By Roger W. Gardner (Originally published at RadarSite)

Could this poor world of ours be any more topsy-turvy than it already is?

The United Nations, this once-relevant world body, this much heralded promise for the future of mankind has slowly but surely become little more than a pitiful spectacle of corruption and compromise. A monumentally ponderous and inept Tower of Babel filled with incompetents and villians, falling over one another to promote the evil machinations of petty tyrants and Islamist thugs.

And now, my friends, in this latest episode of this ongoing farce, we are obliged to suffer the national indignity of an arbitrary investigation into our American systems of social justice. We are going to be evaluated by special rapporteur Doudou Dieneto. He will be touring the US to see if we measure up to those universal standards of human rights — as exemplified by his native country of Senegal.

So, torn between laughter and tears, let’s take a quick look at this symbol of national integrity called Senegal.

Senegal
Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - 2003
Released by the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor
February 25, 2004

http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2003/27748.htm

Government forces were responsible for several deaths during the year, and several disappearances from previous years remained unsolved. At times, police tortured and beat suspects during questioning and arbitrarily arrested and detained persons. Prison conditions were poor. Impunity remained a problem.
Lengthy pretrial detention largely due to an overburdened judiciary is a problem. Human rights advocates and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)continued to report a decrease in arbitrary arrests and random violence in connection with the Casamance insurgency. The Government, at times, limited the freedoms of speech and association. Domestic violence and discrimination against women, female genital mutilation (FGM), child labor and trafficking in persons remained problems.
There were reports that rebel MFDC forces committed killings, torture, and rape.

http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/AFR49/002/2008/enSenegal/Gambia:

Intimidation/ fear of enforced disappearance: Yahya Danfa
Senegal/Gambia: Intimidation/ fear of enforced disappearance: Yahya Danfa

Topsy-turvy
world…

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We Americans are, for the most part, a tolerant people, willing to forgive and forget over time. Which is why, despite the best efforts of George W. Bush, America still enjoys positive, and mutually satisfying, relations with most other nations in the world.

For instance, take Japan. Over the last seventy years, the Japanese have given America several opportunities to develop a long-lasting and justifiable hatred for everything from and of Japan.

To start with, the Japanese attacked the U.S. military at Pearl Harbor on December 07, 1941, a day that will “live in infamy” and the day that brought America into World War 11, willing or not.

But the Japanese are a very clever and cunning people who learned that no nation stands a chance in a military confrontation with the United States. They also learned that Americans fancy all manner of electronic gadgetry such as cameras, high-fidelity music systems, televisions, VCRs, and the like, all of which can be manufactured in Japan for a fraction of the cost of producing said products in the United States.

As a result, brand names like Mitsui and Sony replaced Magnavox and Sylvania in the living rooms of the average American family.

Thus, while the Japanese were unable to subdue America with fighter planes, bombs, and Kamikaze pilots, they brought our proud nation to its knees with eight-track audiotapes and the remote control.

Despite the loss of jobs here at home, the American people understood that “free and open markets” are vital to our way of life. So we stuffed our resentments and bought more gadgets and goods from our newly minted allies in Japan.

Then came the Japanese assault on the American automobile industry.

After decades of driving Buicks, Studebakers, Chevies, and Fords, Americans suddenly found new car dealerships stocked with dozens of models bearing the names Toyota and Honda. Best of all, these cars were more gas efficient and durable, and less costly, than American cars.

Once again, America relied on open markets to serve the interests of the American people. Which is why Toyota is now the leading manufacturer of cars sold in America, while Ford and Chevrolet continue to lose market share while bleeding red ink.

But while America has graciously accepted Japanese dominance in certain technologies and products for 70 years, the latest assault on our way of life is so severe that it threatens to destroy all existing goodwill between the United-States and Japan, forever.

The notion of hostilities between the two nations, once unthinkable, now seems plausible.

You see, the December 7, 1941 “Day of Infamy” has been usurped by two new days of infamy, namely March 25 and 26, 2008.

On those dates, the Japanese government and people hijacked American baseball and caused two major-league, regular season games to be played on Japanese soil, rather than in America!

Repeat: Two official games between the World Champion Boston Red Sox and the Oakland Athletics were played in Tokyo, rather than in Fenway Park in Boston or McAfee Stadium in Oakland, California! Both games will count in the 2008 pennant races, despite the lack of American witnesses in the stands.

This travesty of money over sportsmanship has had a huge negative impact on American fans, especially those of us who live in California. This is so because the first pitch thrown in Japan was around 3 AM, Oakland time.

This time, the Japanese have just gone too far!

John W. Lillpop San Jose, California

johnlillpop@yahoo.com

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The United Nations conference in Bali, attended by some 10,000 participants and observers, is likely to make future generations conclude that ours was deranged to be discussing how humans could have any affect whatever on the climate. They will, in retrospect, agree that the global warming theory was a lie whose agenda was to retard anything that might extend and enhance life on earth.

The Protocol is based entirely on a lie that predicts dramatic and imminent global warming. Global warmers insist that carbon dioxide emissions must be reduced, but carbon dioxide does not cause climate change. Climatologists will tell you that any rise in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere does not precede, but follows warming cycles.

The science is well known, but hucksters like the odious Al Gore and those behind the original Kyoto Protocol, with the media as accessories, have created a climate of crisis.

It’s a very good thing that our Senate voted unanimously in 1997 against binding America to the United Nations Kyoto Protocol on Climate Control and that both the Clinton and Bush Administrations refused to act on the proposed limits. The reason for the Senate resolution was to avoid “serious harm to the economy of the United States.” 

A November 30 Bloomberg News article by Kristian Rix and Mathew Carr reported that Japan, Spain, and Italy face as much as $33 billion in fines as the result of having agreed to reduce so-called “greenhouse gas” emissions and failed. These three nations are deemed the “worst performers among 36 nations that agreed to curb carbon dioxide gases that cause climate change.”

Among the nations exempt from the Kyoto Protocol are China and India, both of whom represent two of the six billion people on planet Earth. The idea that limits on carbon dioxide emissions could be achieved without their participation is idiotic.

Carbon dioxide (CO2) plays a minor role in determining the Earth’s climate but at the same time plays an essential role in the maintenance of all of the Earth’s vegetation, whether it takes the form of crops, jungles, forests, and just someone’s front lawn. Without CO2 all animal life, including our own dies because of its dependence on food crops.

The Earth’s atmosphere is composed of 78% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen, 0.93% argon, 0.038% carbon dioxide, and trace amounts of other gases, including water vapor. We call this “air” and, humans depend on the oxygen content for life. At the same time all six billion of us individually exhale about two pounds of carbon dioxide every day. By contrast, Nature emits about 30 times more CO2 than humans. The oceans of the world absorb and release CO2 all the time. This is Nature’s balance that maintains all life, animal and vegetable, on earth.

Consider now how many schools, hospitals, bridges, roads, and other benefits to their citizens that $33 billion represents to Japan, Spain, and Italy. Such fines will be transferred to the coffers of the United Nations for having failed to curb CO2 emissions that are actually a benefit to the Earth!

An entirely bogus system of “carbon credits” has been created to transfer huge amounts of money from industrialized nations accused of producing too much CO2 to those nations that, for lack of development—failed economies—will garner funding as they “sell” their excess credits. The same system would allow various industries to sell the same worthless credits to those—primarily producers and users of energy—deemed to be major CO2 “polluters.”

Even though the U.S. Supreme Court has fallen prey to the lie that CO2 represents a form of “pollution” and should be regulated, the known science renders this decision an egregious juridical error

The Earth, over billions of years, has gone through cycles of warming and cooling that are well established. It has gone through periods when the CO2 content in the atmosphere was far higher than today. The latest cooling period is called the mini-ice age and lasted from around 1300 to 1850. The Earth has been warming naturally since then.

There is no dramatic warming occurring. Predictions of this are based on totally flawed computer models, none of which can begin to approximate the sheer chaos and complexity of the Earth’s weather system.

These computer models, put forth by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Control, have been repeatedly revealed to be inaccurate to the point of deliberate deception. The constant assertion that there is a “consensus” among scientists that global warming is caused by humans is yet another part of the lie.

As the anti-capitalist forces meet in Bali, the rest of us must demand that we shall not be penalized and threatened by limits imposed on industries and agriculture around the world.

The people of the world must not submit to a lie of global warming that is intended to deprive them of the future benefits that energy use, improved transportation, technological innovations, and the expanded production of food portends.

Alan Caruba writes a weekly column, “Warning Signs”, posted on the Internet site of The National Anxiety Center, www.anxietycenter.com. He also maintains a blog at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com.

© Alan Caruba, December 2007

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