The left has long since given up on the proletariat as its purported concern, to feel angelic about and to justify increasing state power.

The workers have been fired, the planet has been hired.

Collectivist tyranny is now extended in the name of preserving the earth.

“Green” technology, say the statists, is the way to go because it is clean.

It isn’t actually, but they’ll keep pushing for it as long as they can bluff themselves, and insist to the rest of us, that it is.

Amy Oliver and Michael Sandoval write at Townhall:

“Renewable” technology is neither renewable, nor clean, nor green because it relies upon rare earth elements. …

China accounts for ninety five percent of the world market in rare earth elements (REEs). …

The Chinese have labeled areas around rare earth mines …as “cancer villages.” … The toxic by-products literally kill everything – animals, vegetation, and people by contaminating the air, soil, and water. …

For each metric ton of REEs produced, an equal amount of radioactive waste is also produced. At approximately 2,204 lbs, that’s about the weight of an average sedan. As for those 75 cubic meters of acidic waste water, just think of a swimming pool measuring thirty feet long by fifteen feet wide by six feet deep. That’s approximately 20,000 gallons of acid water. …

To further the perspective, each 3 MW wind turbine requires two tons of REEs for the permanent magnet that converts wind into electricity. So much for “clean.” …

Thinking electric such as Chevy Volt? So far in 2011, auto manufacturers have sold 15,068 electric vehicles in the U.S., and each one requires 10 pounds of rare earth magnets.

That means that through the end of November, hybrids and electric vehicles sales consumed between 4,904,820 and 6,093,355 pounds of rare earths. That’s somewhere between 2,452 and 3,047 tons.

If processing one ton of rare earth elements produces approximately 75 cubic meters of acidic waste water and about one ton of radioactive waste residue, then hybrid and electric vehicles alone produce between 183,900 and 228,525 cubic meters of acidic waste water and between 2,452 and 3,047 tons of radioactive waste. …

To add insult to ecological injury, these cars are expensive and don’t perform or handle very well. And owners still need fossil fuels either to run them (oil, gasoline) or for the electricity to charge them (coal).

So why on earth would anyone buy one?

Because, as always with lefties, the buyers want to feel good about themselves.

It’s a clear example of their moral vanity.

Apparently hybrid vehicles owners don’t really want to save the world, they just want to look like they do.

The New York Times reported in 2007 that the number one reason why people buy the Toyota Prius is “it makes a statement about me”. …

It isn’t just hybrid owners that are sanctimonious eco-evangelicals. A study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology explains that being green is a status symbol of both wealth and altruism. …

The age of “conspicuous conservation” will have to compete with more important things such as national security, as much of our high tech weaponry requires rare earth minerals. The demand for “green” will also compete with our love of gadgets such as iPods and computers, and with those civilization-required things like lighting, batteries, and basic electricity.

The new “high efficiency light bulbs” require rare earths while old fluorescents did not. …

While alternative vehicle owners, solar panel supporters, and wind turbine advocates may feel better about themselves, they’re actually polluting the planet with their “clean/green” technology.

The article is informative on rare earths and the pollutants produced by their mining. Read it all here.

Kim Jong Il, dictator of North Korea, has died. To remind our readers what he wrought in his lifetime we re-post this dismal report first posted on June 26, 2011.

*

The people of North Korea are starving.

Frank Crimi writes at Front Page:

While North Korea’s leadership solicits the world’s nations for food aid, the despotic regime continues to deliberately starve its own people. …

The US House of Representatives… voted last week to entirely bar any US food aid to North Korea. The denial of assistance brought cries of humanitarian neglect from some quarters, the most notable being from Jimmy Carter who called the US action a “human-rights violation.” Yet as Republican Representative Ed Royce said, “Let’s be clear, the aid we provide would prop up Kim Jong ll’s regime, a brutal and dangerous dictatorship.”

While that reason alone may have been enough to deny North Korea food aid, there was still an extended list of other justifications. Perhaps chief among these grounds was the growing belief that the North Korean government had actually manufactured its current food crisis. …

North Korea has been manufacturing a food crisis ever since it turned communist.“Communist” is shorthand for “severe shortage of all things that sustain life and make it bearable”.

A recently leaked North Korean police manual … confirmed cases of cannibalism. In one particular instance, a North Korean guard killed his roommate with an axe when he was sleeping, ate part of the corpse and then sold the rest at the market where he described it as lamb meat.

In fact, the situation has become so severe that it has even led to small pockets of public anger, no small feat in this tightly controlled country. Various reports of public resistance springing up in North Korea have arisen over the past year, with some protests turning violent. The outbreak was serious enough for the North Korean government to actually form a special riot control force in 2010 to quell public demonstrations.

These isolated events have led some to speculate that North Korea may soon experience an uprising similar to what has transpired in various Middle East countries, given the similar conditions between the two situations: corrupt leadership, overwhelming poverty, and brutal repression.

However, despite these similarities, it isn’t likely that the North Korean people … will be rioting anytime soon.

For starters, North Koreans may actually be too weak from hunger to sustain a long-term protest movement. Moreover, they have no means of communication by which to share their anger and organize. … North Korea’s lack of the Internet and other social networking infrastructure make a public uprising “quite slim.”

Yet, even if they could organize, North Korean protesters would face a regime that is armed to the teeth and more than willing to use those artillery, bombs and fighter jets on them …

And in any case they need to understand that North Korea is the second happiest country on earth.

Their government recently drew up a “Happiness Index” on which Number One, the land where people live in the greatest bliss possible to humankind, is [North Korea’s staunch friend and supporter] China. Next comes North Korea.

However much their existence may feel like prolonged suffering, the North Koreans have been informed that in almost every other country people are worse off than they are.

So at least they’re saved from the pangs of envy while they endure those of hunger. A great relief and consolation, wouldn’t you say?

*

See also our posts A community organized for slavery, want, and death, April 4 2010, and An act of war provokes a drizzle of drivel, November 24 2010.

We quote from a column by Judge Andrew Napolitano consisting entirely of questions. It has a strong libertarian theme which we like.

We think most of the questions are good – after the opening paragraph in which he assumes that “our rights come from God” and that we have “immortal souls”.

What if our rights didn’t come from God or from our humanity, but from the government? What if the government really thinks we’re not unique individuals with immortal souls, but just public property?

He offers an alternative to God as the source of “our rights”  in our “humanity”, implying that we have natural rights; in other words, because we exist we have a “right” to exist. In whose eyes? Who will enforce such a right? Our fellow human beings? If that were so there’d be no murder.

We prefer to say “we should be free to …” rather than “we have a right to…”. But we’ll accept that in the context of this article the two statements amount to the same idea: the paramount importance of freedom.

What if we were only entitled to our natural rights if it pleased the government? What if our rights could be stripped away whenever the government considers us to be its enemy?

What if this could all be accomplished with the consent of the people? What if the people’s own representatives subverted the Constitution?

As they do.

What if the people were so afraid that they accepted the subversion?

Accept it they do, whether out of fear or inadvertence or apathy.

What if the government demonizes an external enemy and uses fear of that enemy to suppress our freedoms? What if people are afraid to protest? …

What if threats become imminent dangers precisely because the government allowed them to happen? What if government scapegoating of an external enemy is as old as the government itself? What if the government has used scapegoating again and again to scare people into giving up their freedoms voluntarily? What if the government has relied on this to perform the same magical disappearing-freedom act time and again throughout history?

He doesn’t name a threat (though later he implies it is the Islamic jihad, which we think is real). But isn’t the “imminent danger” that government threatens us with now “climate change”? Isn’t carbon dioxide, the food of all green plants, the “scapegoat”?

What if the government could lock you up and throw you in jail indefinitely? …

What if you were just speaking out against the government and it came to silence you? What if the government could declare you its enemy and then kill you?

As many governments in the ghastly Third World do.  And as they’re doing again in post-Soviet Russia (see here and here for examples).

What if your elected representatives did nothing to stop the government from doing this? …  What if the government’s goal was to be rid of all who disagreed with it?

What if the real war was a war of misinformation? What if the government constructs its own reality in order to suit its own agenda? What if civil liberties don’t mean anything to the government? What if the government just chooses to allow you to exercise them freely because you don’t threaten it at the moment? What if the government released a report calling you a domestic terror threat, just because you disagreed with the government?

As the Obama administration has done.

What if the government coaxed crazy people into acting like terrorists, just to keep you afraid?

Does he think that’s happening in the United States? We don’t think it is.

What if the government persuaded you to believe that the greatest threat to your freedom is an impoverished and uneducated Third World population 10,000 miles away?

If he means Afghans, for instance, we agree with his implication that it is no threat. But Iran, which is not so impoverished or uneducated, is a serious threat.

What if the real threat to your freedom is a rich, powerful and all-seeing government? What if that government thinks it can write any law, regulate any behavior and tax any event no matter what the Constitution says?

As does the present too powerful government of the United States. Though it isn’t rich (governments own no wealth), it robs the citizens. And it’s by no means all-seeing; blinkered, rather, if not blind. (Perhaps he means all-spying.)

What if the government is always the greatest threat to freedom because only the government can constitute a monopoly on the use of force? What if, in fact, at its essence, government is simply a monopoly of force? What if, in fact, at its essence, government is simply the negation of freedom? What if the government monopoly incubated, aided and abetted enemies’ freedoms?

As the Obama administration incubates, aids and abets Islamic violence? (See our post Spreading darkness, November 19, 2011.)

What if, when the danger got more threatening, the government told you to sacrifice more of your liberties for safety? What if you fell for that?

As when nations let their governments provide benefits such as “free” health care, and so gain the power decide who will be treated and who not, who may live and who must die?

What if those who traded liberty for safety ended up in internment camps?

As happened to tens of millions of people who let their countries fall under communism.

What if the greatest threat to freedom was not any outfit of thugs in some cave in a far-off land …

Now he plainly means Afghanistan …

… but an organized force here at home? What if that organized force broke its own laws? What if that organized force did the very same things to those it hates and fears that it prosecutes people for doing to it? What if I’m right and the government’s wrong? What if it’s dangerous to be right when the government is wrong? What if government is essentially wrong and always dangerous?

What if these weren’t just hypothetical or rhetorical questions? What if this is actually happening to us? What if the ultimate target in the government’s war on terror [countering the jihad] is all who believe in personal freedom? What if that includes YOU? What do we do about it?

If government is always essentially wrong and always dangerous, is there anything we can do except recognize that government is a necessary evil, and limit its power as best we can? Isn’t that what the men who wrote the Constitution of the United States recognized and accomplished? Isn’t defending the Constitution the best thing Americans can do to stay free?

Now we have the UN pitching plans — again — for taxes on world commerce that would pluck scores of billions directly from the private sector every year, and send this lucre through the skimmers of the UN system, to be reallocated as the UN might prefer.

In a PJ Media article, Claudia Rosett – by far the most illuminating and reliable authority on the UN and its iniquities – writes:

Never mind where you might stand on the question of global warming, global cooling, climate change or plain old weather. If there’s one constant to this entire climate debate, it is that in the name of “climate,” the United Nations wishes to regulate and tax the economy of the planet — stripping resources from the most productive economies to hand them out as assorted UN bureaucrats deem fit. 

This is an agenda for global central planning — which, at the extreme, is what the Soviet Union envisioned as the radiant future of mankind, at least until the USSR itself collapsed as a basket case of monstrously misallocated resources, pervaded by the nightmare repression required to enforce such a system. Nonetheless, at the UN this agenda keeps coming up, year after year, at one climate conference after another.

The proclamations of emergency have varied, but always, in the middle of it, there is the UN, proposing to serve as planner and traffic cop for global commerce — a role that entails the UN aiming to redirect resources and collecting a cut to cover the administrative enterprises of its own neo-colonial empire of agencies, organizations, intergovernmental outfits, programs and special envoys. Somehow that already includes a need for climate conferees to travel great distances at other people’s expense …

Right now, at the UN Climate Change Conference in Durban, South Africa, they’re at it again, conferring for a fortnight. There, they are trying to design a “Green Climate Fund,” hoping to impose some form of global taxes that would bring in some $100 billion per year, to be redistributed to countries the UN decides are most at risk from change in climate. Reports have been emerging that the UN is eyeing a “carbon” tax on shipping, or international financial transactions, or cross-border aviation. Of course, this would raise the cost of commerce for everyone, so there is a further proposal, reports AFP, to use some of the money to compensate developing countries, at the expense of the most productive countries, for the higher costs. Such an arrangement would presumably require yet more intervention from the UN, since someone would have to decide which countries should be compensated, and to what extent — presumably a changing scene, as economic shifts occur — and of course there would be a need for more international bureaucrats to administer such a scheme. It’s also a good bet that more UN bureaucrats would also devote some of their time to coming up with yet more global tax schemes. The possibilities are staggering.

As a recipe for corruption of monumental scope, this is brilliant.It would open money spigots on a scale the UN to date has only dreamt of. …

The UN is a collective, encased in immunity, prone to horrific waste and abuse, and likewise prone to endless promises of reform and transparency which never quite work out — because there is no mechanism to hold the UN to account, or require that its officials comply with their promises. Even the U.S., which contributes 22% of the UN’s core budget, pours billions into the UN system, and periodically tries to clean the place up, has scant luck. In the 193-member General Assembly, the U.S. casts only one vote. The General Assembly budget process is one in which the U.S. provides the biggest share of the money, and a majority of other states out-vote the U.S. in deciding how it will be spent.

The UN must not be allowed to tax us. The UN must not be allowed to become the world’s Kremlin. The UN must be destroyed.

Another UN conference  on “climate change” with the ulterior motive of setting up a world government to redistribute wealth from prosperous Western countries to the bank accounts of Third World tyrants is running now in Durban, South Africa.

As we hoped and expected, Lord Christopher Monckton is there, speaking out as he constantly does against this conspiracy:

Mainstream science, politics, bureaucracy, academe, banking, business, media – all were of one mind. The West, so the playbook ran, must be shut down at once to Save The Planet from “global warming”, er, “climate change”, um, “climate disruption”, no, “extreme-weather events”, ah, that is, “energy-security challenges”. …

I find myself … in Durban among the creatures of “consensus” for the annual UN climate gabfest. Yet the party line was wrong. … Every dire prediction that the usual suspects had made with such sneering arrogance has failed.

Just look. Professor “Phil” Jones of the “University” of East Anglia had to admit … that there had been no statistically-significant “global warming” for 15 years. …

Arctic sea ice was supposed to be gone by 2013. Then it rebounded. Then it was going to reach a new low on 15 September this year …. [but] Antarctic sea ice has been on the up throughout the satellite era. Global sea ice shows little trend in 30 years.

Polar bears were supposed to be headed for extinction. … Today there are five times as many polar bears as 70 years ago.

Kilimanjaro has been losing ice since 1880. …  “Global warming” could not have caused the recent ice loss … The summit temperature, monitored by satellites, has not changed. Now the glacier is growing again.

Sea level is the big one. James Hansen of NASA, who made more than $1 million out of the climate scare last year alone, had predicted it would rise imminently by 246 feet. Was he right? No. The increase over the past eight years, according to the Envisat satellite, was at a rate equivalent to 2 inches per century. Not meters, not even feet. Inches. Two of them. Per century. …

Malaria was going to spread because of “global warming.” Yet the terrible leap in mortality from 50,000 to 1 million child deaths a year occurred a generation ago, when the Environmental Defense Fund – which, with Greenpeace and the World Wide Fund, spent $1 billion of taxpayers’ and donors’ cash on anti-Western pseudo-enviro propaganda last year alone – successfully campaigned for a worldwide ban on DDT, the only effective agent against the mosquitoes that carry malaria.

When the Board of the EDF met to plan the DDT ban, its then legal advisor, Victor John Yannacone Jr., begged it to ban only outdoor use: DDT sprayed inside houses would harm only the mosquitoes and spare the children. The then chairman, furious, fired Yannacone on the spot. As he left the room, someone said: “That’s the last time we employ anyone who knows any science.” That ban has killed 40 million children.

Extreme-weather deaths are down sharply. Global tropical-cyclone and hurricane activity is almost at its least in 30 years. Severe tornadoes have declined. Patterns of drought and flood remain as unpredictable and as devastating as ever. Bangladesh and nearly all of the Pacific atolls are gaining land mass, not losing it.

Net primary productivity of trees and plants worldwide is up. If you want a greener planet, add as much CO2 to the air as you can. Your emissions are also helping to stave off the next Ice Age. It’s already 6000 years overdue.

Yet the dreary, wasteful, pointless congresses of the greedy feeble-minded continue. The Bali Road-Map to Nowhere. The Copenhagen World-Government Treaty that collapsed as soon as it saw the light of day. The Cancun Concordats to establish 1000 – yes, 1000 – new bureaucracies: the structure of the unelected world government that every ex-politician from Gore and Chirac to Attali is demanding.

Everyone says nothing will happen at Durban. That worries me. It suggests the process of building a totalitarian global junta by what one UN official at Cancun called “transparent impenetrability” – publishing documents of such prolix length and complex obscurantism that no one can understand a word and yet no one can later deny the information was available – will invisibly gather pace. …

We like “transparent impenetrability”! Could we suspect that the UN official who invented it had a sense of irony?  No – too unlikely.

The Marxists’ wet dream …  is global totalitarian dictatorship. … But the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and I are in Durban to stop them. So perhaps you’re not going to have it after all.

It’s good to know that a Committee and the noble lord are defending us from world totalitarian dictatorship. But it would be better if the United States, which should be and can be and was always meant to be the truly powerful defender of liberty, had a president and administration that would put an end to the UN and a stop to all its evil schemes forever.

The UN must be destroyed.

This is how the interim government  of Egypt, which is receiving aid and diplomatic support from the Obama administration, deals with peaceful Copt protestors.

For more about this event, and a horrifying picture of a victim with a crushed skull, see our post More acts of religion, October 15, 2011.  On US aid to the murdering military government see our post Spreading darkness, November 19, 2011.

The UN’s R2P, the responsibility to protect civilians, on the pretext of which the US and NATO intervened in Libya, for some undisclosed reason is not applicable to Egypt. See our post The danger of R2P, March 23, 2011.

Empires have traditionally secured the conquest of provinces by taking “hostages” from the families of the upper classes to be raised in their culture and taught to admire the empire holding them captive. The Model UN extends this into the United States where the “hostages” go on living with their families, while being taught to betray their country and serve a global empire instead. 

Daniel Greenfield writes about this at Front Page:

Imagine your child’s school teaching him how wonderful dictatorships are by having him and his friends model their very own group of dictatorships as part of their education. Like so many other Orwellian nightmares in the American educational system, this one is very real and takes place through the Model UN program.

The Model UN program teaches American students that global government is better than national government and that the corrupt kleptocracy on Turtle Bay is the ideal state of mankind. Finally it trains them to put American presidents on trial for violating United Nations laws.

Twenty-two Model UN events are scheduled to take place in November alone and many more are set to follow month after month throughout the school year as the advocates of global government exploit the school system to indoctrinate a new generation in their roles as servants of the conclave of totalitarian regimes.

The Model UN program teaches students to act out roles as representatives of different UN nations, but its real goal is to teach them to reject American exceptionalism in favor of multilateralism by convincing them that countries vary in interests, not in character, and that the People’s Republic of China and Saudi Arabia are no different than the United States in their legitimacy or their form of government.

The great lie that the United Nations was built on is that the voices of all nations are equally valid, regardless if they are banana republics, brutal Islamic theocracies, Communist tyrannies or nations with free and open elections that offer human rights to all. The United Nations is a democracy, but it is a democracy of dictatorships.

A “democracy”  in that each country gets one  vote in the General Assembly regardless of how much clout it has in the real world. But the people are not voting through representatives in the case of the Islamic, communist, and other assorted tyrannies.

The vast majority of the world’s population lives in the thrall of tyrannies and the Model UN program models the farce that this great collective of the oppressed is legitimately represented by the lackeys of tyrants who speak in their name under the United Nations flag. There are 26 full democracies [out of 193 member states] to 55 authoritarian regimes [many more actually – JB] with the latter outnumbering the former in population three to one. The average UN representative is not representing a people or a nation, he is there as the personal representative of an Assad, a Kim Jong Il or a Khaddafi.

The democracy of dictatorships is why global multilateralism does not work and can never work, but the Model UN program helps embed the lie that it can and should into the growing minds of the leaders of tomorrow.

“You may be playing a role, but you are also preparing for life,” UN Secretary General Ki Ban Moon said in an address to the students of a Los Angeles classroom, “You are acting as global citizens.”

Global citizenship under the auspices of the United Nations is incompatible with American citizenship. It violates the United States Oath of Allegiance which states, “I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty” and it sets aside the national sovereignty of the United States and its open system of government in favor of a closed global system ruled by foreign princes and potentates. …

Leading the program in the United States is one of the country’s former presidents.  

The most widespread UN Model program is conducted through the Global Classrooms program of the United Nations Association of the United States of America. The UNA-USA’s National Council is chaired by none other than former president, Jimmy Carter, who did more than any previous leader to undermine America’s national sovereignty.

Though in that effort he has subsequently been surpassed by Barack Obama.

The UNA-USA’s agenda includes AMICC or the American Coalition for the International Criminal Court, whose goal is to push through American ratification of the Rome Statute which would place the United States under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court [ICC] and would preempt the Constitution.

To that end Model UN’s also teach students to act out roles in the International Criminal Court bringing world leaders to trial. One of the world leaders who will be brought to trial at the Hilton Model UN is George W. Bush. At the MUNCH 2012 Model UN ICC, President Harry Truman will be brought to trial by American students answering to a panel of foreign judges. …

Islamic indoctrination also plays a role at Model UN’s. The Pangea Model UN conference has students model the UN Human Rights Council, which is notoriously staffed by Islamic tyrannies …

The lead topic of the Pangea Model UN Human Rights Council is, “Combating Defamation of Religions”. The associated text blames the United States for discriminating against Muslims, warns that a ban on criticizing Islam is necessary to protect human rights and states that such a law is entirely feasible while providing protections for freedom of speech.

Discrimination against Muslims in the US is of course a lie. Of the real discrimination against non-Muslims in the Islamic countries, not a word is said.

To believe that a ban on criticizing anything can be compatible with free speech is to throw all sense and logic to the winds.

Pangea is not taking place in Brussels or New York – it’s happening in North Carolina. Just as MUNCH 2012 is. That is the power of the Model UN which reaches deep into the heart of the country to train ambitious and talented students to sell out their own country and serve the conglomerate of tyrannies and their associated bureaucracy of the blue flag. ,,,

The Global Classrooms project and the Model UN are vehicles for promoting a global government run by the Organization of the Islamic Conference [recently name-changed to the Organization of Islamic Co-operation, and it has an Obama representative in it] and the People’s Republic of China, and no entity that teaches students to betray their allegiance to their country has any place in the American classroom.

The UN must be destroyed.

We quote from a column by Walter Williams at Townhall, which can be read in full here.

I believe that there’s little prospect for Arabs ever being free and that Western encouragement and hopes for democracy are doomed to failure and disappointment. Most nations in the Middle East do not share the philosophical foundations of the West. It’s not likely liberty-oriented values will ever emerge in cultures that have disdain for the rule of law and private property rights and that sanction barbaric practices such as the stoning of women for adultery, the severing of hands or beheading as a form of punishment, and imprisonment for criticizing or speaking ill of the government.

What should the West do about the gross violations of human rights so prevalent in North Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere? My short answer is to mind our own business. The only case in which we should interfere with Middle Eastern affairs is when our national defense or economic interests are directly threatened. That is, for example, if Iran were to meddle with Middle Eastern oil shipments or if we discovered good evidence of its building nuclear weapons, then we should militarily intervene. What they want to do to one another is none of our business.

We agree with him. Certainly the West should not be so culturally insensitive as to interfere with the Arabs’ colorful customs, such as oppressing and mutilating women, stoning adulterers, hanging homosexuals, amputating the limbs of thieves, routinely torturing prisoners, keeping and trafficking slaves, using children as living bombs and training them to saw people’s heads off.

But we shouldn’t hesitate to act when our national defense or economic interests are under threat. If an Arab tyrant blows up an American plane in flight, he should be punished. Arab states that train terrorists pose a threat to every nation, with the US top of their wish list, so they should be promptly discouraged by fleets of well-aimed drones. And as the West needs the oil that lies under Arab feet, the despots must not be allowed to price it at extortionist levels. (To prevent that, the oil fields of the Middle East should have been taken under American control decades ago.) The best policy would be to keep them in constant fear that America might strike them without warning at any moment. Only an occasional salutary demonstration of American wrath would be necessary. Bring back that old Shock-and-Awe. Judiciously but zealously inflicted, it could obviate the need for long and costly wars.

And the UN must be destroyed.

Make no mistake about it – environmentalism is a new nature-worshiping religion.

It’s vatican is the United Nations. Its inquisitors are walking up and down and to and fro on the earth furtively trying to enforce a ukase titled “Agenda 21”.

We have warned about “Agenda 21” (see our post Beware “Agenda 21”, June 24, 2011).

We said that it is one of the biggest steps the UN has taken towards world socialist government, and we quoted Dr Ileana Johnson Paugh, an expert on the subject.

Because we cannot iterate too often or too strongly that Agenda 21 is a serious menace, we’re returning to the subject and quoting her again. She wrote on October 18 at Canada Free Press.:

Senator Robert Menendez [introduced] SB 1621 on September 22, [which may become] the Livable Communities Act. The bill has 17 Democrat cosponsors and, when passed, would create an Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), more bureaucracy to control our private land and housing by government fiat. …

All elements in this bill …  are further implementation of United Nation’s Agenda 21 goals …

The UN’s congregation for the doctrine of the faith has set up the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives [ICLEI], name-adjusted in 2003 to ICLEI — Local Governments for Sustainability. In its turn it has formed sub-bureaus, one of which is named Smart Growth America.

The  words “sustainability” and “smart growth” are euphemisms respectively for a “green” agenda and growth of government power.

Smart Growth America is another NGO (non-government organization) that pushes ICLEI’s goals …

As their site states, “Smart Growth is a better way to build our urban, suburban, and rural communities.”  They are concerned with our transportation, our communities, and reducing carbon emissions. They are using “steering committees” and “visioning” to change our lives in accordance with the United Nation’s vision of a one world government controlled by a few. Under the guise of saving the planet from the destructive humans, private property must be abolished; everybody must live in mixed-use zones, five-minute walk from work and school, moving about on public buses or light rail. Land must be given back to its intended wilderness. …

These progressives are marching on, trying to reshape, restructure, control, and fundamentally change the way we live, according to their dictates and twisted vision of the world. …

Smart Growth America is offering free technical assistance to communities “interested in smart growth strategies.” Americans must wake up fast to this “green” invasion in our way of life: smart green growth, green transportation, saving the green planet, sustainable development, sustainable agriculture, and sustainable green jobs. Everything now is sustainable and all jobs and activities are green.

[But] there is no green industry. We have windmills and we build solar panels expensively. Wind and solar power cannot provide enough electricity for our huge economy. Nobody has built a nuclear power plant since the seventies. There are no green jobs. …

Beware of the Green Monster coming to your community, the excuse for United Nations to take over our economy, take over private property, and set the country back a few decades to the level of third world countries in the name of “social justice.” Watch for these signs and language of UN Agenda 21 activities underway in your communities:

• Installation of Smart Meters in your area, an illegal surveillance device without a warrant in the name of reducing electricity consumption and costs by cutting your power at peak usage and causing all sorts of health ailments because of radiation from the meter itself
• Your area is a member of ICLEI (International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives) or ICMA (International City/County Management Association)
• Your area has a Vision, Master, or Comprehensive Plan that has been adopted in the last 5-10 years, promoting the “Triple Bottom Line,” or the three Es of Sustainable Development (Environment, Economy, and Social Equity)
• Your community supports Smart Growth, New Urbanism, and Resilient Communities with emphasis on using light rail, bike paths, walking, public transportation, discouraging the use of cars.
• Some communities narrow the roads to make them less accessible or install thousands of speed bumps; parking is at a premium and no parking garages are planned.
• Sustainable agriculture and community gardens are emphasized, encouraging a shift away from traditional free market driven food system, providing food just for the local community
• Your city established an Urban Growth Boundary [and] anything beyond it is considered “sprawl” and “blight” .. discouraged through incentives and regulations.
• Your town has joined Public-Private Partnerships, local regional councils, state, or federal government to promote Sustainable Communities Planning or Initiatives.
• Measurement of wealth through GDP (Gross Domestic Product) is discouraged while “happiness” and “well-being” become measures of wealth.
• A “New American Dream” is advertised as “living simply.”
• Green energy is most important, wind and solar, fossil fuels are evil.
• More and more restrictions and regulations are placed on land use, farm, residential, and commercial, in order to preserve the wilderness, small creatures, and natural resources at the expense of humans.
• The community is buying more and more “green space” and returning it to wilderness.
• You find a chart in your local government’s documents with three concentric circles with the words, Environment, Economy, Equity written in the middle of each circle.
• Community leaders subscribe to global warming as a manmade fact. They take action to lower the community’s carbon footprint by adopting “green” LEED [Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, “an internationally recognized green building certification system”] building and energy code standards for construction and development, including incentives, benchmarks, and retrofitting.
• Your town belongs to Earth Charter, the Sierra Club’s Cool Cities Initiative, the Audubon Society’s Sustainable Community Initiative, or your mayor has signed the U.S. Conference of Mayors’ Climate Protection Agreement.
• Officials refer to your town as a “transition town,” a “resilient city,” or a “livable community” and begin teaching “globalism,” “interdependence with nature,” and “interconnectedness”.
• Social Equity vocabulary is being used in your community such as “food justice,” “economic and environmental justice,” “fairness,” “direct democracy,” “diversity,” “food deserts,” “social justice,” and “wealth redistribution.”
• NGOs (non-governmental organizations) become involved in your city’s planning through other “stakeholders” in the “collaborative, consensus-building,” “visioning” process that takes about 18 months to complete and details your community’s future without input from the voters.
• Your school system starts teaching children how to be good “global citizens” and stewards of the environment via International Baccalaureate and other UN sponsored education agendas.
• Your local government authorities start to exceed their constitutionally granted powers by working with private international and national organizations through Public-Private Partnerships.
• You notice a significant push toward “social justice,” interfaith initiatives that promote “one world” along with community diversity, multiculturalism, sameness of faiths, social inclusion, and environmental stewardship.

There is some good news in that here and there people are becoming aware of the threat and are beginning to resist. In another article, October 26, the same author wrote:

As the battles against the green sustainability monster pushed by ICLEI and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) rage across the nation, ten communities have officially rejected membership in the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI).

Rep. Matt Shay reported the creation of an anti-UN Agenda 21 Caucus in the Washington State Legislature … [and]  following the latest rejections of ICLEI by James City County, VA and Lexington, VA, several more communities across the nation are making similar decisions.

The Wisconsin Legislature has introduced two bills (Assembly Bill 303 and Senate Bill 225) to “allow local governments to repeal comprehensive development plans that were forced under smart growth legislation.” …

But the hooded monks of the UN, and their local collaborators – many disguised as “educators and entertainers” – pursue their mission relentlessly:

Meanwhile, the Office of Sustainability Institute at George Mason University invited the “sustainability community” of Fairfax, Virginia, to the Sustainable Living Roadshow on October 19, 2011. If you have no clue about the nature of this road show, it is safe to guess, it is environmental propaganda. I am still trying to understand the need for a sustainability institute at GMU, but then every government entity now has such an office or at least a sustainability plan.

When I saw the invitation, I began to understand the depth and length of brainwashing that the environmental minority is assaulting this country with in order to pass and promote their anti-American agenda.

“The Sustainable Living Roadshow is a caravan of educators and entertainers who tour the country in a fleet of renewable fuel vehicles setting up off-the-grid eco-carnivals with interactive learning villages at K-12 schools, universities, festivals and community events. These villages are designed to empower communities to utilize sustainable living strategies for a healthier planet.”

The sponsors of the Sustainable Living Roadshow are an interesting mixture of corporations, stores, and environmental groups: Birkenstock, Nature’s Gate, Petzl, Hemp Oil Canada, Organic India, The Living Seed Company, Hemp Industries Association, Elemental Herbs, Natracare, and Synchro.

The Sustainable Living Roadshow website displayed pictures of energetic young people holding signs that read, “Toss out fossil fuels,” “We’re Ready, Green Jobs Now,” emphasizing a global culture, another element of UN Agenda 21, a powerful assault on impressionable minds to erase any trace of our culture, our nationality, our borders, our sovereignty.

It does not matter that there is no viable, full replacement for fossil fuels yet to run the largest economy on the planet. Let us toss them out because teachers and environmentalists say so. There is no green industry and there are no green jobs. Students, impressionable children, and ignorant adults have overlooked these tiny details. The media never reports the truth. People do not know that there are are no green jobs and no green industry, just windmills and solar panels.

GMU asked attendees to arrive preferably by bike or public transportation, keeping in line with their walkability and mass-transit goals, which happen to coincide with UN Agenda 21. …

I wondered if parents knew what kind of brain washing their expensive tuition bought for their children and what kind of generation was going to lead our country into the future.

A future of –

Crowding humans off their lands and off their suburban homes into high-density, high-rise mixed-use tenements.

And as the environmentalists complain that there are too many people in the world, reduction of populations would come next by means of abortion, infanticide, refusal of medical treatment to the old, and – we guess – punitive executions for (eg) endangering a species of owl or smelt.

Not to mention suicide, which would be fully understandable in such circumstances.

“Agenda 21”, Dr Paugh points out, is not a treaty, and no member state is as yet bound to implement it. But although its recommendations, “covering every facet of human life”, are not legally binding, they are being implemented administratively in the US “without Congress ever approving or debating them”. If Senator Menendez’s Livable Communities bill is passed, they will become the law of the land.

Plainly, the religion of environmentalism would put total political power in the hands of a self-elected priestly caste.

Primitive earth-worshipers believed that human blood had to be spilt to ensure fertility. We don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the priests and inquisitors of the new earth-worshiping religion plan to carry out mass human sacrifice, and the enslavement of those they’ll permit to live.

Yesterday the Attorney General announced that an Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador to the United States, Adel Al-Jubeir, in Washington, D.C. has been foiled.

The Saudi Ambassador was to be killed by a bombing of a restaurant he frequents in the capital, so many others would have been killed and wounded.

The plot also involved attacks on the Saudi and Israeli embassies in Argentina.

Barry Rubin writes at PajamasMedia:

The case is still being developed, and it isn’t clear whether the origin of this plot goes back to Tehran.

By which he means: Did the government of Iran order the attacks?

That does not need to be asked. In a despotism there are no free agents who decide for private reasons to attack another country. Although there is division among the internal powers of Iran – between the supreme “spiritual leader”, the Ayatollah Khamenei, and the president, Ahmadinejad; between either or both of them and the Revolutionary Guards; and probably between factions in every section of government and the military – it had to be one or some or most or all of them who approved such a plan as this.

According to ABC’s sources, Manssor Arbabsiar — an Iranian American living in Texas — approached an informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration, thinking he was speaking with a member of a Mexican drug gang for help in the proposed attacks. He said he was acting on behalf of a cousin, Gholam Shakuri, who might be a Revolutionary Guard official involved in terrorist operations.

He offered $1.5 million for the killing, with a $100,000 down payment in two installments being paid by Arbabsiar while on a visit to Iran.

These two men have been charged with conspiracy to kill, among other charges. Arbabsiar, who is now cooperating with the prosecution, also offered to provide opium in large quantities for the Mexican drug cartels. Apparently, the FBI has a lot of evidence, including recordings of meetings and telephone calls with Arbabsiar.

Reuters reports more details:

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said one of two men charged in the plot, both originally from Iran, had been arrested and confessed. The other, who was still at large, was described in the criminal complaint as being a member of the elite Quds Force, which is part of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. …

U.S. authorities arrested the other man, Manssor Arbabsiar, 56, who is a naturalized U.S. citizen and holds an Iranian passport, at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York on September 29. …

The assassination plot began to unfold in May 2011 when Arbabsiar approached an individual in Mexico to help, but that individual turned out to be an informant for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

The confidential source, who was not identified, immediately tipped law enforcement agents, according to the criminal complaint. Arbabsiar paid $100,000 to the informant in July and August for the plot, a down payment on the $1.5 million requested.

Shakuri approved the plan to kill the ambassador during telephone conversations with Arbabsiar …

Rubin comments:

Let’s assume that this story is accurate. What’s most important here is not the innate sensationalism of this dramatic story, but its political implications. An Iranian official — perhaps two according to the indictment — is directly linked with a plan to stage terrorist attacks on American soil in which Americans would certainly have been killed or injured. This amounts to an act of war. 

Indeed, it is the first time in modern history that a foreign government has been caught planning a major terrorist attack on American soil.

President Barack Obama, Homeland Security, and other top agencies and officials have the evidence and full briefings into this matter if they choose to access them. What effect would this have on U.S. foreign policy?

What effect should it have?

Already, they have had high-quality intelligence. We know this from the congressional testimony of Defense and State Department officials:

– Iran is the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism.

– Iran is harboring al-Qaeda leaders on its soil and letting them plan attacks on America from that safe haven.

– Iran is training and supplying the Taliban with weapons and training to attack and kill Americans.

– Iran is deeply involved in attacking and killing U.S. personnel and citizens in Iraq.

And that’s not all. Is this sufficient evidence to persuade Obama that Iran regards itself as being at war with the United States? That the top priority of U.S. Middle East policy — and very possibly the number-one priority of U.S. foreign policy generally — should be to counter Iran and revolutionary Islamism? And I don’t mean by supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and Hezballah as moderates!

Yes, it should have been the top priority years ago, but Obama has continued to hold out his hand in friendship to the monstrous regime.

Will there be a change now, Rubin asks.

Is this case going to be the smoking gun — or, perhaps, the smoking bomb — that gets U.S. policy on the right course? It should be, though I suspect it isn’t. …

Does Obama even understand the significance of it?

He has known about the plot since June, so the question is, “Why break it now?”

Jihad Watch asks that question and suggests an answer with another question:

 To divert attention from his spiraling scandals and plummeting fortunes?

But there is another – or additional – possible reason for the timing.

The announcement of the plot was made by Attorney General Eric Holder, who has been issued with a subpoena to appear before the the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in connection with the  “Fast and Furious” gun-trafficking scandal. Was it timed to make him seem extremely competent at his job and even perhaps indispensable?

If so, it’s a miscalculation. To have the Attorney-General make the announcement is to indicate that the administration sees the plot as a problem for law-enforcement, when in fact it is a grave act of aggression by a foreign power against the United States, and as such should be understood as a cause of war.

It has long been apparent that Obama hates to make decisions. And he hates to attack an Islamic country unless other Islamic countries give him the nod. This time, of course, Saudi Arabia will be pleased to have Americans risk their lives in an assault on Iran to punish the regime and prevent it developing into a nuclear-armed power. Obama would rather the Israelis bombed Iranian nuclear installations (especially – we suspect – as their doing so would then allow him to condemn Israel for an act of  aggression).

So will he or won’t he strike back at Iran? Our guess is that he won’t. He’ll go to the UN and ask “the international community” – a wraith lodged permanently in the mind of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – to consider setting a date for a meeting of the Security Council to discuss what warnings of what actions might be sent to the Iranian government without provoking it too severely.