The environment is too important to be left to eco-warriors

Noel Pearson below draws on his consultive Aboriginal culture to argue that environmental issues should be resolved in a non-confrontaional way.  He makes a powerful case against current Greenie behaviour.  What he overlooks is that the Greenies WANT confrontation. They get their kicks out of parading as more righteous, more caring and wiser.  It fulfils ego needs for them.

You can see that in the way they immediately dream up a new issue as soon as they get their way on their previous issue.  Nothing satisfies them. Nothing can satisfy them.  Their lives would be dull and empty without their campaigns.  We are not dealing with psychologically whole people where Greenie campaigners are concerned


Can a cause for the right succeed in the long run if it is pursued through unrighteous means? Can causes for the good be selective in their adherence to science? Or do righteous ends justify unrighteous means?

This is the crisis confronting environmentalism. It suffered a grievous loss at the federal election and the Adani red line is broken. This may be a crisis of legitimacy. The question is whether political environmentalism is turning off voters and hardening attitudes against the necessary effective policies to secure future sustainability. Are the means employed by political environmentalism destroying the possibility of Australia achieving the desired end of sustainability through consensus? Or is consensus unnecessary because the morally right end means the maxim “by any means necessary” applies?

Political environmentalism is undermining the cause of sustainability because short-term expediency and tactical opportunism is trumping long-term strategic consensus-building. Environmentalism has degenerated into the binary of cultural war when it needs to transcend such wars. Its leaders have led the movement into a zero-sum game, where political victory in one battlefield is countered by loss in another.

We should first explain what we mean by causes for the right.

Political parties seeking power in government are not in the business of the right. Electoral politics are by definition ruthless, with few holds barred. Lies, half-truths, fake news, negative advertising and dirt files are part of the repertoire of power in politics. One party’s Mediscare is the other party’s retiree tax.

Former Labor NSW state secretary and federal minister Graham Richardson captured the ethos of politics in his memoir Whatever It Takes. Noble and ignoble things are achieved by marshalling political power.

While causes for power are amoral, there are causes for the right. Civil rights and the anti-apartheid movement are examples. Emancipation and antislavery are even older precedents. Such causes mobilise the political process and power for good ends. Conservation is such a cause. Few would dispute it is a moral duty of humankind regardless of political affiliation and preference.

Causes for the truth must be ethical, otherwise they suffer damage. Moral integrity is the great currency of righteous movements, but the political environmentalists have jeopardised the cause of conservation by allowing it to descend into the hyper-partisan battlefield of culture and politics.

It is exposed to the 51-49 per cent risk. When your party wins 51, then you may win tactical victories, but when it is 49 you have put your cause in peril. This is what has happened to Adani after the election.

I want to allege five profound mistakes the political environmentalists are making in Australia:

First, they are alienating the lower classes in their droves. This is the lesson of the 2019 election. The political environmentalists pushed climate policies that worked for the post-material middle class, but cared less about the economically precarious. More than the costs, it is the movement’s superior cultural attitude that pisses off the lower classes in such a visceral way.

Second, they are alienating indigenous peoples by pushing the costs of conservation on to those who have not created the crisis. Indigenous leaders such as Marcia Langton and Warren Mundine have highlighted the green lockup of indigenous lands from development.

These groups manipulate and exploit divisions within landowner communities. They divide and rule the same as mining companies do, setting up puppets that favour their agenda. We saw this in the campaign against the Kimberley Land Council. We see it in Cape York in relation to Wild Rivers and blanket World Heritage listing proposals.

Traditional owners supported conservation goals and helped create by agreement new national parks and other conservation tenures. But the political environmentalists are never satisfied. They want everything locked up.

They are making enemies of the country’s largest landowners because they use electoral leverage with governments to subjugate land rights. If they are alienating the land rights movement, which is more aligned to conservation than other sectors, what does that say about them?

A third problem is they are at the forefront of deploying so-called “new power” in their public campaigns. Through the diffusion of social media and decentralised campaigning, green groups began to seriously challenge the “old power”. GetUp co-founder Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms explain this development in their 2018 book New Power.

Breaking the old power monopoly is welcome; however, the dilemmas of social media and its susceptibility to manipulation and its effects on civil society and democratic governance are troubling. Twitter and Facebook have just created online mob behaviour. Hardly platforms for moral causes.

And the political environmentalists have used the new power to promote conservation and climate change action in as cynical a way as the forces against which they are pitted. Getup and Sleeping Giants use the same tools of manipulation as deliberately as Breitbart and Cambridge Analytica.

A fourth problem is the political environmentalists are highly selective in their adherence to science, and in so doing bring science into disrepute in public policy debates. Who really believed the black-throated finch was the environmental issue of Adani? The poor critters were used as a proxy for opposition to coalmining.

Why the charade? The Queensland Labor government should have been honest with the public and said: the policy question we face is whether the Galilee Basin should be opened up to coalmining in the context of its contribution to the crisis of global warming. But because they wanted to walk two sides of the street at once — intimating to greenies they did not support Adani while intimating to regional workers that they supported coalmining — they did not bring the crux policy question to a head and provide their answer to it.

They lacked the courage of their convictions and simply did not have the leadership to untie the Gordian knot that expanded coalmining in the Galilee Basin represents. And now the May 18 loss sees them stampeding over the poor birds and anything else standing in the way of their electoral prospects next year.

The stances environmental groups take in relation to any number of issues — nuclear energy and aquaculture, for example — evince a selective adherence to science.

Does not environmental science tell us about the interconnectivity of the planet, and if nuclear power is used in Europe, Asia and the Americas, and contributes to lower carbon emissions, why is the debate on nuclear power not on the basis of science and the mitigation of risks associated with nuclear energy, instead of a green version of obscurantism?

The proponents of safer nuclear waste disposal in Australia (which included the late Bob Hawke) have got a point that is worth subjecting to science rather than outright prohibition. While the case for domestic nuclear power may not be strong, it is a substantial source of energy throughout the world, and as a uranium producer we are obliged to consider our role in the management of its waste. There are strong geopolitical arguments in favour of Australia assuming this responsibility and mitigating the large risks involved, which we are better placed to carry than most other countries. After all, it is the green­ies who tell us the planet is one and national boundaries are environmentally meaningless.

The fifth and most fundamental problem is the political environmentalists have aligned environmentalism with socialism rather than conservatism. Another way of saying this is they have aligned environmentalism with progressivism rather than conservatism.

There is a fundamental philosophical problem at the heart of contemporary environmentalism. I do not mean in respect of the appreciation of the natural environment. I mean in respect of where our motive must come from in order to conserve the good things we have been bequeathed from our ancestors for the benefit of our future unborn.

This is the motive that is unanswered by the utilitarian calculations of liberals and socialists. Not everything is about price. Conservatives understand that some things are valuable because they are priceless.

English conservative philosopher Roger Scruton’s 2012 book Green Philosophy is the starting point for a new conservative approach to conservation. The approach is old — about stewardship and our responsibility to bequeath to future generations the gifts we received from our ancestors — but its application to the environmental crises facing our homelands, including global warming, is new. The climate obscurantists who are in the same binary as the political environmentalists and who think themselves conservatives should read Scruton. They should be the first to understand the conservation in conservatism but, alas, ­cultural war has caused a degeneration on all sides.

Progressive socialists don’t know what Scruton is referring to: oikophilia, the love of home that speaks to people’s connection with their environment, which animates their responsibilities. Instead, they propose large schemes, imposed from above by state diktat, while doing violence to the most important engine of conservation: the local connection of communities with their environment, and their concern to leave their descendants what their ancestors left for them. Progressives are more concerned with environmental posturing, cutting the correct moral gesture, being seen to be more enlightened and selfless, in contrast to the deplorables and knuckle-draggers.

The green leaders all want to be the next Bob Brown, renowned for their own Franklin Dam or Wet Tropics. They trample over politically weaker communities such as Queensland property owners uncompensated for tree-clearing restrictions that underwrote our Kyoto target in the 2000s. It was John Howard’s federal government and Peter Beattie’s state government that dispossessed these landowners without proper compensation.

Indigenous landowners are another politically weaker community that are ridden roughshod over by political environmentalists.

The folly of all of this is now surely clear. What can be done?

Ever since Richardson alighted on the strategy of garnering the environmental vote, Labor began outsourcing its environmental policy integrity to the political environmentalists. This yielded electoral returns in 1987 and 1990 but ultimately led to Labor bleeding market share to the Greens and being held hostage to political environmentalism. Labor’s environmental credibility came from environmental group endorsements after adopting their policies and acquiescing to their demands.

Rather than undertaking the principal responsibility of government, coming up with policies that balance development with environmental sustainability, it did preference deals with the political environmentalists. Environmental groups became experts at marginal seat politics, turning 2 to 3 per cent of the environment vote to win 51 per cent victories for their pet campaigns.

The hook-up with GetUp is the apotheosis of Labor’s dalliance with political environmentalism. What electorate is not going to be suspicious of the next bunch of out-of-towners hectoring them about how to vote next time? GetUp was Bill Shorten’s long game at mobilising AstroTurf activism and it has all ended in tears.

Labor must define its own environmental credentials in its own right, not as an alliance with the Greens or as the lapdog of a certain environmental milieu. Watching Jackie Trad squirm as Queensland Environment Minister Leeanne Enoch approved the Adani mine this week told the whole sorry story. Labor can no longer walk two sides of the street at once. It worked for Annastacia Palaszczuk in 2017 but not for Shorten in 2019. Voters might be fooled once, but not all the time.

To develop environmental policies free from deal-making with the political environmentalists, Labor must balance human society and environmental sustainability. The last thing the environment portfolio needs is a progressive from an inner-city seat, surrounded by a milieu of political environmentalists. Labor needs to take environment policy back to first principles and get its philosophy right first.

The environment is too important to be left to the political environmentalists.

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‘Laziness’ to blame for Mascot Tower cracking with fears more apartment buildings will crumble

First it was the Opal Tower. Now, residents of Mascot Tower have been forced out. But more evacuations could come as buildings crumble.

A building industry body fears more apartment towers will be at risk of cracking from engineering malfunctions after 131 residents were forced to evacuate an inner Sydney complex on Friday night.

Mascot Towers was vacated after engineers became increasingly concerned about cracks in the primary support structure and facade masonry of the decade-old building.

All 122 units were empty on Saturday with its residents expecting to be homeless for at least a week.

Building Designers Association of Australia president Chris Knierim called for an independent building commission to investigate the sector, blaming laziness and the rapid development of new buildings for the latest failing.

He said the industry is under an “enormous amount of pressure” to keep up with the consumer demand for high-rise accommodation.

“The building industry has been too lazy for too many years,” Mr Knierim told ABC Radio. “I have a feeling we’ll see more problems.”

The news of the structural concerns sent shockwaves across the country, with many criticising the influx of rapid development.

“Mascot Towers residents are latest victims of dodgy, greedy builders and inept certification procedures,” controversial commentator Prue MacSween tweeted. “Government Planning Dept and Councils need to lift their game and be held accountable alongside builders, their engineers & certifiers.”

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian promised to “hold everybody to account” once the cause of the building’s crumbling was known.  “There was some speculation it could have been from things that happened in the near vicinity but we need to find out the cause before we know how to act,” she told reporters on Sunday.

When asked if the state government would help those displaced by the complex’s failings, Ms Berejiklian simply replied: “We’re getting to the bottom of what happened”. “The NSW government will hold everybody to account, that’s our role,” she said.

Residents in the Church Ave complex at Mascot near Sydney Airport were forced to find their own emergency accommodation after a “large crack” suddenly appeared in the “slab beams in the primary building corner”, raising concerns of an impending collapse.

Police cordoned off the area and fire trucks parked outside as state engineers inspected the property and firefighters made their way through the complex evacuating occupants in scenes eerily similar to the Opal Tower debacle.

Residents have been told to anticipate being kept out of their apartments for at least a week, local state MP Ron Hoenig told media on Saturday.

Mr Hoenig said the cracks had first been noticed weeks ago by the corporation which owns Mascot Towers. The corporation had brought in engineers before they had got worse on Thursday and Friday.

“It’s too early to point the finger, they’re not sure yet,” he told reporters, according to The Daily Telegraph.

“But it’s suspicious that the new building is not even occupied and the building that’s been up for 12 years all of a sudden has substantial cracks.”

Despite running directly underneath the building NSW rail engineers have concluded no damage has been caused to Mascot train station, Mr Hoenig also said.

According to a spokesperson from Police and Fire Rescue NSW, temporary housing had been set up at Mascot Town Hall on Friday night and residents were also evacuated to apartments nearby. Some residents stayed with friends, others said their employer had helped out with alternate accommodation while one family spent the night in Mascot Town Hall, according to AAP.

On the advice of authorities, news.com.au visited both locations promising temporary housing only to find no trace of it. By 11am this morning, apparently none of the temporary housing was in use. “All residents have found alternative accommodation so the temporary housing was no longer required,” a spokesperson confirmed to news.com.au.

The evacuation comes amid claims the building has been plagued by issues for years. Shop owners in businesses said they had noticed cracks on their walls and ceilings start to develop five years ago. And now, residents are fuming that they had to pack up their lives in minutes due to long running issues.

“We’ve been living here for five years now. They’re always maintaining the building, we’ve never been here without the tradesmen coming in and out,” said Elicia.

“But if you look at that building right next to us, when they were building there was shaking all the time. So if this damage was caused by that or if it was a structural problem, we don’t know yet. We have no idea. The problem is, we don’t know whose problem it is to fix it.”

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No evidence Medivac laws must change: Keneally

Labor is standing by laws it helped pass to make it easier for refugees toget medical treatment in Australia, saying the government hasn’t produced any evidence why the laws should be dumped or changed.

The party’s new home affairs spokeswoman Kristina Keneally is demanding the government explain why it wants to repeal the legislation but denies Labor has changed its view of the laws.

Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton today said he understood Labor was reconsidering its position on the bill and was “open to suggestions about how that bill could be repealed or at the very least wound back”.

“Peter Dutton is the last person who can speak to theAustralian Labor Party’s position on the Medivac legislation,” Ms Keneally told reporters in Sydney this afternoon.  “Let me be clear: Labor supports the Medivac legislation.”

Ms Keneally, who was briefed by the Department of Home Affairs last week, said she was yet to see any evidence the laws should be scrapped or changed. “If the government believes that the Medivac legislation is no longer necessary ... (or) if the government wants to improve the Medivac legislation to ensure that people can more readily get the health care that they need, then the government needs to explain that to the parliament,” she said.

“The government has said nothing about either of those two aspects of the legislation.”

Mr Dutton today revealed just over 30 people had been brought to Australia under the Medivac legislation but none of them were taken to Christmas Island, which was reopened by the government at a cost of $185 million amid warnings from senior ministers that hundreds of asylum-seekers would be sent here for medical treatment.

Labor sources have told The Weekend Australian the party would not support repealing the bill but would consider amendments put forward by the government.  “(Labor) will insist any amendments don’t compromise the objectives of ensuring sick people can get the healthcare they need while keeping Australia safe,” sources said.  “Essentially, the ball is in the government’s court here.”

Under the legislation that passed parliament with Labor, Greens and crossbench support in February, the government is unable to block the transfer of refugees and ­asylum-seekers who are considered to be dangerous but are not ­subject to an adverse ASIO ­assessment and have not been sentenced to more than 12 months’ imprisonment.

Those in offshore processing could be transferred to Australia with their families on the advice of two doctors. The advice would be reviewable by an independent medical panel, and could only be over­ridden by the immigration minister on national-security grounds.

Mr Dutton said it remained the case under the law that the government would be unable to stop potential criminals from coming to Australia.  “We can be compelled under that law to bring people (to Australia),” he told the ABC’s Insiders.

“It (the Medivac bill) was set up on the basis that people wouldn’t be brought here if they needed medical attention. It was a complete nonsense. We have brought many hundreds of people who required attention and we’ve been able to reduce the number significantly off Manus and Nauru. Where we have a concern about somebody in circumstances where they must come to Australia, we do offset that risk, if you like, through all sorts of measures and we provide support to that person to get healthy and the idea is they would return back to Manus or Nauru.”

Mr Dutton also admitted he did not expect the United States to accept the full quota of 1250 refugees from Manus Island and Nauru under a deal clinched between former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and former US president Barack Obama. “There’s 531 people who have gone and there are about 295 who are in the pipelines, where they’ve got approvals but they haven’t been uplifted yet,” he said.

“I don’t think we’ll get to the 1250 because there’s been over 300 that have been rejected by the United States for various reasons. That’s an issue for the US. They’re a sovereign state. They will make decisions about who they will bring under their migration program.

“I hope all of them (the 295 in the pipeline) can take up that offer where it’s made. There are about 95 people who have either withdrawn from consideration or rejected an offer and that’s a concern as well. If we can get those 95 across the line, we get closer to zero.”

Only two Rwandan men accused of killing tourists have come to Australia from America under the Australian-US deal, which Mr Dutton has repeatedly said was not a people swap.

Anthony Albanese and Senator Keneally have committed to reviewing all of Labor’s border security policies except boat turnbacks, offshore processing and regional resettlement.

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Signs of resistance to the woke gang’s war on reason

Comment from Bernard Lane in Australia

Will we ever wake up from the “woke” activist nightmare? This week, Kmart insisted it was a software glitch in photo printing ­kiosks — not some PC edict — that erased the “offensive” word Jesus from captions. Maybe, but the suspicion of journalists is hardly surprising. The grim reality of offence-activism keeps racing ahead of parody.

In Britain, transgender folk angry at being “misgendered” go running to the bobbies, who may be distracted by an epidemic of knife crime. Two years ago a biology professor at a US liberal arts college, Bret Weinstein, objected on moral grounds to a diversity “day of absence” when whites were told to stay away from campus. Harangued as a “white supremacist”, Weinstein was forced out of his job after the college president pandered to “courageous” students fighting racism with more racism. Some days the outlook seems bleak, and we may miss the filaments of hope. So, at the risk of being a politically incorrect Pollyanna, here’s a handful of reasons for optimism.

Planet Peterson

Had a gutful of anti-social media? On Sunday, Jordan Peterson, the most famous psychologist on the planet, gave a sneak preview of Thinkspot, his new online venue for people to speak their minds. “Once you’re on our platform, we won’t take you down unless we’re ordered to by a US court of law,” he said. “We’re trying to make an anti-censorship platform.” Unlike Twitter, where unwoke posts can get you banned. Ever on the lookout for white supremacists and other malefactors, Twitter last month suspended Ray Blanchard, a psychologist who helped write the diagnostic bible on “gender dysphoria”. He’d posted “hate speech”, namely his clinical opinion that sex-change surgery was less than ideal for children who might grow up to bitterly regret it. This won’t happen on Thinkspot. Peterson’s social media play may shake things up. He has 1.2 million followers on Twitter. Others in the loose grouping known as the intellectual dark web — united by the belief that without free speech and honest debate, society can’t correct its errors — also command big audiences. To join Thinkspot, you’ll have to pay a subscription and forswear mindless blurts of abuse. “If the minimum content (for posts) is 50 words, you’re going to have to put a little thought into it,” Peterson said. “If you’re being a troll, hopefully you’ll be a quasi-witty troll.” Thinkspotters will be able to tag a point of interest in a podcast, attaching their own remarks, audio comments or video clips. “We can really add dialogue to the podcast and YouTube world (with) continual running conversations.” Peterson is also plotting a private, online university to bypass what he sees as a corrupted academy.

Smarter than we look

Entrepreneurs are twigging to the podcast secret: a vast, hitherto unsuspected audience hungry for long-form debate of deadly serious stuff, plus jokes. Likewise the appetite for that crusty old form, the 90-minute public lecture. Peterson’s rather severe self-help book, 12 Rules for Life, has filled halls in 150 cities around the world with more than 300,000 people. And their pay-off is to be told that life is suffering and malevolence made bearable by the meaning that comes with willingly shouldering a heavy burden of responsibility. Peterson: “It’s almost inconceivable the degree to which people are starving for encouragement, how little they get and how little it takes to make a massive difference in their life, to say to them, you are a sovereign individual … and you can put your life together with truth and courage.”

Name your grievance

Believe it or not, dog-humping is good news for the intellect. Canine rape culture, Hitler’s Mein Kampf as an influence on “intersectional feminism”, “fat-exclusionary” bodybuilding, a plan to put white students in “light chains” to teach them about their “privilege” — all this and more went into a booby trap sprung upon activists disguised as journal editors. Even insiders couldn’t tell the difference between hoax gibberish and genuine gibberish. The credit for this expose goes to three left-leaning scholars (two Yanks, one Brit) fed up with repulsive excess in “grievance studies” — critical race theory and kindred identity politics on pseudo-­academic steroids. Helen Pluckrose, the Brit of the trio and a medievalist, will be in Sydney on Tuesday night at the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation to give a lecture against woke rewriting of higher education’s “colonialist” curriculum. She and her co-conspirators in the grievance studies hoax — mathematician James Lindsay and philosopher Peter Boghossian — have been alert for any sign that this academic victimology might fall out of fashion, as happened to the skull bump mumbo jumbo of phrenology. Pluckrose: “(Grievance studies has) got so dominant, it’s overreaching and so much of it now is so ridiculous that even the best intentioned left-liberals, who really want to support identity-based politics, are having to say, oh come on, this is a bit much.” From the US state of Tennessee, Lindsay thinks he can already discern what looks like sanity up-in-arms. “A rapidly increasing number of people are sick of the ultra-woke,” he says. “Most people don’t want to focus on race and sex all the time and be told they’re never doing it right, and they’re sick of what is pretty clearly racist attitudes (against whites).” In Portland, Oregon, Boghossian is less sanguine: “My guess is that things will get a lot worse before they correct.” He’s the only one of the three employed at a university, and may lose his job after being found guilty of an ethics breach for failing to alert journal editors to the hoax. Of course, this would have sabotaged the hoax, sparing universities the spectacle of ­scholarship deranged by activism. But this is a story with staying power. Mike Nayna, a Melbourne-based filmmaker, has documented every move in the grievance studies saga. Coming to a screen near you this year, with any luck.

Bad ideas mean well

Universities are an ideas incubator for society, so their vices matter. Next Friday and Saturday, 300-plus pointy heads will converge on the Sheraton New York Times Square hotel for seemingly yet another academic conference. But this is different because the host, Heterodox Academy, wants universities to choose between truth-seeking and political activism. Diversity is a higher education fetish — more women and people of colour, please — but “viewpoint diversity” is an awkward topic because of progressive groupthink in the social sciences, humanities and university administration. Heterodox Academy has put viewpoint diversity on the agenda, challenging the dishonesty that prevails when noisy activists intimidate the sensible majority. For authorities to preside over this campus culture — of “safe spaces” and “deplatformed” speakers deemed to offend groupthink — is a form of malpractice, according to American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, a prime mover in Heterodox. “To teach students to see society as a zero sum competition between groups is primitive and destructive,” he says. The brutal tribalism of social media has compounded errors of judgment by administrators who ignore the findings of psychology. If you want to make young people resilient, the worst thing possible is to shelter them from different views, to play along when they equate unwelcome words with injury, allow feelings to trump reason and abandon all nuance for moral warfare. It has grown rapidly and the underlying conditions are present throughout the Anglosphere. It’s not just scary, it’s a threat to the very purpose of the university. “We can’t do higher education with no nuance,” says Haidt.

Our friend, dissent

It’s welcome news that next month Haidt will make his first tour to Australia, speaking about “Moral psychology in an Age of Outrage”. It should boost Heterodox membership Down Under, which is small. One graduate affiliate is Monica Koehn, a mature-age student at Western Sydney University with a business background. She is doing her doctorate in evolutionary psychology and mating behaviour, a field where gender politics sometimes denies inconvenient science. Koehn says: “If universities had more viewpoint diversity, I believe people would be more willing and able to listen to evidence from differing points of view.” Like Haidt, her politics happen to be on the left but she opposes the shutting down of debate. “If people don’t have the ability to hear a speaker or understand both sides of a controversial topic, how are they able to make up their own minds?” Another Heterodoxer is Kevin Carrico, now at Monash University in Melbourne but American-born and a seasoned visitor to China, the object of his scholarship. “A considerable amount of my thoughts about viewpoint diversity and orthodoxy very much grew out of my experiences in China, where I was not always particularly impressed by the vitality of political debates,” he says. “Coming back to the US after living in China — I don’t want to be too hyperbolic, but I suppose I did recognise the dangers of a situation in which everyone agrees on something and nobody raises any questions about it.” He, too, regards himself as progressive. “But sometimes in academia, critical engagement is too often simply equated with a far left or Marxist viewpoint, which in my perspective … don’t actually provide us with any real understanding of the sheer complexity of the world.”

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 Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here