On March 15, 2006, I posted the following article on this blog. Not a single word needs to be changed today, more than two years later, because it describes the identical travesty of ignorant and dishonest United States Senators heaping blame on others for the consequences of their own reckless and destructive policies.

A credit crisis has been spreading through the economic system.

The Nature of Environmentalism

In my previous post, “A Word to Environmentalists,” I wrote "the first step you need to take is to stop using the same word `environmentalist’ to describe both them [advocates of mass destruction and death] and you. So long as you do use the same word, people cannot help but think of you all in the same terms.”

The turmoil in the credit markets now emanating from the collapse of the housing bubble can be understood in the light of the theory of the business cycle developed by Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek.

In his July 1, 2007, New York Times Op-Ed piece, “Moving Beyond Kyoto,” Al Gore states:

A major demand of the environmental movement, put forward as essential to combating global warming, is the imposition of a massive rollback in global emissions of carbon dioxide accompanied by a freeze on such emissions at the sharply reduced level imposed.

In my last article, I urged everyone to say no to the hideous looking fluorescent light bulbs the environmentalists plan to force on us in the name of fighting global warming and “saving the planet.” I described the light bulbs as an entering wedge for further demands adding up to the sacrifice of our entire standard of living.

The environmentalists are pushing hideous looking fluorescent light bulbs of the kind shown here as a way to save electricity and thus reduce the need for power plants and resulting carbon emissions. The bulbs will thus allegedly help to save the planet from global warming and, therefore, the environmentalists argue, everyone should use them instead of the customary, incandescent bulbs.

The environmental movement has been doing its utmost to sabotage energy production since the 1960s, long before it was able to latch onto the prospect of global warming.

A bill has passed the House of Representatives giving a seat in Congress to the nation’s capital, the District of Columbia.

From the movie review “Casualties of China’s Transformed Economy” by Jeannette Catsoulis, in today’s Times:

Back in 1969, Henry Hazlitt’s Man Versus the Welfare State appeared. It was a valuable collection of essays, one of which was “Uruguay: Welfare State Gone Wild.”

It is customary for old-fashioned religion to threaten those whose way of life is not to its satisfaction, with the prospect of hell in the afterlife. Substitute for the afterlife, life on earth in centuries to come, and it is possible to see that environmentalism and the rest of the left are now doing essentially the same thing.

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently released the summary of its latest, forthcoming report on global warming. It’s most trumpeted finding is that the existence of global warming is now “unequivocal.”

CARACAS, Venezuela, Feb. 16 — Faced with an accelerating inflation rate and shortages of basic foods like beef, chicken and milk, President Hugo Chávez has threatened to jail grocery store owners and nationalize their businesses if they violate the country’s expanding price controls.

Forty-Five nations joined France in calling for a new environmental body to slow global warming and protect the planet, a body that potentially could have policing powers to punish violators.—AP, Feb. 5, 2007

When it comes to matters such as the theory of evolution and stem-cell research, so-called liberals—i.e., socialists who have stolen the name that once meant an advocate of individual freedom—ridicule religious conservatives for their desire to replace science with the dictates of an alleged divine power.

Summary

Globalization, in conjunction with its essential prerequisite of respect for private property rights, and thus the existence of substantial economic freedom in the various individual countries, has the potential to raise the productivity of labor and living standards all across the world to the level of the most advanced countries.

My last post showed how The New York Times promotes the Green party line. The one before that showed how it has supported the Red party line. Like a traffic light, The New York Times alternates between Red and Green.

The New York Times must have a guilty conscience about the continuous distortions of the news that appear in its pages. Evidence of this guilt is provided everyday in The Times’ claim that its “news and editorial departments do not coordinate coverage and maintain a strict separation in staff and management.”

Below are the headlines of four obituaries that have run in The New York Times. The first is that of the recent obituary of the Anti-Communist Augusto Pinochet. The next three are those of the obituaries of the Communist mass murderers Mao, Stalin, and Lenin. Please be sure to note how many are described as having ruled by terror.

On Sunday, December 10, General Augusto Pinochet of Chile died, at the age of 91. General Pinochet deserves to be remembered for having rescued his country from becoming the second Soviet satellite in the Western hemisphere, after Castro’s Cuba, and, like the Soviet Union, and Cuba under Castro, a totalitarian dictatorship.

Separating anatomy from what it means to be a man or a woman, New York City is moving forward with a plan to let people alter the sex on their birth certificate even if they have not had sex-change surgery.

In recent weeks, the New York City Board of Health has displayed a pattern of profound aggression against the citizens of New York City.

I’ve never had much use for Penn and Teller, a pair of comedians that I’ve seen from time to time on television and then have quickly turned off. But the other day, a reader of my blog, Mr. Robert Groot, a Canadian Ph.D. student, was kind enough to send me a link to their internet show on recycling.

It is very common for people to talk nowadays about environmental good and evil, but with virtually no explicit statement of the standards by which something is to be judged environmentally good or evil. People are unaware that a standard is always present and that there is more than one such standard. There are in fact two diametrically opposed and mutually exclusive standards of environmental good and evil. The following example will bring them out.

In the last 500 million years, there have been two ice ages at the same time that vastly higher carbon dioxide levels prevailed in the earth's atomosphere—up to 16 times the present level.

From The New York Times of October 31, 2006:

Dozens of people appeared before the city’s Board of Health yesterday, offering a largely favorable response to proposed restaurant regulations that would ban all but a minute amount of artificial trans fats in food preparation, and require some restaurants to post calorie counts on their menus and menu boards.

The New York City proposals, which have drawn attention across the country, would establish some of the most rigorous limits on trans fats in restaurants and set requirements for menu labeling more rigid than in any other American city.

To the accompaniment of much fanfare and hoopla, the British government has released Sir Nicholas Stern’s Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, a report that it commissioned but that it labels “independent.”