The New Socialism
As we pray and await Harry Reid’s Christmas Eve massacre by the US government to gobble up health care in the United States (we need to keep praying for one Senate hero to stand up for freedom), I think it’s important to see where they’re taking us.
In the following article, Charles Krauthammer has it right that the enemies of freedom have changed strategies. The waters of change have been flowing for a while, but the ascendancy of Barack Obama has opened the floodgates. Don’t look for brown coats, Red coats, or even smiley faced fascists to take away our liberties. There’s a new bully on the block and he’s wearing a green jacket.
Charles Krauthammer is a syndicated columnist who is one of the clearest political thinkers of our time. Read his analysis and be forewarned. These agents of change just might be coming to a neighborhood near you.
By Charles Krauthammer
In the 1970s and early ’80s, having seized control of the U.N. apparatus (by power of numbers), Third World countries decided to cash in. OPEC was pulling off the greatest wealth transfer from rich to poor in history. Why not them? So in grand U.N. declarations and conferences, they began calling for a “New International Economic Order.” The NIEO’s essential demand was simple: to transfer fantastic chunks of wealth from the industrialized West to the Third World.
On what grounds? In the name of equality — wealth redistribution via global socialism — with a dose of post-colonial reparations thrown in.
The idea of essentially taxing hard-working citizens of the democracies in order to fill the treasuries of Third World kleptocracies went nowhere, thanks mainly to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher (and the debt crisis of the early ’80s). They put a stake through the enterprise.
But such dreams never die. The raid on the Western treasuries is on again, but today with a new rationale to fit current ideological fashion. With socialism dead, the gigantic heist is now proposed as a sacred service of the newest religion: environmentalism.
One of the major goals of the Copenhagen climate summit is another NIEO shakedown: the transfer of hundreds of billions from the industrial West to the Third World to save the planet by, for example, planting green industries in the tristes tropiques.
Politically it’s an idea of genius, engaging at once every left-wing erogenous zone: rich man’s guilt, post-colonial guilt, environmental guilt. But the idea of shaking down the industrial democracies in the name of the environment thrives not just in the refined internationalist precincts of Copenhagen. It thrives on the national scale too.
On the day Copenhagen opened, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency claimed jurisdiction over the regulation of carbon emissions by declaring them an “endangerment” to human health.
Since we operate an overwhelmingly carbon-based economy, the EPA will be regulating practically everything. No institution that emits more than 250 tons of CO2 a year will fall outside EPA control. This means over a million building complexes, hospitals, plants, schools, businesses and similar enterprises. (The EPA proposes regulating emissions only above 25,000 tons, but it has no such authority.) Not since the creation of the Internal Revenue Service has a federal agency been given more intrusive power over every aspect of economic life.
This naked assertion of vast executive power in the name of the environment is the perfect fulfillment of the prediction of Czech President (and economist) Vaclav Klaus that environmentalism is becoming the new socialism, i.e., the totemic ideal in the name of which government seizes the commanding heights of the economy and society.
Socialism having failed so spectacularly, the left was adrift until it struck upon a brilliant gambit: metamorphosis from red to green. The cultural elites went straight from the memorial service for socialism to the altar of the environment. The objective is the same: highly centralized power given to the best and the brightest, the new class of experts, managers and technocrats. This time, however, the alleged justification is not abolishing oppression and inequality but saving the planet.
Not everyone is pleased with the coming New Carbon-Free International Order. When the Obama administration signaled (in a gesture to Copenhagen) a U.S. commitment to major cuts in carbon emissions, Democratic Sen. Jim Webb wrote the president protesting that he lacks the authority to do so unilaterally. That requires congressional concurrence by legislation or treaty.
With the Senate blocking President Obama’s cap-and-trade carbon legislation, the EPA coup d’etat served as the administration’s loud response to Webb: The hell we can’t. With this EPA “endangerment” finding, we can do as we wish with carbon. Either the Senate passes cap-and-trade, or the EPA will impose even more draconian measures: all cap, no trade.
Forget for a moment the economic effects of severe carbon chastity. There’s the matter of constitutional decency. If you want to revolutionize society — as will drastic carbon regulation and taxation in an energy economy that is 85 percent carbon-based — you do it through Congress reflecting popular will. Not by administrative fiat of EPA bureaucrats.
Congress should not just resist this executive overreaching, but trump it: Amend existing clean air laws and restore their original intent by excluding CO2 from EPA control and reserving that power for Congress and future legislation.
Do it now. Do it soon. Because Big Brother isn’t lurking in CIA cloak. He’s knocking on your door, smiling under an EPA cap.
The Global Warming Sham and Pony Show
;)
By now it’s become obvious that only the stupid and power hungry believe that use of man-made fossil fuels is heating up the planet.
The revelations of the “Climategate Scandal” have proved what many of us have believed all along–that those in the highest echelons of power have been cooking the books for political and monetary purposes for many years. The hush-hush e-mails (whoever leaked them to the world should be TIME magazine’s Person of the Year) confirm that there is no unusual cycle of man-made warming taking place, but rather we are currently in a cooling cycle that has many cyclical causes to it. One cause is not driving your car.
We should have known that since the first grade when we learned to read that fossil-fuel burning contributes only 6% of CO2 emissions worldwide. This is only further proof that we’re getting really bad at math in the Western world.
Then there are the 16,500 Copenhagen delegates flying into Denmark on 140 private jets, renting 1200 limos, causing as big a carbon footprint at the entire city of Nashville, Tennessee, and telling the world that we must save the planet, rob the developed nations, and keep developing nations living in mud huts instead of improving their lives via technology (including the use of oil, gasoline, and natural gas). Are they all that delusional, or is money and power a much bigger draw than the simple facts?
It’s time to stand up to the global control crowd and say enough is enough. While continuing to increase our wise stewardship of God’s world, let’s unleash the inventiveness and drive of private business to develop all means of usable energy–oil, nuclear, wind, solar, bio, and everything else. That commitment could result in bringing billions of people out of poverty in the 21st century.
The following article by Alan Caruba is the final death-nail in the global warming hoax. Read it, pass it on and refuse to live in ignorance one day longer. Then go out, take a nice drive in your car, and pray that God would help us multiply these wonderful blessings to people in every nation.
Climategate: A Willful Ignorance
Alan Caruba is the founder of The National Anxiety Center (www.anxietycenter.com), a clearinghouse for information about “scare campaigns” whose purpose is to influence public opinion and policy. He blogs daily at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com
“Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age.”
— MIT Professor Richard Lindzen, PhD, Atmospheric Science
“On such (climate) models we are supposed to wager trillions of dollars—and substantially diminished freedom.”
–George F. Will, syndicated columnist, Washington Post
Long ago I took one science course in college because it was required, not because I had any great interest in science. The course was zoology, and only my end-of-semester paper on raccoons, an assigned subject, helped me avoid a failing grade. To this day, more than fifty years later, I still recall that its Latin name was Procyon lotar.
I cite this to indicate that anyone can learn science. It is neither mysterious, nor arcane. To some it is an intoxicating, powerful search for new understanding and new truth that becomes a lifelong pursuit, but even someone with no particular aptitude can grasp its fundamentals with a minimum of effort.
Why, then, do men entrusted with explaining the world to us, the reporters and editors of respected journals, resolutely refuse to embrace the truths that science offers in favor of the man-made myths intended to influence public opinion and policy?
Why do otherwise educated and apparently intelligent people publish a magazine like The Economist and put on its cover “Stopping Climate Change,” the headline of a 14-page “special report”?
This is an astonishingly stupid headline. Even a child knows you cannot “stop” climate change. None of the more than six billion people on Earth can “stop” climate change because one of the definitions of change is “to become different” and a planet that has existed for 4.5 billion years has passed through many changes long before the first appearance of Homo sapiens.
Imagine a child saying, “Make it stop snowing” or “make the Sun come out.” But there are more than 16,500 men and women this very day who are gathered in Copenhagen, Denmark, at a “climate change” conference based entirely on lies that defy simple truths about how the Earth functions.
Unless one was determined upon a willful ignorance of those truths, the vast body of lies that continue to be reported would and should sink beneath the weight of real science, legitimate science, not the computer model inventions that conveniently ignore the Medieval Warm period when temperatures were higher than they are now, a time when Chaucer (1342-1400) would write of vineyards in northern England, a time well before the Industrial Revolution and the emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) that result from the use of coal, oil, and natural gas.
It is only willful ignorance that would keep a reporter or anyone else from knowing what has been known for years, that CO2 increases over the past 300,000 years have never caused temperature rise. Indeed, the rise of CO2 always follows in the wake of a temperature increase. What is so terribly wrong about the Copenhagen conference and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change sponsoring it is that its own member scientists know that too.
A week after the revelations of more than a thousand emails between the chief perpetrators of the science fraud that has since come to be called Climategate, an editor at The Economist could still write, “This newspaper believes that global warming is a serious threat, and that the world needs to take steps to try to avert it.”
Could The Economist be so uninformed, misinformed, or willfully ignorant of the commonly known fact that, despite a rise in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, the Earth has been in a new, natural cooling cycle for a decade?
Can all the labors of the 16,000 scientists, diplomats, politicians, and other assorted conspirators manage to ignore that fact?
Not only can they, the newest form of the fraud has emerged already and was trumpeted in the pages of The Economist, claiming beyond all credulity that the Earth’s vast “carbon sinks,” its oceans, forests and all vegetation, are unlikely to be able to “absorb” all the CO2 being produced by that most horrid of all creatures, human beings.
The IPCC should be disbanded as a threat to mankind. The EPA should be required by Congress to produce scientific proof that CO2 is a “pollutant” to be regulated. It cannot!
The people attending the conference should be run out of Copenhagen as if peasants were once again pursuing the monster, Frankenstein.
And The Economist, along with all the so-called scientific magazines and news outlets that have prostituted themselves to the global warming fraud, should issue an apology to their readers.
Your Most Important Major – An Open Letter to Tiger Woods
From Ron Boehme, Director of Youth With A Mission US Renewal
Like millions of people who look to you as the number one golfer in the world, I’ve been stunned by the events of the past few weeks. The SUV accident doesn’t make sense to any thinking person and your first explanation was lame and awkward. Avoiding the police regarding the car crash was the next red flag. Then the revelations of adulterous affairs and finally an apology for “transgressions” blew the lid off your personal and family life.
The Tiger Woods mystique is now severely shattered and, I must say, you are are acting like someone who’s been caught red-handed, but doesn’t know what to do.
I’m greatly disappointed in you as a sports figure that many young people admire and look up to. I’ve also been praying for you and your family–and it is out of those prayers that I offer some advice that I hope will be a blessing to you, Elin, your kids, and others who read it. I hope these thoughts somehow find their way to your home in Florida. If they don’t make in a printed form, I pray they will be revealed to you by the One who holds each of our futures in the palm of His hand.
Tiger–I’m certainly not able to give you advice about golf. But as a faithful husband and father of thirty-three years, I can give some advice about life. To put it simply, you must apply to your spiritual and moral life what you’ve learned as a golfer. If you don’t, all the money and trophies you earn won’t mean a hill of beans.
The world has seen your incredible discipline–the laser-beam, focused concentration. We’ve been amazed at your will to win and the self-control you exercise to reach the lofty goal of being the best golfer in the world.
Using your God-given talents with a high degree of focus, will, concentration, and skill, we’ve watched you win many majors. Your first Masters at Augusta was a beauty–a 12 stroke victory at the age of 21– a work of perfection. We’ll never forget your tearful embrace of your dad at its conclusion. Your last US Open was the stuff of legend–as you limped around the course on a painful knee that afterwards required surgery.
But none of those majors or any of the British Opens of PGA titles compare to the most important major of your life that you are now facing. That major has to do with your character, family, and relationship to your Creator. We want to win the most important major of your life–the Tournament of Life. Your human existence and future in eternity are more than a game–they are for keeps. Play them well and you are blessed. Play them poorly and you could be cursed forever.
Using some golfing imagery with which you are familiar, I submit some thoughts to you on how you can now get back up and win the game of life. Here’s what you need to do.
1. Survey the Hole
In many golfing tournaments we’ve watched you carefully walk around the tee looking out over the hole and analyzing the correct approach to take. That’s what you need to do with your life right now. You need to carefully look at what you’ve done, what it means, and what you need to do to get it back on track.
As you gaze at the “Hole of your Life,” it’s fair to say that there’s some green fairway in front of indicating that you’ve accomplished some good things in your 34 years. But what has also become apparent is that you’ve hooked some balls into the water on the left, and sliced some balls into the sand traps on the right. You’re actually in big trouble on this hole, you can’t take a mulligan, and a very bad score just might ruin your entire tournament.
Only one course of action will save you. Honesty. Yes, simple honesty. We all learned that lesson in kindergarten with the memorable chorus which went, “”H-O-N-E-S-T-Y no matter what the consequences be, is the very best P-O-L-I-C-Y.” It was true then when life was simple. It is even more true now when yours has become extremely complex.
Coverup was your first mistake two weeks ago. You weren’t honest. Your handlers gave you bad advice. You dug yourself a hole that is presently swallowing you. If you want to move forward and leave this nightmare behind, you need to have the guts, passion, and focus to be honest about your life. Tell the world what really happened the night of the crash. What precipitated the accident? How have you failed your wife and family? What has been the extent of your extramarital affairs? Has there been one, three, ten or fifty? Is there anything else the world needs to know about the real Tiger Woods?
You don’t need to go into painful details–just the overall facts flowing from a humble heart. You’ve just experienced the truth of the first half of Proverbs 28:13 that says “He who conceals his transgressions will not prosper.” If you are honest and humble, you will soon learn to appreciate the second half of that wise proverb, “But he who confesses and forsakes them will obtain compassion.”
Then step to the tee and take the next big swing.
2. Drive the Ball
Many of us have marveled at the awesome drives you’ve crushed at many a tournament with a one or two wood. The drive you need to hit now is the biggest of your life and will take the greatest effort. No irons or woods will do. In this one, you need to crush your own pride and submit your very disciplined will to the Creator of us all–the God of the universe. You not only need to be honest about your sins, you need to repent of those sins before your Maker and ask him to forgive you.
It’s time for you and all the rest of us to stop hiding behind the meaningless phrase that “I’m not perfect.” Everyone already knows that. The God who made you knows it in complete detail. But your humanness or fallenness is not an excuse to live an evil, reprobate life. You are responsible for your actions, you messed up big time, and it’s time to turn around and ask forgiveness of all those you’ve sinned against.
Start with God–I’ve never heard you talk about him in an interview. I don’t think you know him well–but He knows you intimately and you’ve hurt him the most by your selfish behavior. Confess your sins to Him. Then confess to your wife, your children, and any others you have harmed by your actions. I once made list of every sin I ever remembered committing–then followed through with asking people’s forgiveness for each one of them. That exercise set me free to live a joyful and holy life. Acts 3:19 says, “Now turn from your sins and turn to God, so you can be cleansed of your sins. Then wonderful times of refreshment will come from the presence of the Lord.”
Crush your pride, Tiger, with a mighty swing of repentance. That will put you within striking range of your next important shot.
3. Chip to the Green
You’re so good at this in golf, but have been very bad at it in life. Chip shots need to be precise with perfect aim at their desired destination. Tiger, the only person who has the power to forgive and transform your life is Jesus Christ. Not Mohammed, Confucius, Buddha or Mother Earth. There’s only one empty tomb–and its his–Jesus. You’ve used his name in swearing many times–now you need to use it to receive the gift of his salvation. Acts 4:12 rightly says, “There is salvation in no one else. There is no other name in all of heaven for people to call on to save them.”
Tiger, Jesus died on a cross in your place to save you from the many sins you’ve committed. He did that for us all. Believe in God’s love and forgiveness through Jesus and you will be saved, forgiven, and become a new person. It’s happened to millions of us, It can happen to you.
Want to change your present circumstances? Want to silence the tabloids and paparazzi? “If any one is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold all things have become new” (2 Corinthians 5:17). Give them nothing to write about except a forgiven, changed, godly life. Then use your incredible gift of perfectionism to “perfect holiness in the fear of God” (Hebrews 12:14). Biblical perfection is the maturity of a righteous and good life.
So make that precise chip shot of faith in Christ, and then…
4. Hole the Putt
The final shot is also something you’re good at–for birdies or eagles. In the game of life, this shot applies to making the commitment, through the power of Christ’s Spirit within you, to be faithful to your wife and a good dad to your beautiful children. You can do it, Tiger. It doesn’t matter how long the putt is or how tricky the green. In the same way you study grass contours and softness or hardness, study your wife and family and learn how to serve them in unselfish fidelity and love. God will show you how to act, and help you line it up perfectly.
I’m one grateful man who married a wonderful woman, produced six great kids, and together have maintained a completely faithful marriage for over three decades. Many of us are doing it because Jesus gives us the power and the grace. You can do it too. Not because you’re Tiger Woods. But because you, too, can become a child of God that overcomes the world (1 John 5:4).
Tiger, you can be an overcomer of some very bad choices and ugly public gossip by honing your skills in the Tournament of Life. This is the most important major of your life. Through honesty, repentance, faith, and fidelity you can show the world the traits of a true champion.
If you do these things, then you’ll ultimately receive the only trophy that matters–the crown of eternal life. And your Heavenly Father will also give you a big hug and proudly exclaim, “This is my son in whom I am well pleased.”