The battle into which Israel has been provoked by the terrorist organization Hamas is being fought (we say “is” because the truce is nugatory) with computers as well as armament.

From Bloomberg Businessweek, 11/19/12:

Knowledge of computer code is proving to be as important to Israel’s conflict with Hamas as the Iron Dome system intercepting rockets from the Gaza Strip.

In a government building in Jerusalem, technicians in civilian clothes sit in front of a bank of screens, trying to deflect millions of attempted attacks on Israel’s government websites. A map on the wall shows sites where virtual attacks are being carried out around the world, updating every few seconds. Israel and the Palestinian territories stand out with a big red flame. Extra workers are drafted in.

Hamas is running a campaign called OpIsrael.

“From the very beginning, we called on Palestinian software technicians in Gaza and all over the world to use technology to undermine Israeli websites and pages,” Islam Shahwan, the spokesman for the Hamas Ministry of Interior in Gaza, said in an interview from the enclave.

The clicking of keyboards and mice has already become a hallmark of the conflict’s latest flare up that started on Nov. 14 as much as the sound of rocket fire. Aided by supporters abroad and speedy Internet access, the virtual battle is intensifying in tandem with the air attacks as Israelis and Palestinians try to disrupt the flow of information and hack each other’s propaganda machines.

More than 44 million attempts were made to bring down state websites, [Israeli] Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz said on Nov. 18, standing in the government’s cyber war-room.

“Beyond the main military battlefield, there is a secondary arena,” Steinitz said. “Israel has been under unprecedented cyber attack.”

An Israeli air strike on Nov. 19 hit a 15-floor office building in downtown Gaza City used by the television stations of Hamas …  The second floor of the complex that houses an Internet and computer services company was also damaged, cutting connection to subscribers.

The building was targeted because of the presence of senior terrorist members there, Israeli army spokeswoman Avital Leibovich said. One of the militants killed in the assault was Ramez Harb, head of Islamic Jihad’s media operations, who Israel said was responsible for propaganda for the group.

Its armed wing, called Saraya al-Quds Brigades, said on its website on Nov. 17 that its intelligence department “managed to penetrate data for 5,000 cellular phones belonging to senior Israeli army officers and got their personal data.”

Sounds impressive, but what did the terrorists do with their penetration?

The group used the mined information to send warnings via text message, saying “we will make Gaza a graveyard for you and your soldiers and we will turn Tel Aviv in to a massive flame,” according to the website. …

Israeli hackers used their penetration to send a more practical warning:

 The Hamas Interior Ministry said on Nov. 18 by text message that Israeli hackers had penetrated and paralyzed its site, and told Gaza residents to seek necessary information on its Facebook page.

The same day, an Israeli speaking broken Arabic on behalf of the Israeli army cut into the transmissions of Hamas and Islamic Jihad radio stations to warn Gaza residents to “keep away from Hamas infrastructure and don’t help the terrorists.”

Later, from Softpedia, by Eduard Kovacs, 11/22/12:

OpIsrael, a campaign launched by hacktivists from all over the world to show support for Palestine, is beginning to fade away. However, during the operation, some pro-Israel hackers have initiated a counteroffensive.

On Monday, an Israeli hacker known as Yourikan leaked the credit card details of several Palestinian users after allegedly breaching the systems of Palnet, one of Palestine’s largest ISPs.

“Say no to Palestine! Say no to terror!” the hacker said after the attack.

His views are shared by the famous hacker known as The Jester, who has been busy over the past few days disrupting Palestinian websites owned or operated by Hamas …

The Jester has taken down a forum belonging to Hamas – almoltaqa.ps – that’s allegedly utilized “for radicalizing fighting-age male Palestinians.” He also disrupted qassam.ps, a site utilized by the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigade “to spread propaganda and lies.”

Other targets are aqsatv.ps, which the hacker describes as being a “HAMAS run TV channel used for spreading propaganda and images of bodies being dragged through streets [by Hamas – see below]”,  and hamasinfo.net.

All the aforementioned sites are currently down and have been in this state for the past couple of days or so.

Although the Koran is believed by Muslims to contain all the knowledge a man could ever need, the Obama administration is spending ample tax-dollars coaching Muslims in science and technology.

As far as we can discover, it is the only religious group at home or abroad to be given this expensive attention.

But then, Islam has earned its reward from Americans, hasn’t it?

Here’s the information quoted in full from a US Government Fact Sheet:

Science and Technology Engagement With the Muslim World

Progress in Realizing the President’s Vision of Enhanced Science and Technology (S&T)
Partnership in the Muslim World

1. Science Envoys: Three of America’s most prominent scientists traveled and engaged with counterparts in Morocco, Egypt, Indonesia, and other countries.

2. OPIC Fund: The OPIC Global Technology and Innovation Fund attracted almost $2 billion in private investment to support technological development projects to be implemented in Muslim communities around the world.

3. Center of Excellence on Water: USAID and State Department began the creation of a Middle East Water Center after extensive consultations across the region.

The program pursues the shibboleths of the left:

4. Center of Excellence on Climate Change: USAID and the State Department began the creation of an Asia Regional Climate Change Center after extensive consultations across the region, with an anticipated initial focus on water-scarcity issues.

Here’s one specially worth noting:

5. Gulf Nuclear Energy Infrastructure Institute: This newly established institute — a collaborative effort involving the State Department, Department of Energy (DOE), Khalifa University of Science, Technology and Research, Emirates Nuclear Energy Corporation, UAE Federal Authority for Nuclear Regulation, Sandia National Laboratory, and Texas A&M University’s Nuclear Security Science & Policy Institute — will work with Gulf States through regional workshops and follow-up bilateral training to assist those states that decide to pursue nuclear energy with the tools to do so in a safe, secure, and safeguarded manner.

It all sounds wonderfully friendly and cozy, this communion with the religion that is dedicated to our destruction:

6. Entrepreneurship Summit: This summit brought together successful business and social entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, development bankers, and other business experts to discuss ideas and share experiences with a view toward creating support networks that will help promote development in Muslim communities.

7. Expanded Science Corps: Secretary of State Clinton committed to expanding the number of Environment, Science, Technology, and Health (ESTH) officers at embassies, with new positions already being filled in the Middle Easter and North Africa (MENA).

But she grudges every penny spent on protection for our diplomats in the Islamic Middle East. (See all our recent posts on the murder of Ambassador Stevens and three other Americans in Libya.)

8. Regional R&D Collaboration: The State Department launched six new Middle East Regional Cooperation projects to fund applied research and S&T cooperation involving institutions in Jordan, West Bank/Gaza, Tunisia, and Israel on topics in agriculture, environmental protection and global and regional health.

Cooperation projects? Jordan, “West Bank/Gaza”, Tunisia with Israel?  Well, good luck with that.

9. Bilateral R&D Collaboration: The United States and Indonesia concluded a new S&T Agreement and the United States provided a doubling of financial support for S&T agreements with Egypt and Pakistan.

10. Frontiers of Science Program: The U.S. National Academy of Sciences expanded this program to support linkages between young scientists in the United States and Southeast Asia, with planned expansion to additional regions as well.

11. MENA POWER 2010: The U.S. Trade and Development Agency (USTDA) sponsored a Middle East and North Africa technology and projects forum to match MENA policymakers and project stakeholders in the electric power sector with U.S. providers of equipment and service solutions.

For such vital “investment”, the heavily-indebted United States borrows or prints money.

Lots more moola is to be lavished on solar panels (and windmills?)  in Islamic states – “green energy” being another bee in Obama’s bonnet:

12. Energy:

• Memorandum of Understanding for Clean Energy Cooperation: DOE partnered with UAE’s multi-billion-dollar Masdar City clean energy initiative, with delegates and DOE officials outlining an initial work plan.
• Memorandum of Understanding for Cooperation: Secretary Chu signed this MOU during his visit to the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology, in Riyadh, to facilitate partnerships with DOE national laboratories, U.S. universities and scientific institutions.
• Feasibility Studies: USTDA supported extensive feasibility studies throughout the region to determine potential capabilities for geothermal energy, solar energy, and smart grid technology.

13. Information Communication Technology:

• Iraq Science and Technology Virtual Science Library project was officially transferred to Iraqi government control and administration. 7500 users are now registered, 95% of the university population is participating, 1,000,000 articles have been downloaded to date, and publications by Iraqi authors are increasing apace and expected to reach about 300 this year.
• NSF supported a host of electronic networking programs, including implementation of a multi-million-dollar broad-band internet linkage to Egypt and Pakistan, and provided support to involve Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, France, and nearly all countries in North Africa in a network for research on new materials for renewable energy. Maghreb Digital Library. The State Department supported the establishment of a Digital Library for the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Mauritania) to support development in S&T, increase access to digitized scientific data and research, and encourage partnership and networking.

14. Health:

• Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius and the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) jointly hosted a Health Dialogue with Ministers of Health from the OIC member states in Geneva on the margins of the World Health Assembly. Concrete steps were outlined for enhanced collaboration.
• The National Institutes of Health conducted training in tobacco control, injury and trauma, bioethics [?] and genetics. This included meetings among twelve regional nations across MENA and SE Asia, leading to the creation of new programs in medical schools in the participating nations.

15. Water: The U.S. Geological Survey supported extensive training in collection and analysis of water samples, workshops on water contamination, training on the establishment of digital water resources data systems, and consultation on the establishment of water quality laboratories across the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia.

16. Space: NASA signed agreements with several nations for future collaboration on space programs. NASA now has agreements with 30 of the world’s more than 50 Muslim-majority nations.

17. Pollution: The Environmental Protection Agency has teamed up with Indonesia and Jordan to create programs aimed at decreasing air pollution in both nations. Breathe Easy Jakarta and Jordan’s Environmental Rangers are just two of the programs implemented to increase public participation and enforcement and accountability in the fight against pollution.

And lots more is in the pipeline. Unless, that is, Mitt Romney becomes president and cancels this massive transfer of US borrowed wealth to Islamic states.

Top 10 Activities in the Year Ahead

1. Global Engagement Fund: S&T collaboration is an important part of the new $100M Global Engagement Fund submitted to Congress for FY2011.

2. US-Egypt Year of Science 2011: This year-long enterprise will celebrate US Egypt engagement in science, promote interest among Egyptian youth in science-related careers and research, and promote digital engagement among the Egyptian science community with US peers and institutions.

3. New Science Envoys: The Administration will name three new envoys, with plans to travel to Central Asia, East and West Africa, and Southeast Asia.

4. Science, Technology, and Innovation Conference 2011: This conference will include representatives from Muslim communities around the world in cooperation with Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (ISESCO) and other key stakeholders.

5. White House/OSTP Digital Knowledge Networking Event: This major international event will bring together ICT leaders from public and private foundations involved in electronic knowledge sharing, technology, education, and development, along with other experts, to move from idea to realization of a significant increase in on-line knowledge-sharing in science and technology.

6. Middle East Energy Efficiency Center: DOE, State, and USAID will launch an effort in the Middle East to promote and enhance regional cooperation in science and technology, focusing on six energy-efficiency initiatives.

7. Challenges & Awards: EPA/USAID will launch a challenge to drive innovation for water technologies serving international and domestic constituencies.

8. Forest Conservation: The Department of Interior will work with several nations to preserve nature reserves and protect endangered species.

9. Eye on the Earth – Abu Dhabi 2010: EPA will co-sponsor this event to address the establishment of a global environmental information network.

10. Joint Ocean Exploration: NOAA’s research vessel Okeanos Explorer and the Indonesian research vessel Baruna Jaya will make a pioneering joint mission to the “Coral Triangle” in the Indo-Pacific region in the summer of 2011.

Note that in all this there is no mention of any project to promote the education of women in the Muslim world. We do not advocate the spending of US tax dollars on women’s education in Afghanistan (for instance), only suggesting that if the Obama administration is concerned with improving knowledge in Islam, they might raise the subject in some of their get-togethers with their Muslim buddies.

The Times of Israel reports – quoting a British newspaper, the Sunday Times:

Israel could destroy Iran’s electric network with a specially designed electromagnetic bomb in the event of a military conflict between the countries …

[It] would be detonated above the ground, creating an electromagnetic pulse that would “disrupt all the technological devices working on the ground,” an American expert was quoted as saying to the London paper.

The use of the new technology by Israel was brought up in discussions regarding a possible attack on Tehran’s nuclear facilities …

Such a move would send Iran “back to the stone age,” the British paper said.

Such a bomb would not kill people, or destroy buildings. It would wreck communications systems.

This kind of bomb would operate based on the nonlethal technology of gamma rays… The outburst of energy would “fry” electric devicesand currents around the source of the explosion.

Will Israel use this powerful weapon?

In his speech to the United Nations last Thursday (September 27, 2012), Prime Minister Netanyahu said:

The relevant question is not when Iran will get the bomb. The relevant question is at what stage can we no longer stop Iran from getting the bomb. The red line must be drawn on Iran’s nuclear enrichment program because these enrichment facilities are the only nuclear installations that we can definitely see and credibly target.

But he did not go on to say that if Iran crossed that red line, Israel would destroy those nuclear installation by whatever weapons it deems most effective. Having sounded strong and determined up to that point, the Israeli Prime Minister suddenly sounded weak.

I believe that faced with a clear red line, Iran will back down. This will give more time for sanctions and diplomacy to convince Iran to dismantle its nuclear weapons program altogether.

Sanctions and diplomacy, tried for years now, have spectacularly failed.

As long as Barack Obama is president of the US, no red line will be drawn. He won’t even consider it.

Will Israel yet save the world from a nuclear-armed Iran? Will it even act to save itself? If it will, and if not now, when?

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

They can kill us, but we mustn’t hurt their feelings?

If only it were true that their feelings were hurt by little movies and cartoons! We’d have the perfect weapons. It isn’t true of course. The movies and cartoons are mere pretexts to express their hate.  They hate us because we are different from them ; we are “the other”. That, they claim (following the lead of the abominable Professor Edward Said), is the way we see them, looking down on them. They learnt from the Communists to accuse America of being “imperialist” – as if imperialism wasn’t their history and ambition.

Well, we are different, actually. Very. And they profoundly envy our civilizational achievements. Which is to say, our superiority.  That is why they want to kill us.

If we candidly declare our superiority, they call us “racist”, but they are not a race. They are peoples who share a set of absurd ideas. We have good reason to look down on them. Consider the savagery of their sharia law. Their oppression of women. Their intolerance of homosexuals. Their arrogant insistence that they have a monopoly of the Truth – by which they mean the vicious nonsense that they believe an angel dictated to their murderous prophet.

They pretend it is this movie or that cartoon that offends them, while really they are offended by their own backwardness. Still, they will hunt down and murder a cartoonist here, a movie-maker there. Because they want to kill us. 

What should we do about it? Not refrain from making mocking movies, but make more of them. Thousands more.

That’s also Daniel Greenfield‘s idea: thousands of people should “make an anti-Mohammed movie”.

He writes at Front Page:

When South Park’s depiction of Mohammed was censored due to Muslim threats, professional cartoonists and ordinary people responded with “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.” The situation is much graver now than it was two years ago when there was general support for the idea of being able to depict Mohammed and few attacks on those responsible.

The man behind the Mohammed movie has been threatened with prison and has become the subject of a media witch-hunt whose sole purpose appears to be disclosing his personal information to his killers. The private and public arms of the Obama administration, its Department of Justice and its media spin corps, are acting to intimidate and punish anyone who dares offend the international Islamist theocracy.

The issue is not the merit of the Mohammed movie or the character of Nakoula Basseley Nakoula. Free speech is not about the merits of the speaker, but about maintaining freedom of speech for everyone. The Mohammed movie has become an opportunity for Islamists and domestic appeasers to implement a de facto blasphemy law dealing with Islam in the United States.

Nakoula is being transformed into a cautionary tale and that tale has no place in a free country. It is a fossil of the Muslim world where uppity Christians and Jews are punished for having the temerity to stand up to their Muslim masters. Once the informal punishment of Nakoula has been accepted, then it’s only a matter of time until the informal arrangement becomes formalized into law. …

Intimidating everyone who draws a Mohammed cartoon stops working when tens of thousands of people are drawing them.Turning one man into an example of what happens when you make a Mohammed movie stops working when there are thousands of Mohammed movies being made. …

It’s something that you can do on your own or with a few friends. … Short films can be as little as 5-10 minutes. Even shorter projects can be only 30 seconds. What matters is not the running time, but the impact, and that comes with the subject matter. Imagine a version of this video that tackles Mohammed instead of Jesus and you can see the possibilities:

Making an online video does not require expensive equipment. You probably already have the basic requirements in your phone, camera and laptop. All you really need is something that can record video. Your PC or Mac computer already comes with basic video editing software and if it doesn’t, YouTube has a built in video editor that you can use for simple operations.A Mohammed movie does not have to be a historical epic. It can be anything. Depicting Mohammed in any way, even if it’s putting a turban on your cat, is already a form of defiance. Imagine Mohammed in the present day or in the age of the dinosaurs. Imagine him trying to order ice cream. It doesn’t really matter. Creativity is part of what makes such a project interesting. The Mohammed cartoons were just as much about crossing boundaries as about being original, funny or theological. Many of them were really bad, but they succeeded just by existing. …

The movie does not have to follow any shape or form beyond the one that you want to give it. All it has to do is exist. …

Broadcasting your movie is as easy as uploading it to YouTube or LiveLeak. …

It has never been easier to tackle a project like this, but in cultural and legal terms, these may also be the last few years when the window is open wide enough for it to be possible. …

Freedom is not passive. It does not abide waiting around for you to use it. Like all things in this world, it must struggle to survive. Our freedom to think as we wish, speak as we wish and believe as we wish is under siege. The best weapon that the besiegers have at their disposal is our compliance. They can intimidate individuals, but they cannot intimidate the rest of us unless we choose to be intimidated.

The Internet has given us all the tools that we need to fight back. All we have to do is use them.

*

Why do American politicians and military top brass insist that Their religion be respected?

Because American politicians and military top brass have religion. They too believe in solemn nonsense.

It is religion itself, religion as such, which is the cause of the strife, the fear, the expense of blood and treasure, all that makes for the worst in human relations. 

No irrational belief deserves respect. All must be subjected to critical examination. All deserve scorn.

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.

Mitt Romney, visiting Israel in late July, spoke of the economic stagnation of the Arab world and attributed it to Arab culture. He was certainly correct, though not “politically correct”. Predictable offense was enjoyed by Arabs and Democrats. Loudest with objection were the Palestinians, a beggar nation who like to blame their dependency – on which they and their Arab brethren and the United Nations insist – on Israel and America.

Arab culture is stagnant and sterile. It won’t be changed by the West. President George W. Bush went to war to get regime change in Iraq, and he got it;  but what he did not get was democracy. Oh, some Iraqis are playing at democracy, with purple-finger elections and a parliament and a prime minister, but their country is no more a democracy now than it has ever been.

No sudden Arab Spring will transform the Muslim Middle East. Uprisings can change governments but they cannot bring civilization. The Muslim world has access to Western learning, just as it had access to Indian, Roman and Greek learning. It made use of some of those ideas in a slapdash fashion just as it made use of Judaism, Christianity, Socialism and Democracy, in a similar fashion.

We quote from an article by Daniel Greenfield at Canada Free Press. (It’s well worth reading in full.)

The Palestinians are a fraud, but so are the Jordanians, and to a lesser degree, the Egyptians and the Syrians. Every [Arab] nation is an artificial entity ruled over by powerful families or old soldiers who are keeping the whole thing together with guns and bribes, not to mention imported bread and circuses.

The British treated the region as a grab-bag of clans, and backed any powerful family willing to throw in with them. That is how the Hashemite kings and the Arab-Israeli wars came to be. Unlike the Brits, the United States was not interested in an empire, just in oil rights, which is how we got in bed with one of the most powerful families in the region, who became far more powerful thanks to their association with us. And who repaid us by trying to conquer us in their own way.

At some point we forgot that the Saudis, the King of Jordan, the Palestinian Authority and most of our so-called allies, are just powerful families with territorial claims based on that power. And even slightly more civilized countries such as Egypt, aren’t really any better, the invaders who overran them just absorbed more culture and civilization from their conquests and their proximity to more civilized parts of the world.

Mostly they’re feudal states with skyscrapers planned by foreign architects and built by foreign labor …

A primitive society confronted with an advanced civilization does not become civilized, it adopts some of the habits and facades of civilization in cargo cult fashion, it uses some of its tools, and hybridizes some of its ideas, but all this is done in pursuit of its existing goals. Everything that the Muslim Middle East has taken in from the civilized world has been used to pursue the same goals that it was pursuing a thousand years ago.

Imagine savages buying advanced steel knives, designed with space age technology, manufactured to never rust or grow dull, then shipped by jet plane to their island, where they are used to perform ritual human sacrifices so that the crops may grow. That in a nutshell is the relationship between the civilized world and the Muslim Middle East—except that the savages are not content to stay on their island and perform their human sacrifices only on their own tribe.

The barbarians lavish their petro-dollars on cars, aircraft, guns, computers, cell phones – and the high-tech machines of contemporary medicine which are, many of them, invented and manufactured in Israel, and which wealthy Arabs use in foreign countries though they won’t import them into their own. But such things do not inspire them to question the worth of the primitive superstition and oppressive laws that dominate their lives.

Their ideology and culture need to be criticized, and though seriously repulsive, laughed at:

We are witnessing a seismic shift in global affairs. The shake-up is a perfect storm of political, demographic and technological change that will soon make the world as we have known it for the last 30 years almost unrecognizable.

Those attention-gripping words open an article by Victor Davis Hanson at Townhall:

Since the mid-1980s there have been a number of accepted global constants. The European Union was assumed to have evolved beyond the nation-state as it ended the cycle of militarism and renounced free-market capitalism. With its strong euro, soft power and nonaligned foreign policy, the EU was praised as a utopian sort of foil to the overarmed U.S. with its ailing dollar. …

The Arab Middle East for the last 40 years seemed to be the world’s cockpit, as its huge petroleum reserves brought in trillions of dollars from an oil-depleted West, along with political concessions. Petrodollars fed global terrorism. Oil-poor Israel had little clout with Europe. In general, the West ignored any human-rights concerns involving the region’s oil-rich dictatorships, monarchies and theocracies, as well as their aid to Islamic terrorists.

Conventional wisdom also assumed that an indebted U.S. was in permanent decline, a cash-rich China in ascendency. …

But none of that conventional wisdom now seems very wise — largely because of a number of technological breakthroughs and equally unforeseen political upheavals.

The eurozone is unraveling. An aging, shrinking population and a socialist welfare state lead to serfdom, not utopia. …

The Arab Middle East is now in a free fall. Tyrants in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen were ousted, while one in Syria totters. But while the world hoped secular democrats would follow in their wake, more likely we are witnessing the emergence of one-election Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood. The region will be mired in turmoil whether these upheavals turn out to be like the hijacked Iranian revolution that ended in theocracy, or the Turkish democratic model that is insidiously becoming Islamist.

Horizontal drilling and fracking have made oil shale and tar sands rich sources of oil and natural gas, so much so that the United States may prove to possess the largest store of fossil fuel reserves in the world — in theory, with enough gas, oil and coal soon never to need any imported Middle Eastern energy again. “Peak oil” is suddenly an anachronism. Widespread American use of cheap natural gas will do more to clean the planet than thousands of Solyndras.

If the United States utilizes its resources, then its present pathologies — massive budget and trade deficits, mounting debt, strategic vulnerability — will start to subside. These new breakthroughs in petroleum engineering are largely American phenomena, reminding us that there is still something exceptional in the American experience that periodically offers the world cutting-edge technologies and protocols — such as those pioneered by Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Starbucks and Walmart.

In comparison, China is not only resource-poor but politically impoverished. For decades we were told that Chinese totalitarianism, when mixed with laissez-faire capitalism, led to sparkling airports and bullet trains, while a litigious and indulgent America settled for a run-down LAX and creaking Amtrak relics. But the truth is that the Los Angeles airport will probably sooner look modern than the Chinese will hold open elections amid a transparent society — given that free markets did not make China democratic, only more contradictory.

Even more surreal, tiny oil-poor Israel, thanks to vast new offshore finds, has been reinvented as a potential energy giant in the Middle East. Such petrodollars will change Israel as they did the Persian Gulf countries, but with one major difference. Unlike Dubai or Kuwait, Israel is democratic, economically diverse, socially stable and technologically sophisticated, suggesting the sudden windfall will not warp Israel in the manner it has traditional Arab autocracies, but instead become a force multiplier of an already dynamic society. Will Europe still snub Israel when it has as much oil, gas and money as an OPEC member in the Persian Gulf?

Good, good – but Islam is still waging jihad and spreading sharia law; and the UN still exists; and Iran is still becoming a nuclear power; and Obama is still occupying the Oval Office.

We praised the Stuxnet computer virus for doing an enormous amount of harm to Iran’s centrifuges.

Now we are delighted with the news that more harm is being done to Iran by a virus named Flame.

This is from Investor’s Business Daily, by Andrew Malcolm:

Someone has developed a computer virus that can infiltrate foreign networks and installations, eavesdrop on conversations near laptops, grab images off the screens and send it all back home without being detected. …

The Russians were the ones who blew the cover on this clandestine op, apparently aimed at Iran. According to the Russian internet security firm, Kaspersky Lab, which reported the Flame virus this week, it was Kaspersky Lab, which reported the Flame virus this week, it was designed for espionage.

Not sabotage like the Stuxnet virus that was silently delivered by someone into Iranian nuclear project computers back in 2009. It [Stuxnet] was even programmed to silence infection alarms, so it had time to penetrate deeper and successfully screw up Iran’s centrifuge program more …

Experts said the Flame virus was likely the most complex and sophisticated ever discovered. It’s like unearthing the tip of an ancient pyramid buried in desert sands. No one yet knows how large it is or what all is inside. Much of the virus has yet to be found and gauged. But it’s been reported widespread in the Mideast, primarily Iran, Lebanon, Palestinian areas and Saudi Arabia.

Flame even controls its own spread to avoid detection, can turn on internal desktop microphones to record nearby conversations, can capture and encrypt screen images such as blueprints and transmit the material undetected outside to shifting sets of servers positioned globally to defy locating.

They suggest, given its nature and scope, that it had to be developed by a nation.

Let’s see, it could actually be disinformation from Russia. But who else might be up to such trickery aimed primarily at Iran?

Tuesday Iran announced it had been the victim of a cyber-attack, accusing the U.S. and Israel. Well, we can certainly rule out the United States as Flame inventor. The jabber-mouths of the Obama administration couldn’t keep that kind of secret for two days, let alone two years. They were so eager to garner credit for the campaigning president that they blew the cover on the British mole underwear bomber inside al Qaeda a couple of weeks ago.

So who then? But it matters not, just as long as the thing is working against Iran and the Islamic enemy in general.

It has been reliably estimated by many researchers into the subject of “Global Warming” (or any of the other sobriquets by which it is known) that in fulfilling the draconian prescriptions of the Kyoto Accord or its successors, such as the United Nations IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, millions of jobs will be lost in the developed world, the quality of life in the industrialized nations will sink to substandard levels, and the inhabitants of the Third World will be deprived of the minimal immunities, comforts, and amenities to which they aspire.

Are the warmists aware  of that? Do they want to spread poverty?

Seems so. But they are not succeeding.

This is from PJ Media, by David Solway:

Fiona Kobusingye, coordinator of the Congress of Racial Equality Uganda, has vehemently denounced the attempt to impose energy restrictions on African nations in the name of fighting global warming. “These policies kill,” she writes. As for the combustible Al Gore, he “uses more electricity in a week than 28 million Ugandans together use in a year.” Her conclusion: “Telling Africans they can’t have electricity — except what can be produced with some wind turbines or little solar panels — is immoral. It is a crime against humanity” . …

H. Sterling Burnett, a senior fellow at the nonprofit National Center for Policy Analysis, would clearly agree. He correctly argues that recommendations based on “flawed statistical analyses and procedures that violate general forecasting principles” should be taken “into account before enacting laws to counter global warming — which economists point out would have severe economic consequences.” Such consequences are already in evidence. Benny Peiser, editor of CCNet science network, speaking at the Heartland Institute’s 2009 climate conference in New York, sounded the death knell of the green movement in Europe owing to huge costs and minimal results …  Environmentalist Lawrence Solomon quotes Spanish economist Gabriel Calzada, whose studies show that “every green job created ploughs under 2.2 jobs elsewhere in the economy” and that green jobs are proving to be unsustainable since the creation of even one such job costs $1 million in government subsidies …

These are costs that may be suffered in other, frankly ludicrous, ways as well. The United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) in its 2008 Annual Report, published in 2009, jubilates over the replacement of motorized vehicles by “bicycle rickshaws”—which, it must be admitted, will certainly help to decongest metropolitan traffic. That it would reduce America and the West to Third World Status does not trouble UNEP overmuch. Perhaps that is the plan.

The much-ballyhooed T. Boone Pickens strategy of introducing large-scale windmill technology is now proving to be a similarly quixotic project, unsightly, land-consuming, bird-killing, neurosis-inducing, expensive and totally inadequate to its declared purpose of meeting even a fraction of our electricity needs. Alex Alexiev of the Hudson Institute has laid the cards on the table for all to read: green electricity bills are rising exponentially; Europe is gradually abandoning many of its green energy programs as cost-ineffective and injurious to both wildlife and human health; and, as of the end of 2008, American solar and wind-power stocks had lost 80% of their value …  Rhode Island’s Public Utilities Commission has rejected a deal to build an offshore wind farm that would have entailed “hundreds of millions of dollars in additional costs…”  New Zealand has repealed its carbon tax scheme and Australia’s opposition party is vowing to follow suit.

The writing is on the wall in majuscule. The Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) has closed shop, putting an end to its estimated $10 trillion carbon trading scheme. In August 2011, President Obama’s pet green project, the California-based Solyndra solar plant, filed for bankruptcy, costing the U.S. $535 million in wasted stimulus funds and 1,100 jobs …  Other such futilities are impending. The Beacon Power Corp, recipient of a $43 million loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy, has filed for bankruptcy after being delisted by the NASDAQ …  The solar cell company Spectrawatt, recipient of a federal stimulus boost, and Nevada Geothermal, which profited from Federal DOE and Treasury Department subsidies, are on the brink of failure …  Ener 1, which received a $118 million stimulus grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to develop lithium storage batteries for electric cars, has filed for bankruptcy protection … This is bad news for the plug-in Chevy Volt, the president’s car of choice, which is beset with problems anyway; GM had to suspend production to cut inventory owing to anemic sales …  Abound Solar, which makes cadmium telluride solar modules to the tune of a $400 million federal loan guarantee, has laid off 300 workers, amounting to 70% of its workforce … And now the electric vehicle battery company A123 Systems, beneficiary of $300 million in Obama’s Recovery Act funds and $135 million in state tax credits and subsidies, courtesy of Michigan’s former Democratic governor Jennifer Granholm, is about to go belly up …

The reason for many of these failures in green energy-production companies is simple. … As author Rich Trzupek explains, the energy density of convertible wind and solar is risibly low and dispersed, which renders electricity-generating power plants, whether large or small, “the most inefficient, least reliable, and expensive form of power we have” …  As happened in Spain, Europe’s bellwether country for climatophrenic ruination, Obama’s “solar alchemy,” which demonizes traditional forms of energy extraction and application, has become a recipe for an American economic debacle.

Finnish professor Jarl Ahlbeck, a former Greenpeace member and author of over 200 scientific publications, points out that “real measurements give no ground for concern about a catastrophic future warming.” Contrary to common belief, he continues, “there has been no or little global warming since 1995” …  His findings have been supported by many other studies. To adduce just a few instances: geophysicist Phil Chapman, basing his results on careful analyses from major weather-tracking agencies, reports that global temperature is “falling precipitously” ;  …  geologist Don Easterbrook, associate editor of the Geological Society of America Bulletin, Professor Emeritus at Western Washington University and former U.S. representative to UNESCO, is also convinced that recent solar changes suggest the advent of a new cooling cycle which could be “fairly severe” ; … and a new study conducted by three Norwegian scientists, Jan-Erik Solheim, Kjell Stordahl and Ole Humlum, indicates that the next solar cycle, which is imminent, will see a “significant temperature decrease” over and above the current decline …

Moreover, as Robert Zubrin has decisively shown in his recent Merchants of Despair, there exists robust scientific proof derived from ice core data and isotopic ratios in marine organism remains that Earth’s climate is a stable system, that CO2 emissions create surplus plant growth that in turn absorbs atmospheric carbon dioxide, thus restoring climate equilibrium over the long haul, and that under cyclical conditions of global warming agricultural productivity naturally increases and human life immensely improves.

In a brilliant article for the Financial Post …  analyzing the eleven logical fallacies on which the argument for man-made climate change rests, Lord Christopher Monckton, known for tracking and exposing scientific hoaxes, has effectively proven that the anthropogenic thesis has absolutely no basis, neither in fact nor in theory. So-called climate skeptics need nerves of steel to oppose the reigning ideology. It takes no less courage and perhaps even more for a climate “Warmist” to buck the trend, as culture-hero James Lovelock has recently done. Lovelock, who in his 2006 The Revenge of Gaia prophesied the charring of the planet, now admits he had been “extrapolating too far.” Despite predictably hedging his bets and deferring catastrophe into the indefinite future, he avers that “we don’t know what the climate is doing” and disparages his previous work, including Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers, as “alarmist” (MSNBC.com, April 30, 2012).

Nevertheless, the Global Warming meme continues to circulate in defiance of the accumulating evidence, which leads one to wonder who the real “deniers” are. In my own country of Canada, “Warmist” foundations are determined to continue issuing environmental fatwas, in particular to tie up state-of-the-art, economically productive oil pipelines in endless litigation. That such a move would impact national revenues and cost thousands of potential jobs is a matter of no concern.

But the cost of environmentalism is becoming of ever greater concern. Must do.

If the deceit and self-righteousness of Big Green don’t rouse voters and tax-payers to vocal opposition, the cost will surely do it.