We Should Live - Ben Bateman

As the Democrats tear each other apart over their primary, fate has delivered to those of us on the Right another unexpected present.

You’ve probably heard about the fundamentalist Mormon cult that was raided by Texas Rangers. The whole story stank from the beginning, and the authorities wildly overreacted. The raid was apparently based on little more than an anonymous phone call, and it resulted in over 400 children being forcibly taken from their parents and put in state custody. If you’ve ever wondered why conservatives aren’t impressed with impassioned rhetoric from the left about human rights and constitutional protections, this story might help. All those rights invented out of thin air granted us by liberal philosopher-king judges always mysteriously evaporate when the iron fist of the state comes down on people that the Left doesn’t like. If police had even thought about raiding a far-left cult, then the mainstream press would have screamed about it for days. But not when the victims of capricious state brutality are on the extreme Right.

It could have gone worse, though. At least Janet Reno didn’t take charge and burn the children alive while trying to save them. These FLDS children were merely kidnapped at gunpoint on the flimsiest of evidence while their parents were apparently granted no opportunity to be heard—and certainly no presumption of innocence. Where conservative kooks are involved, the rule seems to be kidnap the children first, then let the parents try to establish their innocence.

I’m quite aware of how bizarre and controlling life probably was inside the FLDS compound. Probably more so than most. But that icky feeling is completely irrelevant to the deep legal point. Even creepy fundamentalist Mormons are entitled to a presumption of innocence and a right to be heard—before their children are stolen from them.

It’s also quite bizarre that so much of this government overreach is premised on alleged polygamy and teenagers getting pregnant. Since when did anyone get upset about teenaged girls becoming pregnant? If a justification for a baby-snatching raid by the Texas Rangers, then they’ve got quite a lot of work ahead of them. I’m sure that they can find entire inner-city zip codes packed full of pregnant teenagers—and most of them won’t know or care who the fathers of their children are. Isn’t that worse than whatever happened in the FLDS compound? I mean, at least the FLDS girls were married to the fathers of their children! Let’s get a little perspective here.

And how did polygamy suddenly become a crime so serious that its mere allegation dispels all due process rights that the accused would normally enjoy? If the judges in the more liberal states continue to trample democracy on the subject of marriage, then in a few decades they’ll be finding a constitutional right to marry barnyard animals. Yes, polygamy is still illegal, and yes, I would prefer that it stay that way. But where are our priorities here?

Recently the story got even better. The pretext for the raid was an anonymous plea for help from a girl trapped inside the compound. But it was a hoax by Rozita Swinton, a black Colorado woman with a history of doing this sort of thing. And the buzz around the conservative blogosphere—still not fully confirmed—is that she is a pledged delegate for Barack Obama.

This summer in Denver, the Democrat Party is going to burn, baby, burn.

UPDATE: After cooling off for a few minutes, let me state the obvious: I’m not an expert on this case, and the authorities probably know some stuff that they aren’t disclosing that could change our understanding of the situation.

But still, I see no justification for abducting the children at gunpoint, except as a strongarm tactic force the adults to incriminate themselves and each other.  Let’s assume for argument that everything said against the FLDS compound is true:  Teenage girls were regularly forced to marry creepy older men and were then effectively raped.  By what twisted logic would that justify taking the little children from their mothers?  If we are to believe that the mothers are the victims, then why harm them further by stealing their children?  Abduct the mothers!  That might at least make a little sense.  But it seems like wild abuse of power to steal the children when no one has alleged that the children are being mistreated in any way.

So sad:

An Italian woman artist who was hitch-hiking to the Middle East dressed as a bride to promote world peace has been found murdered in Turkey.

The naked body of Giuseppina Pasqualino di Marineo, 33, known as Pippa Bacca, was found in bushes near the northern city of Gebze on Friday.

She had said she wanted to show that she could put her trust in the kindness of local people.

I guess that secular utopian religions have their martyrs, too.  This story reminds me of the Children’s Crusades.  This new victim even followed a similar route.

After decades of openly hating all things masculine, American universities are shocked to discover that young men have become less enthusiastic about higher education. Actually, the academicians haven’t yet figured out that enthusiasm might be the problem. In their view, it’s just that young men are slacker sexist pigs who are inferior to young women in every way—and that’s not the fault of the universities. Time.com reports:

[A] gender gap has reopened: if girls were once excluded because they somehow weren’t good enough, they now are rejected because they’re too good. Or at least they are so good, compared with boys, that admissions committees at some private colleges have problems managing a balanced freshman class. Roughly 58% of undergraduates nationally are female, and the girl-boy ratio will probably tip past 60-40 in a few years. The divide is even worse for black males, who are outnumbered on campus by black females 2 to 1.

While educators debate whether there is a “boy crisis” that warrants a wholesale change in how to teach, colleges are quietly stripping the pastels from brochures and launching Xbox tournaments to try to close the gap in the quality and quantity of boys applying. “It’s a gross generalization that slacker boys get in over high-performing girls,” says Jennifer Delahunty, dean of admissions at Kenyon College, “but developmentally, girls bring more to the table than boys, and the disparity has gotten greater in recent years.”

Ms. Delahunty has special experience with this issue. After working on admissions committees that favored boys over girls for the sake of class balance, she experienced a moment of moral clarity after her own daughter was wait-listed. So she wrote an article about it for the New York Times in which she apologized for this unfair treatment of girls. The article generated many responses from a wide range of viewpoints. She heard from misogynists and, uh, what’s the opposite of a misogynist?

“It pissed off the feminists and the misogynists–I got both sides of the spectrum,” she told me. “The misogynists said women already have too many advantages. And the feminists said, How dare you not treat women like men.” But what most amazed her was the reaction of young women: by and large, they assumed this is just how things work. “Why aren’t they marching in the streets? That’s the part that slays me,” Delahunty says. “It isn’t fair, and young women should be saying something about it not being fair.”

And this is apparently the attitude of many college administrators: Sex discrimination against girls is a profound tragedy. Everybody knows that sex discrimination should only disadvantage boys.

Maybe they can find some solace in the thought that they aren’t really trying to help out boys. God, no! They’re really just trying to indirectly help the girls. As an admissions director for the College of William and Mary told US News & World Report: “even women who enroll … expect to see men on campus. It’s not the College of Mary and Mary; it’s the College of William and Mary.”

Memo to higher education: The boys know that you hate them. You haven’t exactly kept it a secret, even before the Duke rape case. And since you hate them so much, they have done both you and themselves a favor by not attending your schools.

(For readers who are not familiar with the problems that I’m describing with an admittedly broad brush, Glenn Sacks has a recent article that describes them more specifically.)

The Far East is apparently the world’s epicenter of anti-obesity mania. Last fall we saw a story about an immigrant to New Zealand whose wife was refused entry into the country because she failed a Body Mass Index test. Now Japan has raised the stakes in the contest to be the country most hateful towards the overweight. The Junk Food Science blog reports:

Today, the Japanese government institutes its compulsory “flab checks” for all workers over the age of 40.

To stem Japan’s “soaring obesity,” the health ministry has mandated that all waistlines among its 56 million workers over age 40 be below “regulation size” of 33.5 inches (for men). Any company failing to bring its employees’ weight under control — as well as the weights of their family members — will be fined up to 10% of its earnings by the government.

The Guardian elaborates:

Health authorities hope the measures will arrest the rise in obesity among middle-aged men and slow soaring medical costs. All employees over 40 - about 56 million people - will be required to take the test to determine whether they are at risk of metabolic syndrome - symptoms associated with being overweight that, if left unchecked, increase the risk of strokes, heart disease and diabetes. Men with girths of more than 85cm (33.5in) will be given exercise and diet plans and, in urgent cases, told to see a doctor.

A 33 inch waist for men over 40? I think I might have had a 33 inch waist back when I was 13 or so. The stories don’t mention if sumo wrestlers get an exemption. Maybe this will fizzle when the Japanese realize that this law will effectively shut them out of the heavyweight classes of Judo and other wrestling-type sports in the Olympics and elsewhere.

Barking Moonbat Early Warning System comments:

Expect this attitude to spread worldwide within a short time. Fat people and smokers are the two groups people are actually encouraged to be prejudiced against. And white guys, but that doesn’t count.

at least not in the sense that the author of the WWII-era song meant it.  Via Ace of Spades:

UK Bus Driver Kicks Passengers Off Bus…So He Can Pray!

The white Islamic convert rolled out his prayer mat in the aisle and knelt on the floor facing Mecca.

Passengers watched in amazement as he held out his palms towards the sky, bowed his head and began to chant.

“Eventually everyone started complaining. One woman said, ‘What the hell are you doing? I’m going to be late for work’.”

After a few minutes the driver calmly got up, opened the doors and asked everyone back on board.

But when the already unnerved passengers saw the driver’s rucksack on the floor, they refused to get back on.

“One chap said, ‘I’m not getting on there now’”.

“An elderly couple also looked really confused and worried.

“After seeing that no-one wanted to get on he drove off and we all waited until the next bus came about 20 minutes later. I was left totally stunned. It made me not want to get on a bus again.”

Perhaps they were being paranoid. But as one person said in the comment section:

“you cant fault anyone for not wanting to get back on after the rucksack came out - the London bombings are still very much with the general public and it is a legitimate concern that we all have to live with. The world IS a much different place post 9-11/7-7…”

From WSJ.com:

Foreclosure on Las Vegas Casino to Begin

The developer of the Cosmopolitan Resort Casino, a $3.9 billion condo-hotel complex on the Las Vegas Strip, has been notified by its primary lender that it will begin foreclosure proceedings.

The move by Deutsche Bank AG, the lender on a $760 million senior loan, comes after the developer, Ian Bruce Eichner, wasn’t able to finalize a deal for new financing amid the credit crunch. Mr. Eichner in late February cut a tentative deal with two of his other lenders, Global Hyatt Corp. and New York hedge fund Marathon Asset Management, for a possible rescue of the twin-tower project.

I’m not one for doomsday scenarios.  The coming crash will not be the end of the world as we know it.  But it will be very unpleasant in the short term, and the aftereffects will linger if the Fed continues to inflate away the dollar to try to prop up Wall Street.

As I explained earlier, the subprime mess basically means that our economy has been growing for the past several years based on lending that was based on bank assets, which included a great many mortgages, and those mortgages were based on home valuations that were too high because the system fell into moral hazard.  Nobody can wave a wand and restore the value of those lost assets.  Not Bernanke, not Bush, not George Soros or Warren Buffet.  Not even Congress giving us back tiny scraps of our own money and expecting gratitude for it.  Nobody.

The banks must cut their lending to levels that are proportionate to the real value of their assets.  And that means that a whole lot of businesses will be denied loans, and other businesses will pay much more for credit than they did before.  Basically they’ll be unwinding the loans that they never would have made had they known what their assets were really worth.  Without those loans, businesses will go under, and the liberal press will give us the usual “Women and Minorities Hit Hardest” stories.

But then it will recover.  Unless the government gets too deeply involved and really makes a mess of things, the economy will shrink to the point at which it would have grown had the assets not been overvalued, and then it’ll start growing again.  Until then, I wouldn’t invest much in stock.  Heck, I’m even worried about investing in dollars, since they’re declining in value, too.  But you gotta own something, so pick your assets wisely.

If you live long enough and pay attention to the news long enough, these sorts of stories become routine: Series of blunders turned the plastic bag into global villain:

Scientists and environmentalists have attacked a global campaign to ban plastic bags which they say is based on flawed science and exaggerated claims.

The widely stated accusation that the bags kill 100,000 animals and a million seabirds every year are false, experts have told The Times. They pose only a minimal threat to most marine species, including seals, whales, dolphins and seabirds.

Gordon Brown announced last month that he would force supermarkets to charge for the bags, saying that they were “one of the most visible symbols of environmental waste”. Retailers and some pressure groups, including the Campaign to Protect Rural England, threw their support behind him.

But scientists, politicians and marine experts attacked the Government for joining a “bandwagon” based on poor science.

But how could this be? Only a few years ago “everyone” “knew” that plastic bags were a scourge on the planet. Now the fearmongers say, “Never mind.”

Could this have some connection to global warming? Is it conceivable that the current eco-scares will be debunked in ten years, just as the eco-scares of 10 years ago are being debunked today (and those of 20 years ago were debunked 10 years ago, and so forth)?

No, don’t believe it. Sure, the eco-scaremongers have a long track record of drumming up fake scientific consensus that is later demonstrated to be false. Sure, they’ve done it with nuclear power, alar on apples, radon in basements, the spotted owl, the vanishing rain forests, plastic bags, and many others that I could find with just a few minutes of Googling.  But surely this time the eco-fanatics are right, and we should immediately make ourselves miserable with the knowledge that doing so will somehow make the future better for someone else.  Maybe.  Or maybe not.

(And isn’t it strange how selectively those people become concerned about future generations?  I mean, these are the same people who love abortion and hate procreation.  In fact, they hate humanity generally.  And yet they always claim to be deeply concerned about future generations.)

I understand how youngsters can be fooled by these hoaxes. They just haven’t lived long enough to see the pattern. But I don’t understand the grown-ups. Even someone who pays minimal attention to the news ought to notice that yesterday’s panics quietly go away, while the new panics are reported with breathless excitement.

The internet may slow these hoaxes down, though. When I was a kid, the only information most people had was whatever the mainstream media fed them. Now the truth is out there, just a few clicks away. Continuing ignorance becomes steadily more difficult to justify.

The People’s Cube has an entertaining quiz that asks you to guess which socialist uttered a given quote.  It’s not too hard to guess most of the right answers, just based on the differences in language from past to present.  Be sure to click on all the wrong answers, too.  They have some funny lines.

Global warming is dying.  Mother Gaia keeps refusing to provide the eco-fanatics with the tropical apocalypse that they’ve been dreaming for so long:

• Madison, Wisconsin just finished its second snowiest December on record.
• Temperatures in Siberia are expected to reach -67 degrees Fahrenheit, which is too cold even for that region’s hardy residents.
• And Baghdad saw snow for the first time in decades.

I’m sure that your heart goes out to the many soon-to-be-unemployed doom-mongers.  But don’t worry.  They’re already working hard to find something new for us to be scared of.

Intrepid Seattle reporter Tom Paulson informs us that we’re running out of dirt:

The planet is getting skinned.

While many worry about the potential consequences of atmospheric warming, a few experts are trying to call attention to another global crisis quietly taking place under our feet.

Call it the thin brown line. Dirt. On average, the planet is covered with little more than 3 feet of topsoil — the shallow skin of nutrient-rich matter that sustains most of our food and appears to play a critical role in supporting life on Earth.

“We’re losing more and more of it every day,” said David Montgomery, a geologist at the University of Washington. “The estimate is that we are now losing about 1 percent of our topsoil every year to erosion, most of this caused by agriculture.”

. . .

Montgomery has written a popular book, “Dirt,” to call public attention to what he believes is a neglected environmental catastrophe. A geomorphologist who studies how landscapes form, Montgomery describes modern agricultural practices as “soil mining” to emphasize that we are rapidly outstripping the Earth’s natural rate of restoring topsoil.

Try not to laugh, please.  Mr. Paulson is only a journalist, and we therefore can’t expect him to know much of anything, nor can we expect him to ask any basic questions that might interfere with his clean narrative.

I don’t want to hear any snide comments about how farmers have closely studied the science of soil quality and erosion for centuries, if not millennia.  And you smarty-pants scientists who have spent your lives studying the specific chemicals that give soil its fertility, you genetic engineers who creates new varieties of plants that do an even better job with maintaining soil fertility, you civil engineers who build manmade lakes and design flood plains.  You can all just shut up with your facts and figures, because Tom Paulson is a journalist, and his almost completely uninformed opinion on the subject outweighs the views of a thousand actual scientists and engineers.

In a few months, topsoil depletion will be a full-fledged eco-disaster every bit as real and terrifying as global warming.  And I really mean that.

HT: Clayton Cramer, Ace of Spades

The bears are in charge, folks. (more…)

It was a wild day. (more…)

Mike Nifong has filed for bankruptcy, buried under $180 million worth of civil claims brought by the young men whose lives he attempted to ruin for political gain.

I’m not sure how much good it will do him. Last I checked, liability for willful and malicious torts is not dischargeable in bankruptcy 11 USC 532(a)(6). And Nifong’s conduct in the Duke Rape Case was about as malicious as I can imagine.

But even assuming that Nifong could put together some argument that his actions were merely negligent, he doesn’t have the money to mount a defense and make that argument. His bankruptcy schedules show a house worth $235,000 but secured debt over $302,000, from which I infer that his mortgage is more than the value of his house, so he doesn’t have any equity to borrow against to pay his lawyers. Probably his bankruptcy lawyer has some angle that I’m not seeing, but Nifong declaring bankruptcy mystifies me.

It’s nearly impossible to predict which technology will most shape our lives in the future, and even more difficult to predict how it will change them.  Here’s one of my top contenders:

Microsoft is developing Big Brother-style software capable of remotely monitoring a worker’s productivity, physical wellbeing and competence.

The Times has seen a patent application filed by the company for a computer system that links workers to their computers via wireless sensors that measure their metabolism. The system would allow managers to monitor employees’ performance by measuring their heart rate, body temperature, movement, facial expression and blood pressure.

Thus begins the predictable drama that surrounds every new technology.  Alternating groups tell us that it will either solve all our problems or destroy life as we know it.  Right now we’re on the pessimistic side with this particular technology:

The Information Commissioner, civil liberties groups and privacy lawyers strongly criticised the potential of the system for “taking the idea of monitoring people at work to a new level”. Hugh Tomlinson, QC, an expert on data protection law at Matrix Chambers, told The Times: “This system involves intrusion into every single aspect of the lives of the employees. It raises very serious privacy issues.”

I seriously doubt that this technology would accomplish much in most workplaces.  Managers can already snoop on their workers in various ways, such as internet usage or video cameras.  The problem with worker supervision isn’t in the technology, but in the labor required to interpret the results.

This technology is more mature than many people realize.  It has already been used extensively in the armed forces, and this article suggests that some pilots, firefighters, and astronauts are already using them.

And as those uses suggest, the real power of these implanted body-monitoring systems is to instantly communicate when your body is in trouble, whether that trouble involves sleepiness, low oxygen, irregular heartbeat, or just about anything else.  If the technology becomes cheap enough, then the elderly could start signing up in droves.  An abstract fear of Big Brother will quickly lose out to the opportunity to get immediate help with much more real and reasonable fears of stroke, heart attack, etc.

Investopedia doesn’t really cover this, so let’s start with a brief introduction to candlestick patterns.  (more…)

General advice for the beginner on how to go about learning technical trading.

(more…)

We had a strong down day, but not a full-fledged panic. (more…)

I haven’t yet written about Canada’s Human Rights Commissions (HRCs), because I haven’t thought of anything interesting or witty to say that hasn’t been said a dozen times elsewhere.  These Commissions are kangaroo courts set up by liberals to harass conservatives.  Until recently, they were a tool for activist liberals to bash poor, isolated far-right Canadians.

I’m not clear on whether the plaintiffs in these cases have won every time or merely nearly every time.  The plaintiff enjoys taxpayer-funded legal help, while the defendant must pay his own legal bills.  And there is no real law to be applied.  If you’re a liberal, then you need merely complain that your feelings were hurt, and the liberals on the HRCs will bring the might of the state down on whoever offended you.

The HRCs have mostly gone after fringe individuals before, but now they’re trying to get into the mainstream.  The case against MacLean’s for publishing excerpts from Mark Steyn’s book has received lots of attention in recent months, and it still makes me too angry to write anything interesting about it.  But before Mark Steyn there was Ezra Levant, owner of the now-defunct Canadian magazine The Western Standard.  In early 2006, amid the furor over the Mohammed cartoons, The Western Standard was virtually alone among media outlets in actually publishing the “offensive” images.  Various Muslims ran crying to the Alberta HRC, and now the case has come to what seems to be its first hearing.

This hearing was videotaped, though the audio is very, very quiet.  Turn your speakers way up.  Mr. Levant is not going away quietly.  He has posted eight segments of the hearing up on YouTube for the world to enjoy.  I recommend starting with the opening statement.  He is eloquent, and he understands perfectly the larger issues at stake.  Canadians should be calling their politicians in outrage, demanding that these HRCs be disbanded.

Today was a tough day for me.  I stayed out of the market, and tomorrow I’ll know if that was wise. (more…)

We got our bounce. (more…)

We finally got a rally after eight trading days of neutral or down trading. (more…)

Remember The New Republic?  It’s the bi-monthly political magazine that disgraced itself so severely in the Scott Beauchamp affair.  For those fortunate enough to have missed that mess last summer, TNR published an article in which a soldier serving in Iraq confirmed all the darkest stereotypes that the left holds about the US military.  The story turned out to be almost entirely false, but TNR stood by it as long as possible, twisting and turning for months to avoid the necessary retractions and apologies.  Last month the magazine reviewed the whole drama in some detail and concluded after thousands of words that the story was in fact, actually, really truly, false.  If there’s an apology in there somewhere, I couldn’t find it.

All that is background for the latest blockbuster article from The New Republic, this one savaging presidential candidate Ron Paul for articles in newsletters with his name on them:

Finding the pre-1999 newsletters was no easy task, but I was able to track many of them down at the libraries of the University of Kansas and the Wisconsin Historical Society. Of course, with few bylines, it is difficult to know whether any particular article was written by Paul himself. Some of the earlier newsletters are signed by him, though the vast majority of the editions I saw contain no bylines at all. Complicating matters, many of the unbylined newsletters were written in the first person, implying that Paul was the author.

But, whoever actually wrote them, the newsletters I saw all had one thing in common: They were published under a banner containing Paul’s name, and the articles (except for one special edition of a newsletter that contained the byline of another writer) seem designed to create the impression that they were written by him–and reflected his views. What they reveal are decades worth of obsession with conspiracies, sympathy for the right-wing militia movement, and deeply held bigotry against blacks, Jews, and gays. In short, they suggest that Ron Paul is not the plain-speaking antiwar activist his supporters believe they are backing–but rather a member in good standing of some of the oldest and ugliest traditions in American politics.

I don’t like Ron Paul.  I think he’s a nut, especially on foreign policy.  Men who say things like this just can’t be taken seriously:

You’d pull American troops out of Korea, Germany, the Middle East, everywhere?

I would. Under the Constitution, we don’t have the authority to just put troops in foreign countries willy-nilly when we’re not at war.

Conservatives already unhappy with Ron Paul will be tempted to use this TNR article to pile on his and drive him out of the race.  But that would be a serious error.  The fact that Ron Paul is a nut doesn’t mean that the hit piece against him is fair or accurate.  My reading of the article is that it’s the kind of overheated political hatchet job that got TNR in so much trouble over Beauchamp. (more…)

Prices bounce at support—except when they don’t. This is the lesson of today’s market panic. (more…)

One of my New Year’s resolutions is to start blogging consistently about technical trading, which takes up much of my time these days. I’m thinking of two lines of posts: One will be a simple diary about what the market did and what it’s likely to do. The other will explain what technical trading is, how it works, and how you can use it to develop a trading system that will make you far more money in the market than any mutual fund.

But in this age of litigation, obviously I cannot recommend that you make any particular investment. In fact, my official advice is that you view technical trading merely as a hobby to be done with virtual money and make-believe trades. Your actual money you should keep under your mattress or in a clean, dry mayonnaise jar. If you choose to enter the stock market with real money, be aware that this is a big, mean game in which very smart people will take your entire life’s savings without a moment’s hesitation, if you’re foolish or careless enough to let them.

Many of my readers will have no interest in any of this, so I plan to hide it all behind More links, so that readers who prefer my posts on politics, philosophy, and theology can still find them without undue effort. (more…)

I try not to link to everything that Mark Steyn writes, but this article is exceptional:

Just for a moment, let us take it as read, as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins and the other bestselling atheists insist, that what happened in Bethlehem two millennia is a lot of mumbo-jumbo. As I wrote a year ago, consider it not as an event but as a narrative: You want to launch a big new global movement from scratch. So what do you use?

The birth of a child. On the one hand, what could be more powerless than a newborn babe? On the other, without a newborn babe, man is ultimately powerless. For, without new life, there can be no civilization, no society, no nothing. Even if it’s superstitious mumbo-jumbo, the decision to root Christ’s divinity in the miracle of His birth expresses a profound — and rational — truth about “eternal life” here on earth.

From there he makes some points on Europe’s upcoming demographic collapse. It’s familiar territory for Steyn fans, though I was interested to note that British news sources expect the various spellings of ‘Mohammed’ taken together to overtake ‘Jack’ and ‘Thomas’ as the most common name given to baby boys in the United Kingdom in 2008.

Then Steyn pushes on to his main point, which is the Christmas focus on the birth of a baby contrasted with a burgeoning Western culture of self-hatred and death. Two of my points should already be familiar to my regular readers: Last May the UK-based Optimum Population Trust urged Britons to have fewer children for the planet’s sake. And just last month the Daily Mail ran a very positive story about young women choosing abortions and sterilization to help save the planet.

Now an Australian obstetrician has upped the ante by proposing that the government levy a tax on people who have more than two children, and financially reward people who choose sterilization. It won’t be long before someone in the fever swamps of environmentalism declares that mere financial incentives are not enough, and the state needs to start mandatory sterilizations and abortions. That may sound like hyperbole, but consider, the above three news stories appearing in mainstream news publications would have been inconceivable ten years ago.

The trends are similar in environmentalist theology. Steyn points to the recent book A World Without Us, in which the author loving contemplates what would happen to the Earth if all humanity were to suddenly disappear. He might also have mentioned the recent movie I Am Legend, starring Will Smith and doing very well at the box office, has a similar theme of massive human extinction that is—of course—our own fault.

But the real cutting edge of environmental theology is Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence, by David Benatar of the University of Cape Town. In what seems to be a bid to become the new Peter Singer, Mr. Benatar’s thesis is that creating a child seriously harms the child by its mere existence, and that human existence itself is bad. Lest you think I exaggerate, consider this passage from page six, which you can read for yourself via Amazon:

Nor is the harm produced by the creation of a child usually restricted to the creation of that child. The child soon finds itself motivated to procreate, producing children who, in turn, develop the same desire. Thus any pair of procreators can view themselves as occupying the tip of a generational iceberg of suffering.

Most people are taken aback when I tell them my blog’s name. We should live? Who would be crazy enough to say that we shouldn’t? Lots of people, as it turns out, and not all of them Muslims.

Steyn closes his article:

It’s hard not to conclude a form of mental illness has gripped the world’s elites. If you’re one of that dwindling band of westerners who’ll be celebrating the birth of a child . . . next week, make the most of it. A year or two on, and the eco-professors will propose banning nativity scenes because they set a bad example.