Henny Penny meets Stalin

With the financial earthquakes shaking many previously rock-solid institutions, the fear they have engendered is turning capitalists and conservatives into almoners begging the government to alleviate their pain, in return for which, they are willing to surrender their freedom to the state. I wrote about this in these very pages some time ago, regarding the nature and effects of crises in history.

The opportunists, those who are in the fortunate position to have been voted into office just as the crisis hit, are using the situation to implement the kind of societal controls they could only have dreamed of a few short months ago. In the name of financial repair, they have convinced the public that anti-greenhouse gas cars will solve most, if not all of the problems facing our economy. They have replaced the war on terror with the war on climate.

Of the 8 billion people on earth, how many do you see demanding a drastic emergency battle against global warming. There are some, you see them at demonstrations, but as with AIDS, for every demonstrator for a quick cure, there are dozens of people deliberately getting infected and irresponsibly infecting others. When reality sets in, the cost involved in preventing the sky from falling causes most people, given a choice, to opt out.

USA Today just recently published an article about a politically inspired program to get children to practice "green" living and 700 schools signed up for it. In USA Today's usual fashion, they take two viewpoints and say, this one says this; that one says that. Then, this one thinks this, that one thinks that, and so forth. Very impartial. No one is left with a really good argument that isn't refuted by the other. One of the arguments against the program characterized it as amounting to teaching environmental religion.

USA Today should call things by their proper name. This isn't "teaching." It's indoctrinating. You can "teach" math, you can "teach" science, you can "teach" English, you can "teach" literature, but watch out when someone "teaches" values other than the universally held ones.

After the vote on the stimulus package, John Duncan, a Tennessee republican congressman described it as a bill full of the democrat wish list.It contains all the elements of the political agenda that they have been unable to push through before under president Bush and the evenly divided congress. When Nancy Pelosi was interviewed on television last week, she said she would not apologize for the money in the stimulus plan that was earmarked for family planning (read: abortion) even though it has little to do with economic stimulus. She had the cheek to suggest that the abortion industry also needs some stimulus. Thankfully, this provision was removed from the bill before it was passed.

All this is happening right under the nose of the public who is now so paralyzed by fear that it will allow the government to do anything in the name of warding off the great depression of the twenty-first century.