“Better Late Than Never” Edition…

Last weeks Watcher’s Council vote was a real nail biter but in the end, The House emerged triumphant with my post entitled The Left’s “Word Deficit.”

Finishing a close second was an excellent piece by Dymphna of Gates of Vienna called Pimping Misery. Is the United Nations salvageable?

The world has gotten smaller and the rate of change has increased exponentially so the last thing we need is central control. It can’t respond quickly enough, as the Tsumani aftermath proved; it has no moral authority, as illustrated in Darfur, and it has no accountability, as Oil for Food demonstrates, continuing to bubble out vast reserves of corruption and downright evil.

The world not only doesn’t need the United Nations, the sad fact is the world would be a better place without the United Nations. If it ever had any usefulness that utility is so long past it’s no longer visible.

Agreed, with one small caveat: If the UN didn’t exist, it would have to be invented. This yearning for one world government is an outgrowth of the socialist impulse that has colored European politics for nearly 150 years and is probably with us to stay. Prior to World War I, the dream of a supranational organization that would prevent war, regulate trade, and generally unite mankind in peace and harmony was pretty much confined to a few philosophers (Immanuel Kant) and nutcases (Hegel). It took liberal saint Woodrow Wilson (and the slaughter of 20 million during World War I) to create the League of Nations. And when that failed, it took another liberal saint in FDR to try again with the UN.

What these efforts have in common is a denial of man’s natural inclinations, i.e. the urge to disobey as many of the ten commandments as possible especially nos. 6 through 10 with a special emphasis on #6 and #7. There may in fact be a formula out there for some kind of worldwide extra-governmental organization. But it will never be invented by a liberal. Only a conservative would recognize the inherent evil of human beings and create a world body accordingly.

I’m kidding of course. No conservative would be so stupid.

Tied for second in the voting with Dymphna was the good Dr. Sanity and a fascinating post on terrorist enablers: (”The Consequences of Enabling Terror”)

Whatever Michael Jackson was or wasn’t doing with those young boys was hardly a mystery to the boys’ mothers and/or families, which had to be complicit and enable Jackson’s behavior (the kids didn’t get to the Ranch on foot, nor did they stay overnight without permission). No, it served the purposes of the parents to enable Jackson’s behavior. It serves the purposes of the Feminists et al, to ignore the brutality of Islam towards women, in favor of demanding that the Harvard President whimper and wallow before them in abject apology for remarks that were scientifically justified.

Yes I am angry. And I’m fed up with such insane moral equivalence.

I’ve decided that it isn’t just a question of moral equivalence as the good Doctor Sanity so rightly points out. It’s also people who have fallen in love with the sound of their own arguments. It must be very sweet sounding to these lickspittles to hear the word “Gulag” or “Hitler” come out of their mouths when they talk about America or George Bush. The endorphins released in the brain when making such analogies must make the comparisons to evil and tyrants irresistable. There is, in fact, a recognized pathology at work here.

It’s called looniness.

Finishing a close third was Council newbie Rhymes with Right. Greg’s post on the SCOTUS Kelo decision is spot on: (SCOTUS: Your Property is not your Own)

Imagine that – these poor dumb citizens believed that they had the right to decide when and if they would sell their homes and property to private developers, and at what price.

Didn’t they know that the government has the right to give them a low-ball price for their homes and turn around and sell them at that sweetheart price to a favored local developer or appealing corporation. After all, why should a homeowner be able to decide that he wants to stay in his house when a multinational corporation worth hundreds of millions of dollars wants the lot for parking at their new offices? And don’t you understand that government should be able to decide that it would be economically beneficial to have a 100-house neighborhood consisting of million dollar homes rather than 500 houses valued at a mere $100,000 – it will bring a better sort of person, too. If the old owners can’t find a house in the town they grew up in – let them buy trailers!

Given the spate of seizures since the decision was handed down, this may be the most disasterous ruling made by the Supreme Court since Plessy v Ferguson which upheld the excreable notion of “seperate but equal” facilities for the races. Not even the made up privacy right granted in Roe v Wade caused as much constitutional mischief as this ruling has the potential to do.

John Hindraker of Powerline (writing in The Weekly Standard) doesn’t agree. But the question of the immediate and dire impact on individual American citizens and their right to be secure in their property is answered with more and more examples of Kelo type seizures that have come to light in the past week.

The impact will be most heavily felt in very small towns and ex-urban areas where the confluence of money, politics, personal relationships, and greed are most in evidence. Part-time politicians who are elected as Trustees or Assemblymen and whose campaigns are bankrolled by developers are wide open to the kind of corruption Kelo invites.

These are real world situations not theoretical constitutional constructs. It remains to be seen whether there will be any protections that can be legislated short of a constitutional amendment re-affirming our property rights.

The winning Non-Council piece was submitted by Maxed out Mama and it’s a doozy. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Paul Ehrlich, Bing Professor of Population Studies at Stanford, best selling author, winner of numerous academic prizes…and moonbat extraordinaire: (Ehrlich’s Wit and Wisdom)

“We must institute the Chinese Communist system of compulsory abortion in various forms of infanticide so that each couple will have only one child. We must hope that our government doesn’t wait until it, too, decides that coercive measures can solve America’s population problem…. The price of personal freedom in making childbearing decisions may be the destruction of the world.”
[Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University]

You know what’s really cool? The German government is thinking about imposing penalties upon childless people in an attempt to boost their birthrate RIGHT NOW. Europe’s decline and fall basically is rooted in the declining birthrate. One thing I love about these types - no matter what the problem, they can always come up with a reason why the government must to force people to do something for their own good.

Has there ever been an individual more wrong, more often, in the history of popular culture? Because that’s been Ehrlich’s enduring appeal; his dreams of catastrophe have resonated with the scientifically illiterate, the ignorant, and the anti-industrialization crowd ever since his best selling The Population Bomb became the bible a certain segement of the anti-science left. Here’s Ehrlich, writing in 1970, on the world food situation in 1980:

“This vast tragedy, however, is nothing compared to the nutritional disaster that seems likely to overtake humanity in the 1970s (or, at the latest, the 1980s) … A situation has been created that could lead to a billion or more people starving to death.”

Read the entire post if for no other reason than to realize that the very same people who were enthusiastically agreeing with him in the 1970’s and 1980’s are behind the Global Warming scare of today.

If you’d like to participate in this week’s Watcher’s Council, go here and follow instructions.