Radical Environmentalists Disclaim Responsibility for Eco-Terrorist James Lee

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The following piece is written by Steven W. Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute and is used with permission.

Yesterday at the Discovery Channel offices in Maryland, environmental activist James Jay Lee took company employees hostage, threatening to kill them unless the media outlet agreed to turn itself into a propaganda channel for population control. The standoff ended when the gun-toting and bomb-laden eco-terrorist was shot dead by a SWAT team.

Lee had earlier outlined his demands on his website, savetheplanetprotest.com, where he posted a 1,100 word manifesto aimed at the Discovery Channel. In it, he demanded that Discovery change its programming and focus on getting rid of people who are “polluting” the planet. “All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants…” Lee wrote, “…programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility must be pushed. … That means stopping the human race from breeding any more disgusting human babies!” It is because there are too many people, he exclaims elsewhere on the site, that “Global Warming is a reality. The massive extinction of animals is happening all over the world.”

Where did he get such wacko ideas?

From the mainstream environmental movement, that’s where, which early embraced the idea that the best kind of environmental protection was population control.

Earth Day Founder Hugh Moore first popularized the idea, picked up by Lee, that people are a form of pollution. Moore invented the term “popullution,” short for population pollution, and chose as the theme of the first Earth Day in 1970 the slogan “People Pollute.”

Population Bombster Paul Ehrlich went on to narrow the focus to human babies, frequently exhorting people to “Join the environmental movement, stop having children, and save the planet.”

By 1971 most of the leading environmental groups had signed on to the anti-natal agenda, having been convinced that reducing the human birthrate would greatly benefit the environment. Lee obviously made their agenda his own.

Coercion in matters of birth control, suggested by Lee above, has been widely and openly endorsed by radical environmentalists. “Voluntarism is a farce,” wrote Richard Bowers of Zero Population Growth in 1969. “The private sector effort has failed… [even the expenditure] of billions of dollars will not limit growth.” Sterner measures were required, said Bowers, who proposed enacting “criminal laws to limit population, if the earth is to survive.”

And then there is Al Gore who, however cartoonish he now seems, continues his overheated rhetoric about the dangers of global warming. According to Lee’s own account, it was a viewing of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” several years ago that first spurred him to environmental activism. I note also that Gore, in a post on his personal blog two weeks ago, called for major protests against the failure of the U.S. government to act against global warming.

Lee was particularly affected by reading Ishmael and My Ishmael, environmental cult books by Daniel Quinn that tell the story of a sentient gorilla with a Jewish name (Ishmael), who castigates humans for having too many babies. Reducing human numbers and returning humans to a tribal existence (Quinn is also no fan of industry) are recurrent themes of the books, and are cited by Lee as a major inspiration.

Now, if a book by Glenn Beck had in any way, however remotely, inspired a gunman to take hostages at MSNBC and demand that they reorient their programming to promote the pro-life, pro-family cause, you can bet that the lamestream media would be howling hate crime, not just at the criminal, but also at Beck himself.

Instead, we see the media in full-throated denial of any connection between the anti-people words of their environmental icons and the anti-people acts of James Lee. The Huffington Post has already reached the conclusion that Lee was mentally ill, the implication of which is that neither he, nor his intellectual progenitors, can be held accountable for his actions. I am not a psychologist, but it seems to me that you have to be functioning pretty well to write long essays, maintain a website, and plan an assault (complete with bombs) on a major media center.

Those who inspired Lee’s ravings are taking a different approach. While Al Gore is maintaining a discrete silence, Daniel Quinn is babbling to all and sundry that his books had absolutely nothing whatsoever—zip, zilch, nada—to do with James Lee’s actions. “This James Lee has been inspired,” Quinn concedes, “but in a destructive way. He’s doing what he can do — which is a crazy stunt. I wish I could understand what he’s trying to do, and what he’s trying to say. It’s hard to connect it with my book.”

Really? It seems rather easy to connect the dots to me. Perhaps Quinn has not yet read Lee’s manifesto, the ideas of which, although put more crudely, bear more than a passing resemblance to his own. Both of them want industrial civilization to self-destruct, taking with it most of the people on the planet, but Quinn wants to do it … democratically.

As he explains, “The solution has to come from a consensus of the majority of the humans in our planet, and say ‘Yes, this is what we must do, painful as it will be, to ensure the survival of the race.’ … And it will be painful. There’s not going to be any painless solution.”

Lee’s solution was to speed up the achievement of consensus by inflicting pain and terror on innocent people to force the Discovery Channel to broadcast an endless series of anti-baby, anti-people documentaries.

“It’s hard to imagine how he got from reading this book to his current behavior,” Quinn now says. “It certainly puzzles me.”

What puzzles me is how obtuse otherwise intelligent Leftists can be when they are in denial. They endlessly advocate “radical action,” and “radical social change,” and then when someone takes them seriously they throw up their hands in pretended astonishment.

It is also clear that Daniel Quinn and others feel a certain twinge of sympathy for James Lee. After all, the taking of hostages in the environmentalist cause is not a mere “crazy stunt,” as Quinn put it, it is a brazen act of eco-terrorism, and should be described as such.

Do not hold your breath.

I am reminded of the British labor leader who balked at comparisons between Communism and Nazism. Nazism was pure evil, this social democrat said, while Communism was merely deformed. However much Lee and other radical environmentalists may have disagreed about means, they shared the view that people are a pestilence on the planet. And so they are soul mates.

Steven Mosher is the President of the Population Research Institute.

Research Scientist: Cheating and Censorship in Science Threaten Americans

WASHINGTON, July 26 /Christian Newswire/ — In a legislative briefing to be presented at the National Capitol building on Wednesday, July 28, former George Mason University professor and research scientist Dr. Caroline Crocker will tell Americans they are at grave risk as a result of what she termed “a serious crisis of integrity in our scientific and academic institutions.” Warning that all Americans should be alarmed at the rampant tolerance of cheating in schools, which she said can translate to corruption in the scientific enterprise and related business concerns, Dr. Crocker will outline examples of the risks related to this issue as well as her plans for working with others to remedy this threat by the formation of a new national non-profit organization, the American Institute for Science and Technology (AITSE).

“The impact of this issue is truly incalculable – but is definitely significant. The first thing we need to do is call attention to just how serious this issue really is by identifying where it affects all of us at a very personal and practical level – and then we need to come together to find ways to effectively address the matter.” In her briefing, Dr. Crocker will outline how academia fails to effectively stimulate students to learn from examining all sides of an issue and how professors who demand deep learning are penalized. She showed how this can lead to problems in the medical profession and pharmaceutical industry and suggested how improvements could be made by raising the profile of the importance of scientific integrity.

Dr. Crocker, an immunopharmacologist with numerous scientific publications to her credit, warns that “Science is often corrupted by politics, financial interests, and even different ideological viewpoints. This has significant impacts on the health and welfare of Americans – we need to change that or our society will suffer greatly for it.”

Christian Newswire

Population Control Evolved

Population Control Evolved
by Steven Mosher and Colin Mason

“For the past forty years, the United Nations has been beating the drums about “overpopulation.” One of their most successful propaganda and fundraising gambits of late has been “World Population Day.”

~ Steven W. Mosher

It started as “Five Billion Day.” This was the day—July 11, 1989, to be exact—when the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) estimated that the world’s population would reach five billion. With one voice, the U.N. Population Fund, the International Planned Parenthood Federation, and related anti-people groups decried the growing threat of “overpopulation,” and asked the governments of the world for billions of dollars to deal with this supposed crisis.

But a billion human beings are not added to the planet’s population very often. Annual funding requests needed an annual justification. Thus the following July 11th was billed as “World Population Day (WPD)”, as has every subsequent July 11th up to the present day.

In its initial iteration, World Population Day consisted of dismal pronouncements from the United Nations Population Fund—the lead spear carrier for this unholy day—bringing us the bad tidings that we are breeding ourselves off the face of the planet. This early “apocalypse now” style proved effective at generating massive press coverage, which in turn prompted parliaments around the world to open up their purses.

The rhetoric of World Population Day has softened considerably in the years since. First of all, the numbers simply didn’t support the old population bomb thesis. Birth rates were falling farther and faster than anyone thought imaginable. Second, forced-pace population control programs in China and elsewhere had produced a backlash in the West.

The 1994 Cairo conference marks a watershed in the rhetoric, if not the reality, of population control programs. Largely because of opposition from a consortium of Catholic and Muslim countries, the Programme of Action that resulted from the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) contains no population projections, no demographic analyses, no universal right to abortion, and no hard targets for contraceptive acceptance, fertility decline, or population levels. What survived the prolonged and often fractious negotiations was a pastiche of less controversial policies centering not on the numbers but on what came to be called “reproductive health care.”

This outcome was initially quite a disappointment for the hard-line controllers who, in the words of Adrienne Germain, “argued that Cairo’s ‘reproductive health approach’ will be far more expensive and less efficient than vertical family planning programs. Rather, they say, priority should be given to meeting the unmet need for contraception, as conventionally defined. They further argue that ‘population’ resources, small to begin with, certainly should not be stretched to cover the kind of ‘social engineering’—that is, health, empowerment, and rights—mandated by the ICPD. If there is to be any ‘social engineering,’ they say, it should take the form of incentives or other persuasive measures directly targeted on fertility and, in particular, contraceptive use.” In other words, they wanted to continue the hard sell, complete with hard targets, which relied upon bribes, sanctions and propaganda campaigns to ensure compliance.

Advocates of a “reproductive health care” approach, including Germain herself, sought to reassure the hardliners that the “demographic imperative”—that is, the need to control population growth—remained the top priority. “ reproductive health approach will be more cost effective in meeting demographic goals … by reducing dropout and failure rates, and … by appealing to the younger individuals and couples who, in demographic terms, need to …contracept earlier and longer. Proponents of the ICPD also look to broad ‘social engineering’, rather than fertility-centered propaganda or incentives … That is, we argue for creation of socio-economic conditions in which it makes sense for individuals to have two or fewer children.” [italics added]

Germain concluded by reassuring hard-line controllers that these presumably costly social engineering programs would not compete with their existing programs for funding. Rather, they would be paid for by “broader development agencies and budgets, not from family planning budgets; nor would ministries of health and family planning be responsible for their implementation.” This new money, according to Germain, would ensure that the reproductive health approach would not compete with, but work alongside, existing top-down, numbers-driven population control programs. This point bears repeating: The hard-line approach was slated to continue, with or without the infusion of new funds necessary to initiate full-service reproductive health care programs.

In the event, the UNFPA’s fundraising drive, and those of related organizations, stalled shortly after take-off. In the years since, it has issued increasingly frantic calls for donor countries to “honor” the ICPD commitments—that is, put more money into population control—only to have these increasingly ignored. Of the projected tens of billions of dollars that these new commitments to reproductive health care supposedly required, only a fraction has actually been raised. The 179 nations present at the ICPD have not even come close to meeting their pledges. Annual funding in 2003 stood at only $4.7 billion, a handsome sum of money, to be sure, but only one-quarter of the estimated $18.5 billion that had been pledged at Cairo.

Caught between the demands of the Cairo agreement for reproductive health care programs, on the one hand, and the reality of existing family planning commitments and essentially static budgets, on the other, the population bureaucracy has had to improvise. They have done so by dressing up existing fertility control programs in the guise of reproductive health care. And they now tout such “reproductive health” programs as a great boon to women and children. Among the many benefits of reducing the birthrate they list lower maternal mortality, reduced infant mortality, improved overall health, and higher living standards. The claims of the controllers are greatly exaggerated, if not entirely bogus.

But this year’s World Population Day rhetoric is even blander than “reproductive health” and reproductive rights.” This year’s theme—“be counted” and “everyone counts”—is so soft that it can mean almost anything. According to UNFPA Director Thoraya Obaid it means that “Every country counts its people. The numbers tell decision-makers about current and future needs …With world attention focused on achieving the Millennium Development Goals by 2015, and the upcoming MDG10 Summit at the United Nations in September, the availability of consistent and comparable statistical information has become even more crucial. Data for development plays a prominent role in monitoring progress, assessing and realigning plans and strategies, and conducting effective advocacy. Data, and public access to it, contributes to transparency and accountability.”

So the UNFPA’s job is now … carrying out a census? Data for resource allocation? Even the official UN Secretary-General’s statement has only passing reference even to reproductive rights, normally the cornerstone of UNFPA rhetoric.

On the ground, however, it’s business as usual, and the locals know it. News photographs of WPD celebrations from Dehli, India, for example, bear captions quoting Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, saying: There is a need for small families as resources are limited and uncontrolled population may result in slower development. From Africa we are assured that, vis-a-vis WPD, “Family Planning is an investment in the people’s needs and the needs of the population. It’s a win-win situation.”

The United Nations, in the person of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, has even proclaimed, “individuals have a basic right to determine freely and responsibly the number and timing of their children,” adding, “Millennium Development Goal 5, improving maternal health, affirms this right.”

The minds behind World Population Day understand that top-down population control has too much bad press. Places like China and Peru have shown the world what coercive population policies really look like, and the results are ugly and violent.

http://www.crosstalkblog.com/wp-admin/media-upload.php?post_id=3654&type=image&TB_iframe=1&width=640&height=669

They understand that in order to sell population control, it has to look like human rights. It has to look like choice. It has to look like help. It has to look like anything but what it really is.

Steven W. Mosher is the President of the Population Research Institute.
Colin Mason is the Director of Media Production at Population Research Institute.

Reprinted with permission.

Tom DeWeese: Green Jobs Don’t Exist in a Free Market

Al Gore stumps the nation spreading the virtues of going green, thrilled at the prospects of new industries that will crop up in the process. Of course, green jobs are the center of the scheme to enforce sustainable development. “We can shut down those old industries and yet be prosperous in the future as we protect the environment,” goes the mantra.

A large part of Obama’s $786 billion stimulus bill was devoted to green or renewable energy projects. Obama and his environmentalist hordes convinced Congress that the money would be used to create an army of home weatherizers, wind-turbine factory jobs and other employment opportunities that would help put to work the nearly 8 million people who have lost their jobs during the recession. “We know the jobs of the 21st century will be created in developing alternative energy,” Obama proudly proclaimed. This, of coursed, from a man who doesn’t know the difference between price and earnings or overhead and profit. Well, he doesn’t know shineola about the economy and job creation either.

Economic lesson number one: Government regulations do not create jobs. Private industry serving the wants and needs of the consumers create jobs. Period.

The reality is that after massive spending programs, not just from the stimulus program, but from energy bills, development bills, and economic packages over the past several years, all of which have poured billions into the “green” industries, alternative energy and the jobs that are supposed to go with them simply have not materialized.
The fact is, no more than 100,000 jobs have been created, economists say, and the prospects are for only modest growth for years to come. Jobs that have been created are for highly educated workers involved in basically experimental industries. There is virtually nothing for the lower educated, manual laborers who so desperately need work.

The answer for them has been the destruction of American industry jobs in the name of protecting the environment as the rustbelt grows. Those jobs have been deported to foreign nations. Of course, that does nothing to protect the environment, as the industries are just relocated. But, as with all “green” claptrap, the reality is destruction of our very prosperous way of life and the redistribution of our wealth to somebody else. Thanks Obama. Good job.

–Tom DeWeese, president of American Policy Center

Find out more at American Policy Center.

EPA Head Lisa Jackson’s Radical “Environmental Justice”

This video reveals the radical agenda of EPA head, Lisa Jackson.

Crosstalk Show Notes – Wednesday April 7

The following links will be referenced on today’s Crosstalk Show.

This is an article by our guest, Dr. E. Calvin Beisner, on the issue of ‘Social Justice’ and the bandwagon of the Evangelical Left.
http://www.crosswalk.com/11628346/

Here’s the “social justice” PSA put out by the Evangelical Left.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6aUtizKqKw

Here’s the article by Dr. Mark W. Hendrickson on the fallacy of ‘social justice.’

http://www.crosstalkblog.com/2010/04/dr-mark-w-hendrickson-on-the-social-justice-fallacy/

Here’s what the Evangelical Left calls “social justice.” Note the transsexual in the peach suit behind the homosexual clergy members.
http://www.theird.org/Page.aspx?pid=1022

The so-called Evangelical Left is crucial in the implementation of Barack Obama’s pro-abortion, pro-gay marriage, pro-socialist political program for America. In short, they are change agents with a job to do. Thanks to biblically illiterate Christians, they’re making a lot of inroads.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/07/01/obama.evangelicals/index.html

Dr. Beisner is national spokesman for the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation. They’re website can be found here. The website has many articles on the bogus science behind the global warming agenda.

http://www.cornwallalliance.org

U.N. Climate Chief Resigns

The climate sham is falling apart, and rather quickly. After suffering several major blows in recent weeks, global warming enthusiasts need more bad news like a hole in the head. But their getting more anyway: The lead U. N. climate official just announced his resignation. Read more here.

Global Warming Hoax Continues Its Meltdown

The news today is full of stories about the now exploded myth that the earth is burning up. Here are several good articles on the collapse of one of the biggest hoaxes ever perpetrated on the public.

The Hottest Hoax in the World

The Wall Street Journal on the Global Warming Meltdown

Many Meteorologists View Global Warming as Biggest Scam in History – Kansas City Star

Morano: New Eco-Fears Being Test-Marketed

As “global warming” and “climate change” have collapsed, the tireless tree huggers are test-marketing new crises to see what will catch fire in the public imagination.

Marc Morano of ClimateDepot.com wonders what will be the new catastrophe du jour. Read his post here.

A Moment of Illumination by Dr. Mark Hendrickson

Dr. Mark Hendrickson of the Center for Vision and Values at Grove City College writes about what happened when he entered the world of politically-correct Christmas lights. It’s definitely not pretty.

We’ve all had those sudden epiphanies where the proverbial light bulb clicks on and understanding comes into clear focus. I had one of those moments over the Christmas holiday season. In this case, the light bulb experience was literal as well as figurative.
Here is what happened:

My wife came home all excited because she had found strands of battery-powered Christmas lights to add some pizzazz to a couple of wreathes in our living room. The excitement gave way to glumness as soon as the “on” switch was turned. Instead of bright, cheery, Christmassy points of light, the LED bulbs emitted a pale, weird, sickly light of indeterminate bluish hue. Yuck!

Welcome to the dreary world of politically correct Christmas lights. Such wan, ghastly Christmas lights may bring joy to the hearts of worshipers of Gaia and those who put up “unity trees” instead of Christmas trees, but for those of us who are still quaint and old-fashioned enough to want a festive and joyous atmosphere in which to celebrate the birth of our Savior, those ugly-though-energy-efficient LEDs were a big humbug.

The austerity of a green future was apparent again when I turned on our new energy-efficient outdoor light on the back porch. I thought the new bulb must have already broken, because the twilight seemed as dark as it had before I flipped the switch. When I went outside to check, I saw that the light “worked.” The bulb was emitting about half the light that a match would provide. As most of you readers probably know already, these “modern” energy-efficient bulbs take time to warm up. Do environmentalists really believe that using bulbs that no longer give us instant illumination is progress?

Some of these wretched new bulbs also represent a retrograde step in terms of human safety. They contain mercury. For decades, we have searched for ways to lessen human exposure to this highly toxic element. Now our environmentally enlightened leaders have legislated a phase-out of tried-and-true incandescent bulbs in favor of bulbs that give inferior performance while posing a greater health hazard.

For those naïve enough to believe that environmentalism is about making the world more livable for humans, these new-fangled, pathetic excuses for light bulbs should suffice to correct that misapprehension. The greens want to punish us for having dared to convert Mother Earth’s raw materials into products that improve our quality of life so magnificently.

President Obama is a believer in this grim green Puritanism. During his presidential campaign he chastised the American people for our affluence, asserting moralistically, “We can’t drive our SUVs and, you know, eat as much as we want and keep our homes on, you know, 72 degrees at all times … and then just expect that every other country is going to say OK. You guys go ahead and keep on using 25 percent of the world’s energy, even though you only account for three percent of the population.”

The implication is that Americans have been piggish, hogging an unfair percentage of the world’s depleted resources. This view is flawed.

In the first place, we have consumed so much energy simply because we have been free to do so. Whenever countries adopt market economies—that is, when they protect property rights and protect legitimate (i.e., non-coercive, non-fraudulent) profit-seeking behavior—human productivity, energy consumption, and prosperity all rise in lockstep. It is NOT the United States’ fault that foreign governments so long impeded the economic freedom and concomitant energy consumption of their citizens.

Secondly, it is fallacious to view energy supplies as nearing exhaustion. In their book “The Bottomless Well,” Peter W. Huber and Mark P. Mills tell us that human beings consume approximately 350 Quads (a quadrillion BTUs) of energy per year. KNOWN (I’m emphasizing “known,” because more will surely be found) global coal deposits contain some 200,000 Quads of energy; oil shale deposits, 10 million Quads; uranium and its cousin elements contain even more; and the deuterium in the world’s oceans contains at least 10 trillion Quads of energy that will be unlocked when nuclear fusion technology is developed.

Since the Huber and Mills book was written, Brazil has found billions of additional barrels of recoverable oil off its shores. BP has found billions more in the Gulf of Mexico. Humans will never use all the energy that our energy-rich world contains.

Someday, our descendants will look back at the vigorous efforts of greens and liberals to keep us from developing the most economical forms of energy with bemusement and bewilderment. The energy is there. What would you rather do—tap in to nature’s bountiful supplies, or put up with light bulbs that don’t give instant light and the eerie, gloomy beams of politically correct light bulbs at Christmastime?

— Dr. Mark W. Hendrickson is an adjunct faculty member, economist, and contributing scholar with The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College.