Blog to discuss the book "The Apocalypse - Letter by Letter: A Literary Analysis of the Book of Revelation" and current events that point to the events described therein.
Time Magazine: "Want to wreck the environment? Have a baby." - Prince Philip Concurs
LONDON, May 13, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A feature in the current issue of Time Magazine asks a rhetorical question, "What's an an environmentally conscious parent to do?" Time's Pamela Paul gives the response most frequently pushed by radical environmentalists, saying the answer is 'don't have children'. In a television interview this week, the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Philip, concurs, saying the recent increase in global food prices is due to too many children. At the same time, the Italian Prime Minister is seeking ways to turn around his country's disastrously low birth rate that currently stands at well below replacement level.
"Want to wreck the environment?" the Time feature starts, "Have a baby."
"Each bundle of joy gobbles up more of the planet's food, clogs garbage dumps with diapers, churns through plastic toys and winds up a gas-guzzling, resource-consuming grown-up like the rest of us. Still, babies are awfully cute. Given that most people still intend to procreate, what's an environmentally conscious parent to do?"
The Duke of Edinburgh followed the same environmentalist playlist when he said this week that the only way to save the planet is for people to stop having babies. Prince Philip told a television interviewer this week that the solution to the burgeoning global food crisis is simply to have fewer mouths to feed. The prince, who has four children, said, "Food prices are going up. Everyone thinks it's to do with not enough food, but it's really that demand is too great - too many people."
In recent months, food prices have risen dramatically around the world and economists are struggling to identify the reason. Most have said it is the result of rising oil prices which have affected the cost fertilizers, food transport, and industrial agriculture. The prince admitted that implementation of a massive population control movement might be a problem for governments. "Basically, it's a little embarrassing for everybody. No one quite knows how to handle it. Nobody wants their family life to be interfered with by the government."
Indeed, the only governments to try a systematic programme of population control are known to be among the world's most oppressive regimes. The communist government of China has had its One Child policy in place since 1979 when it was put in place ostensibly to alleviate social and environmental problems. The result has been social unrest, arrests of pregnant women and forced abortions and state-sponsored infanticide. It has also caused a massive and likely incurable imbalance in the population's sex ratio in favour of boys and resulted in a dramatic aging of the population. The Chinese government, while maintaining the One Child policy, is now struggling to find answers to the problem of millions of elderly with few children grown to adulthood to care for them.
Ironically, Prince Philip's wish has already come true. Currently the British birth rate stands at approximately 1.66 births per woman, well below the 2.1 level at which a population is sustained naturally.
Meanwhile, the recently elected Prime Minister of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi, is casting about for ways to stop the plummeting of the Italian birth rate. He told journalists today that he would try to remove "material reasons" that push women to seek abortions. In his inaugural speech before parliament, Berlusconi promised "new and important expenditures for demographic development". Italy is facing a demographic crisis. The country once noted for its fervent Catholicism and dedication to large families, is aging as the birth rate drops. Italy is now the "greyest" country in the European Union, with the highest "ageing index," according to the Italian National Statistics Institute (Istat). Istat estimates that the birth rate has climbed slightly from 1995 to 2005, from 1.19 births per woman to 1.32, but the government agency said this was almost entirely the result of immigration.
Government interference with family life has long been a major goal of the environmental movement's population control goals through enforced abortion, contraception and sterilization.
It is axiomatic among environmentalists that the human population would outstrip the world's food supply. Last year, Paul Watson, founder and president of the radical Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, denounced the "human virus" said that a "radical and invasive approach" was required. Watson who has called human beings the "AIDS of the Earth" said, "Curing a body of cancer requires radical and invasive therapy, and therefore, curing the biosphere of the human virus will also require a radical and invasive approach."
In 2007, the UK's leading population control lobbyist group, the Optimum Population Trust (OPT), issued a warning of environmental disaster if British couples do not restrict themselves to a two-child maximum.
Note: As I said, i never held much stock in "one-world order" conspiracy theories but it does seem things are headed that way. Look how easily the British folk have lost their historic national sovereignty via a small group of EU enthusiasts. If it can happen there...
UK to Hand Sovereignty to EU without Referendum
"One thousand years of British history have been extinguished without a shot being fired." By Hilary White
LONDON, March 6, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Britain's MPs voted yesterday to deny the public a referendum on the Treaty of Lisbon, the European Union's substitute for the Constitution that failed in 2005 after being defeated by Dutch and French plebiscites. The House of Commons vote, 311 to 248 - a majority of 63 - defeated a Conservative amendment that would have allowed the British public a say in whether the treaty would come into effect in the country. Commentators and activists fighting the issue have called the vote yesterday in the House of Commons the effective end of British sovereignty.
The Conservative opposition are planning to reintroduce their amendment in the House of Lords later this year. The Lords, however, have little power to defeat legislation.
The vote followed closely on the heels of ten local "mini-polls" held last week in Labour and Liberal Democrat constituencies that resulted in 88 per cent support for a referendum. In the 2005 election all three major parties promised a referendum on any attempt to revive the defeated Euro-Constitution.
The Lisbon Treaty will see the creation of a permanent EU president, foreign minister and diplomatic service that are not subject to scrutiny by Parliament or accountable to the electorate, and surrenders nearly 50 national vetoes to Brussels. The new EU president will be a full-time Brussels official, serving a two-and-half-year term and will be chosen by Europe's leaders. A Brussels-appointed foreign minister will be able to make foreign policy, binding upon member states, without a full British national veto.
Critics charge that the Treaty, signed by Gordon Brown last year, will restrict Britain's ability to police its borders, control immigration, fight crime and domestic terrorism, reject EU regulations on employment law and energy policy, and leave it dependent upon an outside power in foreign policy decisions. The Treaty is to come into force January 1, 2009, in time for the 2009 European elections later that year.
The Daily Telegraph, the paper that led the charge for a referendum, called the vote "a singularly squalid example of bullying and gerrymandering that has left even hardened participants in the Commons open-mouthed at government cynicism".
Iain Martin wrote, "When the entire story is told by historians, future generations will be surprised that the Euro-fanatics who plotted to sell out British sovereignty and democracy avoided being sent to the Tower for treason."
Melanie Philips, a columnist for the Daily Mail and the author of "Londonistan", wrote that the process of the Treaty through the House of Lords is a mere formality. She wrote, "At a stroke, much of what remains of the UK's power of self-government will now be negated and the rest will surely follow in due course."
When the Treaty of Lisbon surfaced as a political issue last year, Tony Blair's successor, Prime Minister Gordon Brown, refused to allow a plebiscite, claiming that the Treaty was "substantially different" from the defeated Constitution. He made assurances that British sovereignty in key areas such as criminal law enforcement and anti-terror measures were protected. His assurances were widely rejected and have become the focus of widespread discontent with Labour's policies and the increasing power of Brussels.
The Treaty's authors and some of its European political supporters have admitted that the document is little changed from that rejected in 2005. Only ten of its 250 proposals are different from the original Constitution and the Treaty's critics say those ten are of little consequence. The author of the Constitution, Valery Giscard d'Estaing, said, "All the earlier proposals will be in the new text, but will be hidden and disguised in some way."
The Spanish Prime Minister Jose Zapatero admitted, "We have not let a single substantial point of the Constitutional Treaty go." German Chancellor Angela Merkel said, "The substance of the Constitution is preserved. That is a fact."
Melanie Philips wrote, "One thousand years of British history have been extinguished without a shot being fired." She says that the only possible recourse now is to remove Britain entirely from the European Union: "There is not one good reason why it is in Britain's interests to continue to stay in. We should come out in order to save British democracy. End of story."
John Redwood, MP for Wokingham, a senior Tory and political theorist, wrote that the vote had emboldened the Labour government to push forward with universal ID cards, a scheme that has been promoted as a means of combating terrorism, but that many outside the Labour party have condemned as a step further towards a police state in which innocent citizens are closely monitored by the state. Redwood wrote, "Everywhere we hear the smack of autocracy, as an out of touch government continues its battle against the British people and their liberties...The visceral hatred of democracy and liberty emanating from the government is now nauseating."
Note: The MP purposely used the loaded word "fundamentalist" to equate devout Catholics with terrorists. This is pure persecution and is growing throughout the west. He is using as leverage the tax money used to support these schools. Catholics needs to fight back by pointing out what "fundamentalist" Catholic doctrine really teaches about educating the young, caring for the sick, loving our enemies, etc. and counter the claim about money with the huge benefits Catholic institutions have always conferred upon society.
Catholic activist says, "To secularists anyone who actually believes his religion is a 'fundamentalist'".
By Hilary White
LONDON, February 26, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Last month, LifeSiteNews.com reported that a British Parliamentarian had threatened to "investigate" what he called an increase in "fundamentalism" among British Catholic bishops in regulations for Catholic schools. This week, the Independent reports that MP Barry Sheerman, the chairman of a Commons select committee, is going ahead with the investigation.
The Independent reports that the Children, Schools and Families Committee will "call Catholic bishops to account" for recent isolated attempts to re-install genuine Catholic doctrine on moral and sexual teaching into the schools' curriculum. The reaction from Parliament comes in response to a document issued by Lancaster Bishop Patrick O'Donohue, "Fit for Mission: Schools," an instruction to revamp Catholic education in the diocese of Lancaster based on the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
Sheerman, MP for Huddersfield and the Labour chairman of the committee, told the Independent that while the spokesmen for the English Catholic Church had "often peddled a softer line" on moral issues, the publication of Fit for Mission seems "at odds" with what was happening "on the ground".
"A lot of taxpayers' money is going into church schools and I think we should tease out what is happening here," said Sheerman. "We seem to have a shift in emphasis on the ground despite what the reasonable voices of the leadership are saying."
The Committee will interrogate the bishops on their approach in the schools to abortion, sex education and "PSHE" (personal and social health education).
But in a pamphlet titled "Will Your Grandchildren be Catholic?" Daphne MacLeod, a Catholic activist and former headmistress, writes that it is precisely this "softer line" preferred by Mr. Sheerman that has eroded the genuine Catholic religious nature of the Church's schools.
McLeod, the head of the Catholic education advocacy group, Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice, told LifeSiteNews.com that the investigation by the Parliamentary Committee is an "ominous" stroke by an increasingly aggressive secularist government against religious institutions. The use of the term "fundamentalist" is especially offensive she said, and is a transparent attempt at equating believing Christians with violent Islamic extremism.
"To secularists," McLeod said, "anyone who actually believes his religion is a 'fundamentalist'. But Christian 'fundamentalists' are the ones who are around the world looking after AIDS patients, who started hospitals and schools."
McLeod said the implication that "fundamentalist" Christianity is some kind of threat to the state is an insult. "Let them show us some proof that there is a danger. Christian 'fundamentalists' are the ones who practice forgiveness and who are taught to 'turn the other cheek'. Show us how that is a threat."
Fr. Timothy Finigan, a Catholic priest and theology professor who founded the Association of Priests for the Gospel of Life, agreed that the use of the term "fundamentalist" was a scare tactic.
The message, Fr. Finigan wrote, is clear to bishops who dare to step away from the "softer" line of the mainstream of Catholic episcopal leadership. "There's that 'F' word beloved of the secularists everywhere, conjuring up images of suicide bombers, blown-up buses and women in burkhas," he wrote.
Sheerman's comments about tax-funding for the Catholic schools was also a rhetorical attack, Fr. Finigan wrote. "Let's be clear about this. Catholics also pay tax. The money does not belong to the government, it belongs to us and is given to the government in trust for use for our benefit."
Catholic schools in Britain are owned by the Church and operate using tax funding to help maintain buildings. Fr. Finigan wrote, "If Catholic children are not educated in Catholic schools, they will be educated in community schools at the expense of the state anyway."
"By his emotive appeal, Sheerman is attacking the historic agreement of 1944 with little less subtlety than the 'No Rome on the Rates' campaigns of a former era."
To contact Barry Sheerman: House of Commons London SW1A 0AA Telephone: 020 7219 5037 Fax: 020 7219 2404 Email: SHEERMANB@parliament.uk
