Some of what Bill Nye said in the above video from Campus Reform:
“We need, dare I say it, a tax, or should I say a fee,” Nye purportedly said Wednesday, right before an anonymous student began recording.
“It’s not just to be mean, it’s to redistribute wealth,” Nye said.
Nye went on to claim that instituting such a tax would drive innovation in more environmentally friendly ways.
“It will stimulate people investing in more energy efficient means. If you gotta pay a fee every time you make carbon monoxie and somone comes up with a more efficient car, you’ll use that car. Somebody comes up with a more efficient blender, you’ll use that blender. I mean, that’s just how it’s going to go.”
[….]
“The trouble with this is, there are people now, in the U.S. government, who don’t like government,” Nye lectured.
The former television host and Disney actor then ranted about limited government conservatives, comparing them to a General Motors employee that wants to shut their own company down.
“We have to get people who really want the government to do what it’s supposed to do, which is run things,” Nye said.
A student who attended the event told Campus Reform that he was disappointed with the big government push offered by Nye. “I thought this was going to be a fantastic event talking about science, but it turned out to be politically charged, big government propaganda.”
“I think he should stick to T.V.”…..
Via CNS-News, admitted goals, “UN’s Top Climate Official: Goal Is To ‘Intentionally Transform the Economic Development Model’”:
The United Nations’ top climate change official says the U.N.’s goal is to “intentionally transform the economic development model” in place “since the Industrial Revolution.”
“This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model, for the first time in human history,”Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) said February 3rd during a press conference in Brussels.
“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution….
Fox News also notes that U.N. ‘Climate Change’ Plan would likely shift trillions to form new world economy:
A United Nations document on “climate change” that will be distributed to a major environmental conclave next week envisions a huge reordering of the world economy, likely involving trillions of dollars in wealth transfer, millions of job losses and gains, new taxes, industrial relocations, new tariffs and subsidies, and complicated payments for greenhouse gas abatement schemes and carbon taxes — all under the supervision of the world body….
U.N. experts in Geneva were at it again last week telling the Holy See that Catholic teaching on abortion is a human rights abuse, revealing a chasm between the Church’s understanding of its mission and how U.N. officials perceive it. The episode is reminiscent of a time in history when secular leaders did not accept a separation of Church and State.
The American on the U.N. Committee Against Torture, Felice Gaer, told the Holy See that the Church’s position on abortion was a “concern” and that “women should have a right to choose.” Prohibitions on abortion are a form of torture according to Gaer—who ironically spent a decade on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.
An expert from the country of Georgia tried to be nuanced, and accused the Catholic Church of having “publically shamed” women and doctors who commit abortions through excommunication, thereby torturing them….
The Catholic Church it Has No Right to Oppose Abortion ~ U.N.
When the committee met in Geneva on Monday [video] for a hearing on the Vatican’s compliance with the Convention Against Torture, Vice Chairperson Felice Gaer, an American, said in her opening statement that laws that ban all abortion—which is the position of the Catholic Church–may violate the convention. She also repeated verbatim some language that had been in a letter the CRR had sent to the committee on April 11.
Gaer, however, did not quote the section in CRR’s letter that urged the committee to tell the church that the freedoms of religion and speech did not give the church a right to advocate against abortion.
CRR’s letter included several recommendations for how the Committee Against Torture should deal with Catholicism.
CRR recommended: “Urge the Holy See to refrain from negatively interfering publicly or privately in women’s or legislators’ decisions concerning access to abortion and to support states as they attempt to align their policies on women’s reproductive rights with their obligations under the convention.”
CRR also recommended that in its upcoming report on the Vatican’s compliance with the Convention Against Torture, the committee should: “Note that the Holy See’s actions are a violation of Articles 1, 2 and 16 of the Convention Against Torture and that the rights of freedom of speech and of religion extend only so far as they do not undermine women’s reproductive rights.”
Kathryn has been covering the ongoing effort by radical pro-abortion NGOs to apply the U.N. Convention against Torture to the Catholic Church for — among other things — its international pro-life advocacy. The argument is so facially irrational that one would be tempted to dismiss it out of hand. Not even the U.N. could be so blindly malicious and ideological that it would attempt to destroy the church’s rights of free speech and religious liberty for the sake of protecting abortion-on-demand, could it?
Moreover, even if the U.N. Committee against Torture moved against the Vatican, such an action would be irrelevant to American courts and American constitutional law, wouldn’t it?
In fact, there is cause for concern. To be clear, the effort by the Center for Reproductive Rights clearly and explicitly targets the church’s rights to free speech and religious liberty. Here’s an excerpt from its recommendations to the Committee:
Note that the Holy See has negatively interfered with states’ attempts to develop legislation on abortion that would have served to better protect women from torture or ill-treatment. Note that the Holy See’s actions are a violation of Articles 1, 2, and 16 of the Convention against Torture and that the rights of freedom of speech and of religion extend only so far as they do not undermine women’s reproductive rights, including the right to be free from torture or ill-treatment. (Emphasis added.)
This is an astonishing statement, one that clearly targets the Catholic Church’s pro-life advocacy, equating it with state-sanctioned “torture or ill-treatment” of women and girls. By equating advocacy with torture, the Committee could begin an international legal process that would cause the U.N. to review statements or actions by pro-life public officials as “torture” within the meaning of the Convention. Radical pro-abortion groups would file amicus briefs citing new international legal standards equating pro-life advocacy with torture, thus claiming such advocacy is beyond the protection of the First Amendment. Indeed, the argument would be simple (and chilling): By permitting unfettered pro-life advocacy — by public officials and private citizens — the United States would be in violation of international law, specifically by torturing its own citizens.
[….]
It’s difficult to overstate the perversity of the abortion lobby’s U.N. argument. There are few acts more barbaric than abortion, and the very idea that such barbarism can be insulated even from criticism insults the very notion of free speech and obliterates religious liberty. This is a dramatic escalation of the already-overwrought “war against women” rhetoric, and one that would lead to such absurd results as domestic “women’s groups” accusing conservative candidates of literally torturing voters with pro-life arguments.
4. UN Human Rights Council expert Richard Falk blamed the Boston Marathon terror bombings on “the American global domination project” and “Tel Aviv.” Council members praised Falk and the president defended him.
5. The UN Special Committee on Decolonization, charged with upholding fundamental human rights and opposing the subjugation of peoples, elected the murderous Syrian regime to a senior post.
The above video is a stylized version of the longer video found at U.N. Watch. Here is The Blaze’s story on it:
A United Nations interpreter translating the proceedings of the General Assembly on Thursday was caught – not realizing her microphone was still piping her voice into the chamber – expressing her dismay that the world body is so focused on condemning Israel while ignoring every other country in the world.
Following votes at the General Assembly’s Fourth Committee which includes all 193 UN member states, nine resolutions were adopted condemning Israel. Not one resolution was adopted targeting any other country, not even Syria where more than 100,000 have been killed in just two-and-a-half years.
The unnamed interpreter, unaware she was still being heard both by delegates and online via a live webcast, said, “I mean, I think when you have five statements, not five, like a total of ten resolutions on Israel and Palestine, there’s gotta be something, c’est un peu trop, non? [It’s a bit much, no?] I mean I know… There’s other really bad sh** happening, but no one says anything, about the other stuff.”
After the translator spoke, the delegate chairing the meeting could be seen trying to suppress his laughter. This as other delegates laughed audibly after hearing the interpreter’s candid opinion about their work, including her use of an expletive.
Once she realized what was happening, the translator said, “apologies” after which the Secretary of the meeting commented, “I understand there was a problem with interpretation?”
The translator could then be heard saying “The interpeter apologizes.”
UN Watch, a non-governmental organization which monitors events at the United Nations, first caught the gaffe and posted a recording of it on YouTube.
The disproportionate targeting of Israel at the UN is a phenomenon about which TheBlaze has reported (for example, here and here).
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday played the clip of the interpreter’s candid assessment at the weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem. Should her job be threatened, Netanyahu said she would have a place to work in Israel, Ynet reported.
“I would like to tell this translator that she has a job waiting for her in the State of Israel. There are moments that tear the hypocrisy off the unending attacks against us and this brave translator did so,”…
[….]
…It’s noteworthy that the UN chose to condemn Israel over its decision to extend Israeli law to the Golan Heights in light of the activity of Al Qaeda-linked jihadi rebels over the border in Syria.
“That’s right: the UN adopted a resolution today that mentions the word ‘Syria’ no less than 10 times—yet said nothing of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s massacre of more than 100,000 of his own people,” wrote Hillel Neuer, Executive Director of UN Watch.
In an op-ed in the Times of Israel, Neuer pointed out that by next month which marks the end of its annual legislative session, 22 resolutions will have been adopted targeting Israel and only four discussing other countries.
“The hypocrisy, selectivity, and politicization are staggering,” Neuer wrote.
It also follows a pattern. Last year’s legislative session was closed “in a blaze of glory” as former Reagan administration official Elliot Abrams noted with the passing of nine resolutions against Israel in just one day, December 18.
Israel has been singled out by the UN General Assembly more times than any other country for alleged human rights violations.
According to Eye on the UN, another non-governmental group, in more than 50 years, 82% of all UN General Assembly emergency session meetings have been about condemning Israel. The group noted in 2011 that of the UN Human Right’s Council’s resolutions, 47% critical of specific countries condemned Israel.
“I sincerely hope she [the interpreter] won’t get fired. Because the one who should really apologize today is the UN. Founded on noble ideals, the world body is turning the dream of liberal internationalists into a nightmare,” Neuer wrote.
See Anne Bayefsky’s recent comments in the U.N. HERE, as well as her PragerU contribution.
From video description:
Much to the dismay of people in actual need of human rights protection, the UN’s Human Rights Council have been hijacked by the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) — an organization of 56 Muslim countries who use Islamophobia to justify terrorism, while undermine the fight for human rights in Muslim countries and making sure Muslim countries and Islam will always be above criticism while of course blaming all the ills and injustice in the world on the western non-Muslim world and particularly the United States and Israel.
In this video, Anne Bayefsky, discussed the U.N.’s Racism Conference (Durban Conference), the invention “Islamophobia” as means to justify terror. And the intense lobbying by the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) for the issues of “Islamophobia” and “oppression” of Muslims ONLY by non-Muslims to be the prominent focus of the UN’s agenda in general and the Human Rights commission in particular. And the war (which they have won) to ensure that a prohibition against “Islamophobia” will be endorsed by the world community as the newest international human right issue and the equivalent of anti-Semitism. Borrowing from Wikipedia:
“According to human rights groups, the council is controlled by a bloc of Islamic and African states, backed by China, Cuba and Russia, who protect each other from criticism.[3] UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon and former High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson have criticized the council for acting according to political considerations as opposed to human rights. Specifically, Secretaries General Kofi Annan and Ban Ki Moon, the council’s president Doru Costea, the European Union, Canada and the United States have accused the council of focusing disproportionately on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.[4][5][6] The United States boycotted the Council during the George W. Bush administration, but reversed its position on it during the Obama administration”.
Bio:
Anne Bayefsky is a Senior Fellow at Hudson Institute and formerly taught law at Columbia University Law School. Since 1984, she has participated in U.N. human rights conferences on both official and non-governmental delegations, and conducted a major review of U.N. human rights legal documents in collaboration with the U.N. High Commission on Human Rights. She has authored a book on the United Nations, published numerous articles, and is the recipient of Canada’s highest annual human rights research award.
In the last few decades the United Nations has been obsessed with one country. Is it North Korea, Zimbabwe, Iran, Syria, China or some other nation with a reprehensible human rights record? Those would all be fair guesses and they would all be wrong. Anne Bayefsky, director of the Touro Human Rights Institute, answers this riddle and explains the upside down moral universe in which the United Nations resides.
The film, which runs 35 minutes at OverruledMovie.com, focuses on three real-life American family cases in which parental rights were egregiously violated by the government: a medical care case, an educational freedom case, and a religious freedom case. The movie also warns against adoption of the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child. This treaty would override virtually all child and family laws in the United States and grant ultimate authority to international bureaucrats.
Overruled describes why the adoption of the proposed Parental Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is the only means to halt the parental rights violations which are taking place all over America.
“American parents just assume that their traditional right to make sound decisions for their children is fully protected in our legal system,” said Michael Farris, President of ParentalRights.org. He added, “Overruled reveals how precarious our rights are in today’s legal climate – and the movie makes it clear that we can and must fix the problem before it is too late.”
Fortunately, the American people overwhelmingly support traditional parental rights. A Zogby poll last year that surveyed over 2,000 people found that 93% of Americans agree with the traditional definition of parental rights, which is the ability to raise their children free from government interference so long as no abuse or neglect is taking place.
Farris said, “We need to capitalize on this strong support all across the country and pass the Parental Rights Amendment to prevent government officials from unnecessarily interfering with families.”
Scott Scharpen, the film’s Executive Producer and chairman of the board of ParentalRights.Org, was proud to announce that Overruled is presented by ParentalRights.Org, a non-profit grassroots organization focused on passing the Parental Rights Amendment. Overruled is available online free of charge at OverruledMovie.com.
Camera.org, a highly recommended site for bias against Israel in the media, reports on the retraction of the Goldstone Reportthat needs to be inculcated into the psyche of bloggers in preparation to answer the liberals who still cite this report which most rejected when it came out (save the liberal U.N. backers and anti-Semites around the world). As Camera comments on this about-face:
In examining the New York Times’ record on the Goldstone report, one cannot help but come to the conclusion that the newspaper is more interested in promoting as credible an investigation that even its leader has repudiated than in objectively reporting on its shortcomings. Unfortunately, this is unsurprising coming from a media outlet that is increasingly moving from objective news reporting to advocacy journalism.
That accusation was contained in a report to the United Nations by Richard Goldstone, an eminent South African judge who had been used by the international community previously to investigate war crimes. That Goldstone was also a Jew and a Zionist made the charge all the more powerful.
Now, though, Goldstone has retracted his findings. He no longer believes that Israel intentionally targeted civilians during the Gaza war (although he still believes Hamas did) and says that any deaths were inadvertent — the usual fog of war, the usual panicked decision. For Israel, it’s like the governor has called the warden — it’s been reprieved and taken off death row.
Once again, rockets are being fired into southern Israel from Gaza, some of them going up the coast as far as Ashkelon, a major city and port. Before the last war, from April 2001 to the end of 2008, 4,246 rockets and 4,180 mortar rounds were fired into Israel, killing 14 Israelis and wounding more than 400. The rockets have since been improved. Should more than the occasional rocket actually make it all the way to Ashkelon (one came close Monday) or should one of them come down on a school, another war with Hamas would start a moment or two later. Israel has already hit back, but not in force. In addition, a West Bank settler family of five was recently murdered in their home by what are universally thought to be Palestinians. This, too, has put Israel on edge.
This resending of the report has consequences reverberating towards the Obama Administration that should be highlighted in the 2012 Elctions. In fact, it has even caused the likes of Rabbi Schmuley Botech to comment on Samantha Powers (someone whom I just blogged on as well), he says the following:
On my recent lecture tour in South Africa the subject of Judge Richard Goldstone came up quite a lot. Whether it was the dinner in Johannesburg at the home of Chabad head Rabbi David Masinter where acquaintances of the judge were in attendance, or at Sea Point Synagogue, South Africa’s largest, where I lectured and whose Rabbi, Dovid Weinberg, had officiated at Goldstone’s grandson’s Bar Mitzvah in Johannesburg, or my speech for Chabad of Cape Town and later in Pretoria, the man whom the media describes as a ‘respected international jurist’ and who had falsely accused Israel of war crimes was never far from anyone’s lips.
South Africans are among the world’s proudest Jews and most ardent Zionists. So it was understandable that they would detest Goldstone, viewing him as a traitor to his people, a man who engaged in a blood libel against the Jewish state in order to enhance his standing at the United Nations.
I have personally never agreed with this assessment of Goldstone, seeing him instead as one of Lenin’s ‘useful idiots,’ a man so full of his own pomposity and self-righteousness as to be utterly blind to simple notions of right and wrong. Like Jimmy Carter before him, Goldstone is one of those well-meaning ignoramuses whose view of morality is that whichever is the party without tanks and an air force must be the party who is just. This knee-jerk reaction to always champion the underdog, notwithstanding their evil actions explains the shockingly obvious statement in Goldstone’s recent Washington Postapology to Israel in which he wrote, “In the end, asking Hamas to investigate [its own crimes] may have been a mistaken enterprise.” It took a famous judge three years to come to the conclusion that asking a terrorist organization hell-bent on exterminating Israel to impartially report its own atrocities was not his brightest idea.
[….]
Much more troubling, however, are the comments attributed to Samantha Power, the rising star of the Obama Administration who is being discussed as a replacement for Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. I am a huge fan of Power’s 2002 book A Problem from Hell, detailing how America refused to intervene to stop repeated genocides in the twentieth century. I have repeatedly extolled the Pulitzer-prize winning book in lectures and columns and believe it should be required reading by every American High School student. I was also not surprised to read that it was Power who was instrumental in persuading an always reluctant President Obama to intervene in Libya to stop Gaddafi from slaughtering his people. It was therefore with considerable sadness that I learned of Power’s troubling statements on Israel, comments that require her immediate clarification lest she compromise her own moral credibility. American Thinker and other publications have reported that Power said that the United States should send in a massive military force to protect the Palestinians from Israel. And that she maligned the American pro-Israel lobby with her advocacy of “alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import [the pro-Israel lobby] and… sacrificing…billions of dollars, not in servicing Israel’s military, but actually investing in the state of Palestine.” Is Power really arguing for greatly reducing or eliminating American military aid to Israel and channeling it instead to the Palestinians who have repeatedly used foreign aid to foster hatred of Jews in schools, line the pockets of corrupt officials, and promote terrorism?
There is more, with Power seemingly criticizing the New York Times in 2003 for being insufficiently critical of Israel after it attacked terrorist-saturated Jenin. Of Israel’s presence in Lebanon, Power wrote in her book, Chasing the Flame, that what sparked Israel’s invasion of Lebanon was “dispossessed Palestinians and Israeli insecurity,” where in truth Israel invaded Lebanon to stop the incessant stream of rocket attacks that terrorized its northern cities. The phrase ‘Israeli insecurity’ implies that Israel is paranoid rather than reflecting the reality of a Lebanon dominated by Hezbollah, whose genocidal aim is the destruction of Israel.
One should take note that while the New York Times is about as bad as they get, it is not taxpayer funded like NPR (National Public Radio)! Here is an example of the bias found at NPR on this matter, followed by a video of the European Union voting on March 10th of 2010, adopting the Goldstone Report:
NPR:
18,321 words in pro-Arab only segments;
4,934 words in pro-Israel segments.
Bias in number of Arab-only vs Israeli-only segments:
63-percent Palestinian/pro-Arab only segments;
37-percent Israel/pro-Israel segments.
You may contact this European Parliment member, Annemie Neyts-Uyttebroeck, via email to enquirer why she supported such bad reporting and took the positions she did in the above video – “knowing now what we did then [at least reasonable people].” – annemie.neyts-uyttebroeck@europarl.europa.eu
