Why we must challenge Islam 181
The greatness of the West resulted from the Socratean wisdom that all ideas must be questioned. (Though it endured a thousand dark years when the Catholic Church forbade and punished all such questioning.) Critical examination is the wellspring of science. Our superiority in science and technology – and economic and military might – came about precisely because we doubted, questioned, examined, and experimented.
Islam is backward because it does not permit criticism. It does not allow any questioning of its beliefs. It punishes doubt and dissent.
If we give up criticism at the behest of our implacable enemy, we will be abandoning the mainstay of our might and poisoning our civilization at its root. If we silence our objections to Islam, we allow Muslims to claim that it is the Truth.
Nothing is more important for our survival than freedom of thought. Thought is argument. Argument is progress. We cannot accept any restriction on our expression of ideas. None. Ever.
We should do everything we can to make this absolutely clear to those who believe in an unquestionable orthodoxy like Communism or Islam.
Islam cannot be allowed to claim immunity from criticism on the grounds that it is a religion. Religion is anti-reason, and of all ideas those of religion are the least defensible.
The sacredness in which some hold a belief cannot preserve it from doubt. Reason knows no blasphemy. If Islam appalls us, we must be free to say so in whatever terms we choose. If Muslims take offense, let them try winning us to their beliefs by arguing with us and not by killing us. Violence is no argument. Murder persuades nobody. It might compel obedience, but never intellectual conviction.
Let us express our offense at being assailed by blunt ignorance, and at being ordered by foolish politicians to hold our tongues. If Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton cannot understand that Islam must be criticized, may – considering its doctrine and practice – be denigrated, they must not be left in a position to pay our mortal enemy the ransom of our freedom.
Jillian Becker September 23, 2012
The death of nations 318
Environmentalists, collectivists, communists, barbarians, lunatics – it doesn’t matter which of those words you use to designate them, they are all synonymous in this case – really are taking over control of the world.
Here is the Wildlife Project map showing their plans for the future of America:
We have taken the map and the following quotations from Dr Ileana Johnson Paugh, who writes authoritatively at Canada Free Press:
The map was produced by Dr. Michael Coffman, editor of Discerning the Times Digest and NewsBytes and CEO of Sovereignty International, to stop the ratification of the international treaty on Convention on Biological Diversity one hour before the scheduled cloture and ratification vote.
Which, however, it failed to do.
The mandate of the Convention of Biological Diversity draws buffer zones, core reserves and corridors to protect biodiversity. Areas in green will allow housing. Areas in yellow will be buffer zones, highly regulated with no homes and possible hiking. Red areas will be core reserves and corridors off-limits to human access and human habitation. …
After numerous United Nations conferences around the globe spanning decades and a concerted effort by third world governments led by individuals like Maurice Strong and Gro Harlem Brundtland … the UN Agenda 21 became reality at the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
This conference produced three documents: The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (an international treaty), the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (an international treaty), and UN Agenda 21 (not a treaty but a “soft law”).
President Herbert Walker Bush signed along with 178 countries but refused to sign the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity because it required transfer of technology without recognition of proprietary rights. However, President Bush said, “It is the sacred principles enshrined in the UN Charter to which the American people will henceforth pledge their allegiance.” I am sure the American people were very surprised or perhaps totally unaware that a U.S. President would pledge allegiance to a foreign body instead of the U.S. Constitution.
UN Agenda 21 is a “soft law” document, not ratified by Congress. Parts of it have been incorporated into other laws passed because Congressmen do not read the bills they pass or do not understand the full scope of the UN Agenda 21. The 40-chapter document limits the behavior and freedoms of individuals and firms, involving every facet of human life.
UN Agenda 21 makes suggestions and recommendations that are adapted into law at the state and local levels through comprehensive land use plans which are voted on and included by the board of supervisors into local zoning codes. Citizens do not understand its damaging ramifications to their private property, the ability to make a living, to use their land, grow food in their gardens, sell their produce freely, and engage in agriculture. …
UN Agenda 21 goals include but are not limited to:
• Redistribution of population according to resources
• Government control of land use in order to achieve equitable distribution of resources
• Land use control through zoning and planning
• Government control of “excessive” profits from land use [our quotation marks here]
• Urban and rural land control through public land ownership
• Developing rights must be held by public authorities via “regionalist” authorities
President Bill Clinton facilitated President Herbert Walker Bush’s initial commitment by signing an executive order which created the President’s Council on Sustainable Development to translate UN Agenda 21 into U.S. public policy under the guise of ecosystem management.
One World Governance in the name of protecting the environment, racial justice, and social justice/equity is a communist system that redistributes wealth and promotes universal health care as a human right.
“Racial justice” means affirmative action, and affirmative action means race discrimination. Like “social justice”, it is a euphemism for redistribution of goods, material and abstract, from those who have legally acquired them through their own efforts to those who haven’t. In short, injustice.
Harvey Rubin, the Vice Chair of ICLEI [International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives], proclaimed his vision of a communistic sustainable world in which “Individual rights must take a back seat to the collective.”
You’ve earned your wealth? Give it up. You have some particular skill or talent? Suppress it. You hate being in crowds? Too bad. You want to have a child? Sorry, no. You are old and becoming a drain on the communal resources? Die. You don’t agree with Harvey Rubin? Off with you to a re-education camp.
One World Governance will control:
• Energy production, delivery, distribution, and consumption
• Food growth and production …
• Education control via a curriculum centered on environment and Mother Earth and global citizenship …
• Water through irrigation denial in agriculture, home use, recreation activities; destruction of dams and reservoirs; abolishing hydroelectric generation use of water as a contributor to the now discredited theory that greenhouse gases cause global warming
• Land control through abolishing of private property
• Finances (one world currency to replace the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency)
• De-population (restructuring the family unit and reducing population to “manageable levels” through sterilization and eugenics)
• No borders/no sovereignty
• No national language and culture (a multi-cultural hodgepodge devoid of a nation’s history, and shameless promotion of global citizenship)
• Mobility restriction to 5 minutes-walk/bike from work, school, shopping
• Longer distance travel through rail use
• Homestead by stacking people in high-rise tenements in order to designate formerly privately owned land for wildlife habitat
The One World Governance of the UN Agenda 21 requires that every societal decision be based on the environmental impact on global land use, global education, and global population control and reduction. They have deemed “not sustainable” most human activities that form our modern civilization: private property, fossil fuels, consumerism, farming, irrigation, commercial agriculture, pesticides, herbicides, farmlands, grazing of livestock, paved roads, golf courses, ski lodges, logging, dams, reservoirs, fences, power lines, suburban living, and the family unit.
“Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class – involving high meat intake, use of fossil fuels, appliances, home and work air conditioning, and suburban housing are not sustainable.” (Maurice Strong, Secretary General of the UN’s Earth Summit, 1992)
“We must make this place an insecure and inhospitable place for Capitalists and their projects – we must reclaim the roads and plowed lands, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers and return to wilderness millions of tens of millions of acres of presently settled land.” (Dave Foreman, Earth First) …
There is never a shortage of new converts – the educational system is deliberately dumbing down our students in order to accept the Sustainable Development goals. “Generally, more highly educated people, who have higher incomes, consume more resources than poorly educated people, who tend to have lower incomes. In this case, more education increases the threat to sustainability.”
The few human beings who will be allowed to live for a short time will be kept in a state of environmentally-friendly ignorance. There will need to be book-burning on a massive scale. There’s nothing worth knowing anyway:
In some states, the curriculum includes “constructivism,” a teaching method by which “students construct [their own] understandings of reality and [realize] that objective reality is not knowable.” …
Math, for instance, beyond simple arithmetic, is completely superflous:
The New World Order teachers recommend Connected Mathematics because “Mathematics is man-made, is arbitrary, and good solutions are arrived at by consensus among those who are considered expert.” With the right consensus of experts, two plus two may not be four but five. …
The point to grasp is that Agenda 21 is being implemented right now.
Time to despair? 322
It seems at the moment that a majority of Americans want the Democrats with their socialist agenda and pro-Islam sentiment to rule them, and therefore to change everything that the United States has stood for from the beginning.
If Obama is re-elected, and has his way – which he will if both houses of Congress are given Democratic majorities – what will happen?
Let’s look at the worst plausible scenario.
Most Americans will be poorer. The national debt, vast as it is, will grow even bigger. Unemployment will increase. The value of the dollar will fall as inflation rises. More tens of thousands will be on food stamps (45.8 million are now).
Much private housing will be expropriated. Large numbers of people will be herded into government-supplied accommodation. How warm you may keep your room in winter and how cool in summer will be decided by local government. Car ownership will be discouraged by high gas prices, lack of parking facilities, and pressure on town-dwellers to use bicycles and commuters to use public transport. The countryside will be returned to wilderness. Roads will be destroyed. (All this in line with Agenda 21. Put “Agenda 21” in our search slot for corroboration.)
“Free Speech” will be severely restricted and so cease to be free. This is happening already with the Obama administration trying to stop criticism of Islam.
Your guns will be confiscated.
Sharia law will be applied in courts across the land and take precedence over the Constitution.
What you may eat in restaurants, schools and hospitals, and what food stores may sell, will be decided by Michelle Obama (assisted by New York’s Mayor Bloomberg). (See our post The orderers, June 5, 2012.)
Obamacare will prevail. The treatment you may have or be refused when you are ill will be decided by bureaucrats. If you are old and ill your survival will be arbitrated by a death-panel, whatever euphemism of a name it goes under. You have only to look at the British National Health Service to see the horrid future of health care in America. (Put “death-panels” and “NHS” into our search slot to find the grisly details.)
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will be turned into the equivalent of the KGB. It is almost there now.
There will be no more free elections.
China, Russia, North Korea, Pakistan, and Iran will all become more powerful as America is deliberately weakened militarily. What will that mean? Let your imaginations soar.
World government by that collection of corrupt and savage despotisms, the United Nations, will be established with the enthusiastic help of the American government.
Innovation will cease as freedom goes. The great experiment in freedom that was America, its prosperity and its power, will be over. There will be no turning back.
And all that is just first-thought – but bitterly informed – prediction.
Readers’ gloomy predictions are invited. And expressions of despair.
*
The Republican Party is allowing this to happen. It seems to have lost the plot. The last election was the turning point when it insanely put up John McCain as it’s presidential candidate. With such a feeble alternative to a candidate who offered the electorate a chance to feel good by voting for him chiefly because he was black (a thoroughly racist reason), the ideology of collectivism triumphed. Now that so many people have been reduced to dependence on the state is it likely they will vote away their free ride through life?
Of course, socialism does not work. The system will collapse as it always has because it must. And the country will come to ruin, like Greece. But apparently more than half the voters of America are unaware of this terrifying fact, or else they don’t give a damn.
Why aren’t the Republicans telling the voters in the strongest terms that this is what will happen?
It’s a real question. We’d like to know why.
Going with the wind 217
The article by James Delingpole from which we quote is about property rights and what he rightly calls the “green religion”; matters of concern equally on both sides of the Atlantic:
Property rights are a cornerstone of our liberty, our security, our civilisation. …
Here’s the Virginia Bill of Rights, precursor to the US Declaration of Independence:
“That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”
Here’s Samuel Adams:
“The Natural Rights of the colonists are these: first, a right to life; second, to liberty; third to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can.”
And here, most trenchantly, is the philosopher who inspired them, John Locke:
“Whenever the legislators endeavour to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience …”
Time for a revolution, then, for the theft of our property rights is exactly what is happening to us now under our notionally “Conservative” prime minister and his increasingly desperate and damaging attempts to position his collapsing administration as the “greenest ever.” I’m thinking especially of the ongoing renewables scam.
The wind farm industry is surely the worst offender. Some vexatious twerp complained the other day about my claim that wind farms reduce property values by between 25 per cent and 50 per cent. Actually, if anything, I’m understating the problem here. I know of cases where properties have been rendered unsaleable by wind farms. But whatever the exact figures, I think those of us not in the pay of Big Wind or trotting out propaganda for the preposterous and devious Renewable UK would all agree that the very last thing we’d want on our doorstep would be a wind farm and that we certainly would never dream of buying a property near one. QED.
Since not a single one of the wind farms blighting Britain would have been built without state incentives (in the form of Renewable Obligations Certificates, Feed In Tariffs, and legislation which makes it very hard for communities to prevent wind farms being built in the area) we can reasonably say therefore that wind farms represent a wanton assault by the state on property rights. We expect such confiscatory measures “for the common good” from socialist regimes. But from a Conservative-dominated Coalition it’s a disgrace.
The Coalition itself is a disgrace. How a co-called Conservative Party ever decided to team up with a Liberal Democratic Party that is well to the left of the opposition Labour Party would be beyond comprehension to anyone who didn’t know that the so-called Conservative Party of Great Britain is not remotely conservative. In fact its leader, David Cameron, is an ardent fan of Saul Alinsky, the communist revolutionary who inspired Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
But it’s not just the wind farm industry which is complicitous in this scam. … The hydro power industry turns out to be very nearly as damaging, unpleasant, slimy and untrustworthy as its nasty elder brother Big Wind. … yet another taxpayer-subsidised boondoggle for rent-seeking scuzzballs, which produces next to no electricity and which – just like wind farms – causes immense damage to wildlife (in this case fish rather than birds or bats). …
The hypocrisy of it! Environmentalists going to endless lengths to protect a smelt while they feed other fish and innumerable birds to their terrible engines. Above all, they hurt people. Delingpole gives a particular instance where property rights are harmed:
Nottingham Angling Club … in 1982 forked out £150,000 for the fishing rights to a one and half mile stretch of the river Trent above a weir which is now about to be converted to hydropower. The quality of their fishing will almost certainly diminish. And there are stories like this from all over the country. Whether its wealthy fly fishing enthusiasts who’ve paid a fortune for a prime stretch of river in Hampshire or Dorset, or an ordinary working man’s club like the one in Nottingham, people are going to suffer as a result of this state-sponsored drive for renewables. Again, as with wind power, the only reason these hydropower schemes are going ahead is because of the government subsidies and incentives for those canny or cynical enough to get in on the scam. So again, what we have here is a clear case of the state arbitrarily confiscating people’s property rights because of its desire to be seen paying lip service to the green religion.
But the harm to people caused by governments pursuing the green superstition is far greater than that. It is general, affecting the price everyone has to pay for electricity. Not just property rights but liberty itself is going with the wind.
All over America, city councils, implementing Agenda 21, are trying to increase the amount of energy they provide from “green sources” at ever greater expense. What’s more, they hope to ration it, to keep us colder in winter and hotter in summer.
This is the newest form of religious persecution.
Swinging to the right 138
The extreme importance of the 2012 presidential election is recognized by (among millions of others, we hope) Diana West, who warns at Townhall that “Election 2012 is anything but politics as usual. It is an existential crisis.”
She writes:
This election is for keeps. If Barack Obama doesn’t lose his bid for a second term, he and his vast, left-wing support network of Marx-inspired think tanks, strategists and elected officials will fulfill Obama’s 2008 campaign promise to “fundamentally” transform this nation, thus bringing the American experiment in liberty to what could be the final curtain…
Americans are about to decide whether to empower the increasingly dictatorial executive branch of Barack Hussein Obama, whose future plans to distort “checks and balances” promises to transform the U.S. government out of all recognition, or to break the momentum of government centralization by electing Romney-Ryan.
Yes. And we find signs that are good; signs that there is a swing to the right in public opinion, considerably boosted since Paul Ryan was selected as candidate Mitt Romney’s vice-presidential choice.
This is by Scott Johnson at PowerLine:
GOP vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan appeared at a rally this morning at Deep Run High School in Glen Allen, Virginia. … An audience of more than 2,000 turned up for the rally. More impressive than the size of the crowd is the fact that supporters started lining up for the event around 2:00 a.m. Recent alumni of Deep Run High School, where Ryan spoke … joined the line around 7:00 a.m. with [Chick-fil-A] breakfast in hand.
In these faces we can see what optimism looks like:
Ryan is a star. Romney’s pick of him for his vice-president has energized the Republican Party and brought excitement to the electorate. Even the heavily left-biased British newspaper the Guardian has to concede that:
Democrats’ nerves start to show as Ryan fires up conservative voters …
And:
The Democrats have been sending out panic-laden appeals for donations, one of them expressing concern over the size of the crowd. One of the appeals, for $3 or more, said of Romney-Ryan attacks: “This could cost us the election.”
And quoting American pundits with a message the left canot be happy with, the Guardian raises the prospect of Republican government for the next 16 years:
If Romney wins, then Ryan, as vice-president, will be well placed as a Republican presidential candidate for the future. …
Roger L. Klavan writes at PJ Media that the Democrats are scared of Ryan:
Obama’s main man David Axelrod looks depressed. Why wouldn’t he be? Forced to run a campaign based on lying about or distorting what the other side says, fanning the flames of non-existent racism, etc., is a sure loser, even if you win — perhaps especially if you win. Winning ugly in this instance will not be a triumph of any sort. Obama, at his worst, may succeed in destroying America as we know it, but he would destroy himself and everyone around him in the process. At this moment, I’m betting none of this will happen. Romney’s choice of Ryan, for me, saved the day.
But the black vote – that’s remaining pretty solid for Obama, isn’t it?
Or is it? A formerly prominent black Democrat has gone over to the Republicans. Former Democratic Representative Artur Davis, who was also a candidate for the governorship of Alabama in 2010, and was one of Barack Obama’s campaign managers in 2008 – making one of the nominating speeches for him at the 2008 Democratic National Convention – is to speak this year at the Republican National Convention in support of the Romney-Ryan ticket. (Read more about this in the Washington Post here.)
And there’s this (also from the Washington Post). The story of a black community organizer’s disillusionment with Obama. He is “disillusioned” for the wrong reasons, and he probably will not be coming over to the right, but if he decides to cast his vote for Obama, it won’t be with any enthusiasm. The point is, redistributive economics and collectivist politics don’t work, and the Obama episode in American history has proved it. Once Obama has gone – and go he absolutely must with the coming election – his bad four years in the White House can be seen as a lesson millions of Americans needed to learn.
He still walks the same streets here as his old acquaintance Barack Obama once did. That is about all they have in common anymore. At 50, Chicago activist Mark Allen … [is] the head of a small, community-assistance organization called Black Wall Street Chicago. Allen regards his personal survival alone as a small victory, grateful he can pay the rent on his modest office space, aware he is doing better than many on this city’s restive South Side.
“Things haven’t gone the way we’d hoped after Barack got elected,” he says. Surveys place unemployment rates above 25 percent here, and indications are that South Side residents such as Allen aren’t nearly as passionate about the 2012 election as they were during Obama’s trailblazing 2008 campaign.
Historically, community organizers such as Allen have wielded outsize influence in the black-majority neighborhoods of the South Side, with none better known than Obama, who directed a group called the Developing Communities Project for three years during the 1980s. But old bonds between the two have frayed. Allen, who as a member of another group worked on community issues with Obama during their organizing days, has grown frustrated with his former ally in the Oval Office.
Obama’s much ballyhooed 2009 stimulus package has failed to touch ordinary South Side residents, says Allen, who has reached out to Obama administration officials, including fellow Chicagoan and prominent White House adviser Valerie Jarrett, to express his dismay. …
Allen, who views the South Side’s pain as common to U.S. inner cities, also offers a political warning for Obama’s campaign strategists. The disillusionment of once fierce Obama admirers, he suggests, may hamper the president’s reelection chances by subtly dampening black voter turnout.
Best of all there’s this:
Striking miners shot in South Africa 102
Yesterday, August 17, the South African police opened fire on striking miners, killing 34 and wounding 78 according to press reports.
The incident recalls another South African miners’ strike which began way back in December 1921, when the gold-mining companies reacted to a drop in the world price of gold by lowering the wages of white miners, and, in defiance of the color bar, proposed to employ black miners in the more skilled jobs that the whites held to be their prerogative.
Under the leadership the Communist Party the strike escalated into a violent revolt.
The slogan of the Communist Party was: “Workers of the world unite and fight for a white South Africa”.
In March 1922 the prime minister, Jan Smuts, called out the army and air force to crush the uprising. With the use of heavy artillery, tanks, and bombing from the air he succeeded. More than 200 men were killed.
The political outcome was that trade unions for whites only were recognized, and the color bar was reinforced.
Blacks were kept in poverty. There was no way they could rise by their own effort. The system of apartheid, which was to be entrenched in law some twenty years later, was launched by the demand of the Communist Party.
The present strike, put down with guns, began with a dispute over wages.
The miners were armed with spears and machetes. The police say some had guns, but that remains to be ascertained.
Will the world that claims to abhor apartheid (as it should), also condemn a massacre of black miners under the predominantly black and leftist government of post-apartheid South Africa?
Why do we hardened skeptics doubt it?
Pleistocene Park 200
A tense drama, more full of nerve-racking suspense than the most gripping cliff-hanger any thriller-writer or epic movie-maker has ever conceived, is being enacted right now, in reality, on the world stage.
It is potentially the most devastating tragedy of all recorded history; more destructive than the terrible plagues that ravaged populations in the Dark and Middle Ages; more totally and irredeemably catastrophic for humankind than all the wars ever fought put together.
And yet, at the same time, it is a prodigious comedy, a gargantuan farce.
Here’s the plot:
Two tribes are scheming to change the world, each to something nearer to their heart’s desire.
The one is the tribe of the Masters. They are self-annointed kings, tsars, chieftains, tyrants. They know what’s right for humankind. They believe themselves to be brilliantly cunning. Their aim is to re-organize all the nations of the world and hold them in perpetual control. Their hope is that everyone now living, and everyone born from this time on, will be kept in a place performing a task or suffering a destiny that the Masters will assign to him or her, and none will dare to disobey.
The other is the tribe of the Loonies. They are child-like romantics, fantasists, fanatics, wild-eyed maniacs, psychopaths. They know what’s right for the Earth. They believe themselves to be irresistibly persuasive. Their aim is to reduce the population of the world, by any and all effective means, however ruthless, to about one tenth of the present number. Their hope is that those (very thin) persons permitted to survive, and to breed to the extent the Loonies may allow, will live in caves on wild berries and such vegetation as they can scratch from the soil beneath their feet; in helpless fear of man-eating beasts of prey; having no cures for pain or illness; no literacy; no possessions other than something that cuts, something that holds water, something that wraps, and sandals perhaps. (About sandals they haven’t yet made up their minds; they are doing some studies.) They are against civilization because they believe it is unfair to flora and fauna, to rocks and stones and trees, to oceans and rivers. So for as long as we humans are necessary to the earth at all – and that may not be very long – we must go back to the life of the savage (“solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”, as Thomas Hobbes described it).
The Masters would not allow the world’s population to shrink to a tenth of its present size. They have no liking for beasts of prey. They require literacy because they plan to indoctrinate. They can use medical science for their own ends. They must be able to depend on the assured continuation of the human race since they need to have people in their power. In sum, they do not share the vision of the Loonies. They despise it. But they understand that their plan will not appeal to many people, whereas the vision of the Loonies unaccountably attracts a lot of sympathy. They do not argue against it. They listen to the Loonies describe their vision and nod as if in sympathy. They need the Loonies.
The Loonies need the Masters to start the process of depriving people of their ability to support and defend themselves.
If the Masters attain their objective, they will eliminate the Loonies. If the Loonies attain their objective, there will be no Masters. Each side knows this. Neither says it. Each side believes that it is able to make use of the other and then dispense with it, and each believes it will prevail.
So they meet, usually at a place in North America called Turtle Bay, but sometimes in cities on other continents, such as Kyoto, Copenhagen, Rio. And they smile at each other, and whisper to each other, and nod and nod. They compose documents and issue them. The Masters having the power of governments behind them, spread the Loonies’ message that human life must change, that the earth must be saved from the alleged depredations of civilization, that people must be forced to serve the planet. And many people are persuaded that the planet needs to be saved from dangers imagined by the Loonies, and so accept the need for re-organization and concerted action which the Masters propose. And the Masters are careful to make cautious demands for changes that will not look and feel as transformational as they or the Loonies have in mind.
Together, thus far, they are making progress. The first act, Separate Plotting, is long over. The second act, Conspiracy and Co-operation – highly amusing to those in the audience who realize the bluff that’s going on from each side – is underway. The third act, Success and Subjugation, will bring all people everywhere under world government by the Masters. The fourth act will be a fierce battle to decide the denouement of the drama: Communism or Savagery, depending on which tribe will be the ultimate victor.
Whichever side wins, the human race will lose.
Now we must show you that though we may embroider a little we are not merely fantasizing or grossly exaggerating.
The United Nations, the headquarters of the Masters, has a “Sustainable Development” program which is called Agenda 21. It is a socialist program concerned with the use of land and natural resources, the size of populations and the distribution of wealth, the organization of communities. It is being stealthily implemented in the name of environmental protection, with the hope that Western electorates will not notice that it is a socialist agenda.
In the name of preserving the environment, populations are being “nudged” by states and local authorities to move from the countryside into towns and cities. Suburbs are marked for demolition. This will require the expropriation of private property by the state.
And what will be done with the emptied countryside?
The Loonies have a program for it, and a word to describe it: “RE-WILDING“.
The following quotations and factual information come from an article by Kelly O’Connell at Canada Free Press:
‘Re-wilding” — or returning huge tracts of land to wilderness and re-establishing wild animals on it is –
One of the most dramatically anti-human ideas ever conceived, defined [as] “the scientific argument for restoring big wilderness based on the regulatory roles of large predators,” [by] Soul and Reed Noss in their landmark 1998 Wild Earth article Rewilding and Biodiversity….
The goal is to provide large carnivorous animals with “big parcels of land so the elite caste might macro-manage earth according to their dictates.”
The term “rewilding” was coined by Dave Foreman, founder of Earth First! — one of the most radical and violent environmentalists in history. Foreman’s book, Rewilding North America: a Vision for Conservation in the 21st Century, is a primary codex for those seeking a radical reduction of humanity’s presence on earth.
The Rewilding Institute elucidates Dave Foreman’s book:
Three major scientific arguments constitute rewilding, justifying emphasis on large predators.
1. The structure, resilience, and diversity of ecosystems are maintained by “top-down” ecological (trophic) interactions initiated by top predators.
Translation: Trophic means having to do with what animals eat. Big animals that eat other animals are (the Loonies believe, and have persuaded the Masters) essential for the maintenance of “ecosystems”.
2. Wide-ranging predators usually require large cores of protected landscape for foraging, seasonal movements, and other needs; they justify bigness.
Translation: Because big beasts are the best ecosystem preservers, they must be given all they need to do their work, and they need lots of space.
3. Connectivity is also required because core reserves are typically not large enough in most regions; they must be linked to insure long-term viability of wide-ranging species…
Translation: Their spaces, however large, must lead into one another over the whole of a continent.
The US Congress – no doubt “nudged” by the UN – was convinced that this was the way forward. It passed the Wildlife Corridors Conservation Act 0f 2010, calling for “wild animal bridges and tunnels, and increasing roadless areas.”
Implication: Roads must be taken away, and bridges and tunnels (whether in existence or having to be specially built) must be provided for the use of animals. (Though why, if they have the whole of the wild, and there are no roads, they will needs tunnels or bridges is a puzzle. Perhaps the Loonies want them to be able to get though mountains and over rivers, the grass being always greener, and the prey always plumper, on the other side of any barrier.)
Of course, reintroducing large carnivores where they do not live at present, “will drive out humans“. But this is not a problem. It is in fact “the ultimate intent of the re-wilding project, as its planners admit”.
Quotation from Loonies – probably Soul and Reed:
“If native large carnivores have been killed out of a region, their reintroduction and recovery is the heart of a conservation strategy. Wolves, cougars, lynx, wolverines, grizzly and black bears, jaguars, sea otters, and other top carnivores need restoration throughout North America in ecologically effective densities in their natural ranges where suitable habitat remains or can be restored. Without the goal of rewilding for large areas with large carnivores, we are closing our eyes to what conservation really means — and demands.”
This the Masters can probably organize. But it will not be enough to satisfy the Loonies, zealots for whom the restoration of a pre-civilized world requires the resurrection of extinct species. Not possible? Well, they think it may be. The idea is –
– to find DNA materials to recreate extinct animal groups. For example, under this plan, well-preserved extinct animals — such as glacier-bound woolly mammoths, recently disappeared passenger pigeons, or the La Brea Tarpits’ saber toothed cats – could be raised as fetuses from scratch.
On this Science Daily published A Plan for Reintroducing Megafauna to North America:
“Dozens of megafauna (large animals over 100 pounds) — such as giant tortoises, horses, elephants, and cheetah — went extinct in North America 13,000 years ago during the end of the Pleistocene [Period]. As is the case today in Africa and Asia, these megafauna likely played keystone ecological roles via predation, herbivory, and other processes.”
So they must be resurrected.
In the American Naturalist, 12 scientists provide a detailed proposal for the restoration of North America’s lost megafauna. Using the same species from different locales or closely related species as analogs, their project “Pleistocene Rewilding” is conceived as carefully managed experiments in an attempt to learn about and partially restore important natural processes to North American ecosystems [which were] present for millennia until humans played a significant role in their demise 13,000 years ago. …
The Loonies much prefer wooly mammoths to human beings.
French explorer Bernard Buigues and Larry Agenbroad [of] Northern Arizona University hope that Jarkov Wooly Mammoth sitting inside a 23-ton block of ice will contain flesh samples with some perfectly preserved DNA. That and some proven cloning technology could resurrect a long-gone species.
What Buigues and his team would do is something similar to the process that created the famous sheep Dolly: extracting the nucleus of one adult mammoth cell and inserting it into an empty egg cell. The embryo would then be implanted in the uterus of an Asian elephant, the mammoth’s closest living relative, a surrogate mother that would gestate it as its own but without transferring to the baby any of the elephant’s genes.
A certain number of trained human beings will be necessary to do this work. They will be allowed the necessary equipment, such as sedatives for Asian elephants while they are being operated on. But the rest of humanity will not have so much as a white coat. The reduced masses will have to huddle close, to leave as much space as possible for the hairy mammoths and other “megafauna”.
The Wildlands Project would claim 50% of the North American continent for “wild land”, protected from “human use”, in order to preserve “biological diversity”.
“Moral and ethical guidelines for the Wildlands Project are based on the philosophy of Deep Ecology”, according to which:
- Personal possessions must be kept to a minimum.
- All life, human and non-human, has equal value.
- Consumption of resources above what is absolutely vital for human needs is immoral.
- Human population must be reduced
- Western civilization must radically change its present economic, technological, and ideological structures.
- Believers have an obligation to try to implement the necessary changes.
To a certain extent the Masters and the Loonies are able to agree on ideals, but what the Masters see as means, the Loonies see as ends.
Both want to “sow chaos into human history to cause anarchy”.
The Masters would then step in to restore order.
The Loonies, however, would want anarchy to continue as long as human beings continued – which shouldn’t be very long. According to them:
Rewilding is the process of undoing domestication. In [the philosophy of] green anarchism and anarcho-primitivism, humans are said to be “domesticated” by civilization. Supporters of such human rewilding argue that through the process of domestication, our wildness has been tamed and taken from us. Rewilding, then, is about overcoming our domestication and returning to our innate wildness. Though often associated with primitive skills and relearning knowledge of wild plants and animals, it emphasizes primal [ie primitive] living as a holistic reality rather than just a number of skills or specific type of knowledge. Rewilding is most associated with green anarchy and anarcho-primitivism or anti-civilization anarchy in general.
But this is not what the Masters envisage. They need the human race to be not just “domesticated” and “tamed”, but firmly ordered. By them.
As the probable outcome of the drama becomes clear to the audience, people will ask themselves which fate they would rather embrace:
Living in serfdom enforced by the gulag, the lash, and the firing squad – which is to say, in an illusion of security,
or –
Scratching a bare living out of the soil until dying soon of famine or incurable disease, or in the jaws of a predator beast – which is to say in an illusion of freedom.
It would be best to reject both now, and destroy the UN while we can.
The mystic UN and Agenda 21 205
Could there be something happening in the world today that is even more threatening to life and liberty than Islam and its jihad?
There could be, there is, and its name is Agenda 21.
It emanates from that powerhouse of evil, the United Nations. It was initiated and is driven by votaries of a dark mysticism. They call themselves shamans. They freely confess – no, they boast – that they are working to establish totalitarian world government; that they aim to reduce the population of the world to half a billion and keep it at that number; that those suffered to live must return to a primitive existence deriving bare sustenance from such resources as their local habitat provides, own nothing, and worship the earth goddess Gaia with prescribed ritual.
That is their vision of a new world order, the ultimate objective. It is to be attained step by step, starting with the enforcing of environmental regulations (among them the phasing out of the motor vehicle); emptying the suburbs and bringing people into the cities to be closely and austerely housed; returning the countryside to wilderness, which involves the destruction of roads …
Is this just absurd alarmism? Surely no plotters, even in the UN, could really bring this off, could they? They haven’t really started doing these things have they? Who are these shadowy figures who can exert irresistible influence on the political powers of this world?
We quote from The Green Agenda, a (Christian) site established to expose the movement for world government and explain how it is being put into effect, chiefly through the implementation of Agenda 21. It has links to the documents themselves.
Agenda 21 spreads it tentacles from Governments, to federal and local authorities, and right down to community groups. Chapter 28 of Agenda 21 specifically calls for each community to formulate its own Local Agenda 21: “Each local authority should enter into a dialogue with its citizens, local organizations, and private enterprises to formulate ‘a Local Agenda 21.’ Through consultation and consensus-building, local authorities would learn from citizens and from local, civic, community, business and industrial organizations and acquire the information needed for formulating the best strategies.” – Agenda 21, Chapter 28, sec 1.3
Interestingly, in April 1991, fourteen months before Earth Summit, Prince Charles held a private two day international conference aboard the royal yacht Britannia, moored off the coast of Brazil. His goal was to bring together key international figures in an attempt to achieve a degree of harmony between the various countries that would gather at the Summit. Al Gore was present, along with senior officials from the United Nations and the World Bank.
At the summit 179 nations officially signed Agenda 21 and many more have followed since. Nearly 12,000 local and federal authorities have legally committed themselves to the Agenda. In practice this means that all their plans and policies must begin with an assessment of how the plan or policy meets the requirements of Agenda 21, and no plans or policies are allowed to contradict any part of the Agenda. Local authorities are audited by UN inspectors and the results of the audits are placed on the UN website. You can see how many local authorities in your country were bound by Agenda 21 in 2001 here. The number has increased significantly since then.
The official opening ceremony was conducted by the Dalai Lama and centered around a Viking long-ship that was constructed to celebrate the summit and sailed to Rio from Norway. The ship was appropriately named Gaia. A huge mural of a beauiful woman holding the earth within her hands adorned the entrance to the summit. Al Gore led the US delegation where he was joined by 110 Heads of State, and representatives of more than 800 NGO’s.
Maurice Strong, Club of Rome member, devout Bahai, founder and first Secretary General of UNEP [UN Environment Program], has been the driving force behind the birth and imposition of Agenda 21.
He chaired the Earth Summit, and outside, while he did, –
His wife Hanne and 300 followers called the Wisdom-Keepers, continuously beat drums, chanted prayers to Gaia, and tended sacred flames in order to “establish and hold the energy field” for the duration of the summit. …
In the course of his opening speech Maurice Strong made these remarks:
“The concept of national sovereignty has been an immutable, indeed sacred, principle of international relations. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the new imperatives of global environmental cooperation. It is simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by individual nation states … The global community must be assured of environmental security.”
“We must transform our attitudes, and adopt a renewed respect for the superior laws of Divine Nature.”
“Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class – involving high meat intake, use of fossil fuels, appliances, air-conditioning, and suburban housing – are not sustainable. A shift is necessary which will require a vast strengthening of the multilateral system, including the United Nations.”
“Global management” is required in order to keep the earth clean and pure. Or it is necessary to keep the earth clean and pure in order to impose “global management”. Take your pick, because it is never made clear which is the means and which the end. In any case, they’re after “global management” (which we believe is the end). They will manage your life because they know best. You will do as they say. For “sustainability“. And to serve the Higher Good. Which is the nursing of the planet. The serving of the planet. The worshiping of the planet.
And the preservation of everything that lives on it. Even human beings within strict limits. This is called “biodiversity“.
The Global Biodiversity Assessment of the State of the Earth, prepared by the UN Environmental Programme (UNEP) –
armed UN leaders with the “ecological basis, and moral authority” they needed to validate their global management system. The GBA concludes … that “the root causes of the loss of biodiversity are embedded in the way societies use resources. This world view is characteristic of large scale societies, heavily dependent on resources brought from considerable distances. It is a world view that is characterized by the denial of sacred attributes in nature.”
For this the inscribers of this idiotic document blame Christianity, Judaism, and Islam – of which we are not defenders; but it’s not as if they themselves are against religious superstition – far from it:
“Eastern cultures with religious traditions such as Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism did not depart as drastically from the perspective of humans as members of a community of beings including other living and non-living elements.”
The UN was delighted with this tosh. Maurice Strong was honored and rewarded:
Following the Earth Summit Maurice Strong was named Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations, and was appointed to the position of Chief Policy Advisor by Kofi Annan. He was also a member of the UN’s Commission on Global Governance, and the key architect of the Kyoto Protocol.
Did you know that the UN has a Commission on Global Governance? Do Western governments know it? If so, why is the UN allowed to continue in existence?
Just as the dirty mystic Rasputin was able to influence the rulers of Russia, so Maurice Strong is able to influence the would-be rulers of the world in the UN. A parliament of fools if ever there was one.
Strong and his wife have also established the Manitou Foundation, providing land in Colorado to an eclectic mix of religious groups, including the Crestone Mountain Zen Center, the Spiritual Life Institute (a Catholic Carmelite monastery), the Haidakhandi Universal Ashram, the Sri Aurobindo Learning Center, Mangala Shri Bhuti (Tibetan Buddhists), and Karma Thegsum Tashi Gomang (Indian mystics). The Strongs have located their spiritual centre in the Colorado mountains because:”The Strongs learned that since antiquity indigenous peoples had revered this pristine wilderness as a place for conducting their vision quests and receiving shamanic trainings. It is prophesied that the world’s religious traditions would gather here and help move the world toward globally conscious co-existence and co-creation.”
But while these multifarious dupes and charlatans wait for their “vision quests” and “shamanic trainings”, their drumming, their sacred flames, and their invocations to return the human race to primitive savagery, the collective political steps to the same end are being taken conscientiously by national and local government in accordance with Agenda 21.
So what exactly does Agenda 21 contain? It consists of 115 different and very specific programs designed to facilitate, or to force, the transition to Sustainable Development. The objective, clearly enunciated by the leaders of the Earth Summit, is to bring about a change in the present system of independent nations. The agenda is broken up into 8 “programme areas for action”: Agriculture, Biodiversity and Ecosystem Management, Education, Energy and Housing, Population, Public Health, Resources and recycling, Transportation, Sustainable Economic Development.
A link to the entire document is provided, but as the author says, it would take a few days to read all of this “blueprint for the 21st century”. The first six paragraphs are quoted for those with less time at their disposal. There the assertion is made that it “reflects a global consensus and political commitment at the highest level on development and environment cooperation”.
This is nonsense of course. There is no global consensus. As for a political commitment “at the highest level”, if this means that the likes of Prince Charles, Prince Philip, Angela Merkel, Mikhail Gorbachev, Tony Blair, have swallowed the ballyhoo without even chewing it, then yes.
It also asserts that “the developmental and environmental objectives of Agenda 21 will require a substantial flow of new and additional financial resources to developing countries, in order to cover the incremental costs for the actions they have to undertake to deal with global environmental problems and to accelerate sustainable development. Financial resources are also required for strengthening the capacity of international institutions for the implementation of Agenda 21.” That means taxing us, and global redistribution of our money.
The author (whose name we have not discovered) stresses that “Agenda 21 is … an attempt to impose a global centrally planned quasi-government administered by the United Nations. Under Agenda 21 all central government and local authority signatories are required to conform strictly to a common prescribed standard and hence this is just communism resurrected in a new guise.”
She also says that “Agenda 21 has [already] gained a stranglehold on global regulatory and planning processes”.
We think this is true, at least to some significant extent.
In our town the City Council is certainly putting Agenda 21 into effect. Small-unit housing is being built near railway stations. It is not family accomodation, but most suitable for single occupants. (Families are to be discouraged from living together. The family as such is bad for the environment and for collective organization.) There will be places to park bicycles but not cars. Private transport is being discouraged. “Smart meters” will inform the Authorities how warm or how cool the occupant keeps his/her austere little space. How much heat, light and water you use will not only be monitored, but controlled.
Hundreds of cities in many if not all the states have embarked, or plan to embark, on the same sort of program. (Unless they’re going bankrupt. It may be that economic crisis, bad as it is, could save us from something worse.)
President Obama is against the existence of the suburbs, where individual families live in privately-owned houses. He wants to concentrate population in the cities. (Some have written about this – eg. see here – but have not put it into its proper context, which is the implementation of Agenda 21.) The government can, has, and will use the eminent domain clause of the fifth amendment to expropriate private property.
It is more than likely happening in your town. Your property is under threat. Your way of life is being decided for you.
Not only do we have Christians, we even have some Democrats on our side in confronting this horrifying movement.
Watch this video made by Democrats Against UN Agenda 21. It is long but informative. The worst news about what state and local government are doing to us comes after the 50 minute mark, but don’t skip too much before that. The shocking information needs the explanation and context.
The UN must be destroyed.
The politics of pity 263
This post is about “the false and dangerous morality of pity”
The quoted words are those of Bret Stephens, deputy editorial page editor and foreign-affairs columnist for the Wall Street Journal. He delivered a speech at Commentary’s annual dinner on June 4 at the St. Regis Hotel in New York City, from which these extracts, from an adaptation of the speech at the Commentary website, are taken:
On the fourth of June, 1967, there were excellent reasons to side with Israel. It was a democracy besieged and assaulted by tyrannies. Its maritime rights had been violated by Egypt’s closure of the Straits of Tiran; international law was on its side. It had compelling reasons to believe it was under mortal threat. It made no territorial demands on its neighbors, much less call for their destruction. It was a net contributor, scientifically and culturally, to the march of civilization. Simply put, the Israelis were the good guys.
Yet the reason usually cited for sympathizing with Israel that fourth of June is that it was the underdog — the proverbial 98-pound weakling versus its big bullying neighbors. And this was true, albeit only partially true, because Israel quickly demonstrated that it wasn’t such a weakling after all.
And from the moment Israel won that war, thus securing its survival, it lost the sympathy of the world. We know that some newspapers had prepared Crocodile-tear editorials regretting the demise of a short-lived state of Israel. To feel for Jews suffering flattered the “feelers”; to feel for Jews triumphant did not.
It is to this deplorable weakness, this eroticism of the ego, that Christian morality and “social justice” advocacy – which means the entire ideology of the Left – pander.
Bret Stephens reasons:
But it’s hard to make a defensible case for siding with the underdog based on underdog-status alone. Was Saddam Hussein hiding in his spider hole a better man than he was in his palaces? Were the allies in 1945 less deserving of victory than they were in 1942? Was Israel’s cause less right on June 12, right after the war, than it had been on June 4? These are the kind of nonsense propositions you are bound to wind up with if you make moral judgments based on underdog – or overdog – status alone.
The instinct to side with the underdog arises, at least in part, from the guilty pleasure of pity — the feeling of superiority that the sensation of pity almost automatically confers. Pity, it turns out, is not a form of sympathy, or empathy, or a genuinely humane concern for the misfortunes of others. On the contrary, pity is really a form of self-congratulation, an act of condescension, a sublimated type of narcissism. Little wonder, then, that the politics of pity should thrive in … our culture of narcissism.
Consider the ways these politics plays out in our lives today. Remember that headline in Le Monde from September 12, 2001—“Nous Sommes Tous Américains”—“We Are All Americans”? Le Monde’s editorial pity lasted just so long as the wreckage of the Twin Towers smoldered in the ground, and then it was straight back to bashing the hyperpuissance. Or take the condemnation of the United States, by outfits such as Amnesty International, for the killing of Osama bin Laden. Poor Osama, defenseless before those marauding SEALs!
Yet nowhere do the politics of pity play out more vividly than when it comes to the Palestinians. How is it that, at least on the left, the Palestinians have become the new Chosen People? Part of the answer surely lies in the fact that Palestinians, uniquely, are the perceived victims of the Jewish state, and therefore another vehicle for castigating Jews. If you believe that Jews can do no right, you’re probably disposed to think that Palestinians can do no wrong — especially when they are attacking Jews.
But that’s not the whole answer. People who really aren’t anti-Semites or knee-jerk enemies of Israel nonetheless are disposed to make all kinds of allowances for Palestinians that can only be explained by the politics of pity. How many billions in international aid have been given to the Palestinians, and what percentage of those monies has been squandered or stolen? How often have Palestinians made atrocious political choices without ever paying a price for them in terms of international regard?
The reason Palestinians don’t have to earn global sympathy by showing themselves worthy of it is that they are the perceived underdogs and are therefore automatically entitled to the benefit of every doubt. And it is because “caring” for the Palestinians flatters the vanity of their sympathizers. I don’t think the world really loves the Palestinians. But … it does “love to love” them. Being pro-Palestinian, as that term is typically used, is not a testament to compassion. It is, more often than not, an act of self-love. It’s moral onanism.
Competing for the title of who is the most pitiable is shameful. Competing for the title of who is the more pitying is despicable.
Bret Stephens warns mistaken friends of Israel from entering the pity-stakes:
In recent years, friends of Israel, and many Israelis as well, have sought to reengage the world’s affections by trying to portray Israel as the real underdog — in other words, to enter a contest of victimhood with the Palestinians.
Israel was not founded to serve as another vehicle for showcasing Jewish victimhood, but for ending it.
Right, right, right!
In order for one to deal effectively with the world, whether as individual or statesman, it is necessary to know the world as it is. It is a world full of danger, evil, and cruelty. Sentimentalizing it into something other than it is, pretending that human nature is “fundamentally good”, or can be changed by ideology, is to make a dumb mistake. Every human being suffers, and every human being inflicts suffering. The moral thing to do is to try not to harm others – a hard, if not impossible, task.
Bret Stephens looks at what is happening in the world now with clear sight:
The world as we would wish it to be is not a world in which Syria is bleeding, the Chinese are increasing the rate of annual military spending by a double-digit percentage, the Arab Spring is turning to an Islamist winter, Europe is imploding economically, and Iran is brazening its way to a nuclear bomb. That world is the real world, and it is the world the rest of us inhabit: the world of the concrete fact, the world of the worsening circumstance. It is the world in which decisions are made harder, not easier, by delay, in which delay increases the chances of failure, and of death.
It is a world choked with pity, yet pitiless.
The whole speech as it appears in Commentary is well worth reading.
Obama’s training in Communism 19
Dr Paul Kengor talks about his book The Communist. It is about Frank Marshall Davis, who was Barack Obama’s political mentor early in his life, in the Cold War era. (Later – by his own admission – Obama deliberately chose Marxist professors to be his teachers. At the start of his political career in Chicago – though he has denied it – he associated closely with extreme-left terrorists.)
(Video from Impeach Obama Campaign)