From Canada’s Financial Post:

The “inconvenient truth” overhanging the UN’s Copenhagen conference is not that the climate is warming or cooling, but that humans are overpopulating the world.

A planetary law, such as China’s one-child policy, is the only way to reverse the disastrous global birthrate currently, which is one million births every four days.

The world’s other species, vegetation, resources, oceans, arable land, water supplies and atmosphere are being destroyed and pushed out of existence as a result of humanity’s soaring reproduction rate.

Ironically, China, despite its dirty coal plants, is the world’s leader in terms of fashioning policy to combat environmental degradation, thanks to its one-child-only edict…

….bla bla bla

A few minor asides:

The current President of China (2003-present), Hu Jintao, has 2 sons with his wife. (Specifying “with his wife” because we’re only counting legitimate children here)

The last President (1993-2003), Jiang Zemin, had 2 sons with his wife.

The President before that (1988-1993), Yang Shangkun, had 3 children with his wife.

The current Premier of China (2003-present), Wen Jiabao, has one son and one daughter with his wife.

The last Premier (1998-2003), Zhu Rongj, had one son and one daughter with his wife.

The Premier before that (1988-1998), Li Peng, had 3 children with his wife.

The Premier before that (1983-1988), Zhao Ziyang, had 5 children with his wife.

The Premier before that (1976-1983), Hua Guofeng, had 4 children with his wife.  Hua was Premier in 1979 when the One Child Policy was instituted.

The Premier before that was Mao himself. He had at least 4 wives, one of whom is believed to have had 3 of his children and one 6, but Mao was generally such a freak no one really knows.

And, according to her own website, the author of the FP article excerpted above has a couple if kids of her own…

I left the business to stay at home with our two babies, Eric and Julie, for six years.

From This Is London:

His name is Matthew, he is 26 years old, and his supporters hope to take his case to the European Court of Human Rights.

But he won’t be able to give evidence on his own behalf - since he is a chimpanzee. Animal rights activists led by British teacher Paula Stibbe are fighting to have Matthew legally declared a ‘person’ so she can be appointed as his guardian if the bankrupt animal sanctuary where he lives in Vienna is forced to close….

It may sound nice to propose that a chimps should have the same rights as humans. But what then about the corollary: that a human’s rights should be equivalent to those of a chimp? And if a chimp then why not any other animal? How about plants? While we’re at it, lets propose humans have no rights whatsoever.

I think a related question should be considered by anyone suggesting enemy combatants in foreign war zones should have the same rights of US citizens under our Constitution.

More rights for everyone - why not? Seems like a nice enough concept.

But again, the corollary: under our laws should US citizens be treated the same as enemy combatants in foreign war zones? When you are brought up on charges of running a stop sign do you want to be treated like a Al Qaeda operative trying to blow up an airplane?

Extending the notion of human rights or constitutional rights to a limitless degree is equivalent to destroying those rights all together.

From UN Watch:

From American Thinker:

Three days ago we saw the first pictures of Burmese villages being destroyed. We have learned about the massacres of monks and other civilians peacefully protesting in Myanmar. British PM Gordon Brown said that “the death toll in the Myanmar crackdown to be ‘far greater’ than has so far been reported.”

That’s at least three whole 24-hour news cycles, plenty of time to start a storm of protest. Where is the BBC? The Guardian? Der Spiegel? Der New York Times? Where are all the peaceniks of the Left? Mother Sheehan, where art thou?

As far as I can tell, Burma’s fascist massacres of peaceful Buddhist monks has not yet led to a peep from our self-proclaimed peaceniks. Where are they?…

Simple - peaceniks in America are almost always leftists, and leftists aren’t generally bothered by brutal dictatorships, so long as they claim to be marxist in nature and are brutal enough.

The democratic Union of Burma was overthrown in a coup lead by militant marxist Ne Win in 1962. Win’s ideology, called the Burmese Way to Socialism, drove the country into extreme poverty. By the 80s Burma was the poorest country in the world, under perpetual marshall law, dominated by a single political party (BSPP - Burmese Socialist Political Party), and dependent on its communist neighbor China. Mass poverty, military dictatorship, communism - not bad stuff for leftists.

American Thinker continues:

…Today, many on the peacenik Left are eager to boycott Israel and protest America. But somehow they were nowhere to be found in the fight against Soviet imperialism, against Pol Pot’s genocide, against Rwandan mass murder, against Balkan massacres and rape rooms, against two decades of Sudanese jihad against starving African infidels, against Saddam Hussein’s torture regime, against Mahmoud A’jad’s nuke program, against indoctrinated teenagers bombing innocent kids in Israel, while the terror bosses were having orgies in their mansions…

…Were he alive in Burma today, Martin Luther King would die as a total unknown, and his birthday would not be a national holiday anywhere in the world. As Burma just proved again, peaceful protests never work against genuine bad guys. That’s the gaping flaw of pacifism. It only works when force establishes strong and humane governments….

Beyond the left’s obvious affinity for marxism there is another consistent thread - affinity for the most brutal and party in any dispute. Israel vs Syria, US vs Saddam, Castro vs Cuban Refugees in FL, Chavez vs the Venezuelan Constitution, White Russia vs Red Russia, Communist China vs Nationalist China, North Vietnam vs South Vietnam. In each of these contests which party was most brutal and depraved? In each with which side did the left sympathize?

As Orwell wrote in 1945:

…there is a minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmited motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism.

Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defense of western countries…

…All in all it is difficult not to feel that pacifism, as it appears among a section of the intelligentsia, is secretly inspired by an admiration for power and successful cruelty.

From Der Spiegel:

When two Tunisian men were sent home after five years in Guantanamo, they thought they would be free. Instead, they faced imprisonment, abuse, threats and solitary confinement. Now they say things were better back in the US prison camp.

Many of the detainees sitting in Guantanamo Bay hail from countries with a terrible record of torturing and abusing prisoners. While they may want to see an end to their ordeal in the US prison camp, they also have reason to dread the treatment they could face back home.

According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), the US government is not doing enough to ensure that prisoners sent back home are not subjected to ill treatment, despite diplomatic assurances from their home countries. The US is continuing to repatriate prisoners, sending home 16 Saudis on Thursday. But in their haste to reduce the numbers at Guantanamo, it seems they are being less than thorough in ensuring that the former prisoners are not mistreated.

The two Tunisians were sent home on June 18 and, according to HRW, they had no idea that they would be facing further imprisonment. They now say that if they had known, they would have fought the transfer…They now claim things are so bad that they would rather be back in Guantanamo — despite Tunisia’s pledge to the US that they would be treated humanely.

Human Rights Watch (perhaps along with the author of the article) is missing a fundamental truth. The statement “many of the detainees sitting in Guantanamo Bay hail from countries with a terrible record of torturing and abusing prisoners,” is true because the broader statement “the majority of the human race lives in countries with terrible records of torturing and abusing prisoners.”

By turning the detainment of combatants into a legal and media circus, groups like HRW don’t advance human rights. To the contrary, they make life much harder (and likely shorter) for suspected enemies of the US.

Without Gitmo most of the people now there would probably have just been killed on the battlefield - why bother capturing someone if we will have to chose between releasing them immediately or turning them loose to abuse our legal system? Anyone we do capture would probably be handed over to Afghan, Iraqi, or other foreign jurisprudence - which is almost certainly not up to the standards demanded by HRW.

The Czech Republic is causing a major headache for its EU partners. Protesting policies on climate change, defense, and EU integration, the tiny country is emerging as the consistent bette noir in the group.

This week’s Economist reports the CR is stirring up trouble on another front - human  rights. From the article:

…Czech officials regard their newly minted EU membership as a chance to influence a club with global clout, and throw Europe’s weight behind democrats everywhere from Myanmar to Belarus, Moldova and Cuba (a particular Czech obsession). Indeed, there is a whole unit inside the Czech foreign ministry devoted to helping dissidents in other countries.

Alas, inside the Brussels foreign-policy machine such concerns are an irritant. EU diplomats describe the Czech Republic as out on a limb, even “unprofessional”, when it makes emotional points about freedom that are far off the agenda of given meetings. When the Czechs speak about Cuba, there is particular eye-rolling and checking of watches. The Czechs do not really believe their rhetoric, murmur old-school diplomats; they are merely acting as “message boys” for the Americans…

…Czech officials say they are motivated in part by their memories of Nazi and Soviet oppression (though several other ex-communist EU nations with similar histories appear rather less fussed about human rights). A bigger reason, all agree, is the moral example set by Vaclav Havel, an ex-dissident writer and the country’s first post-communist president—not least his role in ensuring that ex-dissidents filled key government positions, notably in the higher ranks of the foreign ministry…

Good for the Czechs. And I’m flattered that the most tireless advocate of human rights in the EU is automatically, if falsely, assumed by the establishment to be an American lackey.

From UN Watch:

Dictators Fidel Castro of Cuba and Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus will be celebrating the UN Human Rights Council’s likely adoption tomorrow of a reform package that will see both regimes dropped from a blacklist, while Israel is placed under permanent indictment.
 
Contrary to all the promises of reform issued last year, the proposal released today by Council President Luis Alfonso de Alba targets Israel for permanent indictment under a special agenda item: “Human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories,” which includes “Human rights violations and implications of the Israeli occupation of Palestine and other occupied Arab territories”; and “Right to self-determination of the Palestinian people.” No other situation in the world is singled out — not genocide in Sudan, not child slavery in China, nor the persecution of democracy dissidents in Egypt and elsewhere. Moreover, the council will entrench its one-sided investigative mandate of “Israeli violations of international law”—the only one not subject to regular review after a set term—by renewing it “until the end of the occupation.”

According to this Amnesty International graphic, the US is the worst violater of human rights in the world.

The US is cited in 6 categories: Torture, Extrajudicial Executions, Executions, Death Penalty, Discrimination and Violence against Women, and Arbitrary Detention.

Not sure why “Executions” and “Death Penalty” are both counted. Notably, several enthusiastic employeers of the death penalty are not cited for it - eg Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Russia.

The next worst offenders got cited for 4 each - including, of course, Israel. “Palestine” got 2, along with Iran.

Only 7 other countries, including almost no Muslim ones, are cited for “Discrimination and Violence against Women.” China, with its 150,000 forced abortions per year, apparently doesn’t have a violence against women problem.

Among the EU only Spain and the UK (of course) are cited, each once. North Korea’s record is squeaky clean.