Posts filed under 'United Nations'
Yep, nothing more important than getting the United States back on the side of butchering unborn children, because that is the loving and merciful thing to do, right?
Supporters of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) are confident that President-elect Barack Obama will reverse the Bush administration’s 2002 decision to stop the $40 million it received in U.S. funding. The policy was instated because of UNFPA’s support for China’s one-child policy, which includes coercive abortion practices.
Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D – N.Y.) said the funding will be approved by the Democratic majority Congress. Her comments came while speaking Wednesday at a press conference at the National Press Club where the 2008 U.N. report on world population was released.
“You know the president will have to do nothing,” said Maloney. “He will just have to let the will of Congress go through. One of the changes is that UNFPA will be funded,” CNSNews.com reports.
The Bush administration in 2002 had stopped funding the organization, citing the Kemp-Kasten Amendment which prohibits funds from being available to organizations or programs determined to be supporting or participating in coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization programs.
In July of 2008, Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte announced that for the sixth year in a row, the government had determined that “UNFPA provides support for and participates in the management of the Chinese government’s program of coercive abortion and involuntary sterilization.”
And I know that all of you, my fellow Americans, are delighted that in some small way we, too, will be involved in forced abortions and sterlizations in China. When we think about the poor, frightened woman being forced to have an abortion, we can take real pride in being Americans, can’t we?
Oh, the joys of a liberal, Democratic Administration - with such advances in the battle for equality for women and death for children, can federally funded abortion on demand be far behind?
Tags: abortion, China, culture of death, Culture of Life
November 18th, 2008
Consider this a long-range, opening shot in an elitist attempt to justify an eventual Obama Administration foreign policy:
Quite apart from their unhappy consequences, all these invocations of Munich begin by rewriting history. Chamberlain was a democratic leader who knew that most of his people understandably did not want to go to war in 1938, only 20 years after another terrible war in which about three-quarters of a million British men had been killed.
Besides which, Chamberlain was far from alone in thinking that he was addressing a real grievance. The one accurate thing about Kagan’s quaint comparison is that the residents of the breakaway Georgian region of South Ossetia no more want to be ruled by Georgia today than the Sudeten Germans wanted to be ruled by the Czechs 70 years ago.
While it’s lamentably true that German resentment at “the slave treaty of Versailles” following World War I helped bring Hitler to power, there is another inconvenient truth: Between the wars, British and American liberals almost universally believed that the post-1918 settlement had been unjust. H.N. Brailsford, the leading leftist English commentator on foreign affairs, had written in 1920 that, of all the Versailles treaty’s redrawing of borders, “the worst offence was the subjection of over three million Germans to Czech rule.” Experience seemed to show that nationalism was the great force of the age and that it needed to be assuaged — or appeased, a word first used, it should be remembered, by those who advocated doing so.
To be sure, Churchill denounced the Munich agreement in a resonant speech: “This is only the first sip, the first bitter foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in olden time.” But he was speaking as someone untroubled by any sympathy for national self-determination.
In other words, Munich wasn’t a bad deal, in and of itself…the Sudenten Germans were just going for national self-determination, Hitler’s Germany had a legitimate interest in the fate of the Sudentenland, Czechoslovakia had no business ruling the Sudentenland, Germans were justly outraged over the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles…later in the piece, the author also notes that Churchill was opposed to Indian independence, and thus didn’t have a leg to stand on when he argued that Britain must support democratic Czechoslovakia.
In all my time of reading on matters of history and politics, I’ve never seen a better example of pure, unadulterated, ignorant bullsh**.
The principles at stake in the Munich talks weren’t the fate of the Sudenten Germans, the Republic of Czechosolovakia, the validity of the Treaty of Versailles or, even, the worth of democracy and national self-determination - all of these were raised, by Hitler and those who wished to appease him, in order to cover up the fact that the issue was collective security against unprovoked aggression. It was felt, post-WWI, that had Imperial Germany been confronted with the entire anti-German coalition of 1918 in 1914, Germany would have been restrained from launching its war of aggression against France and Russia. The League of Nations was set up to commit all the powers concerned to come to the defense of any power or group of powers threatened by un-provoked attack. Churchill, at the conclusion of the Munich, was not so much aghast at the loss of Czechoslovakia (though, in a purely military sense, the loss of Czech military power and bases was a catastrophe for the Anglo-French alliance), but at the fact that Hitler was assured by the Anglo-French alliance that un-provoked aggression would not be thwarted. When Chamberlain, 9 months later, asserted that Britian would stand by Poland if she were attacked by Germany, Hitler justifiably considered this to be a worthless statement, and thus World War Two was assured.
What is wanted here? A justification for a surrender to Putin’s imperial ambitions and Iran’s desire for nuclear weapons and the export of Jihad designed to eventually destroy Israel. This will also be applied to any Chinese demand upon Taiwan and any continued nuclear blackmail by North Korea - and, indeed, any and all demands made upon the West, and the United States, by anyone who ranges himself against same. While Obama’s asinine statement that he’ll meet with tyrants without pre-conditions has caused consternation among the wise, people of the left are delighted with the idea - viewing the West in general, and the United States in particular, as the source of the world’s ills (just as apologists for tyrants in the 1930’s so identified the West in general and the British Empire in particular), the demands of tyrants - as long as they are anti-Western and especially anti-American - are entertained as legitimate voices which must be accommodated in the interests of peace and justice.
We must not un-learn the lesson of Munich - we must assert, always and everywhere, that un-provoked aggression will be met, and defeated, regardless of cost. And, no, what we did in Iraq wasn’t un-provoked aggression and any attempt here to equate liberating Iraq and selling out Czechoslovakia is the attempt of a fool - and a wicked fool, into the bargain. This is, unfortunately, which is being stored up for us and which will be unleashed under an Obama Administration - the elites of the world are desirous of a world in which the United States is weakened, tyrants strengthened and more and more of the decisions of the world are taken out of the hands of the people and placed in the hands of elites, who will travel to various Munichs around the world and slowly but surely sell us all into slavery, just so long as the elites can remain on top, and in extreme wealth and comfort.
They on the left have been slavering after this for ages, and in Obama they see their big chance - an ignorant man who will be easily manipulated into doing whatever the elite wishes to do. To imagine that Obama - who seems to not have an iota of foundation in world affairs and history - will be able to prevent well-informed elites from imposing on him a policy of appeasing tyrants is to hope against all available evidence. For the sake not just of the United States but of the people of the world - and especially those people of the world, our brothers and sisters, who labor under tyranny - we must prevent Obama from coming to power…he make for us a bitter cup of misery and eventual world war, and perhaps ultimate defeat. We can stop this by the mere fact of keeping him out of office - or we can allow it by mere fact of not working hard enough for victory.
Tags: conservative truth, Defeaticrats, Obama Deceptions
September 28th, 2008
Because abstractions are incapable of acting. People act, as Victor Davis Hanson notes regarding Senator Obama’s latest MSM leg-tingler:
With all due respect, I also don’t believe the world did anything to save Berlin, just as it did nothing to save the Rwandans or the Iraqis under Saddam — or will do anything for those of Darfur; it was only the U.S. Air Force that risked war to feed the helpless of Berlin as it saved the Muslims of the Balkans. And I don’t think we have much to do in America with creating a world in which “famine spreads and terrible storms devastate our lands.” Bad, often evil, autocratic governments abroad cause hunger, often despite rich natural landscapes; and nature, in tragic fashion, not “the carbon we send into atmosphere,” causes “terrible storms,” just as it has and will for millennia.
Perhaps conflict-resolution theory posits there are no villains, only misunderstandings; but I think military history suggests that culpability exists — and is not merely hopelessly relative or just in the eye of the beholder. So despite Obama’s soaring moral rhetoric, I am troubled by his historical revisionism that, “The two superpowers that faced each other across the wall of this city came too close too often to destroying all we have built and all that we love.”
I would beg to differ again, and suggest instead that a mass-murdering Soviet tyranny came close to destroying the European continent (as it had, in fact, wiped out millions of its own people) and much beyond as well — and was checked only by an often lone and caricatured US superpower and its nuclear deterrence. When the Soviet Union collapsed, there was no danger to the world from American nuclear weapons “destroying all we have built” — while the inverse would not have been true, had nuclear and totalitarian communism prevailed. We sleep too lightly tonight not because democratic Israel has obtained nuclear weapons, but because a frightening Iran just might.
The world will not come together. It won’t solve our problems. We, people, have to actually get out there and do things…if what is meant by “the world” is a UN resolution condemning the crime of Darfur, then that is worse than doing nothing…what is needed is for those oh, so liberal people out there to find someone like Kitchener and send a punitive expedition to the Sudan to force the Sudanese government to stop being a bunch of inhuman savages. You want to “free Tibet”? Then gather yourself money and arms and infiltrate Tibet and start to set up revolutionary cells to expell the Chinese invaders. You want to help the poor? Then you can at least donate some money to Missionaries of the Poor…if you’re waiting for “the world” to do it, you’ll be waiting a long time. Its up to you, ya see?
The high flown rhetoric of Obama hides nothing - and not in the sense that Obama’s got nothing to hide; he’s hiding the fact that there’s nothing there. Under a President Obama we’ll have many, many meetings in many, many ritzy areas of the world and we’ll hear from many, many people telling us of the plight of this or that people or thing…and money will be appropriated and Nobel Prizes awarded…and nothing will have been done, because people didn’t actually go and do something about the problem. We had during the 8 years of Clinton lots of talk of doing things and not much action - and the worst offenders are those very same European elites who hail Obama as the man to lead the world…it was the Europeans, after all, who sat on their hands and talked about doing something in Yugoslavia as the horrors of World War Two were repeated, nightly, on their television sets.
What we want in a President is a man who will do something - McCain is that man. He won’t wait for the UN to have a conference, but will dive right in looking for a practical solution that actual people can carry out in a short amount of time. All through Obama’s thought runs the idea that we’ll do things, one day, after we’ve talked about them, for a while…all of McCain’s thought is centered on what we can do, right now, to make things better for people. Think about it for a moment - who has done more for others: the Marine in Anbar or the head of the UN High Commission on Human Rights? The one does, the other talks. Talk is, as they say, cheap.
And so, my friends, is Obama - just a man who moralises on the cheap and never puts himself out to actually do something. Afraid of his own shadow, Obama hides behind a mountain of words which sound sweet in the ears of those who want others to do the heavy lifting…but which disgust anyone who has ever done anything.
UPDATE: Gerard Baker has a hilarious send up of the Obama phenonema. A sample:
And it came to pass, in the eighth year of the reign of the evil Bush the Younger (The Ignorant), when the whole land from the Arabian desert to the shores of the Great Lakes had been laid barren, that a Child appeared in the wilderness.
The Child was blessed in looks and intellect. Scion of a simple family, offspring of a miraculous union, grandson of a typical white person and an African peasant. And yea, as he grew, the Child walked in the path of righteousness, with only the occasional detour into the odd weed and a little blow.
When he was twelve years old, they found him in the temple in the City of Chicago, arguing the finer points of community organisation with the Prophet Jeremiah and the Elders. And the Elders were astonished at what they heard and said among themselves: “Verily, who is this Child that he opens our hearts and minds to the audacity of hope?”
Read the whole thing.
July 25th, 2008
Close it down. Implode it. Sow the ground with salt - just make certain that once we kill the UN, it stays dead:
The United Nations will send nearly a quarter of a million condoms into cyclone-hit Myanmar to help needy survivors with no access to contraceptives, a UN official says.
So far, the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) said it had sent 72 800 condoms to survivors struggling to maintain their family planning after the storm hit in early May.
A total of 218 400 condoms would be delivered, UNFPA aid advisor Chaiyos Kunanusont said.
“We don’t want regular use of contraception disrupted. An emergency usually damages the health system, so people don’t have access to condoms and contraceptives,” said Chaiyos.
Who even thought about this? I want that person found and locked up as a raving lunatic…
Tags: birth control, culture of death, liberal lies
May 21st, 2008
Something I’ve been thinking about for a while:
Americans and Europeans share a common goal - to build an enduring peace based on freedom. Our democracies today are strong and vibrant. Together we can tackle the diverse challenges we face, whether radical religious fanatics who use terror as their weapon of choice, the disturbing turn towards autocracy in Russia or the looming threats of climate change and the degradation of our planet.
But the key word is “together”. We need to renew and revitalise our democratic solidarity. We need to strengthen our transatlantic alliance as the core of a new global compact - a League of Democracies - that can harness the great power of the more than 100 democratic nations around the world to advance our values and defend our shared interests.
At the heart of this new compact must be mutual respect and trust. We Americans recall the words of our founders in the Declaration of Independence, that we must pay “decent respect to the opinions of mankind”. Our great power does not mean we can do whatever we want whenever we want, nor should we assume we have all the wisdom and knowledge necessary to succeed.
We need to listen to the views and respect the collective will of our democratic allies. When we believe that international action is necessary, whether military, economic or diplomatic, we will try to persuade our friends that we are right. But we, in return, must also be willing to be persuaded by them. (emphasis added)
I’m guessing that it was more than 10 years ago that I first thought up my proposed successor to the UN - the Union of Democratic States. The flaw in the UN is that it includes within it nations with completely opposite points of view. To have the United States in tandem with the People’s Republic of China doesn’t mean you’ve got a body to resolve global issues, but a body where the most dishonest and intransigent will get their way. Fundamentally, there is no community of interests between the people of the United States of America and the government of the People’s Republic of China - there is such a community of interests between the people of the US and the people of China, but the people of China don’t count; their government doesn’t allow them to count.
A properly functioning global body would have in it only those nations which are solid democracies - not because they’d all agree (you’ll note how much agreement there is between the US and France, for instance), but because they have a common mechanism for determining policy - the votes of the people. The Chinese government is adding to the blood and suffering of Darfur in order to make a grab at Sudan’s oil resources…do the people of China want this to happen? Almost certainly not - but they also almost certainly don’t know its happening, and even if they did make any attempt to protest it would result in, at the minimum, police harrassment. The benefit of democracy isn’t that it creates truth - it is that it allows truth a chance to come out. The problem with tyranny is not that it creates lies, but that it enforces their acceptance. Between truth and lies, there is no prospect of a resolution - when you combine a truth with a lie you don’t really get a half-truth, you get a whole lie. Tryannical regimes are based on lies and can only thrive as long as their lies are protected.
It is true that the government of a fellow democracy might try to deceive us, but given that it is a democracy, we can rely upon it that the diligent political opposition - looking for any means to tear down the party in power - will unearth the truth and broadcast it far and wide, thus allowing us, on our side, to adjust our actions to fit reality. If China were to deceive us, how absent a spy or a defector would we find out? Only when it was too late. The democracies of the world must gather together and present a united face to tyranny - and, amongst themselves, work out in reason and peace the issues which vex our world. In this conception of John McCains, so similar to one I’ve had for a long time, I find another reason to back him in November.
(Side Note: Yeah, his views on climate change get on my nerves, but I’m pretty sure that the next couple years will provide the data demonstrating that the alarmists are, well, using alarmism quite improperly, and this data will, in turn, prevent any climate change actions detrimental to our economy and liberty. The point is becoming moot)
Tags: League of Democracies
March 21st, 2008
Interesting, and a bit scary:
NEW YORK — How big do you have to be to earn the wrath of the United Nations and Internet giant Google?
If you’re journalist Matthew Lee, all it takes are some critical articles and a scrappy little Web site.
Lee is the editor-in-chief, Webmaster and pretty much the only reporter for Inner City Press, a pint-sized Internet news operation that’s taken on Goliath-sized entities like Citigroup since 1987.
Since 2005, he’s been focusing almost entirely on stories that deal with internal corruption inside the U.N., posting several stores online almost daily.
He’s been especially interested in the inner workings of what could be called the practical-applications arm of the international organization, the United Nations Development Programme.
Many of Lee’s stories were featured prominently whenever Web users looked for news about the U.N. using the powerful Google News search engine, a vital way for media outlets both large and small to get their articles read.
But beginning Feb. 13, Google News users could no longer find new stories from the Inner City Press.
“I think they said, ‘If we can’t get this guy out of the U.N., let’s disappear him from the Internet,’” Lee said.
It began with an innocuous-sounding yet chilling form letter from Google to Lee, e-mailed on Feb. 8:
“We periodically review news sources, particularly following user complaints, to ensure Google News offers a high quality experience for our users,” it said. “When we reviewed your site we’ve found that we can no longer include it in Google News.”
Lee believes - with justification - that the UN has pressured Google (or, perhaps, found a friendly ear in Google’s leadership) to remove a thorn from the UN’s side. This is not the way the internet is supposed to work - its supposed to be, in large measure, a free-for-all of information with little or no filters. If you don’t like what someone is saying, fire back with your own words, and let the internet community decide who makes the better case. Its disturbing that a corrupt and moribund organization appears to have enough pull to de-facto censor and independent voice.
I believe this calls for a Congressional investigation - we need to find out if the UN is acting improperly against its critics, and whether or not Google is playing fair with news sources.
Tags: freedom of the press, Inner City Press, internet censorship, UN corruption
February 19th, 2008
