Creating 1,000 hypocrites

What do European Kyoto Treaty supporters have in common with “community
activists” at this week’s “Hip Hop Summit” in New York?

A lot.

They may be oceans apart, but this week’s European anti-Bush
environmental protesters and record industry summiteers seem like
ideological soul mates. If politically correct hypocrisy were the
currency of the day, Kyoto Treaty and hip-hop proponents would be rich.
Coincidentally, their motivation is, indeed, wealth.

They either want to create an anti-competitive gravy train – in the case
of European countries who want to defeat the U.S. economically with
ridiculous regulations under Kyoto – or protect the dangerous gravy train
they already have – in the case of thuggish, misogynist trash that’s
populating the airwaves and dirtying pop culture.

They’ve got a lot in common.

Both the Kyoto Klueless and Hip Hop Hopeless put faith in ludicrous
theories to back up their desired movements.

Hip-hop types and music industry officials often spout off about the
benefits of creativity, expression and identity rap artists give to
black youth. And leftist scientists pimp “global warming” and ” the
greenhouse effect” hypotheses to bolster Kyoto. But these theories have
been discredited and disproved.

What’s really causing the depletion of the ozone layer, the purported
basis for the Kyoto Protocol? Evidence shows causes other than the
alleged “industrial pollution” that the media and environmentalists
insist upon. President Bush has support from a bug expert on this
point. Entomologist and Southern Illinois University professor May R.
Berenbaum, no conservative ideologue, says that the expelled intestinal
gas of termites is “a matter of urgent global concern” in “Buzzwords:
A Scientist Muses on Sex, Bugs, and Rock ‘N’ Roll.”

“There are many more insects than there are humans, and mass release of methane, a known greenhouse gas capable of affecting global climate, from so many
abdomens (with so many orifices) could have potentially earthshaking
consequences.”

She cites many studies over the last century that make that finding,
including a 1982 collaborative effort of four scientists from three
continents, published in “Science.” It measured “carbon monoxide,
carbon dioxide, methane, hydrogen, and several short-chain hydrocarbons
emitted from the anus of three different termite species and scaling up
to the global level from there. … [T]ermite flatulence might be
responsible for as much as 30% of the earth’s atmospheric methane
levels – levels that are rising even higher … because deforestation
and agriculture … favor the buildup of termites.” A 1994 study by
scientists J.H.P. Hackstein and C.K. Stumm found that cockroach gas may
be “our chief concern in the methane arena. … [C]arbon monoxide
[may have a lot to do] with windy cockroaches.”

So the solution to bugs farting, is to close U.S. factories, reduce
competitiveness, and depress our economy?

As for hip-hop, any alleged benefits gained by listening to rap’s hate,
misogyny and violence are a myth. In June 2000, in the only
definitive hip-hop study, Harvard University professor Ron Ferguson
found that the rising popularity of hip-hop and “gangsta rap” resulted
in a drop in the reading and math test scores among black youth. It
also resulted in an increase in the amount of television-viewing and
decrease in the amount of reading for pleasure for black kids.

Both Kyoto and hip-hop have their hypocritical supporters. In the case
of Kyoto, European leaders, like Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson,
won’t sign on to the Kyoto Protocol, themselves, because they know it
will harm their economies, just like it will harm that of the U.S., but they pay lip
service to please their earthy, socialist, environmentalist voters, who
comprise many of the protesters. They don’t want us to build more power
plants and industrial smokestacks. Yet, they’ve got them all over
Europe. They insist on President Bush and the U.S. ratifying the Kyoto
Treaty, and, in Persson’s words, “taking leadership.” Even though the
only country to sign onto the Kyoto Treaty is the united European utopia
of Romania. Been there lately? It’s hardly leadership to exempt India
and slave-labor China – the industrial pollution kingpins – from Kyoto
requirements, which the treaty does.

The same goes for Kyoto’s U.S. pushers. Suddenly, Democratic
senators – all of whom voted against ratifying Kyoto in 1997, when Al Gore
tried to make it his Presidential Campaign springboard – are now in a huff
that Bush opposes the treaty. Senators like Joe Lieberman.

In the case of hip-hop, music industry leaders – like summit
organizer Hillary Rosen, head of the Recording Industry Association of
America – scream about freedom of speech and the freedom to
express whatever garbage reaches the lowest common denominator. When FCC Chairman Michael Powell recently fined a Colorado radio station for playing an obscene edition of Eminem’s “My Name Is,” Rosen decried this. “That goes right to the heart of idea-based censorship,” she protested in Daily Variety.

Yet, in April, when Princeton University computer scientist Edward
Felten wanted to deliver a speech at the International Information
Hiding Workshop on how he and colleagues were able to thwart the record
industry’s newest, most regressive copyright-protection technology
(known as watermarks), Rosen’s organization bullied Felten into silence
through lawyers and lawsuits. And all of Rosen’s and her hip-hop
buddies’ pontificating against censorship went out the window. Ditto,
for when entertainment industry barristers went to U.S. Appeals Court in
New York to censor an online hacker magazine, barring it from publishing
code that can break open DVD encryption programs, according to USA
Today.

The hip-hop community has other similar hypocrites in its midst. Take
the Hip Hop Summit’s keynote speaker, Minister Louis Farrakhan of the
Nation of Islam. He often chides whites for disrespecting black women.
In a Nov. 15, 1998, speech at Detroit’s Islamic Center of America
mosque, Farrakhan chided Arab merchants for leering at and disrespecting
black women. Last year’s “Million (300,000) Family March” was
organized by Farrakhan to “uplift families” and “highlight the
revitalization of the black family.” He preached “respect,” “righteous
conduct” and “family unity.”

But in his keynote address to hip-hop bigwigs, Farrakhan sang a
different tune, instead defending the millionaire rappers in the
audience who’ve mostly “become millionaires or close, by regularly
rapping about either killing other black men, impregnating or pimping
Black women, and consuming or dealing drugs,” a description written by
Farrakhan fan and black Detroit Free Press columnist Trevor Coleman.

In his kowtowing speech, Wednesday, to gangsta rap entrepreneurs like
Russell Simmons (CEO of DefJam Records), Ice Cube, DMX, Snoop Dogg,
Warren G, Wu Tang Clan and Jay-Z, Farrakhan defended them, saying they
are only reflecting society and the nation’s “gangsta” government. “You are the most important people I’ve ever talked to in my life,” Farrakhan
said. “You talk about gangsta lyrics. You are literally showing
aspects of a government that is gangsta, tells you you should smoke a
leader that they disagree with.” Farrakhan claimed he admired the power
of rappers, and that Washington fears them because they are blacks who
have power over white youth. Apparently, he never heard of Eminem,
Insane Clown Posse, Kid Rock, and Everlast – all of whom are white
rappers.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “The creation of 1,000 forests is in one
acorn.”

And the creation of 1,000 hypocrites is in politically correct doctrines, like hip-hop and runaway environmentalism.