statism watch

Carol J Williams, Los Angeles Times
August 4, 2008

MOSCOW–Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the reclusive icon of the Russian intelligentsia and chronicler of Communist repression, died yesterday. He was 89.

His son, Stephan Solzhenitsyn, told The Associated Press his father died of heart failure in Moscow.

The soulful writer and spiritual father of Russia’s nationalist patriotic movement lived to be reunited with his beloved homeland after two decades of exile – only to be as distressed by communism’s damage to the Russian character as he was by his earlier forced estrangement from the land and people he loved.

Solzhenitsyn returned from his Vermont refuge to a dramatically changed Russia in 1994. But he deemed it a moral ruin after a months-long odyssey to become re-acquainted with the country that had denounced him as a traitor, stripped him of citizenship and expelled him in 1974.

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BBC News
August 4, 2008

Italian troops have begun patrolling cities as part of a government campaign to combat crime and boost security.

Some 3,000 soldiers will be deployed over the next week in major cities including Milan, Rome and Naples.

They are patrolling alongside police officers and guarding high-profile tourist sites and embassies, as well as immigrant holding centres.

Critics say the move sends a message that Italy is swamped by crime and that its police are not up to the job.

The deployment is due to last for six months.

The BBC’s Mark Duff in Milan says troops made their presence discreetly felt from first light, at the city’s main railway station and main square, the Piazza Duomo.

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Arthur Herman, The Australian
August 4, 2008

It has been a tough year for the high priests of global warming in the US. First, NASA had to correct its earlier claim that the hottest year on record in the contiguous US had been 1998, which seemed to prove that global warming was on the march. It was actually 1934. Then it turned out the world’s oceans have been growing steadily cooler, not hotter, since 2003. Meanwhile, the winter of 2007 was the coldest in the US in decades, after Al Gore warned us that we were about to see the end of winter as we know it.

In a May issue of Nature, evidence about falling global temperatures forced German climatologists to conclude that the transformation of our planet into a permanent sauna is taking a decade-long hiatus, at least. Then this month came former greenhouse gas alarmist David Evans’s article in The Australian, stating that since 1999 evidence has been accumulating that man-made carbon emissions can’t be the cause of global warming. By now that evidence, Evans said, has become pretty conclusive.

Yet believers in man-made global warming demand more and more money to combat climate change and still more drastic changes in our economic output and lifestyle.

The reason is that precisely that they are believers, not scientists. No amount of empirical evidence will overturn what has become not a scientific theory but a form of religion.

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