The IHT reports that the UN is apparently now, at long last, going to shut up about global doom and gloom, since it has just produced a “final” report:

UN issues ‘final wake-up call’ on population and environment

Climate change, the rate of extinction of species and the challenge of feeding a growing population are among the threats putting humanity at risk, the UN Environment Program said in its fourth Global Environmental Outlook since 1997.

“The human population is now so large that the amount of resources needed to sustain it exceeds what is available at current consumption patterns,” Achim Steiner, the executive director of the program, said in a telephone interview. Efficient use of resources and reducing waste now are “among the greatest challenges at the beginning of 21st century,” he said…

Over the past two decades the world population has increased by almost 34 percent to 6.7 billion from 5 billion; similarly, the financial wealth of the planet has soared by about a third. But the land available to each person on earth had shrunk by 2005 to 2.02 hectares, or 5 acres, from 7.91 hectares in 1900 and was projected to drop to 1.63 hectares for each person by 2050, the report said…

The program described its report, which is prepared by 388 experts and scientists, as the broadest and deepest of those that the UN issues on the environment and called it “the final wake-up call to the international community.”

Three points: (a) didn’t we read something similar to this UN report a long time ago? (b) what gives with the use of land per capita as a critical measure as opposed to, for example, weath — are we all meant to be farmers? (c) what will the windy bureaucrats call the next report, since this one was supposed to be “final”?

The philosopher and eminent meteorologist Harry Reid shows himself to be a man completely in tune with the seriousness and probing depth of intellect that characterize the times in which we live:

“One reason why we have the fires in California is global warming”

The biggest fire in America was in 1910, and California routinely has had fires that have devoured millions of acres — many without the arson that played a major role in these latest blazes. Even environmental extremists don’t blame global warming for particular fires. Little wonder then that the geniuses in Congress are as popular as they are.

Daniel Botkin is professor emeritus in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He says that he is “a scientist who believes in the scientific method and in what facts tell us.” WSJ:

Some colleagues who share some of my doubts argue that the only way to get our society to change is to frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe, and that therefore it is all right and even necessary for scientists to exaggerate. They tell me that my belief in open and honest assessment is naïve. “Wolves deceive their prey, don’t they?” one said to me recently. Therefore, biologically, he said, we are justified in exaggerating to get society to change.

The climate modelers who developed the computer programs that are being used to forecast climate change used to readily admit that the models were crude and not very realistic, but were the best that could be done with available computers and programming methods. They said our options were to either believe those crude models or believe the opinions of experienced, data-focused scientists. Having done a great deal of computer modeling myself, I appreciated their acknowledgment of the limits of their methods. But I hear no such statements today. Oddly, the forecasts of computer models have become our new reality, while facts such as the few extinctions of the past 2.5 million years are pushed aside, as if they were not our reality.

A recent article in the well-respected journal American Scientist explained why the glacier on Mt. Kilimanjaro could not be melting from global warming. Simply from an intellectual point of view it was fascinating–especially the author’s Sherlock Holmes approach to figuring out what was causing the glacier to melt. That it couldn’t be global warming directly (i.e., the result of air around the glacier warming) was made clear by the fact that the air temperature at the altitude of the glacier is below freezing. This means that only direct radiant heat from sunlight could be warming and melting the glacier. The author also studied the shape of the glacier and deduced that its melting pattern was consistent with radiant heat but not air temperature. Although acknowledged by many scientists, the paper is scorned by the true believers in global warming.

Hey, man, truth is just a human construct. Get with the program. Professor Alan Sokal wrote a beautiful paper showing that physics isn’t about “truth” but about power relationships in our repressive society.

Bangkok will soon be swamped by the Gulf of Thailand, and the MSM and experts say it is Global Warming. Are you frightened yet? AP:

Bangkok Sinking Under Rising Seas
Major Cities Around the World at Risk of Being Swamped…

Experts say these waters, aided by sinking land, threaten to submerge Thailand’s sprawling capital of more than 7 million people within this century. Bangkok is one of many of the world’s largest cities at risk of being swamped as sea levels rise in coming decades, according to warnings at the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change held here.

“This is what the future will look like in many places around the world,” says Lisa Schipper, an American researcher on global warming, while visiting the temple. “Here is a living study in environmental change.”…

“If the heart of Thailand is under water everything will stop,” says Smith Dharmasaroja, chair of the government’s Committee of National Disaster Warning Administration. “We don’t have time to move our capital in the next 15-20 years. We have to protect our heart now, and it’s almost too late.”

Are you frightened yet? You should be. Frightened of the media, that is. Here are paragraphs 7 and 8 of the story:

The still expanding megapolis rests about 3 1/2 to 5 feet above the nearby gulf, although some areas already lie below sea level. The gulf’s waters have been rising by about a tenth of an inch a year, about the same as the world average, says Anond Snidvongs, a leading scientist in the field.

But the city, built on clay rather than bedrock, has also been sinking at a far faster pace of up to 4 inches annually as its teeming population and factories pump some 2.5 million cubic tons of cheaply priced water, legally and illegally, out of its aquifers. This compacts the layers of clay and causes the land to sink.

Let’s do the math. The water around Bangkok is rising about 1 inch every 10 years. So if that current rate keeps up, the water will rise a foot by the year 2127 — 120 years from now. But Bangkok is apparently sinking about 4 inches a year, 40x faster than water is rising. So this article doesn’t really have anything to do with global warming at all, but you have to dig pretty deep to find out.

Another dopey story on our Planetary Emergency, this one via AP:

Every fall, Marilyn Krom tries to make a trip to Vermont to see its famously beautiful fall foliage. This year, she noticed something different about the autumn leaves. “They’re duller, not as sparkly, if you know what I mean,” Krom, 62, a registered nurse from Eastford, Conn., said during a recent visit. “They’re less vivid.” Other “leaf peepers” are noticing, too, and some believe climate change could be the reason…

University of Vermont plant biologist Tom Vogelmann, a Vermont native…says autumn has become too warm to elicit New England’s richest colors.According to the National Weather Service, temperatures in Burlington have run above the 30-year averages in every September and October for the past four years, save for October 2004, when they were 0.2 degrees below average.

So let’s get this straight. For the past 4 years in Vermont, or in some parts of Vermont, temperatures were above their 30 year average (why 30 years?) in September and October — except that they weren’t. Temperatures were lower than their 30 year average in 2004. And they were no doubt lower in 2002, or else the scare claim would have been about the past 5 years. So it would appear in reality that temperatures have been above their average about half the time in recent years, and below average about half the time in recent years. Isn’t that kind of what an average is all about? We don’t dispute the idea that Vermont might be warmer recently, but the MSM shouldn’t be trying to build a house out of Popsicle sticks.

A “strain of a once innocuous staph bacterium that has become invulnerable to first-line antibiotics, is responsible for more than 94,000 serious infections and nearly 19,000 deaths each year,” according to the WaPo:

MRSA, which is spread by casual contact, rapidly turns minor abscesses and other skin infections into serious health problems, including painful, disfiguring “necrotizing” abscesses that eat away tissue. The infections can often still be treated by lancing and draining sores and quickly administering other antibiotics, such as bactrim. But in some cases the microbe gets into the lungs, causing unusually serious pneumonia, or spreads into bone, vital organs and the bloodstream, triggering life-threatening complications. Those patients must be hospitalized and given intensive care, including intravenous antibiotics such as vancomycin.

In the new study, Fridkin and his colleagues analyzed data collected in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, New York, Oregon and Tennessee, identifying 5,287 cases of invasive MRSA infection and 988 deaths in 2005. The researchers calculated that MRSA was striking 31.8 out of every 100,000 Americans, which translates to 94,360 cases and 18,650 deaths nationwide. In comparison, complications from the AIDS virus killed about 12,500 Americans in 2005.

None of the stories we have seen have speculated on the reason for this sudden and extremely serious situation. We note this story in the Washington Times, which reports on a, no doubt, completely unrelated phenomenon: “A Mexican national infected with a highly contagious form of tuberculosis crossed the U.S. border 76 times and took multiple domestic flights in the last year, according to Customs and Border Protection interviews and documents obtained by The Washington Times.”

It would be rude, as well as politically incorrect, to suggest that the millions of immigrants, legal and illegal, from unhygienic nations who regularly cross America’s open borders, and who routinely use emergency rooms for primary care, could account for the dramatic increase in certain infections and diseases.

We have discussed the importance of DDT and the scandal of the elites and the fashionable on this matter any number of times in this space. Today John Berlau takes up the issue in relation to the most recent Nobel Peace Prize recipient, who has been consistent in his praise for DDT’s greatest enemies:

The Nobel Committee recognized DDT’s immeasurable contribution to public health. In 1948, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Paul Hermann Müller, the Swiss chemist who discovered DDT’s effectiveness at combating the insects that spread deadly diseases. As the Nobel web site entry for Dr. Muller states, “Field trials now showed it [DDT] to be effective not only against the common housefly, but also against a wide variety of pests, including the louse, Colorado beetle, and mosquito,” The web site notes further that during World War II, DDT “proved to be of enormous value in combating typhus and malaria — malaria was, in fact, completely eradicated from many island areas.”

And after World War II, DDT eradicated malaria in vast areas of the world, including parts of the southern United States. But it was vilified in the 1962 book “Silent Spring” written by Rachel Carson, a woman Gore has called a heroine. As a result of the ensuing U.S. and worldwide near-prohibition on making DDT, several millions have died in Africa from mosquito-borne malaria that DDT could prevent.

Even after the turnabout by the World Health Organization, the New York Times and other establishment venues, Gore has never once said that Rachel Carson was wrong. As late as 1996, he called DDT a “notorious compound” that “presented serious human health risks.” The tragedy is that on this issue, Gore could have used his tremendous political capital to make a difference in reducing malaria deaths.

And Gore is still hindering anti-malaria efforts by spreading misinformation about its main causes. In his movie and book An Inconvenient Truth, Gore blames global warming for recent outbreaks of malaria in the cooler regions of Kenya. But as I have reported in my book Eco-Freaks and elsewhere, the World Health Organization had documented epidemics in those very regions in the 1940s, long before global warming was on the radar screen. The malaria was wiped out there, as elsewhere, by DDT, and unfortunately, as elsewhere, has now returned in the absence of DDT’s use. Also unfortunate is that the establishment media for the most part has not seen fit to correct Gore on this…

The WSJ noted recently: “Malaria is the number one killer of pregnant women and children in Africa and among the top killers in Asia and South America. It’s long been known that DDT is the cheapest and most effective way to contain the disease, which is spread by infected mosquitoes.”

It would be good if Mr. Gore would renounce his previous views and get on the DDT bandwagon. Unlike the the fashionable silliness of global warming, such an effort would actually fulfill the criterion set forth in Alfred Nobel’s will that the Peace Prize should help build “fraternity between the nations.” More importantly, it could be very helpful in saving lives.

Barbara Boxer reports that former Vice President Al Gore, he of the Planetary Emergency, has flown off on an “urgent mission“:

Vice President Al Gore has been called “overseas” for a trip related to his work on global warming and has canceled his scheduled appearance Thursday in San Francisco at a fundraiser for Boxer’s re-election effort. So the Boxer fundraiser — which was to include Bonnie Raitt and Jackson Browne — is off until Nov. 9. Here’s a note Boxer sent supporters about the change: I just got a call from Vice President Al Gore. He told me that he needs to travel abroad tomorrow for an exciting and urgent mission that could result in a major breakthrough in the fight against global warming.

The FT found a financial angle to the speculation that Gore will win the Nobel Peace Prize:

Al Gore, the former US vice-president, on Thursday overtook Barack Obama in a closely watched futures betting market on the next Democratic nominee fuelled by speculation that he would pick up the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday. Although the Nobel committee never informs the winner in advance, online speculators drew energy from the fact that Mr Gore cancelled his attendance at a global warming event in San Francisco on Thursday night, citing an unspecified overseas event on global warming. Mr Gore also cancelled his attendance as the keynote speaker at a Citicorp conference in Delhi in early December, which coincides with the Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo. Mr Gore’s odds of winning the Democratic nomination for president moved up to 13 per cent on Intrade, the online betting shop, against 11.5 per cent for Mr Obama and 47 per cent for Hillary Clinton.

Congratulations to Mr. Gore if he wins the prize. He certainly fits right in with a distinguished tradition of recent winners. Maybe he can use the money to fix his film to the satisfaction of the British courts.

UPDATE

He actually said it again: “I am deeply honored to receive the Nobel Peace Prize,” Gore said. “We face a true planetary emergency. The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity.” The Committee was no less grandiose: “The Norwegian Nobel Committee said global warming, ‘may induce large-scale migration and lead to greater competition for the earth’s resources. Such changes will place particularly heavy burdens on the world’s most vulnerable countries. There may be increased danger of violent conflicts and wars, within and between states’.” An orgy of exquisite consciences and self importance..

Having a son shortens a woman’s life span. Scientific American:

Sons are tough on their mothers…Virpi Lummaa of the University of Sheffield in England can prove it: sons reduce a mother’s life span by an average of 34 weeks. The 33-year-old Finnish evolutionary biologist, aided by genealogists, has scoured centuries-old tomes…for birth, marriage and death records — and clues about the influence of evolution on human reproduction…

she found that those who bore sons had shorter life spans than those who gave birth to daughters. This discrepancy has to do with birth weight—male babies are typically larger—as well as testosterone. “Testosterone can compromise your immune system; it can affect your health,” Lummaa says, and the mothers of sons proved especially susceptible to endemic infectious disease, such as tuberculosis. “Boys are a little bit more costly” to raise than girls as well, because they drain more physical resources from their mothers, she adds, as has been seen in other mammals, such as the red deer. Sons also are not as likely as daughters to stick around to help their mothers out later in life…

sons are not just tough on their mothers but also hard on their siblings. Those born after a son were physically slighter, had smaller families and generally had a greater chance of dying from an infectious disease.

Whew. Thanks for the information. Now if we can just stop women from having any sons, maybe the human race could live forever.

The New Yorker has a fascinating story about Adrian Owen and other researchers into individuals in varying degrees of vegetative states. It turns out that many of these folks are much livelier than they appear.

Owen’s final experiment was the most ambitious: a test to determine whether vegetative patients who seemed able to comprehend speech could also perform a complex mental task on command. He decided to ask them to imagine playing tennis. (“We chose sports, and tried to find one that involved a lot of upper-body movements and not too much running around,” he said.) First, he took brain scans of thirty-four healthy volunteers who were instructed to picture themselves playing the game for at least thirty seconds. Their brains showed activity in a region of the cerebrum that would be stimulated in an actual match. “This was an extremely robust activation, and it wasn’t difficult to tell whether somebody was imagining tennis or not,” Owen said. He then repeated the experiment using one of the vegetative patients, a woman who had been severely injured in a car accident. The woman had to be able to hear and understand Owen’s instructions, retrieve a memory of tennis—including a conception of forehand and backhand and how the ball and the racquet meet—and focus her attention for at least thirty seconds. To Owen’s astonishment, she passed the test…

Few vegetative or minimally conscious patients ever recover fully, and many are unlikely to improve. (Some neurologists estimate that an adult who has been vegetative for six months following a traumatic brain injury has only a twenty-per-cent chance of regaining consciousness.) For the past three years, Schiff and Fins have been studying the brain of Terry Wallis, a forty-three-year-old man in rural Arkansas who had been the subject of national news stories in 2003, when it was reported that he had begun to speak after spending nineteen years in a nursing home, in a minimally conscious state. Schiff and Fins contacted Wallis’s family and offered to help him obtain medical care during his recovery, and to use brain scans to document his progress.

In 1984, Wallis, a nineteen-year-old truck mechanic, had been in a car accident and sustained a severe brain injury; he was also paralyzed. Wallis’s father had asked the nursing home to arrange an evaluation of his son by a neurologist, but was told that such an assessment was too expensive and, in any case, would not be useful. In 2003, when Wallis began to speak, he received twelve weeks of physical therapy, which was covered by Medicaid, but the Arkansas Department of Health and Human Services rejected his request for further treatment, concluding that he had not made sufficient progress. One day, in 2005, Fins, who had contacted Wallis’s congressman to solicit his help in obtaining additional medical care for Wallis, asked Mrs. Wallis for her son’s Social Security number. “I was on the phone, and Mrs. Wallis said to Terry, ‘What’s your Social Security number?’ ” Fins recalled. “He gives his number, and I write it down. And I said, ‘Mrs. Wallis, was that Terry?’ And she said, ‘Yup. The first time he told us his Social Security, we thought he was wrong. But we looked it up, and he was right.’ ”

Fins was astonished. Not only has Wallis recovered memories from his life before the accident but, Fins said, “he is picking up American culture. He now knows the song ‘Bad boys, bad boys, what are you gonna do.’ Why is that important? It’s important because that song didn’t exist in 1984, so Terry is laying down new memories. It shows sustained improvement.” In 2006, Schiff arranged for Wallis to be taken to Weill Cornell Medical College, where he examined his brain using a sophisticated technique called diffusion tensor imaging, which assesses the number and health of axons, long fibres that transmit nerve impulses from one brain cell to another. The scans suggested that the axons in Wallis’s brain were growing and forming new connections—a finding that contradicts the long-standing assumption that a damaged brain is incapable of healing after such a lengthy period. “We need to do longitudinal studies, to see if these kinds of changes are accruing over time, whether they happen frequently or infrequently, and what their association with the patient’s level of function is,” Schiff told me. In some cases, he speculated, the brain may sometimes be able to bypass an injured area and devise novel ways of connecting axons. Still, he went on, much about Wallis’s recovery—and the neurological developments that are driving it—remains a mystery. “After nineteen years, Terry spoke a few words, but within seventy-two hours he recovered fluent, expressive, and receptive language,” Schiff said.

Kate Bainbridge, the first vegetative patient that Adrian Owen studied in Cambridge, has also made considerable progress, recovering the use of her arms, and much of her mental function, although she is unable to walk. She still has difficulty talking, and uses a letter board to communicate with people who are not used to her speech. “Most scans show what is wrong with your brain, which doctors need to know,” Bainbridge wrote to me in an e-mail. “But Adrian Owen’s scans show what is working. I say they found parts of my brain were working. It really scares me to think what might have happened to me if I had not had the scans. They show people it was worth carrying on even though my body was unresponsive.”

As for us, don’t pull any plug. Put the iPod on shuffle, set up the audiobooks, and do as many Adrian Owen experiments as possible.

Michael Barone describes one sort of higher eduction today:

Colleges and universities today almost universally have speech codes, which prohibit speech deemed hurtful by others, particularly those who are deemed to be minorities (including women, who are a majority on most campuses these days). They are enforced unequally, so that no one gets punished when students take copies of conservative alternative campus newspapers left for free distribution and dump them in the trash. But should a conservative student call some female students “water buffaloes,” he is sentenced to take sensitivity training — the campus version of communist re-education camps. The message comes through loud and clear. Some kinds of speech are protected, while others are punished.

Where did speech codes come from? There certainly weren’t many when I was in college or law school. So far as I can tell, they originated after college and university administrators began using racial quotas and preferences to admit students — starting with blacks, now including Hispanics and perhaps others — who did not meet ordinary standards. They were instituted, it seems, to prevent those students from feeling insulted and to free administrators from criticism for preferential treatment — treatment that arguably violates the Civil Rights Act of 1964…

Racial quotas and preferences continue to be employed…in spite of state laws forbidding them, and university administrators seem to derive much of their psychic income from their supposed generosity in employing them. This, even though evidence compiled by UCLA Professor Richard Sander suggests they produce worse educational outcomes for their intended beneficiaries and even though Justice Clarence Thomas makes a persuasive case in his book “My Grandfather’s Son” that they cast a stigma of inferiority on them…one indispensable requirement for being a college or university administrator is intellectual dishonesty. You have to be willing to lie about what you consider one of your most important duties. So much for open inquiry and intellectual rigor…

in the 1960s, they abandoned their role as advocates of American values — critical advocates who tried to advance freedom and equality further than Americans had yet succeeded in doing — and took on the role of adversaries of society. The students who were exempted from serving their country during the Vietnam War condemned not themselves but their country, and many sought tenured positions in academe to undermine what they considered a militaristic, imperialist, racist, exploitative, sexist, homophobic — the list of complaints grew as the years went on — country. English departments have been packed by deconstructionists who insist that Shakespeare is no better than rap music, and history departments with multiculturalists who insist that all societies are morally equal except our own, which is morally inferior.

Victor Davis Hanson describes another sort of educated person:

The brilliance of U.S. army and marines officers has not been fully appreciated. I met scores with PhDs and MAs, from Majors to Colonels, who are literally all at once trying to defeat al Qaeda gangs and Shiite militias, rebuild government facilities, arbitrate tribal feuds, repair utilities and train Iraqi army and police. As was true of the last trip to Iraq, I am left with three general impressions about the military.

(1) Our army and marines are far too few and overextended. The United States must either radically increase the size of these traditional ground units or scale back its commitments in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East Through constant rotations, we are literally burning out gifted officers and lifetime professionals— and will lose their priceless expertise if they begin, as I fear, retiring en masse due to the sheer exhaustion.

(2) There is more optimism about success among the battlefield soldiers than present with analysts in Baghdad. The sudden decrease in violence has left many units stunned that Iraqis who used to try to kill them are suddenly volunteering information about terrorists and landmines, and clamoring to join the joint security force. Usually those behind the desk are the optimists, the soldiers who die the pessimists. But instead there is genuine feeling on the front that after four frustrating years of ordeal, at last there are tangible signs of real, often radical improvement.

(3) As a supporter of some four years of the now unpopular effort to remove Saddam and leave a democracy in his place, I continue to have only one reservation, albeit a major one. The U.S. soldier in the field is so unusually competent and heroic that one comes to despair at the very thought of losing even one of them. As a military historian I know that an army that can’t take casualties can’t win, but I confess after spending 16-hour days with our soldiers in impossible conditions one wonders whether the entire country of Iraq is worth the loss of just of these unusual Americans. I understand both the lack of logic and perhaps amorality in such a sweeping statement, but feel it nonetheless out here.

Society would appear to be splintering in unhealthy ways.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad continues to elucidate his plan, which all hangs together quite well if you see it in his terms. He sees that there is a grand satanic conspiracy to keep his people down, and that it is his responsibility and divinely ordained mission to make things right in the world.

As we understand it, Ahmadinejad wants to “decode the black box” of the so-called Holocaust to examine its use as a pretext for the creation and crimes of Israel. He is a scientist, after all, and approaches such matters as the Zionist conspiracy with geometric logic, so no doubt he could decode the secret Holocaust-Israel plan — in which a tiny fraction of the people killed in WWII were given the land of another people. He wants to conduct a referendum in, at a minimum, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, to decide if the Jews should stay or go. If the Jews lose, he wants them to go to Europe, the site of the so-called Holocaust, or now apparently North America

Ynet has the latest on Ahmadinejad’s plans from the Jerusalem Liberation Day festivities in Teheran:

“Let a referendum be held in Palestine. It is our clear proposal to European countries…Let all Palestinians including Muslims, Christians and the Jews attend the referendum”…

“the creation of the Zionist regime, the continuation of its existence and unlimited support for the regime (by the US) are an insult to human dignity…Defense for the ominous interests of the Zionist regime is a must for certain powers. Western governments who are pioneers of secularism pursue defense for the Zionist regime as the holiest task in the world”…

“Nations should be allowed to conduct research on crimes of the Zionist regime and decode the black box for its atrocities…The Palestinian youth and nation have been deprived of all human rights for more than 60 years. Today, Quds is not an issue only related to Palestine and the Middle East but a case of world humanity.”…

Western nations have turned the Holocaust into a “holy issue and do not let anybody raise any question about it “These events took place in the World War II. Later, they (Israel) committed a historical genocide in Palestine. They ratified unlimited and holy rights for themselves and introduced all nations as criminals…They allowed themselves to commit whatever crimes under pretext of the Holocaust. They even built secret prisons in Europe… and attacked and imposed economic sanctions against a nation that did not officially recognize the Zionist regime.”

“the world should know that the Iranian nation hates massacre(s). It regards agents of the World War II and Hitler as dark and black faces.”

In a Reuters story, Mr. Ahmadinejad makes the helpful suggestion that perhaps the Jews should be given Canada and Alaska:

“Iran condemns fabricating such a pretext (the Holocaust) for the Zionist regime to commit genocide against the Palestinian nation and occupy Palestine…The Iranian nation and countries in the region will not rest until Palestine is free and criminals punished”…

“Europeans cannot tolerate the Zionist regime’s presence in their own region but want to impose it on the Middle East. Give them (the Jews) this vast land of Canada and Alaska to build themselves a home and resettle there”

“Iran wants to remove international concerns over its atomic work through talks…But if they (the West) want to start a new game it will have no result for them but regret”

More Reuters:

“I announce to the whole world that the Iranian nation has passed the difficult points (on its nuclear path)…And no power can stop this nation from making more and more (atomic) achievements”

So Mr. Ahmadinejad believes there is a conspiracy of 2000 Zionists who want to rule the world, and that he has a divine mission to do his part to defeat evil and make things right in the world. You are free to take his nuclear plans seriously or not.

UPDATE

We quote from the official Iranian news agency’s report on Ahmadinejad’s comments, and find pretty much the same thing as in the western versions based on it:

“Why don’t you let the black box of the Zionist regime be decoded? If the Western leaders are not members of the Zionist party, they should allow an international fact finding group decode the black box…Nations should be allowed to conduct research on crimes of the Zionist regime and decode the black box for its atrocities…

“They violate sanctity of prophets and insult human dignity and democracy and say they have nothing to do with these acts. You have turned what you call Holocaust into a holy issue and do not let anybody raise any question about it…Events took place in the World War II.

“They allowed themselves to commit whatever crimes under the pretext of the Holocaust. They even built secret prisons in Europe and attacked and imposed economic sanctions against a nation who did not officially recognize the Zionist regime…Today, Qods is not an issue only related to Palestine and the Middle East but a case of world of humanity”

“The world should know that the Iranian nation hates massacre. It regards agents of the World War II and Hitler as dark and black faces.”

Hooman Majd served as interpreter for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in his 2006 trip to the United Nations, and had this report about the “2000 Zionists who want to rul the world” in the NY Observer of October 1, 2006:

“Our political situation, by God’s grace, is great,” he went on. “For those who don’t want our people to progress, the situation is not good. In the Middle East, the situation for America has become very bad. Very. They thought if they attack Lebanon, their situation would get better,” he said, allowing no difference between Israel and the United States. “They gave 33 days to the Zionists to do something in Lebanon, and it didn’t happen. Same thing in Iraq; same thing in Afghanistan. It’s not that our situation has gotten worse in the last year; it’s that it’s gotten much better.

“As for America,” he said, “we will not be dictated to. Don’t forget that it was America that unilaterally broke off relations with Iran …. I remember Mr. Carter saying that to punish Iran, we will break diplomatic relations.”…“And now,” he added, “some of them expect us to go and beg for the resumption of relations. We’ll never do that. There’s not one Iranian in the world who would ask us do that,” he said, as if challenging any Iranians in this part of the world to do so. “Never,” he emphasized. “For what?”

President Ahmadinejad, apparently satisfied that he had convinced everyone that Iran was strong, moved on to the question of Iran’s nuclear program. “If, God forbid—God forbid—we budge on this issue, they’ll next say, ‘You have to give up your chemistry departments in your universities, and your physics departments too.’ Then even the medical schools.” The president’s tone wasn’t bombastic; if anything, it was very matter-of-fact. “It’s clear that they don’t want us to progress,” he said. “Of course, not all Americans—Americans are good people.

“Two thousand Zionists want to rule the world. You can do it elsewhere,” he said, as if speaking directly to the mysterious 2,000, “but not in Iran. It’s impossible—it’s not doable.”…

That evening’s dinner, for 500 loyal Iranians, was held in a grand ballroom of the Hilton. The crowd, consisting of Iranians who are fiercely nationalistic and more positively inclined to the Islamic Republic, greeted their president with prolonged applause. The national anthem played loudly over the speaker system, and to anyone who harbors suspicions that 2006 Iran is reminiscent of 1936 Germany, this event would have appeared to have some of the trappings of a Bund rally in 1930’s New York.

“2000 Zionists want to rule the world.” Much else flows nicely from the core belief that there is a tiny cabal of Jews who plot to rule the world, and are the puppeteers in an intricate plan that subverts and uses the wealth and rulers of many nations in service of their nefarious ends. This explains a lot about Mr. Ahmadinejad. This conspiratorial construct, combined with Mr. Ahmadinejad’s profound sense of religious destiny, combine to make him a potentially very dangerous man indeed.

Much of the news is grim today. It’s nice to know that, in these times, people from the left and the right are getting together to solve the nation’s problems in their own special ways. AP:

the Middlebury Institute wants liberal states like Vermont to be able to secede peacefully. That sounds just fine to the League of the South, a conservative group that refuses to give up on Southern independence. “We believe that an independent South, or Hawaii, Alaska, or Vermont would be better able to serve the interest of everybody, regardless of race or ethnicity,” said Michael Hill of Killen, Ala., president of the League of the South…

Naylor, a retired Duke University professor, said the League of the South shares his group’s opposition to the federal government and the need to pursue secession. “It doesn’t matter if our next president is Condoleeza or Hillary, it is going to be grim,” said Naylor, adding that there are secessionist movements in more than 25 states, including Hawaii, Alaska, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Texas.

The Middlebury Institute, based in Cold Spring, N.Y., was started in 2005. Its followers, disillusioned by the Iraq war and federal imperialism, share the idea of states becoming independent republics. They contend their movement is growing. The first North American Separatist Convention was held last fall in Vermont, which, unlike most Southern states, supports civil unions. Voters there elected a socialist to the U.S. Senate.

Middlebury director Kirpatrick Sale said Hill offered to sponsor the second secessionist convention, but the co-sponsor arrangement was intended to show that “the folks up north regard you as legitimate colleagues.” “It bothers me that people have wrongly declared them to be racists,” Sale said. The League of the South says it is not racist, but proudly displays a Confederate Battle Flag on its banner.

We note that author and journalist Sale, who once called the 1970’s a time of “economic depression,” expects far worse in the years to come. He has been anti-Industrial Revolution for a very long time. Perhaps one day, he and those with confederate currency buried in the back yard, will turn out to be right. (By the way, though we think of most of what is reported above is kooks having fun, we acknowledge that there is a sense of unease in this country that seems more widespread than it has in some decades.)

Niall Ferguson takes us on a tour of the world of 2050, with its 9 billion people. One of the very interesting aspects of the projections is the effect of the one child policy on the China of the future:

China’s 1.3 billion population may not be as big a source of power as many American and European commentators assume. According to the UN’s medium variant projection, the population of the world will increase from 6.5 billion to 9.2 billion between now and 2050. But China will account for just 4% of that increase.

The most rapid growth will be elsewhere: in sub-Saharan Africa, where the population will more than double, as well as in the Muslim world (Iran’s population will grow by 44%), India (up 46%), and the United States (up by more than 33%). India’s population will overtake that of China some time around 2025…

As well as ceasing to be the world’s most populous country, China will become almost as elderly a society as Europe. Today, fewer than 8% of China’s population are 65 or older. By 2050 that proportion could have risen as high as 24%. The equivalent figure for Europe is 28%; for the UK 24%; and for the US 21%. In sub-Saharan Africa, by contrast, the proportion will rise from 3% to less than 6%. One way of understanding what this means for China’s economy is to calculate a dependency ratio, conventionally expressed as the total number of elderly as a percentage of the working-age population. Right now the figure for China is 11%, compared with 24% in the UK and 18% in the US. By 2050, however, the Chinese figure may be as high as 39%, only fractionally lower than the UK ratio and significantly higher than that for the US…

Certainly, Japan is not a great advertisement for the senescent society. With 20% of its population already aged 65 or over, it has become the sick man of the developed world, struggling to escape from a 15-year slough of low growth and deflation…

Perhaps the great global division of this century will not be between Muslims and “Judaeo-Christians” or between East and West, but simply between the Old World and the Young World.

These projections are fascinating, and it is certainly worth thinking about the implications of current trends. However, it is the predictable-in-nature but random-in-timing appearance of great discontinuities — World Wars, Inventions and technological innovations, Great Depressions or Inflations, Pandemics, etc. — that more captures our imagination. Several very great surprises lie in wait on the road to 2050, some of them positive, some of them devastating, some of them utterly beyond our capacity to predict as of this moment.

Caroline Glick reviews the actual content of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s speeches this week

At Columbia University, Ahmadinejad devoted the majority of his speech to a discussion of the role of science in human affairs…Speaking as “an academic,” Ahmadinejad said that from his perspective, the role of science is to serve Islam and that any science that does not serve Islamic goals is corrupt. As he put it, “Science is the light, and scientists must be pure and pious. If humanity achieves the highest level of physical and spiritual knowledge but its scholars and scientists are not pure, then this knowledge cannot serve the interests of humanity.” Elaborating on this notion, he argued that Western scientists serve corrupt governments who reject the pure and pious path of Islam and therefore are used as agents for corruption.

Tellingly, Ahmadinejad moved directly from his assault on non-Islamic scientists and regimes to a defense of Iran’s nuclear program. The message was clear: Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons is done in the name of Islam and therefore it is inherently legitimate. As far as he is concerned, refusing to allow Iran to pursue nuclear weapons is tantamount to an assault on God.

In his address at the UN, Ahmadinejad laid out his case for Islamic supremacy. He claimed that all of the world’s problems are the consequence of two things. First, by his reading of history, after the Second World War, “The victors of the war drew the road map for global domination and formulated their policies not on the basis of justice but for ensuring the interests of the victors over the vanquished nations.” The second cause for the world’s woes is the world powers’ rejection of Islam. As he put it, “The second and more important factor is some big powers’ disregard of morals, divine values, the teachings of prophets and instructions by the Almighty God… Unfortunately, they have put themselves in the position of God!”

Thankfully for Ahmadinejad, this “corrupted” world order will soon be swept away. Either the “corrupted” powers will “return from the path of arrogance and obedience to Satan to the path of faith in God,” or “the same calamities that befell the people of the distant past will befall them as well.” Concluding his UN remarks Ahmadinejad pledged, “Without any doubt, the Promised One who is the ultimate Savior… will come. In the company of all believers, justice-seekers and benefactors, he will establish a bright future and fill the world with justice and beauty. This is the promise of God; therefore it will be fulfilled.“

Ahmadinejad said: “Science is the light, and scientists must be pure and pious. If humanity achieves the highest level of physical and spiritual knowledge but its scholars and scientists are not pure, then this knowledge cannot serve the interests of humanity.” When we heard it, we took that passage possibly to mean that Iran’s nuclear plans were coming up a little short, and Ahmadinejad wanted to do some recruiting in the US and around the world for pious scientists to help out back in Iran. One can hope they are having such problems, yes?

AP science writer Seth Borenstein reports a scary story that can’t be fact-checked for quite a while

rising seas will likely swamp the first American settlement in Jamestown, Va., as well as the Florida launch pad that sent the first American into orbit, many climate scientists are predicting. In about a century, some of the places that make America what it is may be slowly erased. Global warming — through a combination of melting glaciers, disappearing ice sheets and warmer waters expanding — is expected to cause oceans to rise by one meter, or about 39 inches. It will happen regardless of any future actions to curb greenhouse gases, several leading scientists say. And it will reshape the nation.

Rising waters will lap at the foundations of old money Wall Street and the new money towers of Silicon Valley. They will swamp the locations of big city airports and major interstate highways. Storm surges worsened by sea level rise will flood the waterfront getaways of rich politicians — the Bushes’ Kennebunkport and John Edwards’ place on the Outer Banks. And gone will be many of the beaches in Texas and Florida favored by budget-conscious students on Spring Break. That’s the troubling outlook projected by coastal maps reviewed by The Associated Press.

The AP story says at the bottom: “The change will be a gradual process, one that is so slow it will be easy to ignore for a while.” OK, we will.

Amir Taheri describes the Ahmadinejad administration’s new cultural revolution to remove the corrupt influence of the infidel from education. That would, we suppose, eliminate most that is interesting about the world, including in science, economics, psychology, and most things associated with the idea of progress in human affairs. Not that any of that matters of course, when compared with the glories of jihad.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has promised to “cleanse” the Iranian educational system of what he calls “the corrupt influence of the infidel” and has mobilized a special militia to crush the expected student revolts.

The radical president refers to his “academic cleansing” plan as “The Second Great Islamic Cultural Revolution.” The late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini closed the universities and launched the first “Great Islamic Cultural Revolution” in 1980. A committee created to “cleanse” academia purged more than 6,000 professors and lecturers, virtually destroying Iranian academia. Dozens of academics were executed as hundreds fled into exile. The committee also expelled thousands of students on charges of monarchist or leftist tendencies. It also censored or totally rewrote dozens of textbooks to conform to the Khomeinist ideology.

When the universities were reopened two years later, the committee tried to fill them with students and teachers sympathetic to Khomeinism. The trick was to allocate special places for members of The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and children of families believed to be loyal to the regime.

Further, it established a blacklist of banned authors and writings - an index that has grown every year since, reminding one of the worst days of the Inquisition in medieval Europe. The madness of censorship, supervised by the so-called Ministry of Islamic Orientation and Culture, reached a new peak last week with the banning of a new volume of memoirs of former President Hashemi Rafsanjai - who was a member of the original “cleansing” committee!…

Ahmadinejad launched his second “Islamic Cultural Revolution” last year by appointing a semiliterate mullah as chancellor of Tehran University - the first time that a cleric took charge of the nation’s oldest and largest center of higher education. Ahmadinejad’s purge started last July with the replacement of 20-plus college deans. In almost every case, a bona fide academic was pushed out in favor of a Revolutionary Guard member…

Dozens of academics have been arrested, including some returning from conferences abroad. An unknown number of students have been arrested. In Tabriz, all seven members of the students union were picked up and taken to an unknown destination last month. The families of two of them claim that they may have died under torture. In Tehran, more than 150 student activists have been “disappeared” in recent weeks. As part of the purge, 30 privately owned colleges have been shut and their assets seized. Thirteen others are under investigation.

The willingness of Iran and other Islamic countries, as well as Gaza, the West Bank, etc., to absolutely destroy their children’s economic well being and futures in breathtaking. That the authorities do this without shame or guilt is eloquent testimony to the demented nature of the puritanical Islamic supremacist ideology that they preach. And yet the West takes no note of this massive inter-generational child abuse.

A report from Kathmandu via Reuters:

Officials at Nepal’s state-run airline have sacrificed two goats to appease Akash Bhairab, the Hindu sky god, following technical problems with one of its Boeing 757 aircraft, the carrier said Tuesday. Nepal Airlines, which has two Boeing aircraft, has had to suspend some services in recent weeks due the problem.

The goats were sacrificed in front of the troublesome aircraft Sunday at Nepal’s only international airport in Kathmandu in accordance with Hindu traditions, an official said. “The snag in the plane has now been fixed and the aircraft has resumed its flights,” said Raju K.C., a senior airline official…

Neither Akash Bhairab nor the goats could be reached for comment.

A little humility is perhaps in order about all the knowledge and wisdom that humans possess of the ways their world and the universe function. There is a hole in the universe of unfathomable size — a billion light years across. AP:

Astronomers have stumbled upon a tremendous hole in the universe. That’s got them scratching their heads about what’s just not there. The cosmic blank spot has no stray stars, no galaxies, no sucking black holes, not even mysterious dark matter. It is 1 billion light years across of nothing. That’s an expanse of nearly 6 billion trillion miles of emptiness, a University of Minnesota team announced Thursday…

“This is 1,000 times the volume of what we sort of expected to see in terms of a typical void,” said Minnesota astronomy professor Lawrence Rudnick, author of the paper that will be published in Astrophysical Journal. “It’s not clear that we have the right word yet … This is too much of a surprise.”…

Retired NASA astronomer Steve Maran said of the discovery: “This is incredibly important for something where there is nothing to it.”

“This is incredibly important for something where there is nothing to it.” It reminds us, as that fellow said, that man can walk the streets and boast like most but he wouldn’t know a thing.