The still-comparatively-free-world has almost everything it needs to defeat its most belligerent enemy, Islam. It has superior military, technological, economic, political and intellectual  power. All it lacks is the will.

Daniel Greenfield, writing at Canada Free Press, explains that by not acting against the enemy, by not even naming the enemy as Islam, we are conniving at our own defeat:

The formula for fighting a War on Terror without defining a vector for that terror has led to a state of terror, in which everyone is either terrified or terrorized. The official word is that anyone and everyone can be a terrorist, and even though they all seem to be Muslim, the official position is that this is a complete coincidence, a misunderstanding of the religion of peace or a result of our foreign policy. …

Muslims term their lands the Dar-al-Islam and our lands, the Dar-al-Harb, the realm of the sword. But the irony is that it is Islamic lands which are the true realm of the sword, forever in conflict, Muslim fighting Muslim, while repressing and enslaving Jews, Christians, Hindus and any other minorities under Muslim rule.

The sword has given way to the bomb, though it is still used occasionally on hostages, and by importing Islam we have imported the way of the sword and the rule of the bomb. When the followers of the sword take the plane, then sooner or later they will bomb the plane or use the plane as a guided missile. There is no avoiding that.

Rather than terrorizing the terrorists, our governments terrorize us. They make us into the prisoners of an endless terror while they appease the terrorists. By [their failure] to define a clear enemy, we have all been made into the enemy.

The raid is as indigenous to Arabia as its sand. As Islam has become indigenous to America and Europe, the raid is becoming indigenous to Western nations as well, and no game of ‘three monkeys’ will change that. Islam spread by sword and terror, it survived by sword and terror, and it thrives by sword and terror.

The body count of those slain by Muslim terrorists has translated directly into a quantum increase in Muslim political influence. The Mohammedan religion, once obscure, is now at the helm of foreign and domestic policy. …

The latest conquests of Islam may take a century to complete, but if the demographic trends continue, then they will cover the territory from the warm coasts of Spain to the frozen depths of Russia. The raids will soften up the lands of the sword, cut away their people, intimidate their governments into making concessions and use brute numbers to swarm them and become the majority. It has happened for over a thousand years, long before American foreign policy was anything more than a dream, and it is happening now. All around us.

The demographic bomb is the most explosive of all the devices and it doesn’t show up on even the most intrusive airport scanners. Arafat called the womb of the Arab woman his strongest weapon. The House of Saud liked to say that they had built their nation with a sword of steel and a sword of flesh. These two quotes explain the miserable state of the Muslim woman and the quiet ticking of the demographic clock, the bomb whose components are veiled women, trundling in groups behind a single man, the girls exploited by Muslim ‘Asian’ sex gangs and the rising number of female converts. …

When the number of Muslims proliferate, so does the number of bombs .. the kind that blow up right away and the kind that tick slowly away from generation to generation, embedding themselves into a society, undermining it, chipping away at its roots, until it is time for them to go off. But whatever kind of bombs they are, when they go off they destroy our lives and our freedoms.

We must go on to the attack.

We could make a good start by bombing the kaaba, a black stone enshrined in Mecca that Muslims hold sacred.

This is from PowerLine:

We know … that Churchill was at least passingly familiar with Hayek’s 1944 classic, The Road to Serfdom, but there are indications from early in Churchill’s career — around the time he was attacking socialism — that he instinctively understood Hayek’s famous critique of centralized and dispersed knowledge in his equally important 1945 essay The Use of Knowledge in Society.

As Churchill put it in a speech in 1908:

“I reject as impracticable the insane Socialist idea that we could have a system whereby the whole national production of the country, with all its infinite ramifications, should be organized and directed by a permanent official, however able, from some central office. The idea is not only impossible, but unthinkable. If it was even attempted it would produce a most terrible shrinkage and destruction of productive energy.” 

The “permanent official” means of course any number of permanent officials.

No economy can thrive as it might if it is regulated, to any degree however slight, by government.

– with the implementation of Agenda 21.

No freedom, no private property, no rights, no math, no hope …

Watch, learn, fear – and act?

This video is from 2009.

Agenda 21 is being zealously carried out now in our town. How about yours?

Look for the building of many large blocks of very small apartments  – reminiscent of the kind built by Communist regimes in Eastern Europe between 1950 and 1990 – along railway lines. They are mentioned in the video, and we can see them going up near where we are headquartered. People will be corralled into them. Families will be separated. They provide space for bicycles but not cars. You will cycle or walk in your home town, and be taken to more distant destinations by train or bus, if you are permitted to travel at all.

This is the spread of world government from the tower of evil, the UN.

It is not scare-mongering. It is really happening.

Agenda 21 must be stopped.

The UN must be destroyed.

(Video from PowerLine)

Why waste a perfectly good baby – when you’ve killed him?

(Please note: we are being sadly and somewhat bitterly sarcastic. We are against the killing of babies, even if magical and lucrative uses may be found for their corpses.)

Herb “clinics” or “chemists” in northern Chinese towns sell pills made from human foetuses.

Feeling low? Getting old? Take a dose of ground-up baby

The picture and quotations come from the Mail Online:

This week the South Korean customs department revealed it had foiled 35 attempts to smuggle these “human-flesh pills” across its border and seized more than 17,000 of them from China in just nine months. …

This grotesquely unsavoury industry appears to cash in on China’s strict family planning laws, which limit most families to just one child each and are said to result in 13 million abortions a year, the equivalent of more than 35,000 terminations a day.

The country, which has a population of more than 1.3 billion, is said to have ‘dying rooms’ in hospitals where unwanted newborn babies are abandoned to perish. Those trying to avoid a huge fine for violating the one-child laws have even been known to commit outright infanticide.

We maintain that abandoning newborn babies to perish is infanticide.

Now, unscrupulous pharmacists, hospital workers and even the relatives of those having abortions are making money from archaic beliefs that consuming infant cells can cure and rejuvenate us.

In fact, it is dangerous to swallow the  powdered flesh of another human being.  The pills are “likely to be poisonous”.

A South Korean television team investigating the trade, “discovered that the make-up of the pills they bought were between 97 per cent and 99 per cent human. And they all contained high levels of harmful bacteria, many of them of a type that could only have come from decomposing bodies.”

The SBS journalists saw how a foetus could be turned into pills in just two days.

Once the hospital pharmacist had defrosted the foetus stored in her kitchen fridge, she cut it into “manageable pieces”. Overnight she dried it out on absorbent paper before slowly microwaving it on a low heat.

According to the undercover team, the smell at this stage was overpowering.

So “aromatic herbs [are] added to the capsules to try to disguise the smell of rotting dried flesh.”

Hair and nails were discernible in the human material.

Once it was thoroughly dried, the pharmacist placed the flesh into a herbal grinder, not unlike a kitchen food processor, to render it down to a coarse, light brown powder, similar to the texture of human ashes following a cremation. That powder would then be put into soluble capsules which were counted out into bags for packing, shipment and sale. …

[The capsules] are believed by many to have fantastic healing powers which fight the ravages of ageing and are capable of defeating even cancer. …

The belief is that the nearer the foetus is to its birth date, the more healing properties it harbours.

One of the foetuses being pulverized, the TV team was told, was seven months old – a fully developed child ready to live outside the womb.

The footage taken by the team showed how placentas — the most common form of illegal human flesh traded in China for alternative medicine — are sold alongside the dried organs of creatures including snakes and bats from around the world to satisfy an appetite for powders, soups and potions said to have tremendous healing properties.

It is a sickening, cannibalistic and illegal trade that the Chinese authorities do not want the world to know exists. Yet it is disturbingly widespread. … While the trade in such drugs is thought to be more frequent in communist China, smugglers see the capitalist state of South Korea as an increasingly lucrative market. … The pills used to be shipped to South Korea brazenly in clear plastic cellophane bags, but more recently smugglers have had to become increasingly sophisticated and use orthodox dark brown pill bottles, with sealed caps and labelled with the names of legitimate drugs or more traditional Chinese herbal medicines to evade detection.

Plainly those Chinese authorities have more moral compunction (though not much) about the freezing, heating, grinding up, selling and eating of dead babies than they have against  killing them.

(On Chinese population control, forced abortion, and infanticide, see also our post immediately below, Environmentalism the supreme killer, May 11, 2012.)

Environmentalists “refuse to look at or admit the existence of the carnage they have created and continue to perpetuate worldwide.”

So writes Robert Zubrin in an article at PJ Media.

He contends that more people have died as a result of the environmental movement than at the hands of the most extreme mass-murdering dictators. In fact, he argues, millions of those deaths in the dictatorships have been caused, indirectly, by the environmental movement.

How good is his case?

Let’s look at the record.

Some of the worst atrocities can be laid at the feet of the population control ideologues such as Paul Ehrlich and his co-thinkers who argued — in direct contradiction to historical fact — that human well-being is inversely proportional to human numbers. As a result of their agitation, since 1966 U.S. foreign aid and World Bank loans to Third World countries have been made contingent upon those nations implementing population control programs. In consequence, over the past four decades, in scores of countries spanning the globe from India to Peru, tens of millions of women have been … subjected to involuntary sterilizations or abortions, often under very unsafe conditions, with innumerable victims suffering severe health effects or dying afterwards.

We are against foreign aid. But we are even more against the forced reduction of populations by “population control programs” including compulsory abortion and  sterilization.

Ehrlich also called for the United States to create a Bureau of Population and Environment which would have the power to issue or deny permits to Americans to have children. While rejected here, this idea was adopted by the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, who were convinced of the necessity of such measures by the writings of the Club of Rome* after these were plagiarized and republished in China under the name of one of its top officials. Thus was born China’s infamous “one-child policy,” which has involved not only hundreds of millions of involuntary abortions and forced sterilizations, but infanticide and the killing of “illegal children” on a mass scale.

There have been tens of millions of cases of murder-by-default: people being allowed to die by keeping from them a remedy for fatal disease:

The anti-technology wing of the antihuman movement also has its share of human extermination to account for. …

… by getting governments to ban the highly effective pesticide DDT – not always for scientific reasons, but precisely because it saves lives:

To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT. It has contributed to the great increase of agricultural productivity, while sparing countless humanity from a host of diseases, most notably perhaps, scrub typhus and malaria. Indeed, it is estimated that in little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million deaths due to malaria that would otherwise have been inevitable. But the role of DDT in saving half a billion lives did not positively impress everyone. On the contrary, as Alexander King, the co-founder of the Club of Rome put it in his 1990 biography, “my chief quarrel with DDT …  is that it has greatly added to the population problem.” …

Scientific arguments were also used, for instance that DDT endangered birds. To these lunatics (what else can one call them?), the preservation of bird life was more important than the preservation of human life.

Rachel Carson … in her 1962 book, Silent Spring, … made an eloquent case that DDT was endangering bird populations.

Which wasn’t even true:

This was false. In fact, by eliminating their insect parasites and infection agents, DDT was helping bird numbers to grow significantly. No matter. Using Carson’s book and even more wild writing by Ehrlich (who in a 1969 Ramparts article predicted that pesticides would cause all life in the Earth’s oceans to die by 1979), a massive propaganda campaign was launched [in the US] to ban DDT.

The EPA – not yet the storm-trooper arm of a dictatorial administration as it has now become – carried out an investigation into the effects of the pesticide:

In 1971, the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency responded by holding seven months of investigative hearings on the subject, gathering testimony from 125 witnesses. At the end of this process, Judge Edmund Sweeney issued his verdict: “The uses of DDT under the registration involved here do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds, or other wildlife. … DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man.”

But dedicated environmentalists are never put off by facts:

No matter. EPA administrator William Ruckelshaus (who would later go on to be a board member of the Draper Fund, a leading population control group), chose to overrule Sweeney and ban the use of DDT in the United States.

Subsequently, the U.S. Agency for International Development adopted regulations preventing it from funding international projects that used DDT. Together with similar decisions enacted in Europe, this effectively banned the use of DDT in many Third World countries. By some estimates, the malaria death toll in Africa alone resulting from these restrictions has exceeded 100 million people, with 3 million additional deaths added to the toll every year.

The harm done by the EPA, itself a creation of the environmental movement, has not been limited to stopping DDT. It is no coincidence that U.S. oil production, which had been growing at a rate of 3 percent per year through the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, peaked in 1971, immediately after the EPA’s creation, and has been declining ever since. In 1971, the U.S. produced 9.6 million barrels of oil per day (mpd). Today we are down to 5.6 mpd. Had we continued without environmentalist interference with our previous 3 percent per year growth in the period since — as the rest of the non-OPEC world actually did — we would today be producing 35 mpd, and the world economy would not be groaning under the extremely regressive tax represented by $100 per barrel oil prices. The environmentalist campaign against nuclear power has made its promise for plentiful, cheap electricity impossible as well.

The genocidal effect of such support for energy price-rigging should not be underestimated. Increasing the price of energy increases the price of all other products. It is one thing to pay $100 per barrel for oil in a nation like the USA which has an average income of $45,000 per year. It is quite another to pay it in a Third World country with an average income of $1500 per year. An oil price stiff enough to cause recession in the advanced sector can cause mass starvation among the world’s poor.

While we think the phrase “genocidal effect” is not well chosen, we follow Dr. Zubrin’s argument.

Again, the evil that he accuses environmentalists of is choosing not to allow the saving of lives that could be saved: 

European greens also have much horror to account for, notably through their campaign against genetically modified crops. Hundreds of millions of people in the Third World today suffer from nutritional deficiencies resulting from their cereal-dominated diets. This can now readily be rectified by employing genetically enhanced plants, such as golden rice, which is rich in vitamin A. Other genetically modified crops offer protection against iron or other vitamin deficiency diseases, dramatically increased yields, self-fertilization, and drought or insect resistance. But as a result of political pressure from the green parties, the European Union has banned the import of crops from countries that employ such strains, thereby blackmailing many governments into forbidding their use. In consequence, millions of people are being unnecessarily blinded, crippled, starved, or killed every year.

Taken together, these campaigns to deny billions of people the means to a decent existence have racked up a death toll exceeding that achieved by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or any of the other tyrants whose crimes fill the sordid pages of human history.

*And here is a very important footnote that explains how and why environmentalists decided to exploit pollution, global warming, and famine in order to make a case for global unification [ie for world government] as long as the earth is peopled, but also against the human race, which they perceive as the planet’s enemy. What their ultimate aim is –  whether absolute power over the human species or its total annihilation – is not clear. Is preservation of the environment the pretext for, or the goal of world government? Perhaps they are not sure themselves.

From Wikipedia:

The Club of Rome raised considerable public attention with its report Limits to Growth … It predicted that economic growth could not continue indefinitely because of the limited availability of natural resources, particularly oil. …

Mankind at the Turning Point was accepted as the official Second Report to the Club of Rome in 1974. … [It claimed] that many of the factors [affecting the environment] were within human control and therefore that environmental and economic catastrophe were preventable or avoidable. …

In 1993, the Club published The First Global Revolution. According to this book, divided nations require common enemies to unite them, “either a real one or else one invented for the purpose.” Because of the sudden absence of traditional enemies, “new enemies must be identified. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. … All these dangers [to the planet] are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.”

Here is part of a Washington Times article by Geert Wilders, leader and hero of the contemporary Dutch Resistance against Islam and its craven apologists:

As I write these lines, there are police bodyguards at the door. No visitor can enter my office without passing through several security checks and metal detectors. I have been marked for death. I am forced to live in a heavily protected safe house. Every morning, I am driven to my office in the Dutch Parliament building in an armored car with sirens and flashing blue lights. When I go out, I am surrounded, as I have been for the past seven years, by plainclothes police officers. When I speak in public, I wear a bulletproof jacket.

Who am I? I am neither a king nor a president, nor even a government minister; I am just a simple politician in the Netherlands. But because I speak out against expanding Islamic influence in Europe, I have been marked for death. If you criticize Islam, this is the risk you run. That is why so few politicians dare to tell the truth about the greatest threat to our liberties today. The Islamic threat to the West is worse than the communist threat ever was. Think of it this way: Politicians who warned against the Soviet threat weren’t forced into hiding, as we who speak out against Islam are.

I received my first death threats in September 2003 after I asked the Dutch government to investigate a radical mosque. When the death threats became more frequent, the Dutch authorities assigned me a team of police bodyguards. In November 2004, after a Muslim fanatic murdered Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh for making a movie about the abuse of women under Islam, policemen armed with machine guns came to my house, pushed me into an armored car, and drove me off into the night. That was the last time I was in my house. Since then, I have lived in an army barracks, a prison cell and now a government-owned safe house.

I have grown accustomed to this situation. After more than seven years, the security detail has become part of my daily routine, but in a free society, no politician should have to fear for his life because he addresses issues voters care about.

Nor should special-interest groups be allowed to trump our Western rights of free speech, as Islamic and leftist organizations tried to do by dragging me to court on accusations of “hate speech.” After an almost three-year legal ordeal, I was acquitted of all charges.

I used to travel widely and frequently in the Islamic world, but now it’s no longer safe. I have read the Koran and studied the life of Muhammad. It made me realize that Islam is primarily a totalitarian ideology rather than a religion. I feel sorry for the Arab, Persian, Indian and Indonesian peoples who have to live under the yoke of Islam. … Without freedom, there can be no prosperity and no pursuit of happiness. More Islam means less life, less liberty and less happiness.

That is why I consider it my duty to sound the alarm about the relentless expansion of Islam. … Islam [wages] jihad – holy war – against the West … from within our borders.

Fifty-seven percent of the Dutch people say that mass immigration was the biggest single mistake in Dutch history. Many politicians, however, downplay the most dramatic sociological change of their lifetime. They ignore the worries of the people out of political correctness and cultural relativism, which insist that all cultures are equal; hence, immigrants do not need to assimilate: Islamic values are just as good as Dutch, British or American values.

If we do not oppose Islamization, we will lose everything: our freedom, our identity, our democracy, our rule of law. To preserve Western civilization, we must do four things: Defend freedom of speech, reject cultural relativism, counter Islamization, and cherish our Western national identities  …

Of all our liberties, freedom of speech is the most important. Free speech is the cornerstone of a free society. So long as we are free to speak, we can make people realize what is at stake. In Western democracies, we do not settle our disagreements with violence, but through spoken and written arguments. In the search for the truth, we allow everyone to express his or her honestly held views. That is how we outgrew barbarism and became a free and prosperous society. We must pass it on to our children.

I have written a book in defense of liberty and freedom of expression, titled “Marked for Death”. It explains the many ways in which Islam has marked for death not only me, but all of Western civilization. The book warns Americans about the danger of turning a blind eye to the true nature of Islam.

That Geert Wilders lives in fear of being murdered in his own country, while those who threaten him are protected by stupid laws against “hate speech”, should be intolerable to the conscience of all Europeans. Instead, European courts continue to prosecute those who defend freedom against the onslaught of intolerant Islam.

The Muslims who pursue him do not seem to realize that they are doing more to condemn Islam in Western eyes than anything Geert Wilders has said.  But if no one will say so, the lesson will be lost.

Islam should be marked by the West for extinction. Instead it is protected by two shields gifted to it by the West. Two shibboleths.

The shield of religion. Islam calls itself a religion, and the West upholds religious tolerance. But Islam needs to be recognized as the totalitarian ideology that it is. In any case, religious ideas should not be immune from criticism. On the contrary – being irrational, they deserve to be accorded less, not more, respect; and criticized all the more relentlessly.

The shield of (faux) victimhood. Islam is an ideology of backward peoples, and backward peoples are needed by the Left as its cause and pretext, since its first choice, the Western proletariat, disappeared into the middle class.

Neither shield is impregnable. Islam must be fought on all fronts, and words are the most powerful weapons against it.

Let’s use words against Islam in America. Let’s criticize it, ridicule it, rage against it. Doing so is forbidden in Europe, and that makes it even more vital for us to do it here. 

It is not a conspiracy theory. It is not a paranoid illusion arising from feverish nightmares. The international Left really IS plotting to establish world government.

The plotters are trying to do it by various means: with an International Covenant on Environment and Development (see our post Prepare to be DICED, March 23,2012); by controlling “carbon emissions”; through the furtive application of the sinister “Agenda 21″* – all spawned by the UN.

The Obama administration is doing its best to assist the process, for instance by claiming that the US cannot go to war without getting the nod from other countries (see our post US needs permission of foreign states to go to war, March 10, 2012), and now by making the US a signatory to a treaty that will hand over its rights to fishing, seabed mining and oil extraction, and the activity of its own navy, to a global bureaucracy.

This report and discussion of the treaty comes from Investor’s Business Daily:

Even if he’s not re-elected, the president hopes to leave behind a treaty giving a U.N. body veto power over the use of our territorial waters and to which we’d be required to give half of our offshore oil revenue.

The Law Of The Sea Treaty (LOST) has been lurking in the shadows for decades. Like the Kyoto Protocol that pretended to be an effort to save the earth from the poisoned fruit of the Industrial Revolution, LOST pretends to be an effort to protect the world’s oceans from environmental damage and remove it as a cause of potential conflicts between nations.

But what is it really?

Like its Kyoto cousin, LOST is an attempt at the global redistribution of power and wealth, the embodiment of the progressive dream of the end of the nation state as we know it and the end of political freedom by giving veto over all of mankind’s activities to a global body — in this case something called the International Seabed Authority, located in Kingston, Jamaica.

The ISA would have the power to regulate 70% of the earth’s surface, placing seabed mining, fishing rights, deep-sea oil exploration and even the activities of the U.S. Navy under control of a global bureaucracy. It even provides for a global tax that would be paid directly to the ISA by companies seeking to develop the resources in and under the world’s oceans. …

The U.S. government now can collect royalty revenues from oil and gas companies that wish to drill on our extended continental shelf — the undersea areas beyond 200 miles of our coast. But if we ratify LOST, we’d have to fork over as much as 7% of that revenue to the ISA for redistribution to poorer, landlocked countries.

Maritime and jurisdictional disputes would be settled by the ISA, which presumably would tell the U.S. Navy where it could and could not go. Freedom of navigation has been guaranteed by the U.S. Navy and, before it, the British Royal Navy. Now it would be the ISA. This meets perfectly the definition of the “global test” Sen. John Kerry, a backer of LOST, said in 2004 that our actions must meet. …

Senator John Kerry is one of that weird schizophrenic breed, an exceedingly wealthy International Communist Plutocrat. Seems he can’t wait to give America away to some atrocious consortium of Third World dictatorships. If he and his like-minded comrades have their way, the US will indeed be lost.

President Reagan, of course, took an oppositie view:

LOST was a bad idea when President Reagan refused to sign it in 1982 and actually fired the State Department staff members who helped negotiate it. It was drafted at the behest of Soviet bloc and Third World dictators interested in a scheme to weaken U.S. power and sovereignty while transferring wealth from the industrialized to the developing world. Reagan rightly decided the U.S. shouldn’t be a part of this global resource grab and redistribution of wealth.

The treaty was co-authored by Elisabeth Mann Borgese, an admirer of Karl Marx and a socialist who ran the World Federation of Canada.

Elisabeth Mann Borgese is, sad to say, the daughter of Thomas Mann, the great (arguably the greatest – JB) novelist of the 20th century.**

She views the oceans as the “common heritage of mankind” and in a 1999 speech declared, “The world ocean has been and is, so to speak, our great laboratory for the making of a new world order.”

We prefer the world order under Reagan, where we called our own shots.

*For the evils of “Agenda 21”, see our posts: Blessed are the slimy, May 5, 2012; Beware “Agenda 21″, June 24, 2011; The once and new religion of earth-worship, October 27, 2011; Agenda 21: the “smart growth” conspiracy, November 21, 2011;Three eees for environmental equalizing economics, December 4, 2011.

** Those who know the works of Thomas Mann will know why it is sad that his daughter is in the world government camp.

Change? Yes, there is change under the Obama administration.

A free democracy is being turned into a tyranny.

How is this being done?

One way is by unleashing anarchic mobs; tying the hands of the police; criminalizing the victims of mob-violence; and systematically discrediting civilized values, as described in this column by Thomas Sowell on the “Occupy” movement:

The unwillingness of authorities to put a stop to their organized disruptions of other people’s lives, their trespassing, vandalism and violence is a de facto suspension, if not repeal, of the 14th Amendment’s requirement that the government provide “equal protection of the laws” to all its citizens.

How did the “Occupy” movement acquire such immunity from the laws that the rest of us are expected to obey? Simply by shouting politically correct slogans and calling themselves representatives of the 99 percent against the 1 percent. But just when did the 99 percent elect them as their representatives? If in fact 99 percent of the people in the country were like these “Occupy” mobs, we would not have a country. We would have anarchy.

Democracy does not mean mob rule. It means majority rule. If the “Occupy” movement, or any other mob, actually represents a majority, then they already have the votes to accomplish legally whatever they are trying to accomplish by illegal means. Mob rule means imposing what the mob wants, regardless of what the majority of voters want. It is the antithesis of democracy.

In San Francisco, when the mob smashed the plate-glass window of a small business shop, the owner put up some plywood to replace the glass, and the mob wrote graffiti on his plywood. The consequences? None for the mob, but a citation for the shop owner for not removing the graffiti.

When trespassers blocking other people at UC Davis refused to disperse, and locked their arms with one another to prevent the police from being able to physically remove them, the police finally resorted to pepper spray to break up this human logjam. The result? The police have been strongly criticized for enforcing the law. Apparently pepper spray is unpleasant, and people who break the law are not supposed to have unpleasant things done to them. Which is to say, we need to take the “enforcement” out of “law enforcement.”

Everybody is not given these exemptions from paying the consequences of their own illegal acts. Only people who are currently in vogue with the elites of the left – in the media, in politics and in academia.

The 14th Amendment? What is the Constitution or the laws when it comes to ideological soul mates, especially young soul mates who remind the aging 1960s radicals of their youth?

Neither in this or any other issue can the Constitution protect us if we don’t protect the Constitution. When all is said and done, the Constitution is a document, a piece of paper.

If we don’t vote out of office, or impeach, those who violate the Constitution, or who refuse to enforce the law, the steady erosion of Constitutional protections will ultimately render it meaningless. Everything will just become a question of whose ox is gored and what is the political expediency of the moment.

There has been much concern, rightly expressed, about the rusting of bridges around the country, and the crumbling and corrosion of other parts of the physical infrastructure. But the crumbling of the moral infrastructure is no less deadly. …

If everyone takes the path of least resistance – if politicians pander to particular constituencies and judges give only wrist slaps to particular groups or mobs who are currently in vogue, and educators indoctrinate their students with “non-judgmental” attitudes – then the moral infrastructure corrodes and crumbles.

Another way is by criminalizing citizens who are going about their lawful business. This method is as ruthlessly pursued by the Obama administration, in the name of preserving the environment and species, as the promotion of mob-rule.

How it is done is described in this study by Joe Luppino-Esposito, a Visiting Fellow at the the Heritage Foundation:

How did a law originally enacted to target poaching of migratory birds evolve to authorize an armed raid of a guitar factory in search of wooden veneers imported without the proper paperwork? The Lacey Act was the first federal wildlife conservation statute, narrowly targeted at the interstate sale in poached game. But in the century since its enactment, the statute’s scope has been enormously expanded to the point that it now incorporates the wildlife and trade laws of every foreign nation. As a result, it has become a trap for the unwary, placing honest businessmen and businesswomen at risk of criminal liability for unknowing violations of hyper-technical foreign laws and regulations.

In short, the Lacey Act has become the poster child for the phenomenon of overcriminalization and should be at the top of Congress’s list for reform. …

The original Lacey Act was … a modest addition to federal authority. In effect, it promoted federalism by preventing poachers and pot hunters from circumventing the states’ game laws. And it expanded criminal liability hardly at all, making federal crimes out of conduct that was already prohibited under state law rather than creating a new federal mandate. The penalty for a violation was a not-inconsequential $200 fine.

Over time, however, the scope of the Lacey Act expanded as federal legislators became more comfortable with passing broad federal environmental laws. In 1935, Congress increased the penalty for violations to $1,000 with a maximum penalty of six months imprisonment. Congress also empowered Department of Agriculture agents to arrest citizens for violations in their presence and to execute warrants. Most important, Congress also extended the Act’s list of predicate offenses to include foreign laws. This meant that if a bird was “captured, killed, taken, shipped, transported, or carried” in violation of the foreign state from which it originated, the United States could prosecute that individual or organization. …

In 1981 … indigenous plants were added to the list of covered species, including those that are considered endangered under U.S. law and those identified in the appendices of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). …  The Act’s criminal offenses were divided into felonies and misdemeanors, with the former carrying a maximum sentence of five years’ imprisonment and a $20,000 fine and the latter a maximum of one year’s imprisonment and a $10,000 fine. …

The most significant change occurred in 2008, when Congress expanded the statute’s reach once again to criminalize improper marking and labeling of protected plants. As amended, the statute prohibits the “knowing” import or export of a prohibited fish, wildlife, plant or the “knowing” conduct of a sale of prohibited fish, wildlife, or plant. Additionally, anyone who “knowingly engages in conduct prohibited by any provision of this chapter … and in the exercise of due care should know that the fish or wildlife or plants were taken, possessed, transported, or sold in violation of, or in a manner unlawful under, any underlying law, treaty or regulation” may be subjected to criminal punishment.

This amendment was hailed by proponents as the first ban on illegal logging operating across international borders. Critics, however, have explained that tracking wood products back to their sources is incredibly difficult and that the “due care” provision is too vague.

Since the beginning of the debate on the Lacey Act, Congress has been concerned about how the statute may affect legitimate business. The result, one century later, is that individuals who try to act within the law are too often ensnared by the Lacey Act.

David McNab and Abner Schoenwetter, who were engaged in the lobster trade, were convicted under the Lacey Act for importing undersized lobsters in 1999. In addition, some of the lobsters were also egg-bearing, and all of them were shipped in plastic bags instead of cardboard boxes. These were not requirements of American environmental law, but requirements of Honduran law—requirements that Honduran courts later determined were invalid. Nonetheless, McNab and Schoenwetter were sentenced to eight years in prison. Due to the low level of criminal intent required for conviction, it did not matter that the two men were unaware of the Honduran environmental regulations.

More recently, armed federal agents raided Gibson Guitar facilities …

Gibson Guitar Corporation being “the world’s best known and most respected maker of fretted instruments” …

… to seize imported woods intended for fingerboards, for the second time in two years. Although no formal charges have been filed, Gibson believes that it is being targeted for their importing of ebony from Madagascar in 2009 and from India this past year. The Justice Department has confirmed that a criminal investigation is under way.

The case appears to turn on the thickness of the wood and what constitutes “finished” wood. The Indian tariff code “HS 4407” is meant for wood that exceeds 6 millimeters in thickness, which cannot be exported. Wood thinner than that is identified as “HS 4408” and may be exported. In this case, the Indian export documents labeled the fingerboard blanks as “HS 9209,” which refers to “[p]arts (for example, mechanisms for music boxes) and accessories (for example, cards, discs, and rolls for mechanical instruments) of musical instruments,” which may also be exported. But the import forms identified the wood as “HS 4408.” An affidavit filed by a special agent with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service alleges that the Lacey Act declarations incorrectly identified the wood as finished veneers rather than unfinished wood that exceeded 6 millimeters in thickness. …

In effect, Gibson was raided because of an otherwise harmless paperwork error. At worst (although even this is unclear), the company may have violated regulations pertaining to the export of unfinished wood that were intended to protect jobs in India. In any event, neither the law in question nor the pending investigation seems based upon the alleged violation or appears to have anything to do with protecting the environment.

Beyond criminal intent, both of these cases also raise questions regarding the requirements of foreign law. In the lobster case, evidence was presented showing that the Honduran regulations at issue were invalid because the size restriction had never been signed by the President of Honduras. The Honduras Attorney General issued an opinion confirming that without the presidential signature, the law was, in fact, invalid. [But] the U.S. court determined that this testimony by an expert on Honduran law was not sufficient to reverse convictions.

As for Gibson Guitar, the company claims that Indian officials permitted the export of the unfinished wood.

If that claim is correct, it appears that in both cases, the United States government is now attempting to make a federal crime out of foreign conduct that the foreign countries do not hold to be unlawful.

Finally, both cases suggest that enforcement of the Lacey Act has deviated far from the Act’s purpose of respecting existing environmental laws to its current use in enforcing laws concerned with trade protection and economic advantage. The Indian regulation that Gibson stands accused of violating exists only to protect Indian workers from foreign competition …  And McNab and Schoenwetter were victims of an anonymous fax to the Fish and Wildlife Service by a competitor who lost out on the bid for the lobster shipment.

Environmental protection was not even at the heart of either case. …

The Lacey Act has now become a casebook example of federal overcriminalization run amok.

The abandonment of law and order along with contemptuous disregard of the Constitution on the one hand, and over-regulation to criminalize the innocent and productive on the other, provide a double-barreled means of bringing free America to its knees. “Change – or else!”

And the change to tyranny is also helped along, of course, by Obamacare, the redistribution of wealth, the growingof the national debt, the corruption of the Department of Justice, the implemention of “Agenda 21″* …

* For the evils of Agenda 21, see our posts: Blessed are the slimy, May 5, 2012; Beware “Agenda 21″, June 24, 2011; The once and new religion of earth-worship, October 27, 2011; Agenda 21: the “smart growth” conspiracy, November 21, 2011;Three eees for environmental equalizing economics, December 4, 2011; Prepare to be DICED, March 23, 2012.

The video (from this source) is long but we think it is worth the time it takes to watch it. What the two atheist professors, Richard Dawkins the biologist and Laurence Krauss the physicist, say about science is fascinating to us.

For instance, Dawkins says that the hippo is more closely related to the whale than to the pig.

They talk about how counter-intuitive science is. They discuss the question of whether something can come out of nothing – by accident. (Krauss insists that the laws of physics are an accident.)

They both maintain that religion should be subject to criticism like all other ideas. And urge that religious ideas be ridiculed – out of respect for those who hold them.

There  are points that we disagree with. As usual with Richard Dawkins, we are irritated by his ill-reasoned and ill-informed political remarks. There aren’t many of them, but among them we count the  astounding statement that the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, is intelligent – no doubt because he is a lefty. (For our take on this question, see our post Intellectuals and the law, March 18, 2010.)

And Krauss is a warmist. “Vast” numbers of people, he says, “will lose their land” because of global warming. He despises the majority of his fellow Americans for thinking that manmade global warming is a hoax, declaring that they only believe it because much money has been spent (by unnamed sinister powers) to convince them of this. No proof adduced. Not the way a scientist should think.

Dawkins doesn’t say what he thinks about that, but does say mankind may be doomed in this century by weapons of mass destruction.

Considering whether religion can be rational, he says that religions can have an “internal consistency”. Perhaps they could have, but they don’t. Christianity is notably lacking internal consistency, as Christians themselves demonstrate by arguing with each other over the “logic” of their beliefs through all the centuries of their existence.

In answer to one of the several not-very-good-to-positively-imbecile questions put to them, Dawkins reveals that he values and often reads two books of  the Bible for their  beauty  – but only in the King James Version: The Song of Songs, and Ecclesiastes (traditionally said to be the Atheist’s favorite). On this we wholly agree with him.

Perhaps there is too little science in the hour and a half. But we were informed and entertained.

See what you think.