Dennis Miller on the O'Reilly Factor

"Climate-change diasters kill 300,000 a year"

That headline is a few weeks old but something I just read today. Incidentally, the misspelling of the "D" word was the Washington Post's, not mine. Here are the first two paragraphs of the story:

LONDON -- Climate-change disasters kill around 300,000 people a year and cause about $125 billion in economic losses, mainly from agriculture, a think-tank led by former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan reported Friday.

The Global Humanitarian Forum also estimated that 325 million people are seriously affected by climate change _ a number it says will double by 2030, as more people are hit by natural disasters or suffer environmental degradation caused by climate change.

I can assert with great confidence that the story and all of the numbers are clearly bogus but yet this is the CRAP that substitutes for real news these days.

The NDP and Durban 2

Lest we forget, the NDP fully desired for Canada to participate in this conference:

Pat Condell: Free Speech is Sacred

The Hypocrisy of the UN and Europe

Alan Dershowitz, a prominent American liberal, has a very different take on Israel than many of his compatriots. Thank goodness! He has published a compelling editorial about Israel's Right to Defend itself. Here's a snippet:

The firing of rockets at civilians from densely populated civilian areas is the newest tactic in the war between terrorists who love death and democracies that love life. The terrorists have learned how to exploit the morality of democracies against those who do not want to kill civilians, even enemy civilians. In one recent incident, Israeli intelligence learned that a particular house was being used to manufacture and store rockets. It was a clear military target since their rockets were being fired at Israeli civilians. But the house was also being lived in by a family. So the Israeli military phoned the house, informed the owner that it was a military target, and gave him thirty minutes to leave with his family before the house was attacked. The owner called Hamas, which immediately sent dozens of mothers carrying babies to stand on the roof of the house. Hamas knew that Israel would never fire at a home with civilians in it. They also knew that if, by some fluke, the Israeli authorities did not learn that there were civilians in the house, and fired on it, Hamas would win a public relations victory by displaying the dead civilians to the media. In this case, Israel did learn of the civilians and withheld its fire. The rockets that were spared destruction by the human shields were then used against Israeli civilians.

There have been three types of international response to the Israeli military actions against the Hamas rockets. Not surprisingly, Iran, Hamas, and other knee-jerk Israeli-bashers have argued that the Hamas rocket attacks against Israeli civilians are entirely legitimate, and that the Israeli counterattacks are war crimes. Equally unsurprising is the response of the United Nations, the European Union, Russia, and others who, at least when it comes to Israel, see a moral and legal equivalence between terrorists who target civilians and a democracy that responds by targeting the terrorists.

The most dangerous of the three responses is not the Iranian-Hamas absurdity, which is largely ignored by thinking and moral people, but the United Nations and European Union response, which equate the willful murder of civilians with legitimate self-defense pursuant to Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. This false moral equivalence only encourages terrorists to persist in their unlawful actions against civilians. The United States has it exactly right by placing the blame on Hamas, while urging Israel to do everything possible to minimize civilian casualties.

Something You Won't See on the Regular News

Hamas using ambulances with UN insignia to transport their able-bodied soldiers:

What's the UN saying about this? Nothing
What's the MSM (Mainstream Media) saying about this? Nothing

Man-Made Global Warming Shot Down

I just listened to a great interview on CKNW between host Jon McComb and guest Christopher Monckton. He discusses a very detailed technical paper he wrote for the American Physical Society. To hear the interview, click here and tune your media player to 35:40 and then later to 46:30.

Here's one key quote by Lord Monckton:

One of the most disfiguring parts of the deliberations of the UN's Climate Panel has been the insistence of the bureaucrats that run it that a particular orthodoxy shall be reflected in the scientific documents it produces. The scientists are not, repeat, not in charge of the UN Climate Panel. It is political representatives who agree on the final text and it is bureaucrats who prepare that final text for them after the scientists have all signed off the final version.

And when I got my final version of it and read through it I saw that these bureaucrats had inserted, among many other things, a table of figures in which, by ingenious manipulation of 4 decimal points, they had succeeded in exaggerating the contribution of melting ice sheets and glaciers - the sort of thing that Al Gore is always banging on about - not just a little exaggeration but a ten-fold exaggeration, a thousand percent exaggeration.

And so I wrote to the IPCC and said, "Look, once we've signed off on this document it is not for you to insert tables like this without our sanction and without having drawn our attention to it.

The UN: Leave Your Principles at the Door

Rwanda. Bosnia. Zimbabwe. East Timor. Darfur. Tibet. Burma. These are but a few in the long list of abysmal failures of the UN. Yet do you see the legions of Bush-haters counting up the bodies and human rights violations in these places? Nope. It's much easier to pick on the American government for actually trying to make a positive difference in the world.

Now the talking heads at the Dis-United Nations Convening Everyday (DUNCE) have once again raised their liberal flag and declared that Israel and Iran are no better or no worse than each other. Moral equivalency at all cost - just gotta love it!

Jonathan Kay provides an excellent summary of the completely useless institution that the United Nations has become.

The Diminishing Effects of Inflammatory Rhetoric

While out & about today I heard a discussion about this complaint from the Pivot Legal Society. When I got home I wrote this letter to CKNW's Sean Leslie, who read it on-air:

Sean, I listened to your discussion with "Mike" with great interest. While of course I have great empathy for those who are living in less than optimum conditions, I take great exception to the use of the phrase, "Human Rights Violation". Do people like Mike and those others on the Pivot Legal Society deliberately avoid keeping themselves apprised of what's going on outside the pampered borders of North America?

Thoughout Africa there is actual genocide occurring. In Tibet, people are being truly oppressed. In North Korea the citizens are literally starving.

Yet in Vancouver we have groups going to the UN, claiming Human Rights Violations over housing issues?!?!? Give me a break! One day perhaps these people will learn that if you're going to use stronger and stronger rhetoric, you better be able to back it up with facts that substantiate it. When you can't, you'll quickly learn the effects of the "Boy Who Cried Wolf" parable.

Human Rights Discussion (CBC Style)

On the recent edition of CBC radio's Sunday Edition program there was a long discussion about "Human Rights". I felt compelled to send them this letter:

While I found the thoughts of your two guests informative, it wasn't a very balanced discussion. Adding someone like Mark Steyn onto your panel would have made it a lot more interesting.

The basic flaw with the arguments your guests put forward is that they assume that the major human rights violators are just "friends waiting for their grievances to be resolved".

Does anyone REALLY think that dialogue and offers of friendship will ever resolve things with al Qaeda, Kim Jong-il in North Korea, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran, or Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe?

The truth is that in most cases these men must be imprisoned or killed before anything can actually change. Denying this basic fact has provided gainful lifetime employment for thousands in the UN but has also DIRECTLY resulted in the murders of millions of people and the ongoing oppression of millions of others.


Update: I just received this response from to my e-mail:

Thank you for your comments. They have been received by the program.

Reynold Gonsalves
Associate Producer
CBC Radio One, The Sunday Edition

Please note that emails sent to the program may be read onair as part of our Mail segment.

For more information about the program, you can check our website at:

http://cbc.ca/thesundayedition

And to it I responded with this:

Dear Reynold,

I certainly hope that letters such as mine will be read on-air. Being immersed in the trees of the CBC, as you are, I wonder if you're able to fully appreciate the forest that constitutes all Canadians in 2007. When right-of-centre people, even mildly right-of-centre people like me hear discussions on CBC Radio, you have no idea how many times we feel like pulling our hair out, frustrated that there's most often no one in the discussion that remotely represents anything other than a left or ultra-left viewpoint. If you were a private broadcaster then it's no one's business what's heard on-air but you are a public broadcaster, on-air through the tax dollars of everyone, and thus clearly should represent the public at large.

I'd love to be a a fly on the wall if you were to read my previous paragraph to your colleagues at the CBC. My guess is that many would laugh or scoff at it. This would speak volumes of exactly what I'm talking about.

Mark Steyn on the Iranian Hostage Taking

Further to what I just wrote about the CBC human rights discussion, Mark Steyn writes a brilliant article supporting exactly what I said. Yes, of course give peace & negotiations a chance. But the Iranians know that Britain, the EU, and the UN are unlikely to do anything more than mildly protest what's going on. What a pathetic way for Tony Blair to finish up his term as prime minister.

Also, could someone please send me links to articles on how the left-wing press, so quick to condemn the U.S. for everything, is condemning Iran for this? Their silence speaks volumes.

Update: Another interesting perspective from Victor Davis Hanson.