Europe steps in to cover US shortfall in funding climate science
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-42004328...........................................................................................................................................
Illegal crop burning in farm states surrounding New Delhi, vehicle exhausts and swirling construction dust have contributed to what has become an annual crisis. Authorities will use the fire trucks in areas with high concentrations of toxic dust, said Ritesh Kumar Singh, an environment ministry official, after a meeting of civil servants from the city government and four neighbouring states.
Another ministry official who did not wish to be identified said water cannon - usually used by police for riot control - would also be employed. "Sprinkling water is the only way to bring down the dangerous pollution levels," said Shruti Bhardwaj, an environmental official charged with monitoring air quality.
The thick blanket of grey air and pollutants has enveloped Delhi for four days. A US embassy measure of tiny PM 2.5 particles, showed a reading of 523 at nine a.m. on Friday. The upper limit of "good" air is just 50. PM 2.5 is about 30 times finer than a human hair. The particles can be inhaled deep into the lungs, causing heart attacks, strokes, cancer and respiratory diseases. http://www.france24.com/en/20171110-india-spray-new-delhi-amid-smog-emergency-environment-pollution
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5-10-2003 True freedom, the freedom that liberates, is grounded in truth and ordered to truth and therefore to virtue. A free person is enslaved neither to the sheer will of another nor to his own appetites and passions. A free person lives uprightly, fulfilling his obligations to family, community, nation and God. By contrast, a person given over to his appetites and passions, a person who scoffs at truth and chooses to live, whether openly or secretly, in defiance of the moral law is not free. He is simply a different kind of slave.
The counterfeit of freedom consists in the idea of personal and communal liberation from morality, responsibility and truth. It is what our nation’s founders expressly distinguished from liberty and condemned as “license.” The so-called freedom celebrated today by so many of our opinion-shaping elites in education, entertainment and the media is simply the license to do whatever one pleases. This false conception of freedom – false because disordered, disordered because detached from moral truth and civic responsibility – shackles those in its grip no less powerfully than did the chattel slavery of old. Enslavement to one’s own appetites and passions is no less brutal a form of bondage for being a slavery of the soul. It is no less tragic, indeed, it is in certain respects immeasurably more tragic, for being self-imposed. It is ironic, is it not, that people who celebrate slavery to appetite and passion call this bondage “freedom”?
Counterfeit freedom is worse than fraudulent. It is the mortal enemy of the real thing. Counterfeit freedom can provide no rational account or defense of its own normative claims. It speaks the language of rights, but in abandoning the ground of moral duty it provides no rational basis for anyone to respect the rights of others or to demand of others respect for one’s own rights. Rights without duties are meaningless. Where moral truth as the ground of duties is thrown overboard the language of rights is so much idle chatter fit only for Hollywood cocktail parties and faculty lounges. Hadley Arkes, the great contemporary theorist of natural rights, has observed in relation to the movement for unfettered abortion that those who demand liberation from the moral law have talked themselves out of the moral premises of their own rights and liberties. If freedom is to be honored and respected, it must be because human freedom is what is required by the laws of nature and nature’s God; it cannot be because there are no laws of nature and there is no God.
But counterfeit freedom poses greater dangers still. As our founders warned, a people given over to license will be incapable of sustaining republican government. For republican government – government by the people – requires a people who are prepared to take responsibility for the common good, including the preservation of the conditions of liberty.
Listen again to President Fairfield, speaking words at that ceremony on July 4, 1853, that are, if anything, still more urgent today: "Unrestrained freedom is anarchy. Restrained only by force and arms, is despotism; self-restrained is Republicanism. Wherever there is wanted the intelligence and virtue requisite for [self-restraint], Republicanism expires."
Slaves to appetite and passion, wanting in the understanding and virtue requisite for self-government, will surely lose it. They will look not to themselves but to government to provide for the satisfaction of their desires. Where counterfeit freedom prevails, the republican principle of limited government is inevitably sacrificed as people surrender personal and, ultimately, political liberty to whatever power promises to protect them from predation and supply the appeasement of their appetites. People are reduced from citizens to subjects to slaves. They trade their birthright of freedom for a mess of pottage. Yet so long as the big-government-provided pottage functions as a suitable narcotic, they imagine themselves free.
At the same time, the want of virtue creates a counterfeit idea of equality that parallels the counterfeit conception of freedom. True equality – equality under the law, equality of opportunity – is displaced by the demand for equality of results, as envy, like every other passion, commands requital. Distinctions, grounded in such intrinsically retributive ideas as personal merit, are cast aside.
Ultimately the counterfeit of freedom is a counterfeit because its view of the nature, dignity and destiny of man is a false view. Men and women are not mere bundles of appetites. Our destiny is not to be, as David Hume supposed, slaves of our passions – “rational” only in the purely instrumental sense of being capable of employing our intellectual powers to, in Thomas Hobbes’s words, “range abroad and find the way to the things desired.” On the contrary: men and women, made in the very image and likeness of the Divine Ruler of the universe, are possessors of an intelligence more profound, and, correspondingly, a freedom more God-like, than that.
We are, to be sure, creatures, and fallen creatures to boot; dust of the earth; sinners every one. Yet the divine image – the icon of God Himself – is not destroyed.
-Dr. Robert George http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/965223/posts
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11-15-17 We are seeing an absolute plague of sexual crimes in this country, eclipsing anything our forefathers imagined in their wildest nightmares. Is there any right-mined person who is not alarmed?
Rape, sexual torture, child molestation, public nudity, spouse-swapping, communal “marriage,” serial “marriage,” homosexual perversion, etc., reflect a societal moral disease that is worse than the “Black Death” that stalked the world from the 14th century onward.
Whence the origin of this corruption that is consuming the visceral organs of America?Jesus declared that such horrible actions as listed (and others) proceed “from within, out of the heart [minds] of men” (Mark 7:20-21). Corrupt the mind of a person and his body will follow rapidly.
Since the mid-50s, particularly the Roth v. United States decision (and several rulings subsequent to that), which permitted obscenity to be measured by “community standards”; (cf. 2 Corinthians 10:12b), this nation has been on a free-fall course towards unbridled sexual chaos. Pornographic entertainment (via live shows, literature, movies, video, TV, and the internet) has desensitized society and evolved an insatiable appetite for increasingly depraved interests.
Virtually anything has become “legal” in its own place. An F.B.I. agent recently stated that federal authorities now are deluged with pedophilia cases! Who is responsible for this maniacal degeneracy? Culpability is widespread.
The aggressive movements of sexual perverts, some judges of lower courts, appellate courts, and the Supreme Court, share a degree of guilt — as does a sex-drunk society. These, in concert, have stamped a societal “OK” on this immoral malignancy — all in the name of “freedom.” An inspired apostle warned against using one’s freedom as a license for vice (1 Peter 2:16)....Today in this nation there is a festering imbalance of tolerating evil and opposing good. And it is highly doubtful that such will get better before it gets worse. https://www.christiancourier.com/articles/1337-when-freedom-becomes-a-license-for-evil
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