing their entry.

The furor that has greeted Senate Bill 1070 wasn’t hard to predict.  Multi-culturalists, amnesty devotees, civil rights advocates and those generally not so hot on the federal government’s exercise of sovereign rights, have described the legislation as akin to a Nuremberg law.  That idea, of course , is preposterous.   The Nuremberg Laws were Nazi racial edicts passed in 1935 against legitimate German citizens.  SB1070 only targets those who have already broken American law and are not citizens. Nor does it target race or ethnic groups.

The one thing that has so many people exercised is this amendment to the wording of  Sec. 2. Title 11, chapter 7 is:

” A LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICER, WITHOUT A WARRANT, MAY ARREST A PERSON IF THE OFFICER HAS PROBABLE CAUSE TO BELIEVE THAT THE PERSON HAS COMMITTED  ANY PUBLIC OFFENSE THAT MAKES THE PERSON REMOVABLE FROM THE UNITED STATES”

The apparent ability of Arizona’s police force to arrest anyone on a mere suspicion that they are illegal will transform Arizona, into, you guessed it, a police state.   But the law does not breach any of the 4^th Amendment prohibitions against illegal searches and seizures. Arizona police are prohibited from racially profiling or stopping anybody merely because of appearance or ethnicity.  They may only  stop someone whom they suspect of either having committed a crime or misdemeanor or of being in the process of doing so.   Lest we forget, being in the United States without proper authorization or identification such as a passport and visa  or a driver’s license, is such a federal misdemeanor.   In reality, SB1070 does nothing to the law but seek to enforce it,  a responsibility the federal government has abrogated.

Greece

The Greek bail out plan announced this week, in which the International Monetary Fund will join with many of the larger European countries in supporting the collapsing Greek economy, was also an attempt to stave off a disaster.    The Greeks have for months teetered on the edge of default on their foreign loans, the prospect of which I explored in the my piece A Greek Tragedy.

The bail out plan rocked markets in Spain and Portugal, threatening to lower their bond ratings.  The drop in investor confidence has rightfully been called a  contagion which  could well spread to many of the smaller and more vulnerable European  economies, such as Italy and Ireland (who, together with Spain, Portugal and Greece, make up the colorful European acronym ” PIIGS”).  The outcome for the Euro’s stability could be devastating as the larger countries are forced to contribute  substantial amounts of their  GDP to shore up  their less robust fellow EU’ers to the south.

Germany plays a pivotal role in all of this and in my previous article, I identified its growing resistance to be being drawn into the vortex of a general European collapse.

But there is an interesting flip side to these developments.  The weakening Euro has made German imports in the United States and Asia cheaper, which is becoming something of a boon to German industry.   One other development, not spoken about too openly these days, is the prospect of a renewed German domination of Europe.  With all the smaller countries of Europe helplessly dependent on German largess, the economic behemoth to the north will exert, by force if necessity, an increasingly controlling influence on monetary policy and financial regulation in those countries.

Although the Germany of 2010 is not the Germany of  1940 and no one is accusing the Germans of a potential political dictatorship, we cannot evade the truth that financial power is often the lever used to exert political power, and the prospects for one country coming to totally dominate that area of the world, cannot be discounted as a fantasy.

Louisiana

You would think poor old Louisiana had had enough trauma to last at least a century.   But then along comes the oil spill of the decade as a burning rig off  Venice, LA, leaves 11 men missing, (presumed dead) and threatens an environmental catastrophe not witnessed since the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska in 1989.

The extraordinary irony of this occurrence is that it happened in the wake of the Obama administration’s decision ( see my piece Surprise! Off Shore Drilling May Not  Be Just a Conservative Passion)  to relax the moratorium on off- shore drilling in Virginia and in other select areas.  The decision came as increasing pressure had mounted on the administration to allow the United States to develop its own oil resources instead of being held at the mercy of the oil cartels in the Middle East and Latin America.

All of that will now be put on hold as environmentalists launch a vigorous “you see” campaign to demonstrate how foolish such an idea would be.   They will paint a bleak future in which no beach in the world will offer water pure enough to allow children to swim safely and drinking water would affected by  oil seepage into water tables.

But lets talk a little common sense, please.   The likelihood of a spill of this nature with any regularity, is highly remote.  The causes of the freak explosion on the Transocean rig are unknown and it is simply too early to suggest that the rig demonstrates the inherent  danger of oil rigs or that all rigs will result in absolute  environmental degradation.  The noise emerging from the environmentalists reminds me of the Three Mile Island fiasco in 1979, when our entire nuclear industry was stopped in its tracks without any evidence at all  that the partial  reactor meltdown in Pennsylvania had  had  any permanent affect on humans in the area.

Such intemperate environmentalist scare tactics neutered the nuclear industry and  set us on a course of energy dependence which, as we well know, has had far reaching consequences.

Conclusion

None of these problems are at all simple to resolve.   Gushers are never too amenable to easy fixes and plugs.   But lets not forget that these are human problems, to which humans will, in their ingenious way, apply human solutions.  The jury should therefore not be called and there should be no rush to judgment on SB1070 , the Euro meltdown  or the Louisiana oil spill, until all the evidence is actually in and we can subject it all to reasoned, discriminating analysis.

Demystifying the Origins of the Universe and the Dangers of Doing So

Understanding the origins of the universe has consumed philosophers, prophets, religious leaders, scientists and politicians since intelligent inquiry into our origins began.  They have all been pursuing the same seemingly endless question -  where, how and why did it all begin?

Well as a result of events in Switzerland over the past few weeks, we might  soon be able to find out.  Just outside Geneva, the world’s largest and most costly super collider made headlines last week  for breaking the record for the highest-energy particle beams ever produced by humankind: 3.5 tera-electron volts.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was created as the most powerful particle accelerator in the world.  It was designed  to offer a definitive mans of testing modern physics’ most vital inquiries -the efficacy of the  Big Bang theory; identifying  the original particle which led to the explosion of all matter (referred to as Higgs boson) as well as ascertaining the source of  dark matter, which accounts for 23% of the mass-energy of the observable universe.

In the experiment on March 30, protons were whipped to more than 99 percent of the speed of light and to record-high energy levels around a 17-mile underground magnetic track outside Geneva.  They crashed together inside apartment-building-size detectors, designed to offer insights into the beginning of the universe.

The scientists of the LHC now hope to begin developing entirely new physical principles and possibly even to  generate the Higgs boson particle itself, which, of course, has never before been observed.

However there are some deep dangers associated with such experimentation that few physicists seem willing to talk about.  In 2008, two mathematicians took to wondering what would happen were the LHC inadvertently to generate a stable black hole. Nothing good, it seems.  Black holes are expected to be generated all the time at the LHC, but a stable black hole ( or a micro- black hole) would not be just a planetary but a solar-system wide catastrophe.  It would mean that in a short while,  all existence in our solar system could be sucked into a nothingness from which there would be no recovery.   In simple words, it would be the end of our world.

Sounds too fantastic and apocalyptic to be true?  Well that’s exactly what the scientists in Geneva think and so they have assigned a very very low, (although, note, not a zero) probability to it.   Yet despite their assurances,  fearfulness about the  experiments has not abated.

The safety concerns regarding the LHC collisions have in fact attracted widespread media attention. Major newspapers have reported doomsday fears in connection with the collider, including The Times, The Guardian,The Independent, The Sydney Morning Herald,and Time.

In the run up to the commissioning of the LHC, Walter L. Wagner (an original opponent of the abandoned American Super Collider), Luis Sancho (a Spanish science writer) and Otto Rössler (a German biochemist)  expressed concerns over the safety of the LHC, and attempted to halt the beginning of the experiments through petitions to the US and European Courts.   Potential risks articulated by others include the creation of theoretical particles called strangelets, magnetic monopoles and vacuum bubbles.

All petitions to the Federal Courts in the United States, the European Court of Human Rights and the German Constitutional Court, have failed.

After the dismissal of the  U.S. federal lawsuit, The Daily Show’s correspondent John Oliver interviewed Walter L. Wagner, who declared that he believed the chance of the LHC destroying the earth to be 50%, since it will either happen or it won’t.

Therefore, while the possibility of the creation of a stable micro-black hole remains extremely remote, we should not fool ourselves that it can’t happen.   And this raises a curious and interesting question:  Just how should rational men and women assess an event of very low probability but one carrying infinitely negative consequences?

How indeed? As the philosopher and mathematician David Berlinski argues,  the fact is that no one knows.

” Even more curious, ” he says ” is the absolute and inflexible unwillingness of the particle physicists even to concede in their imagination that the decision to proceed with such experiments should not be theirs to make. Those raising what everyone once understood as a controversial objection to the LHC  have needed  to go to  court.  But what can a court say or do beyond deferring to the particle physicists themselves?”

That is of course exactly what happened in the European and U.S.  law suits.  The dangers implicit in this experimentation should be not the sole province of particle physicists who have an obvious agenda to fulfill by proceeding with the project – one which involves huge amounts of funding as well as avenues to great fame.

Although the scientists at LHC, responding to the alarms, conducted  their own extensive report in 2003 to determine the risks of an earth threatening micro-black hole and which were found to be infinitesimal, we need to remember that the experiment has never actually been performed and the risk factors are built on only theoretical models.

Whatever the scientific evidence for or against the experiments, the issue certainly is one that deserves much wider public discussion and review.  For in the end, the odds are not really the issue.   It is the irreversible consequences of such experimentation – a matter which should command our complete attention.

Giving Fish Their Human Rights

Otto was a pike who lived in Lake Neuchatel in Switzerland.  Life for a pike in Switzerland was pretty good.  Short working hours and long vacations;  a national health care service for which he paid nothing. And laws that protected abuses against his species. 

Everything was going swimmingly until the day Otto saw a red tail earthworm dangling just below the surface.  Not believing his luck at discovering such a rare delicacy, he quickly ascended only to discover that he had been fooled.  The worm was bait and Otto was about to become Erik Lafevre’s catch of the day. 

Poor Otto.  For the next ten minutes he conducted a life and death struggle against Erik’s rod but the exertion was finally too much for him.  Out of breath and out of energy, Otto took his last gulp of  freshwater and was hauled in, to finally expire on the wooden decking of  Erik’s skiff. 

Fortunately for Otto’s family though, a videographer was on hand to document the entire death struggle.  Within hours the encounter had been downloaded on YouTube and within days it had attracted 400,000 unique views.   

It did not escape the notice of the government.  Claiming that the amateur angler’s inexpert handling of his rod  had negatively impacted the fish’s dignity, Erik was sued in a Zurich district court by State attorneys on behalf of the fish.  Pretty soon everybody was getting into the act.  The worm’s family sued Erik for wrongful death.  The lake, incensed that its waters would be used for so nefarious an activity as fishing, launched its own suit;  and the vegetation at the edge of the lake sued for the fact that Erik had trampled some grass unique to the area as he maneuvered his skiff into the water.  

Sound like a nice modern fable?  Well it would be if there wasn’t so much truth to it.  For in Switzerland today animals, plants and water have individual rights enforceable in Swiss courts.  In fact, as the Wall Street Journal reports, over the weekend a referendum was offered to the Swiss, which, if passed would mandate that each canton in the country would be compelled to hire an animal rights attorney.   Today in Switzerland, an abuse of any animal, even a fish, can earn you a fine and  plant geneticists can be penalized for harvesting plants  in such a way that injures the plant’s dignity. 

One has to wonder about the way in which non-human life has been elevated  to the same level as human in countries as disparate as Switzerland, Spain and Ecuador.  In Spain, limited human rights have been given to apes, a result of extensive lobbying for 20 years by the Great Ape Project ( led by the philosopher Peter Singer and ape conservationist Jane Goodall); In Ecuador, plant life was accorded legal status under the new constitution, passed in July, 2008.

If you are thinking that the movement to elevate animal and plant life to the moral plain of humans is a simple expression of  deep empathy on the part of tree huggers and dog lovers, you  would be quite wrong.  Because the proponents of animal/ plant rights are decidedly anti-human in their perspective, viewing humanity as the true blight on earth and animals as its genuine custodians.

They have introduced into our lexicon a new term – speciesism.  Speciesism holds that assigning different values or rights to beings on the basis of their speicies is a prejudice that is not worthy of humanity.  Because man himself is an animal he is of no less or greater worth than the denizens of the animal kingdom with whom he shares the earth.

This, as Wesley Smith states in his extraordinary new book,  A Rat is a Pig Is a Dog is a Boy, results in the acceptance of the notion that logical distinctions that we all make without thinking betwen oursleves and the animal kingdom, are in fact akin to racism, anti-Semitism and every other bigotry by man against his brothers and sisters. 

But even more significant, says Smith, the removal of  any distinction between humans and non-humans, leads to the decimation of all moral values.  This is demonstrated by the insistence by some of these same ethicists, that sexual engagement between humans and non-humans should pose no serious issue since inter-species breeding has been part of the natural world since the beginning of time.  Infanticide, long condemned in most human societies, should be perfectly acceptable since infants are not cognate, sentient creatures. Vivisection experiments, long carried out on animals, is better reserved for those humans  in a catatonic or vegetative state rather than live animals since the former have, similarly, an absence of  all sentient, cognitive capacity.

It would be nice to think that such a philosophy is restricted to a few crackpot academics and animal rights advocates.  But it would  be a mistake to think this way.   With governments now picking up the cudgel, we increasingly face a world in which the entire concept of human exceptionalism is under assault. 

And so we have a scenario where one day, if our animal liberation friends have their way, there may be places on earth where to kill an animal of any species and under any circumstances, will be regarded as the equivalent of killing a man.  

Maybe Otto’s friends and supporters will then have their day in court after all.

Remembering No Nukes

It is now 30 years since the No Nukes Concert, held on September 23, 1979 in Madison Square Garden.  That event, held  in the shadow of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, was a call to arms against nuclear energy, and featured such musical luminaries as Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, Bruce Springsteen, Crosby Stills and Nash and the Doobie Brothers.

The accident, which had occured a six months earlier, involved a partial core meltdown of a nuclear generating station in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, near Harrisberg.  It was the most significant accident in the history of the American commercial nuclear power generating industry and was further illuminated by the Jane Fonda/ Michael Douglas movie The China Syndrome, an  American thriller that revealed safety coverups at a fictional nuclear power plant in North Carolina.  The film was released only 12 days before the actual incident at Three Mile Island and jump started a national alarmist movement to combat the proliferation of nuclear energy.

Not many people, however, remember the aftermath of that incident.  The reactor was quickly brought under control and an extensive investigation by the Kemeny Commission Report concluded that ” there was no case of cancer detected or the number of cases will be so small that it will never be possible to detect them. “

 Several epidemiological studies in the years since the accident have supported the conclusion that radiation releases from the accident have had no perceptible effect on cancer incidence in residents near the plant.

But none of this would affect the No Nukes campaign and its determination to impede the proliferation of nuclear energy in the United States.

Reading the liner notes from the No Nukes album, released in November of that year, we can obtain an appreciation of how certain were these latter day Chicken Littles that nuclear energy was going to hasten the end of the world.  Jesse Colin Young comments:

 “I’m afraid we’ll live to see a terrorist atrtack on a nuclear facility in our lifetime.”

And Jackson Browne:

” We have  these multinational corporations that control the energy telling us that we have to become self- sufficient. They’re not talking about people. What they’re talking about is protecting their profits. I guess I think of the corporate mentality as the enemy.  These people have to be called the enemy, because whether of not they are consciously trying to kill us , they threaten our very existence and they threaten the life of this planet.”

And John Hall:

“The energy situation presents us simulateneously with a deadly threat and the promise for a near Utopian solution. Its clear the alternatives to nuclear energy are so plentiful and promising that we are by no means released to the ” last resort.”

Graham Nash adds this slice of ineluctable pop star wisdom:

” The cartels and multinationals and the oil companies have billions of dollars invested in the nuclear program and they’re not about to come off it.  The only thing we can defeat them with is the truth. ”

The “truth” – or at least these rocks stars’ version of it,  won.  The nuclear energy industry was stopped in its tracks and after 1980 no further federal licenses were granted for the construction of new nuclear facilities in the United States.

But that didn’t stop the existing nucelar facilities from operating and continuing to produce clean and efficient energy for Americans.  So much so that by 1990 America’s 110 nuclear power plants set a record for the amount of electricity generated, surpassing all fuel sources combined in 1956  – which is when the first nuclear power plant had been built.

A great deal  has changed since 1980.  Computer technology, which had barely penetrated the nuclear industry in the 1970s, has developed to such an extent that no event as occured at Three Mile Island could possibly occur today given the extensive monitoring capabilities of networked security systems.  

The problems associated with nuclear waste have also almost been eliminated by reprocessing technologies developed by the nuclear industry.  According to William Tucker in this Wall Street Journal article reprocessing reduces the volume of spent fuel—already remarkably small—by 97%.    “The French,” Tucker explains, “ reprocess and store all their high-level waste from 30 years of producing 70% of their electricity beneath the floor of one room in their La Hague plant.”

The fears of a successful terrorist attack on a nucelar reactor, similar to the ones of 9/11, have also been put to rest.  Consistent studies have shown that a jetliner crashing into a reinforced concrete wall at 700 mph would have almost no affect on the wall, but would certainly cause the jetliner to disintegrate upon impact.  It has to be remmbered that the 9/11 attacks were  launched against buildings whose exteriors were 90% glass and not against bunkers whose outer shell is composed of tens of feet of reinforced concrete.

In addition, wind and solar power, as the No Nukes folks once argued, can simply not compete with nuclear energy for sheer economy, efficiency and environmental protection. To match the power produced by one reactor at a cost of $6 billion to $8 billion, we would need a wind farm spanning 200,000 acres and as much as $12 billion in investment capital, plus natural gas-fired plants to back up wind turbines that are idle the majority of the time.

Imagine the CO2 that would spew into the environment from such an installation.  

Today, nuclear reactors produce more than 70% of the carbon-free electricity in the country.  According to Patrick Moore in this  Los Angeles Times article,

 ” California would have to remove more than half a million passenger cars from its roads to eliminate the amount of carbon dioxide prevented by the state’s four nuclear reactors.”

It is  any wonder then that President Barack Obama last week, apparently freeing himself and the country from the No Nukes headlock, could announce that the federal government would guarantee loans for two advanced-design nuclear plants in Georgia and that many more are on the way. 

Still, the No Nukes lobby rolls on.  An example is this argument from Chip Ward, a founder of Heal Utah and author of  the anti -Yucca Mountain nuclear dump polemic Canaries on the Rim:  

“Nuclear power generates a radioactive waste stream from hell that will threaten even our grandchildren’s grandchildren. We still have no repository for the waste and no plan to dispose of it.  It also costs 30% to 35% more than power produced from coal or natural gas plants. Delays and cost overruns are common in nuclear plant production. ”

Time and time again in reading through these objections, you find 1970s arguments applied to 21st Century conditions.  They take almost no account of the advances in monitoring capacties, waste removal, reprocessing technologies or the increasing economic benefits of nuclear energy.  After a while you get the feeling that the real objection is not to nuclear energy at all but rather to the perceived ” cartels and multinational corporations” who stand behind it.  With corporations as the designated “enemy”, there will be nothing to convince the likes of Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, the  Union of Concerned Scientists, the Sierra Club or Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen that anything the nuclear industry suggests, proposes or offers will be of benefit to Americans.

Fortunately their influence is fast waning and a new era, providing Americans with safe, clean and economically efficient nuclear energy is moving towards us after thirty years of false alarms and overblown fears.

 

 

Imagining John Lennon’s World

Would the world have been a better place without John Lennon?

Such a question will  engender a surge of rage in members of my generation. Questioning Lennon’s role and importance in modern culture is tantamount to pop heresy.  After all, much of Lennon’s music and late 60s antics were embedded in our adolescent consciousness. Even amongst conservatives it is somewhat gauche to suggest that Lennon was anything other than one of the greatest cultural figures of the modern era, whose signature tunes Norwegian Wood, Strawberry Fields Forever, A Day In the Life….… and Imagine defined the modern sensibility.

I can’t claim to have ever really disagreed with that sentiment.  I am as big a Beatles fan as any.  But since this year marks the 30th anniversary of Lennon’s murder (preceded by the 40th anniversary of the Beatles break up), maybe its finally time to take a closer look at Lennon’s real legacy, divorced from the hagiography that has accumulated around his memory.

I had the opportunity to think more about this after seeing a show celebrating his music, presented by Tim Piper and his band in North Hollywood last Sunday afternoon.  Piper did a commendable enough job impersonating Lennon (although there were so many Lennons over the 20 years of his public career it would have been hard to represent all his incarnations on stage).  He offered serviceable renditions of Beatles songs, as well as Lennon’s solo efforts and the intimacy of the nightclub made the performance feel warmly nostalgic.

 It was only on the drive home, listening to Imagine , that I began to think more deeply about how disagreeable some of Lennon’s messages seem today and how deeply flawed was his global perspective. Imagine itself of course, is not a song as much as an anthem, a fragile vision of an unobtainable world, wiped clean of religion, war, conflict, sovereignty and possessions.

Lennon wasn’t so stupid to believe his nirvana achievable immediately. And he certainly liked expensive cars, beautiful homes and the freedom to travel whenever and however he wished, as much as anyone else.

But listen again to the lyrics of that song – 

Imagine no countries

It isn’t hard to do

Nothing to kill or die for

And no religion too.

 Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man

Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

 

      - and you can begin to hear the first philosophical rumblings of the environmental movement, the U.N.’s global governance campaign and the human rights industry.  All of these forces are posed against capitalism, free enterprise, sovereign jurisdiction and representative government. They are supranational in scope, claiming allegiance to nothing and no one, save a nebulous concept of truth and justice.

Lennon was in essence promoting a world without boundaries – and his program would extend beyond bulldozing physical borders, to demolishing sexual, political and economic restrictions as well.  But truth and justice, or as, in Ringo Starr’s repetitive mantra “peace and love,” are impossible to imagine without the imposition of boundaries. With no restrictions on sexual impulses, economic transactions or property claims, humanity could not effectively function.  Even the primitive tribes in the world’s most remote jungles maintain boundaries over these aspects of human interaction.

Imagine’s world, in the end, sounds more like a place where conflict would be a constant as those seeking to protect what they have and need for sustenance are forced to share it with others, who have not contributed to its growth, harvesting or development.

Of course we had seen this kind of utopianism before. It began once as starry eyed dreaming in the villages of the Ukraine and Hunan Province and ended as inhuman Five Year Plans in the Soviet Union, a crushing Cultural Revolution  in China and the murderous Relocation Farms in Cambodia.  Commencing with the same brand of utopianism, they degenerated into ruthless campaigns to consolidate power. The misery inflicted on the world by such ideas and their idealogues is something Lennon perhaps didn’t quite link with his own brand of utopianism.

A more realistic world view, one schooled in practicalities of human existence and human nature might take a more jaundiced view of utopianism and embrace the realities of life. Perhaps a more mature Lennon, steeped in these realities, might have written this update to his earlier vision:

             Imagine there’s no evil

                  You know it isn’t too late

                  Just take goodness and kindness

                        And fight against those who hate 

               Imagine no terror

                The West’s haters wiped away

                  Love of democracy and freedom

                 Might save us all one day

               Imagine all the people

                 Respecting individuality

 

 

 

 

 

The Rise of the Watermelon Activists

It was a startling fact to learn.   Watermelon, one of the most popular fruits on our planet, is 92% water.   Those big, oblong cylinders are then, surprisingly enough, actually more barrels of H2O than they are a food stuff.  

How looks can deceive.

There are many kinds of watermelon – nearly 1200, in fact - but whenever we think of one it is usually the Carolina Cross variety-  very green on the outside and very red on the inside –  that pops into our imagination. 

I thought about that color contrast at AFA’s recent Los Angeles seminar  The  Green Movement: From Common Sense and Compromise to Coercion and Control, held  in Los Angeles on Sunday, February 21.  After the day was over I actually had an entirely different view of watermelons. 

The seminar presented five speakers, who, one after the other, described the green movement and its operating philosophy of sustainability as a rehash of the same communist principles and ideas, effectively discredited  in the West for over a generation.  

Steve Milloy,  the author of Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them, opened the seminar with a sweeping history of the environmental lobby and how it has always masqueraded as a benign, non-ideological movement, when in fact its focus is on the acquisition of  political power and the control of our most vital institutions, in order to impose a new form of  social and political order on society. 

Claudia Rosett, a journalist and fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington D.C.  followed with a bracing commentary on the United Nations and its use of international environmental policy to penetrate sovereign jurisdiction of Western nations.  She pointed out the life long quest of  U.N. potentates such as Canadian industrialist Maurice Strong to impose a new order on humanity, one in which the rights of the environment are elevated above human rights and national law is superceded by international jurisdiction.   

Michael Shaw, the President of Freedom Advocates, presented an eye-opening examination of the way the Green movement’s philosophy of sustainability has penetrated into the very heart of our society, with local councils and even homeowners associations adopting the tenets of Agenda 21  (see my own article about this U.N. document  here).  Shaw presented damning evidence of the way ICLEI – the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, the U.N.’s vehicle for Agenda 21, uses its extensive influence in American townships through its  plans for  social engineering and behavior modification, to bring individuals in line with its environmental objectives. 

More important than this though, Shaw demonstrated how ICLEI’s focus on land usage is an attempt to impose a regime of land redistribution in the name of environmental protection.  It promotes a modern form of  collectivization wherein citizens will be told where and how they will live.  (You can get more an idea about this by visiting the ICLEI site  here)  

 It is also ICLEI’s job to implement United Nation’s policies that restructure our representative form of government through global and regional development.  Policies and programs take control from our representative government and put that control into the hands of regional, non-elected boards.  It  threatens, according to Shaw, a soviet-styled system that is based on regionalism.   

Ashley Thorne,  the Director of Communications at the National Association of Scholars, followed with a convincing presentation of the way the  philosophy of sustainability is being indoctrinated into our students all over the country.    Several universities, such as the University of Delaware, maintain compulsory sustainability training for freshmen and there are  schools which make a course in sustainability mandatory.  Nearly 650 college professors have signed on to the ACUPP ( American College and University President’s Climate Commitment) which is a document calling upon University presidents to impose stringent sustainability restrictions upon their campuses and to institute more courses in sustainable growth. 

Ms. Thorne pointed out how the United States government became complicit with this  movement when Congress passed all provisions of the Higher Education Sustainability Act (HESA) as part of the new Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 (HR 4137) in July, 2008.  This Act creates pioneering “University Sustainability Grants” which will offer funds to institutions of higher education to develop, implement and evaluate sustainability curricula, practices, and academic programs. 

Holly Swanson , the author of Set Up and Sold Out: Find Out What Green Really Means and the Director of Operation Greenout! in Oregon,  concluded the day with a presentation on the role of the Greens in fostering political change.   She drew a direct line between the writings and pronouncements of former communist leaders both nationally and internationally and Green Movement political action today.   From Gus Hall, the former Chairman of the Communist Party of the United States (“ The fact is , the bigger the stake people have in the struggle for a more livable world, the greaterthe  fighters they will be in the struggle to save humanity from extinction” ) to Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Secretary-General of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, who has acknowledged creating Green Cross International in the early 1990s in order promote communist ambitions, the Green movement has been infused with ideological energy from the collapse of the Soviet Union.  Many of the stalwart members of the Communist party  have become enthusiastic boosters of the Green movement and the connection between the two camps is unassailable.    

You could not have heard five more compelling speakers address a subject that 99% of Americans know almost nothing about.   Even those of us who have feared the growth of the environmental movement and its outlandish attempts to impose its orthodoxies on our lifestyle, were shocked to discover how the philosophy of sustainability has penetrated our local governmental institutions, our universities and our national thinking.  In a workshop following the presentations, I was dismayed to hear of political leaders whom we thought could be recruited to help fight this rising tide, being dismissed as already in the environmentalists’ camp.  

I was also not too happy to hear that even most of the conservative movement,  besides a few stray voices, have accepted sustainability doctrine.  That is certainly the case in the U.K. , where opposition leader David Cameron has made a point of declaring himself an environmentalist and a supporter of sustainable development. 

What hope, then, is there?   The answer lies in education on a grass roots level. Adapting the model of the Tea Party movement, working with churches, synagogues, homeowners associations and local councils, reaching out to high schools and junior colleges, are all essential measures in encouraging the development of a broad based network of activists dedicated to combating this threat to freedom and property rights.

Americans need to begin to understand that ‘sustainable development’ is a mere pseudonym for centralized control over lives and property.  They need to visit the websites of the United Nations Agenda 21, ICLEI, Earth First and Eco-America to read the literature on the real plan of these latter day totalitarians for their future.   They must begin to appreciate that the “green”that this movement is trying to sell us, is in fact a deep red  – in color, in texture and in character. 

Only the color blind could mistake it for anything else.  

.

Prepare Ye for the Apocalypse: The Fundamentalist Left’s Vision of Your Future

Doomsday prognostications are big business these days.  In just the past four months, our movie theaters have offered several scenarios depicting the end of the world as we know it.   They include the block buster 2012,  the feature The Road,  the documentary, Collapse  and sci-fi thriller, The Book of Eli.  All have  projected, in one way or another,  a future so mercilessly bleak and human conduct so damnable, that there is almost nothing left to redeem.

The high prevalence of doomsayers during times of economic or social turmoil is nothing new to Western culture.   From Nostradmus (The Prophecies) to Malthus ( The Principle of Population) to Ehrlich ( The Population Bomb),  every generation seems to sprout a new crop of  nightmare scenarios in which man has neither the will nor the resources to support the continuation of the species.

Apocalyptic visions have usually been the stock in trade of  the religious right and indeed, among certain evangelical Christian and ultra Orthodox  Jewish communities, the Apocalypse may well be nigh, portending a world convulsed in mortal combat as the decisive battle of Gog and Magog ensues among the ruins of Western civilization.

But the left also has its doomsayers, given to febrile maunderings about the imminent destruction of the planet.  This is no more in evidence than what we see occuring in the environmental movement these days.  From predictions of  the catastrophic rise of sea levels, to population explosion and a world unable to feed itself, the sky- is -falling- crowd think they know something about the impending catastrophe(s)  about to overwhelm us and what you, as an individual, can do to stop it.

In Britain this week,  some of these views were given full public expression - and a government imprimatur – with the publication of Land Use Futures: Making the Most of Land inthe 21st Century. The report, commissioned as a part of the  UK government’s Foresight Project, is a  marvel in government scare-mongering, a view of a future in which households will be monitored for their use of energy, land usage will be strictly controlled by buereaucratic fiat and citizens will be told where and in what they can live. 

Taking catastrophic climate change as a given,  the report suggests that mass migrations will occur to the north as the southern regions  of the British Isles dry out;  a projected increase of the population by nine million by 2031 and an increase in the number of single-person households would result in unprecedented demand for land for development and put pressure on natural resources such as water.  According to the report, by 2050, hotter, drier summers could reduce river flows by 80 per cent.

The report’s researchers present a number of scenarios in which the British citizen is forced, then, to make some dramatic changes in his lifestyle.

For instance, in 2014, World leaders are gathered and informed that the climate change situation is far more worse than anyone imagined and that without draconian measures there will be nothing much left to save.

The Government responds by taking control of vast tracts of land and using it to grow wood and crops for biomass power stations. An agricultural productivity Bill requires farmers to increase yields per hectare but most have to sell up because they lack the resources to comply.

 This indeed starts to look like real life aping fiction – 2012 crossed with The Book of Eli  melding with Collapse.  

But fiction it certainly is.   As the entire climate catastrophe scenario unravels ( is there a day that goes by without another lie or fabrication from the climate change crowd not being exposed?)  so too has the population explosion myth.

Paul Ehrlich’s famous prediction  in the December 1967 edition of  the New Scientist ” that the world would experience famines sometime between 1970 and 1985 due to population growth outstripping resources”  was demonstrated to be completely inaccurate.    He said then  ”the battle to feed all of humanity is over … In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” Ehrlich also stated, “India couldn’t possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980,” or “be ever self-sufficient in food.”

No predictions this side of Nostradamus would ever prove so preposterous. 

In my own lifetime, the estimates for total world population has fallen from a height of 20 billion to 15 billion to 11 billion ( the U.N. estimate around 1990) to 9 billion.   In fact, according to the 2004 U.N. World Population Division Report, due to decreasing fertility rates, world population has been decelerating for the last half century or so and the projections show that it may actually decline after 2040.

India has also proven itself eminently capable of feeding its population and the stagggering rise in prosperity in that country over the past 25 years has put the lie to the claim that its 1 billion person population is unsustainable.  In September, 2009, the Indian Minister  for Agiruclture announced that in spite of its three year long drought, India, with the world’s second largest population, would not need to import food. He was followed by the prime minister Manmohan Singh, who announced:

“We had record production and procurement of foodgrains in both 2007/08 and 2008/09. We thus have adequate food stocks and there is no cause for concern or fear of shortages of foodgrains in the country as a whole.”

But the British government’s scientists nevertheless seem certain that the world’s future, and Britain’s in particular,  is unavoidably grim.  Their answer is for goverment to seize property and redistribute it in the name of energy efficency;  for humans to be constantly monitored  for their contribution to environmental degradation and to educate the population in the inquities of home ownership in favor of communal “stewardship” of shared natural resources.

For the authors of this report, the future of the  UK  is dependent on  making  ”a significant cultural shift away from meeting present desires and towards protecting the needs of future generations.”

We have been called on for such self sacrifice before.   Almost every modern dictator has voiced similar admonitions to his countrymen.  Offered now with a smile and wrapped in a new environmental package, this lefitst vision of our future  is no less threatening to our lives and liberty than any of these other manifestations of ideology run amock.   Lenin, Stalin, Hitler and Mao might be proud. 

But for me,  if the Apocalypse is indeed almost upon us, I think I could find better companions to ride out the storm than those four horsemen, thundering towards us from our very unhappy past.

Ballad of a Thin Man

“You’ve been with the professors 
And they’ve all liked your looks
With great lawyers you have
Discussed lepers and crooks
You’ve been through all of
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books
You’re very well read
It’s well known. 

But something is happening here

But you don’t know what it is

Do you, Mr. Jones?”

                                 -  Bob Dylan

 Poor Philip Jones.   To think that only a few months ago he was riding the crest of the Climate Change wave, certain that the adulation would continue to sweep him to a plateau of  glory as one of the planet’s saviors.   Now his career and scientific reputation are in about as much of a mess as the office in which he lost the vital research data upon which the world has written its own doomsday scenario.  

Three admissions – that data for the vital “hockey stick” has gone missing in Jones’ mountain of disorganized office documents;   that there  has been no trackable global warming since 1995;  and that warming periods have happened before but not due to man-made changes  – constitute some of the most provocative developments in over thrity years of global warming advocacy. 

That is because Philip Jones is one of the world’s leading climatologists and his scientific studies regarded as so unimpeachbale  by the IPCC ( Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) – the U.N. body charged with determing whether man-made activity is causing global warming, that his work has rarely ever been challenged by his peers, and certainly not by acolytes such as Al Gore or many members of the media. 

Jones spilled forth all these revelations on Monday in an interview with the BBC.   Yet even more mind spinning was this astonishing admission: 

“Prof. Jones agreed that scientists on both sides of the debate could suffer sometimes from a “bunker mentality”.  He said “sceptics” who doubted his climate record should compile their own dataset from material publicly available in the US.”

Ahem…..debate?   Six months ago you could not get Mr. Jones, Mr. Gore or any member of the climate change chorus to admit that there was any debate at all.  In fact, most had gone on record declaring  that global warming science was settled and beyond dispute.

Yet “compiling their own dataset” was exactly what the most persistent climate skpetics, scientists such as Richard Lindzen, Edward Wegman, Fred Singer and Robert Carter, have been doing for decades.

For Jones, Gore and many of their supporters in the media however, these men were not skeptics at all but deniers, as pernicious and as notorious as other any deniers of historical fact, including the Holocaust:

Said Mr. Gore in 2006:

“Fifteen percent of the people believe the moon landing was staged on some movie lot and a somewhat smaller number believe the Earth is flat. They all get together on a Saturdy night and party with global warming deniers.

Scott Pelley, of CBS’ 60 Minutes, when asked by CBS reporter Brian Montopoli in March 2006, why he did not pause to acknowledge global warming skeptics, responded:

“ If I do an interview with Elie Wiesel am I required as a journalist to find a Holocaust denier?”

Newsweek joined that claque in August, 2007 with its famous cover story on global warming when Sharon Begley labelled these scientists:

   “ part of the denial machine, funded by the energy industry and organized by corrupt right wing lobbies.”

In the midst of the coldest winter in the northern hemisphere in in 130 years, with snow at one point blanketing 48 out of 50 states in the United States and rivers freezing in places they have not done so in 200 years, one would be hard put to understand any resistance to alternative ways of looking at global weather patterns.

For Philip Jones, that opportunity may have come a little too late.  But his acknowledgement that there might exist legitimate critiques of the science of global warming, is evidence that ‘something’ is certainly happening here, and that his chorus may soon be singing a very different tune.

Ballad of a thin man indeed.