The old joke repeated by those who understand how media and the left push identity politics holds that, were the world likely to end, headlines would read: “World Ends: Women and Minorities Hardest Hit!”
The negative fallout from climate change is having a devastatingly lopsided impact on women compared to men, from higher death rates during natural disasters to heavier household and care burdens.
In the 1991 cyclone disasters that killed 140,000 in Bangladesh, 90 percent of victims were reportedly women; in the 2004 Asian Tsunami, an estimated 70 to 80 percent of overall deaths were women.
And following the 2005 Hurricane Katrina in the United States, African-American women, who were the poorest population in some of the affected States in Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi, faced the greatest obstacles to survival, according to the New York-based Women’s Environment and Development Organisation (WEDO).
The 2007 Human Development Report, issued by the U.N. Development Programme, points out that women are particularly affected by climate change because they are the largest percentage – accounting for about 70 percent – of the poor population.
The mock-worthy “women hardest hit” ploy almost obscures the more disgusting attempt to tie these disasters to “fallout from climate change.”
The warm-mongers just won’t give up.
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More (previous here) on why it’s so difficult to be the world’s savior:
CommentsFidel Castro is questioning why the U.S. and other countries sent soldiers to quake-ravaged Haiti, saying military presence hindered international cooperation.
The former Cuban president writes that “without anyone knowing how or why,” Washington dispatched troops “to occupy Haitian territory,” and other nations followed suit.
In an opinion column Sunday in state-controlled media, Castro said neither the U.N nor the U.S. “has offered an explanation to the people of the world.”
Castro noted that several governments complained that the troops kept them from landing aid flights and called on the U.N. to investigate.
Bolivian President Evo Morales, a Castro ally, is seeking a U.N. condemnation of what he called the U.S. occupation of Haiti.
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Remember this the next time they say that the IPCC reports on “settled” science:
Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world’s glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.
In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC’s 2007 report.
It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.
Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was “speculation” and was not supported by any formal research. If confirmed it would be one of the most serious failures yet seen in climate research. The IPCC was set up precisely to ensure that world leaders had the best possible scientific advice on climate change.
In court that’s called hearsay. Why is the UN claiming that it’s “science?”
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The wanna-be world governmental body thinks children 5-8 years old need to be taught about masturbation.
The U.N.’s Economic, Social and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) released a 98-page report in June offering a universal lesson plan for kids ranging in age from 5-18, an “informed approach to effective sex, relationships” and HIV education that they say is essential for “all young people.”
…The UNESCO report, called “International Guidelines for Sexuality Education,” separates children into four age groups: 5-to-8-year-olds, 9-to-12-year-olds, 12-to-15-year-olds and 15-to-18-year-olds.
Under the U.N.’s voluntary sex-ed regime, kids just 5-8 years old will be told that “touching and rubbing one’s genitals is called masturbation” and that private parts “can feel pleasurable when touched by oneself.”
By the time they’re 9 years old, they’ll learn about “positive and negative effects of ‘aphrodisiacs,” and wrestle with the ideas of “homophobia, transphobia and abuse of power.”
The U.N. is beholden to a leftist ideology. There are also hints of radical feminism in the description. “Abuse of power” in the context of gender and sexuality, for instance, is likely code for “male oppression” or patriarchy, two perennially identified boogeymen by the feminists.
They are even using the specter of AIDS to indoctrinate children into their warped world-view. “In a world affected by HIV and AIDS,” they say in the article, “there is an imperative to give children and young people the knowledge, skills and values to understand and make informed decisions.” The values necessary to understand and make informed decisions wouldn’t happen to be leftist values, now would they?
Keep the U.N. away from our children.
Hat-tip: Moonbattery
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Coming as a pleasant surprise, the UN reported today that open trade and economic growth helps, rather than hurts, the environment.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, further liberalization of international trade can help combat climate change and support a low carbon economy, said a joint United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and World Trade Organization (WTO) report launched today in Geneva.
The “Trade and Climate Change” report stressed that an increase and opening of trade could have a positive impact on greenhouse gases emissions by accelerating the spread of clean technology and providing opportunities for developing economies to adapt those technologies.
Many of us have always challenged the “conventional wisdom” on economic growth – that it was destructive to the environment. The reality is quite the opposite, as new technology is almost always cleaner than the old; so the faster new technology is adopted, the better. If Barack Obama and the Democrats are serious about their goal of thwarting global warming, they should dump trade protectionism and their economically destructive cap and trade bill.
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Dr. Susan Rice is now said to be the leading contender for Ambassador to the U.N. in the Obama administration. The pick would be telling in terms of the foreign policy Obama plans to pursue, and how it doesn’t square with his campaign rhetoric. In 2006 Rice argued for military action, unilateral if necessary, in Darfur:
History demonstrates that there is one language Khartoum understands: the credible threat or use of force. After Sept. 11, 2001, when President Bush issued a warning to states that harbor terrorists, Sudan — recalling the 1998 U.S. airstrike on Khartoum — suddenly began cooperating on counterterrorism. It’s time to get tough with Sudan again.
After swift diplomatic consultations, the United States should press for a U.N. resolution that issues Sudan an ultimatum: accept unconditional deployment of the U.N. force within one week or face military consequences. The resolution would authorize enforcement by U.N. member states, collectively or individually. International military pressure would continue until Sudan relented.
The United States, preferably with NATO involvement and African political support, would strike Sudanese airfields, aircraft and other military assets. It could blockade Port Sudan, through which Sudan’s oil exports flow. Then U.N. troops would deploy — by force, if necessary, with U.S. and NATO backing.
If the United States fails to gain U.N. support, we should act without it. Impossible? No, the United States acted without U.N. blessing in 1999 in Kosovo to confront a lesser humanitarian crisis (perhaps 10,000 killed) and a more formidable adversary. Under NATO auspices, it bombed Serbian targets until Slobodan Milosevic acquiesced. Not a single American died in combat. Many nations protested that the United States violated international law, but the United Nations subsequently deployed a mission to administer Kosovo and effectively blessed NATO military action retroactively.
Many on the left may be surprised at these positions. Likely, they took Democratic leaders at their word when they explained their reasons for attacking Bush on Iraq. Those of us more familiar with political history – such as Clinton’s unilateral sidestepping of the U.N. in Kosovo – and the intellectual currents driving policy debates, saw it for what it was: an argument of convenience.
Left-wing interventionists are actually more common than right-wing ones. Before the neoconservatives had won the day in establishing Republican policy, there was Secretary Madeliene Albright, who asked Colin Powell, “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” The ironic difference between the left and right interventionists is this: on the left they only want to use force when U.S. interests are non-existent. Boondoggle that Iraq was in many ways, at least there was a debatable, though certainly plausible, claim of serving U.S. national interests in deposing Saddam. One can’t even make a pretense of serving U.S. interests in Darfur.
When the French foreign minister said, “We cannot accept either a politically unipolar world, nor a culturally uniform world, nor the unilateralism of a single hyper-power,” he wasn’t talking about Bush. The statement was made in 2000 and referred to the administration of Bill Clinton. With Clintonites now littered throughout Obama’s emerging administration, yet another reversal looks to be in order, this time on the usefulness of unilateralism and interventionism.
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Following a White House call for approval of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, the Senate seems heading toward ratifying this long defunct treaty. So what is the Law of the Sea Treaty, what does it do and should we support it?
Simply, the treaty defines who controls the seas and its resources and provides a mechanism for resolving disputes over those issues. A certain numbers of miles off the coast of a nation belong to that nation. A certain number of miles beyond that is a province of exclusive economic, but not territorial, control for that nation. The rest, international waters, are controlled by the UN body which decides who gets to make use of its resources. In reading the text of the treaty, it doesn’t take long for the red flags to be raised. From the Preamble:
Recognizing the desirability of establishing through this Convention, with due regard for the sovereignty of all States, a legal order for the seas and oceans which will facilitate international communication, and will promote the peaceful uses of the seas and oceans, the equitable and efficient utilization of their resources, the conservation of their living resources, and the study, protection and preservation of the marine environment,
Bearing in mind that the achievement of these goals will contribute to the realization of a just and equitable international economic order which takes into account the interests and needs of mankind as a whole and, in particular, the special interests and needs of developing countries, whether coastal or land-locked,
Thanks to historic use of “equitable” as a weapon for socialists, it’s rare that it is possible for resources to be utilized both efficiently and “equitably” at the same time. The Soviet Union learned this the hard way. Whenever you see something like “equitable” used in a situation like these, ask yourself two key questions. Who decides what is equitable and how is having such authority not central planning?
And just what are the “special interests and needs of developing countries”? Are these interests in conflict with developed countries? If so, how much will we be asked to sacrifice for these “developing” countries, who always seem to be in a perpetual state of “development” and yet never manage to actually become developed?
We also see mention of environmental interests, which raises further important questions. Will these interests take precedence over all other considerations as environmentalists, usually getting their way, typically demand?
To answer at least some of these questions, let’s see what various policy experts and affected interests have to say about the treaty.
The Navy is completely supportive of the treaty. In a prepared statement before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Admiral Patrick Walsh, Vice Chief of Naval Operations, states simply that he supports the treaty because it “helps our Soldiers, Sailors, Marines, Airmen and Coast Guardsmen do their job,” and that he believes “our Navy can better protect the United States and the American people if we join the Law of the Sea Convention.”
Admiral Walsh notes four specific benefits, only capable of being provided by “binding treaty law”, granted by the treaty that are of benefit to our Armed Forces:
1 The Right of Innocent Passage, which allows ships to transit through foreign territorial seas without providing the coastal State prior notification or gaining the coastal State?s prior permission.
2 The Right of Transit Passage, which allows ships, aircraft, and submarines to transit through, over, and under straits used for international navigation and the approaches to those straits.
3 The Right of Archipelagic Sealanes Passage, which, like transit passage, allows transit by ships and aircraft through, over, and under normal passage routes in archipelagic states, such as Indonesia.
4 The right of high seas freedoms, including overflight and transit within the Exclusive Economic Zone.
In addition to these benefits, Admiral Walsh also points to the expansive claims of certain foreign nations:
The Convention also allows us to exercise high seas freedoms in foreign exclusive economic zones, including conducting military activities without coastal state interference. And this is important—the single most contentious issue in oceans law and policy today is the attempt by some foreign coastal States to treat the exclusive economic zone ? or EEZ ? like a territorial sea. The Convention makes clear that coastal States enjoy resource rights within the EEZ, but they do not enjoy and may not assert full sovereignty within the EEZ.
Admiral Vernon Clark, former Chief of Naval Operations, offers a similar assessment:
The Law of the Sea Convention supports our ability to operate wherever, whenever, and however needed under the authority of widely accepted law. The Convention codifies the right to transit through, over, and under essential international straits and archipelagic water. It reaffirms the sovereign immunity of our warships and other public vessels. It provides a framework to counter excessive claims of states that seek illegally to expand their maritime jurisdiction and restrict the movement of vessels of other States in international and other waters. And it preserves our right to conduct military activities and operations in exclusive economic zones without the need for permission from or prior notice to foreign governments.
Also appearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, President of the Center for Security Studies Frank Gaffney warns of supranational agencies wielding too much power.
LOST?s Transnationalist architects have long sought to build up supranational agencies. This treaty allows them to do so in unprecedented ways by: conferring on LOST ?organs? responsibility for regulating seven-tenths of the planet (i.e., the world?s oceans and the vast natural resources to be found in and below them); levying what are tantamount to international taxes; and imposing mandatory and un-appealable decisions in disputes that may arise involving parties to the Treaty.
To date, the full, malevolent potential of the Law of the Sea Treaty has been more in prospect than in evidence. Should the United States accede to LOST, however, it is predictable that the Treaty?s agencies will: wield their powers in ways that will prove very harmful to American interests; intensify the web of sovereignty-sapping obligations and regulations being promulgated by this and other UN entities; and advance inexorably the emergence of supranational world government.
Heritage also warns of UN corruption:
When international bureaucracies are unaccountable they, like all unaccountable institutions, seek to insulate themselves from scrutiny and become prone to corruption. The International Seabed Authority Secretariat is vulnerable to the same corrupt practices that have been present at the U.N. for years. The most pertinent example of this potential for corruption is the United Nations Oil-for-Food scandal, in which the Iraqi government benefited from a system of bribes and kickbacks involving billions of dollars and 2,000 companies in nearly 70 countries. Despite ample evidence of the U.N.?s systemic weaknesses and vulnerability to corruption, the U.N. General Assembly has yet to adopt the reforms to increase transparency and accountability proposed by former Secretary-General Kofi Annan and others. This example is particularly pertinent considering that the Authority could oversee significant resources through fees and charges on commercial activities within its authority and potentially create a system of royalties and profit sharing.
Doug Bandow, writing for the CATO Institute, calls the treaty “collectivist in nature and inimical to U.S. interests.”
Most objectionable is Section XI, that portion of the treaty governing seabed mining. The provisions of Section XI may have the effect of forever discouraging such operations, even where there might be huge benefits. Regulations are to be administered through a complicated system of committees and agencies within the International Seabed Authority, a creation of the United Nations that has ultimate jurisdiction over the agreement.
Funding for the ISA, and for enforcement of the LOST, would flow disproportionately from the United States. The ISA?s current budget is modest, but the revised agreement changed none of the underlying institutional incentives that bias virtually every international organization, most obviously the UN itself, toward extravagance.
In his report, Bandow also points out that even with the treaty, we’ll still have to actively protect our navigation rights. The treaty has not prevented signatories – such as Brazil, China, India, Pakistan or North Korea – from making the kinds of expansive claims mentioned by Admiral Clark as a reason for ratification.
Jeremy Rabkin of the Competitive Enterprise Institute is opposed to the lose of sovereignty:
In the past, the United States has jealously guarded its national sovereignty. It has never agreed to treaties under which new standards can be imposed, without express U.S. consent, by the decision of international bureaucrats or by coalitions of hostile?and potentially hostile?nations. What the United States does do in many areas it should do in regards to this treaty?assert its rights under customary international law. The Law of the Sea treaty is not necessary to secure claims which the U.S. already makes on this basis (regarding economic rights in U.S. coastal waters and rights of passage elsewhere). It is a dangerous concession to international fashion to accept the idea that U.S. rights are dependent on the approval of shifting majorities of other nations.
The National Center for Public Policy Research raises similar objections in a recent press release.
On balance, the risks of the treaty seem to outweigh the benefits, which are marginal at best. Signing doesn’t absolve us of having to combat the expansionist claims of other nations, but will expose us to the same kind of attacks that have plagued so many other UN bodies. So much power in a regulatory body populated by the usual thuggish dictators bent on eroding American power is a prescription for disaster. Senate Republicans need to oppose this treaty and protect American sovereignty.
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The U.N. is warning us that it can’t afford to feed the world.
May be true. But more importantly, I say, we can’t afford to let them even try.
We all know Confucius’ fortune cookie wisdom of self-reliance: “Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime.” The UN, like any self-serving socialist organization, understands that there is a secret third part to this anecdote: “Promise an endless supply of fish and men will depend on you for food, thus you gain power over them.” There’s your blue-print for gaining power through the nanny-state. Or in the case of the U.N., redistribution on a global scale. And when the providers fail to live up to their promise – which is inevitably the case – it’s a blue-print for suffering and strife.
Rising prices for food have led the United Nations programme fighting famine in Africa and other regions to warn that it can no longer afford to feed the 90m people it has helped for each of the past five years on its budget.
The World Food Programme feeds people in countries including Chad, Uganda and Ethiopia, but reaches a fraction of the 850m people it estimates suffers from hunger. It spent about $600m buying food in 2006. So far, the WFP has not cut its reach because of high commodities prices, but now says it could be forced to do so unless donor countries provide extra funds.
And what’s causing the budget straining price increases?
You guessed it, global warming. Or more accurately, the hoax that is anthropogenic global warming.
She said policymakers were becoming more concerned about the impact of biofuel demand on food prices and how the world would continue to feed its expanding population.
The warning could re-ignite the debate on food versus fuel amid concerns biofuel production will sustain food inflation and hit the world?s poorest people.
The WFP said its purchasing costs had risen ?almost 50 per cent in the last five years?. The UN organisation said the price it pays for maize had risen up to 120 per cent in the past sixth months in some countries.
Biofuel demand is soaking up grain production as is rising consumption in emerging countries for animal feed.
?We face the tightest agriculture markets in decades and, in same cases, on record,? Ms Sheeran said. Global wheat stocks have fallen to the lowest level in 25 years, according to the US Department of Agriculture.
Ms Sheeran added: ?We are no longer in a surplus world.?
The biofuel craze driving up food prices is the result of global warming fear mongering. Biofuels are “environmentally superior” and therefore less offensive to the Gaea spirit. It’s seems the third-world is in for a bumpy century. If global warming is “allowed” to happen they’ll either drown in the rising seas, be engulfed by the spreading deserts, washed away in the drenching monsoons or withered by the widespread droughts. In the meantime, however, in order to prevent these catastrophes, we will literally burn much of the planet’s food supply.
Ironically, the solution to the problem might be some genuine global warming. Longer growing seasons worldwide would mean the planet could support a much larger human population.
Although, Shrillary might have an alternative solution of her own.
CommentsEven before Hillary finishes her second term as President, her advisors would have American taxpayers pay a fixed 0.7 percent of our Gross National Income toward global funding of the United Nations? Millennium Development Goals. This means that the United States alone would have to pay nearly $140 billion per year for development assistance, to be administered by the United Nations.
In case you are wondering where the funding of this massive increase in foreign aid will come from, Hillary Clinton?s advisors have an answer – a new carbon tax. The Center for American Progress? tax ?expert? recommended this tax as one alternative to raise as much as $100 billion dollars a year in new ?green? revenue. He wrote that ?[W]hat Congress has to realize is that we need more ?good? taxes and fewer ?bad? taxes.
Except in the minds of those hardcore income redistributionists who think they know better how to spend our money than we do ourselves, how can any tax be described as ?good??
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While the Islamist war against the West heats up on British soil, the cross-Atlantic relationship is cooling considerably. The new Prime Minster’s appointment of Sir Mark Malloch Brown to a key foreign ministry post does not bode well for the future of our cross-Atlantic relationship.
CommentsAs a U.N. official, Malloch Brown was an outspoken critic of American leadership on the world stage and a constant thorn in the side of the United States. He launched an unprecedented attack on Washington’s approach to the U.N. in a speech in New York in June 2006, despite the fact that Washington gives over $5 billion a year to the U.N. system–more than France, Germany, China, Canada, and Russia combined. Malloch Brown warned of the “serious consequences of a decades-long tendency by U.S. Administrations of both parties to engage only fitfully with the U.N.” and condemned “the prevailing practice of seeking to use the U.N. almost by stealth as a diplomatic tool while failing to stand up for it against its domestic critics.” He singled out for particular criticism Washington’s decision to opt out of joining the disastrous new U.N. Human Rights Council, despite the fact that it was no better than the discredited former Human Rights Commission.
Malloch Brown could barely disguise his contempt for the American public and media, speaking of “unchecked U.N.-bashing and stereotyping” and a “U.S. heartland [that] has been largely abandoned to its [the U.N.'s] loudest detractors, such as Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.” What was needed in response, he argued, was for America’s leaders to support the U.N. “not just in a whisper but in a coast to coast shout, that pushes back the critics domestically, and wins over the skeptics internationally.”
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Too busy to do anything about Iran’s continuing mission to thumb its nose at the rest of the world, the U.N. Security Council is turning its attention to the big threats to peace and security, that ever-present boogeyman responsible for all things bad in the world, global warming:
CommentsOn April 17, the United Nations Security Council will discuss the security implications of global warming for the first time. The issue was placed on the agenda by the United Kingdom, which assumed the rotating presidency of the Council for April.
. . .The Security Council should not be deliberating global warming. The purpose of the Security Council is clearly laid out in the U.N. Charter, which confers on the Security Council “primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security.”[17] The security implications of climate change are speculative at this point and, even if they result as predicted, would not pose an immediate threat for decades. The projected threats of global warming do not rise to the level of Security Council consideration.
The decision to raise the issue in the Council is troubling considering that such a step is often a prelude to a Council decision or resolution. A Council decision is the sole venue capable of compelling states to adopt actions to address global warming[18]?something that should not be contemplated without greater certainty and evidence of urgency.
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I am a libertarian-conservative blogger living in the DC area. I have a Master's degree in Political Science and work in public policy, but please don't hold that against me.
