• Mainstream press has stumbled on an alarming figure, which I reported way back on 8/28/2009 : “nearly 1 in 5 Americans is either out of work or under-employed.”
The real unemployment rate is 16.3 percent. The discrepancy between the official and the awful numbers has arisen because the former count, conveniently, “only those who have looked for work in the last four weeks.”
• Climagedon or, rather, ClimaGate. Reports The IBD: “Hacked e-mails from Britain’s Climate Research Unit are only the latest evidence of climate fraud. Just ask NASA’s James Hansen about the faking of climate data or EPA employees about the suppression of climate fact.”
For years, noted scientists and other global warming skeptics have been accused of being on the take, their research tainted and funded by grants from Big Oil and other fossil-fuel interests.
Now, it turns out, it’s the warm-mongers who are fudging the numbers and concealing the inconvenient truth.
• To further hobble the economy and contribute to the climate chicanery, the president “will proposean emissions reduction target at a U.N. climate change summit in Copenhagen next month, the White House said Monday. … Obama said during his trip to Asia last week that the U.S. and China want the Copenhagen summit to lead to an agreement that has ‘immediate operational effect.'”
• Finally, “Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the others are going to plead ‘not guilty.'” Read the cuss-studded comments from the Daily Kos coterie.
This is an unremarkable defense. Still, Obama will rue the day he brings this circus to New York. Posturing on the Left and the Right will not change the fact that a show trial of the 9/11 defendants will turn into a farce.
I have only a minor quibble with the superlative Lord Christopher Monckton, former science adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, in his dire warnings about the imminent loss of US sovereignty:
“The US Constitution is the thin edge of the wedge that has allowed U.S. governments to cede the rights of Americans to the UN. Specifically, the ‘Supremacy Clause’ in Article VI states that all treaties made by government shall be ‘the supreme Law of the Land,’ and shall usurp state law. Article VI has thus further compounded the loss of individual rights in the U.S.” It needs repealing, among others.
“The Minnesota Free Market Institute hosted an event at Bethel University in St. Paul on Wednesday evening. Keynote speaker Lord Christopher Monckton, former science adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, gave a scathing and lengthy presentation, complete with detailed charts, graphs, facts, and figures which culminated in the utter decimation of both the pop culture concept of global warming and the credible threat of any significant anthropomorphic climate change.”
“…If credible, the concern Monckton speaks to may well prove the single most important issue facing the American nation, bigger than health care, bigger than cap and trade, and worth every citizen’s focused attention.”
“Here were Monckton’s closing remarks, as dictated from my audio recording:
At [the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in] Copenhagen, this December, weeks away, a treaty will be signed. Your president will sign it. Most of the third world countries will sign it, because they think they’re going to get money out of it. Most of the left-wing regime from the European Union will rubber stamp it. Virtually nobody won’t sign it.
I read that treaty. And what it says is this, that a world government is going to be created. The word “government” actually appears as the first of three purposes of the new entity. The second purpose is the transfer of wealth from the countries of the West to third world countries, in satisfaction of what is called, coyly, “climate debt” – because we’ve been burning CO2 and they haven’t. We’ve been screwing up the climate and they haven’t. And the third purpose of this new entity, this government, is enforcement.
How many of you think that the word “election” or “democracy” or “vote” or “ballot” occurs anywhere in the 200 pages of that treaty? Quite right, it doesn’t appear once. So, at last, the communists who piled out of the Berlin Wall and into the environmental movement, who took over Greenpeace so that my friends who funded it left within a year, because [the communists] captured it – Now the apotheosis as at hand. They are about to impose a communist world government on the world. You have a president who has very strong sympathies with that point of view. He’s going to sign it. He’ll sign anything. He’s a Nobel Peace Prize [winner]; of course he’ll sign it.
[laughter]
And the trouble is this: if that treaty is signed, if your Constitution says that it takes precedence over your Constitution (sic), and you can’t resign from that treaty unless you get agreement from all the other state parties – And because you’ll be the biggest paying country, they’re not going to let you out of it.
So, thank you, America. You were the beacon of freedom to the world. It is a privilege merely to stand on this soil of freedom while it is still free. But, in the next few weeks, unless you stop it, your president will sign your freedom, your democracy, and your prosperity away forever. And neither you nor any subsequent government you may elect will have any power whatsoever to take it back. That is how serious it is. I’ve read the treaty. I’ve seen this stuff about [world] government and climate debt and enforcement. They are going to do this to you whether you like it or not.
But I think it is here, here in your great nation, which I so love and I so admire – it is here that perhaps, at this eleventh hour, at the fifty-ninth minute and fifty-ninth second, you will rise up and you will stop your president from signing that dreadful treaty, that purposeless treaty. For there is no problem with climate and, even if there were, an economic treaty does nothing to [help] it.
So I end by saying to you the words that Winston Churchill addressed to your president in the darkest hour before the dawn of freedom in the Second World War. He quoted from your great poet Longfellow:
Sail on, O Ship of State!
Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!
Lord Monckton received a standing ovation and took a series of questions from members of the audience….”
The Euroskeptic Czech President Vaclav Klaus continues to valiantly oppose the European Union for its sovereignty sundering supranational regulation. He has “stubbornly refuses to fly the EU flag.” However, now it looks as though he may be required to capitulate:
Klaus, “a fierce critic of all things related to the European Union, is the only thing standing between Europe’s élite club and its mighty future. Until he signs the Lisbon Treaty — the Czech Republic is the last holdout among E.U. members — the E.U.’s grand reform plan remains in limbo. While politicians across the continent have spent weeks wringing their hands, trying to figure out how to compel Klaus to sign the document, the majority of Czechs are standing behind their leader. …
Although Klaus is fiercely opposed to the treaty, which aims to overhaul the E.U.’s decision-making procedures and establish a full-time President of the union, it’s looking more likely that he will grudgingly sign it. He is bound by the Czech constitution to approve the document after the parliament endorsed it and he indicated in an interview last weekend that it was probably too late to derail the process.”
To condemn or not to condemn a “man [who is] behaving … just like the barbarous Prophet Mohammed, who married the six-year-old girl Aisha”—that is the question. An NIS News Bulletin, Via Jihad Watch, reports that the heroic Dutchman Geert Wilders—one of the few political leaders in the West to reject dhimmitude— “has compared the Islamic prophet Mohammed to a pig.” What prompted the fearless leader of the ascendant Party for Freedom (PVV) to pipe up recently?
Geert Wilders has seized on a news report from Saudi Arabia for peppery [sic] written questions to the cabinet. In these, he compares the Islamic prophet Mohammed to a pig.
Wilders has requested clarification from Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen on a marriage in Saudi Arabia between an 80-year-old man and a 10-year-old child. The child had run away from her elderly husband, but was brought back to him by her father, the English-language website Arab News reports based on a Saudi newspaper.
Wilders asks the minister if he shares the view that “this man is behaving like a pig, just like the barbarous Prophet Mohammed, who married the six year old girl Aisha.” The PVV leader wants Verhagen to summon the Saudi Arabian ambassador to express his repugnance.
[T]his puts those who will condemn Wilders in a peculiar position. If they take issue with his characterization of Muhammad, they will either be excusing the Muslim prophet’s marriage to a six-year-old and declining to condemn those Muslims who imitate their prophet by taking child brides, or, if they say that Muhammad didn’t actually marry a child, they’re in the position of denying evidence that is in the sources Muslims consider most reliable. Yet as this incident with the 80-year-old and his 10-year-old bride demonstrates ( “my marriage is not against Shariah,” said the codger), many Muslims take that evidence quite seriously.
Update I (August 31): JP writes: Jamie, you cannot try an Arab in his homeland based on Western Laws.
This is a point well taken and worth making. It is clear to me that unlike, say, an America leader, whose admonitions to the Arab world may carry the threat of an invasion, Wilders is merely being provocative. His intention and consistent modus operandi are to expose the West’s self-immolating left-liberalism. I believe the same is the case here. Where are the Hildebeest-type feminists on this?
My mention of Daniel Hannan, the new-found darling of American conservatives and libertarians, in this context, is only tangentially related. Nevertheless, I’ve been meaning to bring Hanna up. Here’s what he had to say about Wilders:
It’s true that Geert Wilders is a controversialist, who takes pleasure in causing offence. He needs 24-hour protection, so serious are the death-threats he has attracted from jihadis. He revels in offending liberals as well as Muslims: his call for the Koran to be banned struck me as rather inconsistent with his stated commitment to civic freedoms. I wouldn’t vote for him if I were Dutch.
My Netherlands-based family are proud supporters of the heroic Wilders, the only man to understand the stakes. Hannan here is very much in the sneering mode of Mark Steyn, who lauds the manner in which America has dealt with fractious immigrant populations, and distinguishes between the American and European melting pots. I don’t know if he is one, but neoconservatives of the deepest dye do not allow for the questioning of immigration policy with respect to the future of western liberal societies.
“When America’s news cartel woke up to one of 2005’s biggest stories—Muslims running riot across France—the response from many a neoconservative was to gloat.
The Schadenfreude was tinged with a sense of American superiority. It’s not happening here because we’re better. And why are we superior? To listen to their accounts, it’s because we’ve submerged or erased aspects of the American identity. …
Perhaps the threat to both homelands is overplayed. I sincerely hope so—for the French and for us. But even if France isn’t the proverbial canary in the coal mine, shouldn’t Americans be rooting for this once-magnificent European country?
Not according to some prominent neoconservatives, for whom the destruction of 8,400 vehicles, dozens of buildings, and at least one life by the Muslim community of France has served to focus attentions on… the ‘bigoted’ French.” …
Undeniably “exceptionally intelligent,” the man speaks a superb English, something that seduced me initially too. However, I soon discerned that even Hannan’s pronunciations about American liberties sundered under Obama were somewhat shallow, or strategically tailored to his role as a star among Republican TV hosts.
Yes, he knows well and repeats often the principles of dispersion and decentralization of power inherent in the American system. But, like so many neocons, he conveys the false idea that up until recently those principles had been respected. Hogwash. Obama is continuing on the path of his predecessor, and Bush built on the wrecking Clinton did. And before that… well you know the story.
Update II: Via Jamie. It would appear that Hannan does subscribe to the neoconservative concept of a propositional nation. Accordingly, and to quote from my upcoming book, a nation is nothing but a notion (the last is Buchanan’s turn of phrase), “a community of disparate peoples coalescing around an abstract, highly manipulable, state-sanctioned ideology. Democracy, for one.”
