Arrested for Preaching About Homosexuality

This, of course, is a fundraising video, but the reality it talks about (no free speech for people critical of homosexuality) is endemic. The situation in the U.S., with our First Amendment, is better in strict legal terms, but bullying, harassment and intimidation from the gay lobby can achieve the same thing here that arrests can in the U.K.

[Update]

The Huffington Post ran a reasonably unbiased article on this incident, but note the level of vitriol directed against not only the street preacher, but also Christianity in general, in the comments.

Global Warmist’s Fraud: More

From Reason.com:

If the theory of man-made global warming were such a self-obvious truth, the result of scientific consensus, then why do advocates for this idea keep committing frauds to advance it? Even more disturbing, why are some writers willing to defend this behavior?

The latest embarrassment for global-warming activists came on Feb. 20 after Peter Gleick, founder of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security in Oakland, admitted that he committed fraud to obtain documents he thought would embarrass a conservative think tank that has been a leading debunker of some of the overheated claims of the climate-change Chicken Littles.

The memos, which reveal the group’s political and fund-raising strategies, provided little to embarrass the Chicago-based Heartland Institute, but it has damaged the reputation of a man who was a respected intellectual in the environmental world. Gleick, a MacArthur Foundation “genius” fellow, doesn’t seem brilliant now, as he takes a leave of absence from the institute, faces public embarrassment and possible prosecution. (Heartland claims that one memo was fabricated, although Gleick denies that charge, but the scandal could get uglier.)

In fact, it’s quite clear that the memo was forged, although it’s possible somebody besides Gleick forged it and fed it to him.

But even after Gleick admitted and apologized for his action, Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik defended him: “It’s a sign of the emotions wrapped up in the global warming debate that Gleick should be apologizing for his actions today while the Heartland Institute stakes out the moral high ground.”

“Peter Gleick lied, but was it justified by the wider good?” asked James Garvey of the British Guardian newspaper. He compared Gleick’s action to that of a man who lied to keep his friend from driving home drunk. “What Heartland is doing is harmful, because it gets in the way of public consensus and action,” he argued. “If his lie has good effects overall—if those who take Heartland’s money to push skepticism are dismissed as shills, if donors pull funding after being exposed in the press—then perhaps on balance he did the right thing. . . . It depends on how this plays out.”

In his view, anything that gets in the way of “consensus” — i.e., everyone agreeing with Garvey — is dangerous, so why not cheat, as long as it “has good effects”? Let’s reserve judgment based on how it plays out.

What would these people argue if a conservative who argues that, say, public-sector unions are bankrupting the state, pulled a similar fraud to get his hands on documents from union officials? Would they be defending that? Of course not. These writers are advancing a Machiavellian political agenda, not advancing a consistent ethical principle.

When it comes to global warming, the ends apparently justify the means. People from all political persuasions do stupid things to advance their cause, but what bothers me most are respectable people who justify behavior they would never tolerate from their foes. That type of ideological fanaticism is corrosive of our democratic society.

It’s easy to chide the hypocrisy of Gleick. He had been the chairman of an ethics committee for a scientific association. His column blasting dishonesty still sits on his institute’s Web site. It’s harder to explain away his deceit as a mere aberration in the climate-change drama.

In the “Climategate” scandal in 2009, “Hundreds of private email messages and documents hacked from a computer server at a British university are causing a stir among global warming skeptics, who say they show that climate scientists conspired to overstate the case for a human influence on climate change,” according to a New York Times report from the time. The emails showed that the scientific community is so invested in this climate-change ideology for financial and ideological reasons that it rather cook the numbers than level with the public about the reality of the threat. A follow-up release of emails in 2011 provided even more evidence supporting skeptics’ claims.

In this scandal, Gleick created a bogus email account in which he pretended to be a Heartland board member. Then he contacted the organization and asked for documents from a recent board meeting. He released them on the Internet anonymously and to journalists while claiming to be a Heartland insider, according to the institute’s explanation.

Although he offered his regrets, Gleick’s mea culpa was laden with excuses: “I only note that the scientific understanding of the reality and risks of climate change is strong, compelling, and increasingly disturbing, and a rational public debate is desperately needed. My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts—often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated — to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate, and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved.”

How do you base a “rational public debate” on deceit?

It’s not as if the documents added anything to the debate. They didn’t show any enormous investment by big corporations. They proved, as one writer noted, that donors give money to organizations whose work they endorse. What a revelation. Isn’t that what happens on the environmental side, also?

Marc Gunther of The Energy Collective admitted that “the leaked Heartland documents didn’t prove very much.” He slammed allies in the global-warming movement for praising Gleick and comparing him to a whistleblower. Clearly, not all believers in man-made global warming defend the indefensible.

But there is something about global warming that attracts the “ends justify the means” crowd. It’s the same fraudulent ideology that California’s state government has embraced as it implements a first-in-the-nation cap-and-trade program that won’t do a thing to cool our state, but will raise taxes on businesses and drive many of them elsewhere. Advocates of AB32 were hardly fonts of honesty and rational debate.

Hey, if Planet Earth is in danger, then anything goes in the political realm also. That ideology is far scarier to me than a little warmer weather.

The global warming crowd resembles nothing so much as an apocalyptic cult. If they were just walking around with sandwich boards emblazoned with “the world is coming to an end!” they would be benign enough.

But these particular fanatics have a lot of political power, and are intent on imposing their apocalyptic vision on the entire society, using the power of the state.

Global Warmists: Lie, Cheat, Steal

From Real Clear Politics, an account of how supporters of man-made global warming are willing to do about anything to promote the cause.

The promoters of the global warming hysteria never really recovered from Climategate, the release of e-mails and data which demonstrated that climate insiders were using questionable data, promoting misleading arguments, and conspiring to block dissenting views from the scientific literature. It was a fatal blow to the credibility of the warmists, and it has been followed by a steady stream of distinguished scientists standing up publicly to withdraw their backing from the global warming “consensus.” The latest example is an op-ed by sixteen such scientists in the Wall Street Journal, followed up by a devastating response to their critics.

The global warming alarmists are losing the argument, and the latest scandal—James Delingpole calls it Fakegate—shows just how desperate they have become.

This was supposed to be a scandal that would undermine the global warming skeptics. In fact, it was supposed to be an exact parallel of Climategate, but this time discrediting the Heartland Institute, a pro-free-market think tank in Chicago that has been a leader in debunking the global warming hysteria.

Someone calling himself “Heartland Insider” released a series of internal documents from Heartland. On the whole, the documents were unremarkable. They revealed that a think tank which advocates the free market and is skeptical of global warming was raising money to, um, advocate the free market and promote skepticism of global warming. As Delingpole put it, “Run it next to the story about the Pope being caught worshipping regularly in Rome and the photograph of a bear pooping behind a tree.”

But there was one document, a “confidential strategy memo” that provided more inflammatory material, including an admission that one of Heartland’s programs is aimed at “dissuading teachers from teaching science.” See, those evil global warming deniers really are anti-science!

But if you are an actual global warming skeptic, this is a big red flag, because we skeptics view ourselves as the defenders of science who are trying to protect it from corruption by an anti-capitalist political agenda. We never, in our own private discussions, refer to ourselves as discouraging the teaching of science. Quite the contrary.

This is the dead giveaway that the “confidential strategy memo” is a fake, and that is what the real scandal has become. The Atlantic blogger Megan McArdle helped break this open with an initial post raising questions, as well as a detailed follow-up. McArdle gets a little too far into the weeds of information technology, not to mention grammar and English usage, but the basic issue is that the “meta-data” in the Heartland files—data marking when the documents were created, on what machines, in what format, and in what time zone—don’t match. Most of the documents were created directly as PDFs from a word-processing program, while the supposed “confidential strategy memo” was printed and then scanned. The genuine Heartland files were created weeks earlier in the central time zone, while the incriminating memo was created very shortly before the release of the documents and in the Pacific time zone. This corroborates Heartland’s claim that the document is a fake.

McArdle also points out that the “confidential strategy memo” consists almost completely of facts and wording lifted from the other files, with the inflammatory quotes pasted in between in an inconsistent style. Moreover, some of the facts from the other files are used inaccurately. For example, the memo claims that money from the Koch brothers—central figures in any good leftist conspiracy theory—was being used to support Heartland’s global warming programs, when it was actually earmarked for their health-care policy work. That’s something a real Heartland insider would know; only a warmist creating a fake document would get it wrong.

So it was pretty obvious that the “confidential strategy memo” was not a Heartland document at all but a fraud pasted together after the fact by someone who wanted to discredit Heartland, but who didn’t know enough about IT to cover his tracks.

Note one other thing: how this fraud self-consciously tries to recreate every aspect of the Climategate scandal, projecting those elements onto the climate skeptics. Climategate had: a) an insider who leaked information, b) private admissions of unscientific practices, like misrepresenting the data to “hide the decline” in global temperatures, and c) discussions of attempts to suppress opposing views. Further scandals that followed on from Climategate included one more element: d) using material from non-scientists in activist groups to pad out scientific reports for the UN.

The fake Heartland memo tried to re-create all of this. It was posted to the Web by someone who called himself “Heartland Insider.” It contains admissions of things like opposing the teaching of science. It includes discussion of attempts to exclude global warming alarmists from the media, particularly an attempt to oust a fellow named Peter Gleick, described in the memo as a “high profile climate scientist,” from his Forbes blog, because “This influential audience has usually been reliably anti-climate and it is important to keep opposing voices out.” And it describes a program to hire a “paid team of writers” to “undermine the official United Nation’s [sic] IPCC reports.” So this has all of the elements of Climategate, but in mirror image.

But it is all a lie. It took bloggers mere days to spot the document as a fake and less than a week to find the person who posted it and the other Heartland documents. He turns out to be...Peter Gleick, a climate scientist who is president of the left-leaning Pacific Institute. It’s actually kind of pathetic, when you think about it. What gave Gleick away was the little touch of self-aggrandizement, the fact that he couldn’t resist over-inflating the significance of his Forbes blog. In his own mind, clearly, he is the one man whose bold opposition keeps the Heartland leadership awake at nights.

So the “leaker” wasn’t an insider, Heartland has not been exposed as anti-science, and it is not conspiring to silence opposing voices. In fact, days before the documents were posted, Heartland had asked Gleick to participate in a debate, and he refused the invitation. Oh, and those “paid writers” who were supposed to “undermine” the UN climate reports? They were actually a team of distinguished scientists who were compiling their own independent climate research.

After he was caught, Gleick confessed, but he’s still trying the “modified limited hangout”: confess to a small crime in the hope that this will mollify investigators and they won’t dig up evidence of your big crime. So Gleick has confessed to obtaining the genuine Heartland documents through deceptive means. (He called Heartland posing as a member of the institute’s board and talked a gullible junior staffer into sending him the handouts for an upcoming board meeting.) But he still maintains that the fake “confidential strategy memo” was sent to him by an anonymous source, and that he only obtained the Heartland documents in an attempt to verify the memo.

This won’t hold up, because Gleick still doesn’t understand the meta-data that tripped him up. The fake strategy memo was created about a day before the documents were released, which appears to be well after Gleick pilfered the genuine documents. That fits with McArdle’s impression that the fake memo was created by cutting and pasting facts from the other documents. Which implies that Gleick was the forger.

All of this will come out, and in a much fuller way than in the Climategate scandal. With Climategate, the victim of the fraud was the public, which pays the salaries of the scientists who have been fudging the facts. But this means that the government and its scientific institutions were put in charge of the investigation, and they had a vested interest in whitewashing the story. In this case, the victims are Heartland and other independent scientists whose reputations were impugned by the forged document. They have a good criminal and civil case against Gleick for identity theft, fraud, and defamation, and they will be able to use the courts’ subpoena power to dig into Gleick’s computer records and get to the whole truth. So he’s now going to suffer the same fate as John Edwards: admit part of his wrongdoing but cover up the rest, then be forced to admit more, then a little bit more. It’s the most ignominious way to go down.

Which means, for us skeptics, that it’s time to pass around the popcorn and enjoy the show.

Oh, and it gets better. Some global warming alarmists are lining up to defend Gleick. Judith Curry points to the blog where Gleick posted the fake memo, which is now declaring, “For his courage, his honor, and for performing a selfless act of public service, [Gleick] deserves our gratitude and applause.” Another warmist adds that Gleick “is the hero and Heartland remains the villain. He will have many people lining up to support him.”

I certainly hope so. A lot of people deserve to go down along with Gleick.

Even many of those who deplore Gleick’s fraud are still willfully blind to its implications. In Time, Bryan Walsh laments that “Worst of all—at least for those who care about global warming—Gleick’s act will almost certainly produce a backlash against climate advocates at a politically sensitive moment. And if the money isn’t already rolling into the Heartland Institute, it will soon.” So yet another warmist has been exposed as a fraud—and the worst thing that can happen is that this will reduce the credibility of the warmists? But they deserve to lose their credibility.

Fakegate shows us, with the precision of a scientific experiment, several key truths about the global warming movement. It shows that most warmists, both the scientists and the journalists, will embrace any claim that seems to bolster their cause, without bothering to check the facts or subject them to rigorous investigation. (Anthony Watts notes how few journalists bothered to contact him before reporting the claims about him that are made in the fake memo.) And it shows us that warmists like Gleick have no compunction about falsifying information to promote their agenda, and that many other warmists are willing to serve as accomplices after the fact, excusing Gleick’s fraud on the grounds that he was acting in a “noble cause.” It shows us that “hide the decline” dishonesty is a deeply ingrained part of the corporate culture of the global warming movement.

Gleick wasn’t just an obscure, rogue operator in the climate debate. Before his exposure, his stock in trade was lecturing on “scientific integrity,” and until a few days ago he was the chairman of the American Geophysical Union’s Task Force on Scientific Ethics. So this scandal goes to the very top of the global warming establishment, and it compels honest observers to ask: if the warmists were willing to deceive us on this, what else have they been deceiving us about?

Between Climategate and Fakegate, the warmist establishment now has zero credibility, and we must call all of their claims into question.

The Sociology and Politics of Global Warming

From Front Page Magazine:

At the end of last year, the media widely trumpeted the “recantation” by Richard Muller, a physics professor at Berkeley. Muller’s confession of faith was met with the unreserved glee of fanatics who believe that conversion equals validation of the True Faith. Now Dr. Fritz Vahrenholt, a prominent German chemistry professor and green activist, announced that he is coming out with a book breaking with the Warmist view. Naturally, this recantation wouldn’t receive nearly the same prominence, except when the inevitable stories kick in about Vahrenholt being a tool of the oil companies.

But set aside the partisan bickering, and one professor accepting a view he had formerly rejected, while another rejects a view he had formerly accepted, is all part of the normal scientific debate. The journey from hypothesis to rock solid consensus is a long one, and it doesn’t end just because Al Gore makes a documentary or a few ads show crying polar bears. Positions are argued, minds change and then a century later the graduate students have fun mocking the ignorance of both sides. That’s science.

Unfortunately, the Cult of Warm doesn’t accept that there is a debate. As far as they are concerned, the debate never happened because it never needed to happen because they were always right. They can’t intelligently address dissent, because their science is not based on discovering the evidence needed to lead to a consensus, but on insisting that there is a consensus and that accordingly there is no need to debate the evidence.

In an ordinary scientific debate, a professor leaving one side and joining another might occasion some recriminations and name calling, but it wouldn’t make him anathema. But like being gay or Muslim, hopping on board the Warm Train makes you a permanent member, and there is no room for changing your mind. Once a Warmist, always a Warmist. That’s not a rational position, but then the Cult of Warm is not a rational faith.

Scientific debates have often had big stakes for human philosophy, but Global Warming is one of the few whose real world implications are as big as its philosophical consequences. At stake is nothing less than the question of whether the human presence on earth is a blight or a blessing, and whether every person must be tightly regulated by a global governance mechanism for the sake of saving the planet.

The Warmists have pushed their agenda through with alarmist claims and hysteria. They have flown jets around the world to argue that everyone must be taxed for their carbon footprint. They have smeared and intimidated anyone who stood up to them. That is not the behavior of people arguing over numbers. It’s a battle of much larger ideas.

If you believe that freedom is at the core of what it means to be human, then the Warmists and what they stand for are instinctively repulsive to you. On the other hand, if you believe that human society must be organized into a moral collective for the betterment of all, then the Warmist idea provides a wake up call compelling us to form into ranks and goose step in recycled rubber boots into the green future.

It’s an exaggeration, but that’s what debates over the proper role of man tend to become. We don’t fight wars over temperature gradients. The passions on both sides are motivated by much larger issues. This isn’t science, it’s the continuing battle over industrialization, the modern society and the rights of the individual dressed up in the garb of theory. And just as a debate over the IQs of minorities will never be a dispassionate inquiry, neither will a debate over whether the world would be better off if we never existed– which is the theme of the environmentalist movement.

The place of man in the university not a question that science can answer, but like so many other controversial issues in the past, it can be aided by manufacturing a scientific consensus that supports one position or another. Nor would this be the first time that science was used in this fashion. It takes a great deal of humility to look outward without prejudging what is out there. When that humility is lacking, then instead of seeing what is out there, the learned doctors and professors come away seeing what is inside them instead.

That unfortunately is what the debate is actually about. The world is not in any danger, but human beings are, as usual, wrangling over their theories of how the world should be.

The debate is not a purely philosophical one. As with all debates about the nature of man, there’s a creed and money at stake. If the Warmists win, then the environmentalist movement takes another step forward to creating a post-religious spiritual crisis for which they have the solution, and a mandate for virtually unlimited power over mankind, over every nation and every individual. That power translates into concrete wealth, which many of the “experts” are already experiencing. But their investments are on the ground floor of what is supposed to be a “green” revolution which will see everyone taxed to save us from ourselves.

It’s hard to be dispassionate when the success or failure of your theory has tremendous implications for your career, your wealth, the status of your field and the triumph of your worldview over all mankind. People have murdered for less. Forging a few graphs and demonizing the opposition is small potatoes by comparison.

A creed needs a crisis. An “If This Goes On” warning that ends in doom, Armageddon and cats and dogs living together in sin. Without an actual deity, the only curses available to environmentalists are those of science. And so they pronounce their curses in science’s name, which is an inconvenience when they fail to come true. An inconvenience that damages the credibility of actual research. But having cast aside reasoned inquiry, the Cult of Warm has no use for science except as a totem to wave over the crowd. They don’t want to be the seekers for knowledge, but the exclusive possessors of absolute truths. And that isn’t how science works.

Like Wall Street, Global Warming has gotten too big to fail. Too many prominent names have committed to it. Too many serious people have nodded their heads and accepted it as an obvious truth, who would be unacceptably embarrassed if it were proven that the whole thing was nothing more than a giant prank. Too many business leaders and governments have invested serious money into it to just shake it off. And much of American and European policy-making is now routed through Global Warming.

No matter what research emerges, the edifice of the lie cannot be allowed to come down. It might be reshaped a little, chiseled on the side, painted over in places, but it can never be toppled, because too much else would come down with it. Global Warming has become the Berlin Wall not only of the left, but of the entire establishment.

If the Cult of Warm were to come tumbling down, then the first victim of it would be the technocratic society built on an unreasonable confidence in experts and Harvard men who always know what they’re doing and know how to do it better than we do. Suddenly all those smart people would no longer seem so smart at all and our Republic of the New Deal and New Frontier would be revealed for a cluster of corrupt gullible idiots who are no better at running things than anyone else would be in their place.

The worst thing you can call a presidential candidate is stupid, not because they aren’t — most of them are — but because the present regime is built on convincing us that we have surrendered our freedom to a meritocracy of the best and the brightest. People who don’t make mistakes because they have gone to all the right schools, read all the right books and nod in all the right places. If people were to realize that their only actual skill is convincingly arguing positions based on talking points with no ability to think outside the box or evaluate the merits of the system, rather than the argument, then the regime would never be the same again.

The way the system actually works is that experts tell leaders what to think, the leaders tell the lobbyists what to think, the lobbyists tell the advisers, who tell the politicians, and then the politicians get up on stage, beam their brightest smile, and tell us what to think. Compared to the absurdity of this pipeline foisting a disastrous philosophy on the world in the name of saving the planet from humanity, discovering that all the banks were playing with imaginary money is positively benign.

Global Warming is not just a failure of a sizable chunk of the scientific establishment to put theory before ideology, it represents a failure of the entire process by which the West has been governed for a frightening number of years. It is a demonstration of how a handful of people in prominent positions can push through otherwise unacceptable measures by manufacturing a crisis and pipelining it through business and government. It’s a hack of our entire system of government.

If you understand the implications of that, then you begin to understand the consequences of it for the progressive technocracy and its mindless elitism that uses opinion leaders to drive actual leaders and has entire agencies dedicated to influencing opinion leaders. If Warmism fails, then it all fails. There will be no mobs in the street or squares filled with protesters, instead the entire infrastructure whose entire purpose is not to look stupid, will suddenly look very stupid.

Stupid leaders might not be too much of a problem in a democracy where people are entitled to elect any idiot they want, but it’s unacceptable in a technocracy where the leaders may win elections, but mostly they win the consensus of the elites. If the elites and their technocracy no longer amount to anything, then the emperor is naked, and suddenly elections might start mattering again.

Yet More Dissent on Global Warming

From the Wall Street Journal, a statement signed by sixteen eminent scientists:

In September, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ivar Giaever, a supporter of President Obama in the last election, publicly resigned from the American Physical Society (APS) with a letter that begins: “I did not renew [my membership] because I cannot live with the [APS policy] statement: ‘The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.’ In the APS it is OK to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?”

In spite of a multidecade international campaign to enforce the message that increasing amounts of the “pollutant” carbon dioxide will destroy civilization, large numbers of scientists, many very prominent, share the opinions of Dr. Giaever. And the number of scientific “heretics” is growing with each passing year. The reason is a collection of stubborn scientific facts.

Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now. This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 “Climategate” email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.” But the warming is only missing if one believes computer models where so-called feedbacks involving water vapor and clouds greatly amplify the small effect of CO2.

The lack of warming for more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause. Faced with this embarrassment, those promoting alarm have shifted their drumbeat from warming to weather extremes, to enable anything unusual that happens in our chaotic climate to be ascribed to CO2.

“But” the warmists will say, “there is a scientific concensus supporting anthropogenic global warming.”

But “science” is hardly the pristine enterprise the naïve think.

Although the number of publicly dissenting scientists is growing, many young scientists furtively say that while they also have serious doubts about the global-warming message, they are afraid to speak up for fear of not being promoted—or worse. They have good reason to worry. In 2003, Dr. Chris de Freitas, the editor of the journal Climate Research, dared to publish a peer-reviewed article with the politically incorrect (but factually correct) conclusion that the recent warming is not unusual in the context of climate changes over the past thousand years. The international warming establishment quickly mounted a determined campaign to have Dr. de Freitas removed from his editorial job and fired from his university position. Fortunately, Dr. de Freitas was able to keep his university job.

This is not the way science is supposed to work, but we have seen it before—for example, in the frightening period when Trofim Lysenko hijacked biology in the Soviet Union. Soviet biologists who revealed that they believed in genes, which Lysenko maintained were a bourgeois fiction, were fired from their jobs. Many were sent to the gulag and some were condemned to death.

Why is there so much passion about global warming, and why has the issue become so vexing that the American Physical Society, from which Dr. Giaever resigned a few months ago, refused the seemingly reasonable request by many of its members to remove the word “incontrovertible” from its description of a scientific issue? There are several reasons, but a good place to start is the old question “cui bono?” Or the modern update, “Follow the money.”

Alarmism over climate is of great benefit to many, providing government funding for academic research and a reason for government bureaucracies to grow. Alarmism also offers an excuse for governments to raise taxes, taxpayer-funded subsidies for businesses that understand how to work the political system, and a lure for big donations to charitable foundations promising to save the planet. Lysenko and his team lived very well, and they fiercely defended their dogma and the privileges it brought them.

Speaking for many scientists and engineers who have looked carefully and independently at the science of climate, we have a message to any candidate for public office: There is no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to “decarbonize” the world’s economy. Even if one accepts the inflated climate forecasts of the IPCC, aggressive greenhouse-gas control policies are not justified economically.

Anybody who thinks the scientists who signed the statement are somehow marginal or unqualified, should read the list of the names and positions.

The simple fact is that “climate scientists” are just a bunch of professors. And like other people (but much more so) the are subject to the influence of ideology, professional self-interest and groupthink.

No Free Speech in Canada

Hate Speech Laws Work Both Ways: Muslims Arrested for Dissing Pope

From Breitbart:

ROME (AP) - Italian police on Friday arrested six Moroccan men suspected of inciting hatred against Pope Benedict XVI for converting a Muslim journalist in Italy to Catholicism.

Stefano Fonsi, head of Brescia police’s anti-terrorism squad in northern Italy, said the suspects allegedly banded together and met privately with the goal of stirring up religious hatred against non-Muslims, including the pope.

Investigators say they found literature exhorting Muslim immigrants against integrating into Italian society and saying the pope should be punished for having baptized the journalist during an Easter vigil ceremony in St. Peter’s Basilica.

The investigation grew out of security checks ahead of a pastoral visit by Benedict to Brescia in 2009, but authorities insisted that their probe revealed no plot against the pontiff or other terrorism aims.

Brescia Prosecutors Fabio Salmone said there was “absolutely no” indication that the group had attacks in mind. “I rule that out,” he told reporters. “There wasn’t even a plan” to organize attacks, he said.

In 2008, Egyptian-born journalist Magdi Allam angered some Muslims by becoming a Catholic. After being baptized, he changed his name to Magdi Cristiano Allam. He had built a career in Italy as a newspaper commentator and author attacking Islamic extremism and supporting Israel.

We consider hate speech laws an outrage, and think they should exist nowhere.

Happily, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that they can’t exist in this country.

But if there are going to be such laws, we want them enforced not only against people who verbally attack politically correct victim groups (blacks, gays, feminists, Muslims) but also against people who attack politically incorrect groups (conservative Christians, whites, males).

Hate speech laws, of course, are part of a leftist agenda to shut up speech that liberals and leftists disapprove of. And so long as they can, with impunity, shut up speech they disapprove of, they will continue to do so -- sometimes by actually punishing people who utter politically incorrect speech, and sometimes by simply chilling politically incorrect speech with the threat of punishment.

But this is a prisoner’s dilemma.

If the left knows that they themselves may be punished for their own hateful speech, they are likely to back off a bit on the issue.

Madison Protesters Shout Down Fox News Segment

Campus Fascism at the University of California, Irvine

Muslim students, taking their cues from 60s campus leftists, shout down a speaker whose views they disagree with.

(Sorry, but you’ll have to put up with a short commercial going in.)

Witchhunt: Global Warming Believers Attack and Threaten Skeptics

This is not new, but we just ran across it. From Climate Depot, an account of how a blogger at Talking Points Memo asked “At what point do we jail or execute global warming deniers. . . . Shouldn’t we start punishing them now?”

A public appeal has been issued by an influential U.S. website asking: “At what point do we jail or execute global warming deniers.” The appeal appeared on Talking Points Memo, an often cited website that helps set the agenda for the political Left in the U.S. The anonymous posting, dated June 2, 2009, referred to dissenters of man-made global warming fears as “greedy bastards” who use “bogus science or the lowest scientists in the gene pool” to “distort data.”

The Talking Points Memo article continues: “So when the right wing fucktards have caused it to be too late to fix the problem, and we start seeing the devastating consequences and we start seeing end of the World type events - how will we punish those responsible. It will be too late. So shouldn’t we start punishing them now?”

The article also claims the “vast majority” of scientists agree that man-made warming “can do an untold amount of damage to life on Earth.”

The full text of the Talking Points Memo is reproduced below:

(Note: The entry is posted under the anonymous byline “The Insolent Braggart”)

At what point do we jail or execute global warming deniers

June 2, 2009, 9:42PM

What is so frustrating about these fools is that they are the politicians and greedy bastards who don’t want a cut in their profits who use bogus science or the lowest scientists in the gene pool who will distort data for a few bucks. The vast majority of the scientific minds in the World agree and understand it’s a very serious problem that can do an untold amount of damage to life on Earth.

So when the right wing fucktards have caused it to be too late to fix the problem, and we start seeing the devastating consequences and we start seeing end of the World type events - how will we punish those responsible. It will be too late. So shouldn’t we start punishing them now?

We are happy to report that the blogger in question repented and apologized. Unfortunately, some things are hard to take back. The fact that you said it in the first place is damning. Further, the retraction seemed to be because (in the blogger’s words) “I did true harm to this site, as well as the cause of global warming research.”

Would he have repented if his tirade had helped the movement?

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg (so to speak). Some of the other goodies include:

Climate Depot Editor’s Note:

The Talking Points Memo appeal to execute skeptics is not unique. As the science behind man-made global warming fears utterly collapses, many of the biggest promoters of the theory and environmental activists are growing increasingly desperate. Looming Question: If the promoters of man-made climate fears truly believed the “debate is over” and the science is “settled,” why is there such a strong impulse to shut down debate and threaten those who disagree?

Small sampling of threats, intimidation and censorship:

NASA’s James Hansen has called for trials of climate skeptics in 2008 for “high crimes against humanity.”

Environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. lashed out at skeptics in 2007, declaring “This is treason. And we need to start treating them as traitors”

In 2009, RFK, Jr. also called coal companies “criminal enterprises” and declared CEOs “should be in jail... for all of eternity.”

In June 2009, former Clinton Administration official Joe Romm defended a comment on his Climate Progress website warning skeptics would be strangled in their beds. “An entire generation will soon be ready to strangle you and your kind while you sleep in your beds,” stated the remarks, which Romm defended by calling them “not a threat, but a prediction.”

In 2006, the eco-magazine Grist called for Nuremberg-Style trials for skeptics.

In 2008, Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki called for government leaders skeptical of global warming to be thrown “into jail.”

In 2007, The Weather Channel’s climate expert called for withholding certification of skeptical meteorologists.

A 2008 report found that “climate blasphemy” is replacing traditional religious blasphemy. In addition, a July 2007 Senate report detailed how skeptical scientists have faced threats and intimidation.

In 2007, then EPA Chief Vowed to Probe E-mail Threatening to “Destroy” Career of Climate Skeptic and dissenters of warming fears have been called “Climate Criminals” who are committing “Terracide” (killing of Planet Earth) (July 25, 2007)

In addition, in May 2009, Climate Depot Was Banned in Louisiana! See: State official sought to “shut down” climate skeptic’s testimony at hearing.

Below are many more examples of the threats, name calling and intimidation skeptics have faced in recent times.

November 12, 2007: UN official warns ignoring warming would be “criminally irresponsible” Excerpt: The U.N.’s top climate official warned policymakers and scientists trying to hammer out a landmark report on climate change that ignoring the urgency of global warming would be “criminally irresponsible.” Yvo de Boer’s comments came at the opening of a weeklong conference that will complete a concise guide on the state of global warming and what can be done to stop the Earth from overheating.

September 29. 2007: VA State Climatologist skeptical of global warming loses job after clash with Governor: “I was told that I could not speak in public” Excerpt: Michaels has argued that the climate is becoming warmer but that the consequences will not be as dire as others have predicted. Gov. Kaine had warned. Michaels not to use his official title in discussing his views. “I resigned as Virginia state climatologist because I was told that I could not speak in public on my area of expertise, global warming, as state climatologist,” Michaels said in a statement this week provided by the libertarian Cato Institute, where he has been a fellow since 1992. “It was impossible to maintain academic freedom with this speech restriction.” (LINK)

Skeptical State Climatologist in Oregon has title threatened by Governor (February 8, 2007) Excerpt: “[State Climatologist George Taylor] does not believe human activities are the main cause of global climate change...So the [Oregon] governor wants to take that title from Taylor and make it a position that he would appoint. In an exclusive interview with KGW-TV, Governor Ted Kulongoski confirmed he wants to take that title from Taylor.

Skeptical State Climatologist in Delaware silenced by Governor (May 2, 2007) Excerpt: Legates is a state climatologist in Delaware, and he teaches at the university. He`s not part of the mythical climate consensus. In fact, Legates believes that we oversimplify climate by just blaming greenhouse gases. One day he received a letter from the governor, saying his views do not concur with those of the administration, so if he wants to speak out, it must be as an individual, not as a state climatologist. So essentially, you can have the title of state climatologist unless he`s talking about his views on climate?

October 28, 2008: License to dissent: “Internet should be nationalized as a public utility to combat global warming skepticism - Australian Herald Sun - Excerpt: British journalism lecturer and warming alarmist Alex Lockwood says my blog is a menace to the planet. Skeptical bloggers like me need bringing into line, and Lockwood tells a journalism seminar of some options: There is clearly a need for research into the ways in which climate skepticism online is free to contest scientific fact. But there is enough here already to put forward some of the ideas in circulation. One of the founders of the Internet Vint Cerf, and lead for Google’s Internet for Everyone project, made a recent suggestion that the Internet should be nationalized as a public utility. As tech policy blogger Jim Harper argues, “giving power over the Internet to well-heeled interests and self-interested politicians” is, and I quote, “a bad idea.” Or in the UK every new online publication could be required to register with the recently announced Internet watchdog...

November 5, 2008: UK Scientist: “BBC SHUNNED ME FOR DENYING CLIMATE CHANGE” – UK Daily Express
Excerpt: FOR YEARS David Bellamy was one of the best known faces on TV. A respected botanist and the author of 35 books, he had presented around 400 programmes over the years and was appreciated by audiences for his boundless enthusiasm. Yet for more than 10 years he has been out of the limelight, shunned by bosses at the BBC where he made his name, as well as fellow scientists and environmentalists. His crime? Bellamy says he doesn’t believe in man-made global warming. Here he reveals why – and the price he has paid for not toeing the orthodox line on climate change.

U.N. official says it’s “completely immoral” to doubt global warming fears (May 10, 2007)
Excerpt: UN special climate envoy Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland declared “it’s completely immoral, even, to question” the UN’s scientific “consensus.”

Former US Vice President Al Gore compared global warming skeptics to people who “believe the moon landing was actually staged in a movie lot in Arizona”
(June 20, 2006)

Gore Refuses to Hear Skeptical Global Warming Views (Video)

UK environment secretary David Miliband said “those who deny [climate change] are the flat-Earthers of the twenty-first century.”(October 6, 2006)

Weather Channel Climate Expert Calls for Decertifying Global Warming Skeptics

(January 17, 2007) Excerpt: The Weather Channel’s most prominent climatologist is advocating that broadcast meteorologists be stripped of their scientific certification if they express skepticism about predictions of manmade catastrophic global warming. This latest call to silence skeptics follows a year (2006) in which skeptics were compared to “Holocaust Deniers” and Nuremberg-style war crimes trials were advocated by several climate alarmists.

Barone: Warmists have “a desire to kill heretics” -- Calls for capital punishment for “global warming deniers” - DC Examiner - June 9, 2009

Strangle Skeptics in Bed! “An entire generation will soon be ready to strangle you and your kind while you sleep in your beds” - June 5, 2009

In theory, none of this proves that anthropogenic global warming isn’t happening. After all, fanatics are sometimes right.

But in reality, fanaticism makes us doubt the empirical judgments of the fanatics. It makes us suspect that they are driven by some inner lust for righteousness, purity and orthodoxy that distorts their assessments of facts.

Add to this the fact that people who are confident of their position generally seek discussion and debate, and tolerate people who have different views.

Obviously, not all believers in anthropogenic global warming are fanatics. A lot are simply people who go along with what they have been told.

But the fanatics are not marginal figures (see above). A movement that creates such fanaticism has to be viewed with skepticism.

Mark Steyn: Hate Speech About Islam?

Below is a video interiew with Mark Steyn, a fellow who has been in trouble with Canadian “human rights” authorities for “hate speech.” These authorities have the power to punish people for things they say.

The interview is worth watching all the way through — a total of four parts. Particularly interesting is the discussion of how “Muslim” now trumps “gay” and “female” among the politically correct.

And also, how Christian civilization is the bulwark protecting free societies.


See Parts 2, 3 and 4 here.

Yet Another Liberal Attack on Free Speech

From the Radio Business Report:

Claiming that precious metal peddler Goldline uses conservative broadcast talkers to whip audiences into a frenzy about upcoming financial catastrophe and then sells them gold as a hedge, at inflated prices, Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) is calling for investigations by the SEC and the FTC. Although several personalities are named, TV/radio talker Glenn Beck is Weiner’s prime target.

Naming names: According to a report released by Weiner, “Fred Thompson, Dennis Miller, Mark Levin, Laura Ingraham, Lars Larson, Michael Smerconish, Monica Crowley and Mike Huckabee are all paid spokespeople for Goldline.” Beck was a spokesperson too, but had to relinquish that role to conform to Fox News policy, but Goldline remains a major advertiser on his FNC program. [emphasis added]

According to the report, “On numerous occasions, Glenn Beck has dedicated entire segments of his program to explaining why the U.S. money supply is destined for hyperinflation with Barack Obama as president. He will often promote the purchase of gold as the only safe investment alternative for consumers who want to safeguard their livelihoods. When the show cuts to commercial break, viewers are treated to an advertisement from Goldline.”

Weiner commented, “Goldline rips off consumers, uses misleading and possibly illegal sales tactics, and deliberately manipulates public fears of an impending government takeover – this is a trifecta of terrible business practices. It’s unacceptable that this company is preying on public fears to sell its products.”

An odd statement, coming from a politician. Those are the people who make a business of “preying on public fears” to get themselves reelected.

The misleading tactics boil down mainly to two, according to Weiner. First, he says that the gold the company sells is marked up 90% above melt value on average, meaning the value of the gold would almost have to double for the buyer to break even. Further, he says salespersons represent themselves as financial advisors, but they are not licensed as such. Weiner believes that is a misrepresentation.

Beck discussed Weiner’s attack on his Premiere Networks radio show, calling it part of a smear campaign engineered against himself and Goldline by the Obama administration. He wondered if other organizations besides those airing conservative talkers, and running Goldline ads, would also be targeted.

Beck also said that his money is where his mouth is on this one. “If my people that do financial advising — because I’m worth — you don’t listen to me for financial advice and that’s why I’ve said don’t — I buy it not as an investment. I buy it as insurance policy. If my people, my advisors would allow me to buy 50%, I’d have 50% of my savings in gold. But they all say that’s nuts. 10%, no more than 10%, no more than 10%. I think I have 15? 15, maybe 20% of mine in gold. From Goldline. Now, you tell me. If I’m such a scam artist, why would I be scamming myself?”

According to Politico, Goldline also responded. Goldline president and CEO Mark Albarian said, “It feels like it’s politically motivated in that neither the Congressman nor anybody from his office ever contacted executives from the company to really ask the important questions that they need to ask to understand this business.” He claimed that Weiner “doesn’t get” the gold business and suggested that the company’s relationship with Beck was the true motivation for the attack.

Goldline, by the way, has an A+ rating from the Better Business Bureau.

We don’t think gold is a particularly good investment. Indeed, we would not buy bullion at the melt value (even if we actually had the money to do so). But it’s not government’s job to second guess what investors want to do. If there were actual fraud -- if the company didn’t deliver the product it promised -- government would have a right to intervene.

But just disagreeing about where investors should put their money is a different matter.

It can’t possibly be an accident that Weiner has picked on a company that advertises on conservative outlets. This is simply another case of liberals in government using their power to try to shut up voices they don’t like.

That’s just not consistent with free republican government. Indeed, as government power increases, free speech necessarily becomes more precarious.

Another Example of How Liberals Don’t Believe in Free Speech

Milwaukee Democratic Party: Amend the Constitution to Take Away Free Speech for Corporations

Of course, the left has been livid about the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case, in which a conservative majority on the Supreme Court ruled that corporations do have First Amendment Free Speech rights.

(Of course, Free Speech rights for the corporations that own the New York Times, NBC, ABC, CBS and CNN are something liberals fully believe in.)

But how do you reverse the effects of the ruling? A group called Move to Amend wants to amend the Constitution of the United States to take free speech rights away from corporations.

So what sort of people and groups are involved in Move to Amend?

Code Pink is there. So are the National Lawyers Guild and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. The two latter were, during the Cold War, flat-out Communist fronts (although we know little about their recent history). A perusal of the right-hand panel of their webpage will make it obvious that this is the moonbat left.

But then who locally is endorsing them?

The Milwaukee County Democratic Party!

They have sent an e-mail to a mailing list called “announce@milwaukeedems.org.” E-mails to bad addresses go back to: “announce-bounces@milwaukeedems.org.”

And yes, Milwaukeedems.org is the Democratic Party of Milwaukee County!

The e-mail, and the web page to which is links, are moonbatty to the extreme.

The e-mail, for example, suggests that citizens take action against the Supreme Court ruling.

Hold a Funeral for Democracy!

Organize a mock funeral outside your closest federal building, with mourners, music, speakers, and eulogies for democracy. Let everyone know that the U.S. judiciary has made democracy illegal by granting away our rights to corporations. Take video to post on YouTube, invite the media, and make sure your political officials are invited to speak in memory of democracy.

The web page linked in the e-mail has some other rather “interesting” suggestions for activism.

Do you live in the hometown or attend the alma mater of one of the Corporate Five?

Organize a rally/circulate a petition and send a press release to the media declaring your town/college is disowning the Justice as an embarrassment and disgrace to democracy. Send the Justice a “Certificate of Disownment”.

Then there is this:

Present a Corporate Megaphone Award “for Calling the Shots”

Go visit with the CEO of a big corporation in your community and congratulate him/her on receiving all the power they need to set the agenda for America, to drown out the voices of everyday Americans and to take the pesky responsibility for self-governance out of the hands of We the People. Present a big oversized golden megaphone to make your point, and take a nice photo or video!

Of course we expect any Democratic Party organization to lean to the left. But we wouldn’t expect such an organization to embrace the radical left so openly, nor show such a fondness for guerrilla theater.

Of course, maybe they did not intend to do it “openly.” A search of their website turns up nothing about the drive to amend or the organization Move to Amend. But maybe it’s taking them a while to update the site. Or maybe they sent out the e-mail, hoping that it would not become known beyond a narrow cadre of hard leftists on their list.

An attempt to contact the Democratic Party of Milwaukee County for comment was not immediately successful.

Global Warming Fascism: A Roundup

ClimateGate, much in the news recently, is a scandal that erupted when a bunch of e-mails from a British climate center were leaked, showing scientists literally conspiring to cook data to support the idea of global warming, conspiring to withhold data from critical scrutiny, and to prevent the publication of views they didn’t like.

While it has made a big splash only recently, it is merely an outcropping of something that has been around for years.

A climate “concensus” in the political and scientific communities has taken on the character of a relgious dogma, with heretics being fired, banished, threatened or shunned.

A web page called Stifling Decent (pun intended), by Roger King, has the details. They are hair-raising.

The Truth About the Town Hall Meetings

Some thoughts from Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal:

What has been most unsettling is not the congressmen’s surprise but a hard new tone that emerged this week. The leftosphere and the liberal commentariat charged that the town hall meetings weren’t authentic, the crowds were ginned up by insurance companies, lobbyists and the Republican National Committee. But you can’t get people to leave their homes and go to a meeting with a congressman (of all people) unless they are engaged to the point of passion. And what tends to agitate people most is the idea of loss—loss of money hard earned, loss of autonomy, loss of the few things that work in a great sweeping away of those that don’t.

People are not automatons. They show up only if they care.

What the town-hall meetings represent is a feeling of rebellion, an uprising against change they do not believe in. And the Democratic response has been stunningly crude and aggressive. It has been to attack. Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the United States House of Representatives, accused the people at the meetings of “carrying swastikas and symbols like that.” (Apparently one protester held a hand-lettered sign with a “no” slash over a swastika.) But they are not Nazis, they’re Americans. Some of them looked like they’d actually spent some time fighting Nazis.

Obama to Dissenters: Shut Up

Most liberals know better than to overtly say, “we don’t like free speech,” and “free speech has to end.”

Admittedly, in some liberal enclaves (English and Philosophy departments, Education schools) liberals will say that. But they are so far out of the mainstream that they say fascist things without even realizing it.

But deep down, liberals can’t help thinking “the world would be so much better if all those evil people who oppose us were shut up.”

And sometimes, they let it slip out.

Free Speech Under Attack in the “Free World”

From the Washington Post, an article about the increasing tide of censorship in what have traditionally been known as “free” countries.

Among the new blasphemers is legendary French actress Brigitte Bardot, who was convicted last June of “inciting religious hatred” for a letter she wrote in 2006 to then-Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, saying that Muslims were ruining France. It was her fourth criminal citation for expressing intolerant views of Muslims and homosexuals. Other Western countries, including Canada and Britain, are also cracking down on religious critics.

Emblematic of the assault is the effort to pass an international ban on religious defamation supported by United Nations General Assembly President Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann. Brockmann is a suspended Roman Catholic priest who served as Nicaragua’s foreign minister in the 1980s under the Sandinista regime, the socialist government that had a penchant for crushing civil liberties before it was tossed out of power in 1990. Since then, Brockmann has literally embraced such free-speech-loving figures as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whom he wrapped in a bear hug at the U.N. last year.

The U.N. resolution, which has been introduced for the past couple of years, is backed by countries such as Saudi Arabia, one of the most repressive nations when it comes to the free exercise of religion. Blasphemers there are frequently executed. Most recently, the government arrested author Hamoud Bin Saleh simply for writing about his conversion to Christianity.

While it hasn’t gone so far as to support the U.N. resolution, the West is prosecuting “religious hatred” cases under anti-discrimination and hate-crime laws. British citizens can be arrested and prosecuted under the 2006 Racial and Religious Hatred Act, which makes it a crime to “abuse” religion. In 2008, a 15-year-old boy was arrested for holding up a sign reading “Scientology is not a religion, it is a dangerous cult” outside the organization’s London headquarters. Earlier this year, the British police issued a public warning that insulting Scientology would now be treated as a crime.

No question, the subjects of such prosecutions are often anti-religious -- especially anti-Muslim -- and intolerant. Consider far-right Austrian legislator Susanne Winter. She recently denounced Mohammad as a pedophile for his marriage to 6-year-old Aisha, which was consummated when she was 9. Winter also suggested that Muslim men should commit bestiality rather than have sex with children. Under an Austrian law criminalizing “degradation of religious doctrines,” the 51-year-old politician was sentenced in January to a fine of 24,000 euros ($31,000) and a three-month suspended prison term.

But it is the speech, not the speaker, that’s at issue. As insulting and misinformed as views like Winter’s may be, free speech is not limited to non-offensive subjects. The purpose of free speech is to be able to challenge widely held views.

Yet there is a stream of cases similar to Winter’s coming out of various countries:

In May 2008, Dutch prosecutors arrested cartoonist Gregorius Nekschot for insulting Christians and Muslims with a cartoon that caricatured a Christian fundamentalist and a Muslim fundamentalist as zombies who meet at an anti-gay rally and want to marry.

Last September, Italian prosecutors launched an investigation of comedian Sabina Guzzanti for joking about Pope Benedict VXI. “In 20 years, [he] will be dead and will end up in hell, tormented by queer demons, and very active ones,” she said at a rally.

We rather welcome the punishment of anti-Christian speech, and not because we favor censorship, but rather because free speech has to be viewed as a prisoners’ dilemma what has iterated to a cooperative solution.

The logic is simple: if conservative Christians have the power to shut up secular leftists, and secular leftists have the power to shut up conservative Christians, then each side will come to accept that tolerating the other side is the price of its own free speech.

But where one side can shut up the other with impunity, it has no incentive to be tolerant. This is usually the case in academia, and in places like Canada.

In February, Rowan Laxton, an aide to British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, was arrested for “inciting religious hatred” when, watching news reports of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza while exercising at his gym, he allegedly shouted obscenities about Israelis and Jews at the television.

Also in February, Britain barred controversial Dutch politician Geert Wilders from entry because of his film “Fitna,” which describes the Koran as a “fascist” book and Islam as a violent religion. Wilders was declared a “threat to public policy, public security or public health.”

And in India, authorities arrested the editor and publisher of the newspaper the Statesman for running an article by British journalist Johann Hari in which he wrote, “I don’t respect the idea that we should follow a ‘Prophet’ who at the age of 53 had sex with a 9-year-old girl, and ordered the murder of whole villages of Jews because they wouldn’t follow him.” In India, it is a crime to “outrage religious feelings.”

History has shown that once governments begin to police speech, they find ever more of it to combat. Countries such as Canada, England and France have prosecuted speakers and journalists for criticizing homosexuals and other groups. It’s the ultimate irony: free speech curtailed for the sake of a pluralistic society.

Free Speech is Dead in Canada — At Least If You Are a Christian

From Ezra Levant’s blog, how “Human Rights Commissions” in Canada have created a right not to be offended — at least is you are a politically correct minority.

One key point: “human rights” laws are never enforced in an even-handed way. Some groups are assumed to be protected, and others not.

Next key point: you have more rights if you are charged with murder than if you are accused of a human rights violation. Further, people charged with human rights violations in Canada have fewer rights than people once called before the Star Chamber.

Scary fact: people like those who staff “Human Rights Commissions” in Canada are fairly common in the United States, especially in academia. And especially in humanities departments, sociology departments, victim studies programs and education schools.

It’s riveting, so watch the whole show.

More Academic Fascism from Radicalized Muslims and Leftists

From the American Thinker:

The virulence of anti-Israelism and antisemitism at The University of California, Irvine campus, for instance, has been so flagrant and endemic in recent years that it actually prompted an investigation by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, the findings of which were issued in a damning 2007 report. But San Francisco State University is not far behind in the ignoble way it has enabled its Muslim students’ organizations to create a veritable reign of terror on campus against Jewish and pro-Israel students, while simultaneously attempting to silence voices of opposition, a situation made evident this January when SFSU’s College Republicans were once again pushed into the limelight for their outspoken challenges to the school’s ubiquitous Palestinianism.

Playing off the recent indignity suffered by former president Bush when an insolent reporter hurled a shoe at the President’s head during a press conference, the College Republicans had set up a booth to let students who so wished to sign an anti-Hamas, anti-terror petition and throw a shoe at a Hamas flag. Deeply “offended” by the Republicans for daring to condemn terrorists, rather than the Israeli state in defending its civilians from genocidal attack, members of SFSU’s General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS) and socialist club overturned the table, seized the Hamas flag, and were physically aggressive enough in their assault of the Republican students to result in two of their members, Muhammad Abdullah and Jeremy Stern, being put under arrest.

The outcome of this event, one would think, would be fairly straightforward, since the pro-Hamas protesters clearly violated SFSU’s own rules for student behavior, which clearly prohibit “conduct that threatens or endangers the health or safety of any person within or related to the university community, including physical abuse, threats, intimidation, [or] harassment,” all of which the Republican group experienced.

But in the morally-inverted world of academia, the Republican group, for the third time, find themselves the target of punishment and censure, not their attackers, and the “offended parties” -- the GUPS and the socialist club -- have made some breathtakingly audacious demands to the SFSU administration: the College Republicans must be punished or sanctioned for throwing shoes at the Hamas flag; pending charges should be dropped against the two protesters who assaulted the College Republicans and seized the Hamas flag; and, most ominously for defenders of free expression on campus, a forum should be created to “educate” students about what forms of speech the “offended” students deem acceptable or unacceptable, including what the Left regularly tries to proscribe as “hate speech.”

Of course, “hate speech” is simply speech that you don’t like.

Expressing hatred of whites, males or Christians is an absolutely normal activity around any university.

Of course, one could say that the College Republicans’ protest was rather provocative and uncivil -- a relevant observation if you think only genteel speech is protected by the First Amendment.

Were only the College Republicans acting out in a provocative way on an otherwise peaceful SFSU campus, they might well be rebuked for being crude and demonstrating impolite and impolitic behavior. But not only has the campus gained notoriety for the outrageousness of some of its morally-defective protests, but the same “offended” parties who sought punishments for the College Republicans, the General Union of Palestinian Students, have continually been at the center of a succession of riots, protests, and anti-Israel, anti-American hate-fests and counter-protests at which radical speakers regularly, and with unbridled invective, denounce and demonize Jews, Zionists, Israel, Republicans, and America.

Most notorious, for example, was the Muslim student-sponsored, pro-Palestinian April 2002 demonstration that included odious flyers and posters depicting a dead Palestinian baby on a soup-can label imprinted with the words “Palestinian Children Meat, slaughtered according to Jewish rites under American license,” echoing the centuries-old blood libel of European antisemitism that accused Jews of murdering Gentile children and using their blood to bake matzos -- a slander that has, not surprisingly, currently gained credence in the Arab world. Even if the perpetrators of this cruel protest consider this type of expression merely “academic free speech” and legitimate debate about Zionism, and also disingenuously claim that that there is no underlying Jew-hatred here, only debate about Israeli policies, and even if they are to be believed, might not such flyers possibly offend Jewish students on campus? Could accusing an ethnic group of infanticide possibly be construed as “intimidation” or fostering “incivility” on campus?

Fascists, here as elsewhere, simply aren’t willing to apply their anti-free speech doctrines in an even-handed way.

Which is why, in some borderline cases, we are less disturbed by restrictions on speech than about even-handedness. If people who want to shut up speech know that they might be subjected to exactly the same restrictions they want to impose on others, that would constitute a built-in protection against excesses. The situation, in other words, would be a prisoners’ dilemma.

But on a modern university campus, where all people are divided into politically correct “victim” groups and politically incorrect “oppressor” groups, even handedness is hard to find.