Which high-tech country might Iran turn to for help in ridding itself of the Stuxnet computer worm that is incapacitating its industrial-military complex? (See our posts A virus that might save us all, September 25, 2010, and Sound the trumpet, September 29, 2010.)

Germany? Siemens provided the systems that are under attack, but apparently will not or cannot come to the rescue.

Russia? Russians were employed to install the Siemens systems. But not only have they been unable to destroy the worm, they are now being accused of planting it, and are fleeing Iran as fast as they can.

Some of them say they hope to return when the trouble has blown over – which rather strongly indicates they were not responsible for causing it.

Here’s the latest Stuxnet-chaos news:

Dozens of Russian nuclear engineers, technicians and contractors are hurriedly departing Iran for home since local intelligence authorities began rounding up their compatriots as suspects of planting the Stuxnet malworm into their nuclear program.

Among them are the Russian personnel who built Iran’s first nuclear reactor at Bushehr which Tehran admits has been damaged by the virus.

One of the Russian nuclear staffers, questioned in Moscow Sunday, Oct. 3 by Western sources, confirmed that many of his Russian colleagues had decided to leave with their families after team members were detained for questioning at the beginning of last week. He refused to give his name because he and his colleagues intend to return to Iran if the trouble blows over and the detainees are quickly released after questioning.

Last Saturday, October 2, the Iranian Intelligence Minister, Heidar Moslehi, “announced that nuclear spies had been captured”, accused of sending “electronic worms through the internet”.  [Which is not how the attack was initiated according to more credible sources – JB.]

This was the first high-level Iranian admission that the Stuxnet virus had been planted by foreign elements to sabotage their entire nuclear program – and not just the Bushehr reactor. The comprehensive scale of the damage is attested to by the detention of Russian nuclear experts also at Natanz, Isfahan and Tehran. …

“Hundreds of Russian scientists, engineers and technicians were responsible for installing the Siemens control systems in Iran’s nuclear complex and other facilities which proved most vulnerable to the cyber attack”, and as they were “the only foreigners with access to these heavily guarded plants”, they are prime suspects.

If it was not the Russians who worked this most inventive and effective form of sabotage ever contrived (and we don’t believe it was), those who did can now enjoy, as an extra cause for celebration, the discomfiture of the Russians. The real saboteurs, we guess, are laughing out of sheer Schadenfreude. And while we’re well aware that Stuxnet could ultimately be a threat to ourselves – to friend as well as foe just as nuclear weapons are – for the present we’re reasonably happy that this humiliating blow has been struck at the insufferable Iranian regime.

In fact, we confess, we are laughing too, and hope our readers feel like joining in.

Cheerful news. The “One Nation” rally in Washington, D.C. yesterday was a disappointment to the left as it failed to attract anywhere near the number of Obama supporters the organizers had hoped for. (See the PajamasMedia assessment of numbers here.)

Among the few that were there, however, enthusiasm was high.

Here are some true believers doing their thing. The Red Army song does the Socialists proud.

This video, which must be one of the most appalling ever made – sadistic, murderous, terroristic – is nevertheless being called, with justification, “the most honest political ad of all time”.

It seems at first to have been made in a spirit of bad-taste frivolity, possibly as satire, but it becomes clear that it is an expression of extreme hate and intolerance, produced in deadly earnest.

It proves beyond all question that the Global Warming Cultists are not just bigots and fools, but also profoundly anti-human.

At PajamasMedia, Zombie explains how it came to be made:

“10:10″ is a campaign to get people around the world to lower their carbon consumption by 10% in the year 2010. Global Warming and all that, you see.

It’s quite a large, well-organized movement, funded in part by the British government.

This morning, the 10:10 campaign released “No Pressure,” a much-anticipated video promoting the notion of compliance to the carbon-reduction drive, a video scripted by famed British screenwriter Richard Curtis (Notting Hill, Mr. Bean, etc.) and produced by a professional film crew with top-notch actors.

However…

Within minutes of its unveiling earlier today, “No Pressure” caused such an uproar that it was taken offline while the producers issued an apology.

Luckily, enterprising bloggers saved copies and have been frantically re-uploading them to YouTube, to prevent the video from disappearing down the memory hole.

Why? Because no video has ever provided such a revealing and shocking peek into the mindset of the Global Warming alarmists.

Before I say any more, you absolutely need to see the video itself:

What do you think? An effective way to convince people to lower their carbon footprint — or final proof that the Green movement are a bunch of crypto-fascists with violent fantasies of exterminating their opponents …?

To see a series of videos and ads which show the thinking behind “No Pressure”, go to Ed Driscoll’s article, also at PajamasMedia, here.

If we lose the video on our site, try going there to see it.

Also worth reading is an article by James Delingpole, revealing more about the video’s makers and their intentions, here.

Among his comments is this:

With No Pressure, the environmental movement has revealed the snarling, wicked, homicidal misanthropy beneath its cloak of gentle, bunny-hugging righteousness.

Evil as it is, if the reaction to the video means that the Global Warming Movement has blown itself up, it will unintentionally have done great good. That may be too much to hope for, but at least it has discredited the 10:10 campaign itself, and perhaps made it harder for the ecofascists to go on preaching their destructive faith.

The White House is upset that two-thirds of the nation – or is it three quarters? –  think that The Stimulus was a hopeless failure, did nothing to revive the economy, and plunged the country into deep debt.

So the WH charged Joe Biden – a really savvy guy, as we all know  – with the task of explaining to the people that, despite all appearances to the contrary, The Stimulus has in fact been a really big success.

His report is out today, and the Washington Post approvingly discloses its contents here.

What is it that the vice president finds to praise? What is it he reveals that will change the minds of voters, dispel their doubts and fears, make them apologize to Obama for their gross misunderstanding, and gratefully return the Democrats to power in November?

That in the spending of 70% of the stimulus money there has been less fraud than might have been expected.

Wow!

Check it out.

And keep your laughter dry.

We prefer to write about what has happened rather than what might happen. But some probabilities, accusations, and conjectures are likely enough and interesting enough to be noticed before they’re certainties.

Which is why we’re drawing attention to a story about a trade union official’s suspected connection with terrorism both in South America and in the Middle East.

Investor’s Business Daily reports and comments:

The FBI raids the Chicago home of a local union leader looking for terrorist connections as the union’s former chief is investigated for corruption. Why are we not surprised?

Thuggery and corruption are not quite synonyms for unionism, but it gets very close when you consider the Service Employees International Union, formerly led by Andy Stern.

That’s the extreme left revolutionary Andy Stern who was reported last October, 2009, to be more often received by Obama at the White House than any other visitor.

From being involved in fraudulent voter registration in Texas to beating up Tea Party activists outside town hall meetings in Missouri, SEIU’s reputation is well-established.

Now we can possibly add a linkage to terrorism.

On Friday, the FBI searched eight addresses in Minneapolis and Chicago. Among those addresses was the North Side home of Chicago anti-war activists Joe Iosbaker and his wife, Stephanie Weiner, whose home was searched for 12 hours.

The agents said they were looking for evidence relating to terrorist activity. Warrants suggested agents were looking for links between anti-war activists and terrorist groups in Colombia and the Mideast. An FBI statement said those investigated were suspected of activities “concerning the material support of terrorism.”

The national media largely ignored the story, and the Chicago media reported it as … anti-war activists being intimidated and investigated and manhandled by oppressive law enforcement. …

Iosbaker is … the Chief Steward for SEIU Local 73. One would think that a high-ranking union official linked to support of international terrorism would be national news …

But no. The mainstream media will ignore the story if they can, and if they can’t, spin it as a story of mean right-wing anti-union bias.

(We confess to anti-union bias. One of the great achievements of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was, in our opinion, her victory over the economy-wrecking British trade unions, especially the National Union of Mineworkers in 1985.)

As we all know, people of Andy Stern’s and Iosbaker’s political persuasion are not union leaders for the love of the workers: they are left revolutionaries who hope to use the unions as a means to their ends. Read about Andy Stern here.

Iosbaker and Weiner were active members, with Barack Obama, of the New Party in Chicago. Read about it here at Gulag Bound. It was formed by an alliance of three organizations:

• The Democratic Socialists of America – the largest Marxist organization in America
• ACORN
• SEIU

Also heavily involved were the Communist Party USA breakaway group Committees of Correspondence and far left ‘think tank’ the Institute for Policy Studies.

Obama “not only worked closely with these New Party candidates”, he himself was a member of it.

All of which should have been made known to the electorate by the media during the presidential campaigns of 2008, but was not.

It’s useful to bring it up now, when Obama and his Democratic hurrah-chorus are calling Constitutionalists, Republicans, and Tea Party people “extremists”. (See here and here.)

Sound the trumpet! Beat the drum! The dread and powerful Malworm Stuxnet is getting nastier!

The secret weapon deployed against Iran, an entirely new type of computer virus named Stuxnet (see our post A virus that might save us all, September 25, 2010), has done even more damage to the Iranian nuclear program and industries than they were at first willing to admit. It incapacitates vital programs, steals and transmits information to its (as yet unidentified, but almost certainly Israeli and US) creators and controllers, and it may be indestructible.

Debkafile now reports how the Iranians’ own computer experts are discovering that the harder they try to extirpate the insidious and elusive enemy, the deeper it establishes itself, and the more havoc it wreaks.

Not only have their own attempts to defeat the invading worm failed, but they made matters worse: The malworm became more aggressive and returned to the attack on parts of the systems damaged in the initial attack.

They’re frantically searching Europe (and probably Germany most persistently because Siemens is Iran’s main systems supplier) for someone who can and will save them from the devouring monster, the invisible worm that is destroying the life of their military-industrial complex. They’re offering astronomical fees to computer mercenaries, but haven’t found anyone to come to their aid. Even if some are willing to try, the Iranians put insuperable obstacles in the way. However badly they need the infidels to save them, they will not let them know what they’re doing and where they’re doing it.

Yet all the while the worm goes on revealing what and where and how.

One [European] expert said: “The Iranians have been forced to realize that they would be better off not ‘irritating’ the invader because it hits back with a bigger punch.”

Perhaps, this expert suggested, even its makers cannot stop it:

Looking beyond Iran’s predicament, he wondered whether the people responsible for planting Stuxnet in Iran – and apparently continuing to offload information from its sensitive systems – have the technology for stopping its rampage.

Some observers (presumably in the US and/or Israel) believe that the number of systems and networks struck by the worm is far greater that the Iranian figure of 30,000 or 45,000, and is more likely to be in the millions.

If that is the case, and if nobody in the world can stop it, Iran is well and truly …. let’s say, wrecked.

For the present at least, Iran is defeated. Western triumphalism is decidedly called for. So another blast of the trumpet, please, another roll on the drum!

Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey says what needs to be said, in the straight way it needs to be said, to progressive journalist Tom Moran who writes for The Star Ledger.

If only there could be just such a governor for every state in the Union!

How about Chris Christie for President?

The Obama administration is growing ever longer arms and ever more grasping fingers, to reach into every aspect, activity, and setting of our lives: our homes, our possessions, our habits, our tastes, our choices, our  minds; to regulate, manipulate, constrain, constrict, direct, control us. Their aim? For them,  power beyond the imaginations of all former tyrants; for us, helpless dependence, obedience, submission.

An exaggeration? Let’s see.

Among the people he has appointed to “czardom”, the unelected ideologues who have real executive power, are “behavioral scientists” and “behavioral economists”, who are actively trying to “usher in an era of profound social reform by getting us to change the way we behave, little by little, every day”, to quote an article by Christine Rosen in the July/August issue of Commentary, titled Now Behave. She names in particular Cass Sunstein, co-author of Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth,  and Happiness, whom Obama has appointed his “regulation czar”. What he and his fellow philosophers now governing the Republic are doing is, in Rosen’s words:

.. reconciling political theory with the scientific study of human behavior since, they argue, the old categories of political theory no longer apply. … Personal responsibility? Impossible in a complicated world governed by complex ‘systems’ and limitless choices.  The result is a kind of [Pavlovian] stimulus-response politics that promises to liberate citizens from having to make complicated choices in exchange for limiting their freedom.

Promises to liberate us from liberty?

It’s all for own good, of course, as every tyranny has ever been for the good of the tyrannized. But it’s not just for our own individual good. No  – as always it’s for the good of “society”.

Rosen explains:

The new behaviorism isn’t interested in protecting people’s freedom to choose. Its core principle is the idea that only by allowing an expert to limit choices can individuals learn to break their bad habits. … Contemporary behaviorists want to nudge us, but not merely to make us happier, better people. They have specific hopes for the social effects this nudging will achieve: fewer smokers, thinner Americans, higher savings rates.

Now we see the dream in  detail. It’s not exactly the same as the grand, vague, Marxist utopian dream of a proletarian paradise. It’s a more mundane, banal projection, concerned with correcting trivial behaviors that insult the puritan eye, nose, and tight fist. A largely aesthetic ideal based on parsimony, satisfying a taste for sparseness and austerity, with everyone skinny and no more unsightly fatties impeding passage through the mall. The venting of a petty and stingy enviousness that cannot endure the sight of abundance. A drive for conforming discipline, with a Spartan adulation of rude health, conjuring up images of medicine-ball, gym-slip, girls’ organizations in the early twentieth century.

The intelligentsia of the Western world, the elite that always classes itself with the rulers rather than the ruled, think all this is wonderful, great, brilliant. If you doubt it, read what distinguished critics and academics say about Cass Sunstein’s book Nudge, quoted proudly in it. Eg: “a wonderful book”; “this gem of a book”; “insightful and amusing, practical and deep … a must-read for anyone who wants to see both our minds and our society working better … it will make the world a better place“.

They see no contempt in it. No evil will. After all, it’s not a plan to force us, the masses; just to plant certain ideas in our minds so we can mull them over and come to accept them as better ideas than our own.

Not forcing us? Are they not already taking steps to regulate how much salt and fat we eat? To limit how much credit we may have so we don’t go and buy something just because we want it? The way you live in your own home will be scrutinized and corrected. Think you can cheat? They have technologies unavailable to earlier totalitarians, and they’ll use them to mold us to their heart’s desire.They are putting X-ray vans on the streets from which they can look into your house and see if you’re just lolling about when you should be working out (in either sense of the phrase). Complain about it? They’ll know. They’re working on censoring your internet communications.

Let’s look at an example of government interference in our home lives, at one way our betters are limiting the choices we can make in small and necessary things.

Ed Feulner, president of that splendid stronghold of conservative principles, the Heritage Foundation, writes today in Townhall:

So, are you ready to comply with the federal government’s ban on incandescent light bulbs? Me neither.

Starting in January 2012, a little over a year from now, the phase-out begins. Simple, inexpensive lighting will become a time-capsule item. Compact-fluorescent lights, or CFLs — the bulbs that look like a twisted ice-cream cone (and won’t fit in many light fixtures where space is tight) — will become the new norm.

Anyone who has priced CFLs knows they’re not cheap. Supposedly they’re worth the extra money because they’ll last longer. That’s cold comfort, though, given the dull, unnatural glow that these bulbs throw off.

Worse, CFLs are full of mercury. If one breaks — and who hasn’t dropped a light bulb now and then? — you have an elaborate clean-up process ahead of you. It’s on the EPA’s website, and it involves evacuating the area of all people and pets, and using duct tape and damp paper towels to get everything up. (Go to www.epa.gov for complete details.) And no vacuuming, or you may disperse the mercury – which, after all, is a toxic substance.

So why are we making the switch? … The theory, of course, is that we’ll consume less energy. It’s all part of the green agenda. The same agenda that the president insists will produce scads of high-paying, earth-friendly “green jobs.” Tell that to the 200 workers in Winchester, Va., who are losing their jobs as General Electric closes its incandescent-bulb factory there. Or to the Americans who work in other plants that have been shuttered.

Yes, some jobs will be created, thanks to the ban. Unfortunately, those jobs won’t be here in the U.S. — they’ll be in China, where CFLs can be made cheaper. …

But at least we’ll be saving energy, right? Not according to a recent study sponsored by Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico and funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. It found that energy use under newer “efficient” lighting will actually go up rather than down.

But their will be done.

One of the most profoundly troubling things about all this is that it’s being done to us so easily. Who is crying out against it? Even those who are aware that it is happening are not raising a hullabaloo, not threatening – let alone taking – action to prevent it. Christine Rosen, though she reports, explains, and objects to it, does not  seem appalled by it. Ed Feulner, a champion of individual liberty, says of the light-bulb diktat: “This whole affair is a prime example of bad ‘unintended consequences’ resulting from well-intentioned plans — plans imposed by devotees of big-government solutions for nearly every problem.”

Well-intentioned? Can no one see that what we are being subjected to, stealthily nudged into, is a subservience more absolute than Orwell visualized, or Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, and Kim Jong Il achieved?

Or are these absurd comparisons? True, no cruel punishments, no forced starvation, no mass killings are written into the scenario. The program wears a smiley face. Its authors, the rulers, wish only the happiness of all mankind.

Didn’t they all?

Jillian Becker    September 28, 2010

Sam Westrop asks why John Hilary of War on Want suggests Shlomo Sand’s ‘The Invention of the Jewish People’ is suitable for ‘learning more about Palestine’. This piece was originally published at The Propagandist:

The debate regarding anti-Zionism’s anti-Semitic overtones is as ever applicable and is as ever strenuously contested. On a British University campus, I regularly experience screaming denials of bigotry from not just British Islamists and their morally anaemic far-Left supporters, but also from persons considered – or at least self-perceived – to be moderates.

For a while now, I have taken what I consider to be a reasonable and positive perspective: if one ignores the unquestionable suffering and the consequent emotional and rational incentives of the Jewish people to provide themselves with the optimism, prosperity and success of the self-reliance and security of a homeland, then one can reject Zionism – or Jewish nationalism – but only on the absolute condition that one also rejects Palestinian nationalism. To choose one over the other is a consummate hypocrisy that assumes absolutely no rational premise or a desire for peaceful resolution.

One particular NGO, which any rational yet uninformed observer would expect to take an enlightened and progressive position, would be ‘War on Want’ – a registered British charity which received just under half a million pounds from the European Commission and about £160,000 from the British Government in 2009.

The stated aims of War on Want include the promise ‘to relieve global poverty however caused through working in partnership with people throughout the world’. Such wording presupposes a forward-thinking organisation that acts in the interest of progress and prosperity; regrettably, the very opposite is true.

Read more…

Obama wants no Muslim to feel shunned and excluded, even if he’s a known terrorist, and even if the place he’s excluded from is a top-secret government center.

What about Muslim terrorists? Must they to be let in to such places, lest they feel cruelly discriminated against?

Oh, yes! For one thing, you see, no Muslims are terrorists, and no terrorists are Muslims. There is only a “tiny minority” of “extremists” who carry out terrorism in the name of Islam and in no way represent the Religion of Peace. Indeed, the word “Muslim” should never be uttered in the same sentence as the word “terrorist”.  Such is the official and only-permissible opinion of the Obama administration.

Furthermore, in those official eyes, even Muslims  who have been proved to be dedicated supporters of active terrorist organizations are really only the maligned victims of prejudice, and they more than any need to be reassured that they are trusted and respected. How may this be done? Why, invite them into the National Counterterrorism Center, show them around, let them ask questions and give them frank, full, and honest answers. They’re Muslims, not terrorists, for godssake!

Our view is obstinately different. We say those who finance, support, applaud, and defend terrorism, are co-perpetrators of terrorism. We know that without their fans and funders, the terrorists could not operate. We have also observed that almost all acts of terrorism carried out anywhere in the world in the 21st. century have been perpetrated by Muslims in the name of Islam (today’s tally, 16115 since 9/11). But there you – our terrorist is an Obama administration’s peace-lover.

One such known co-perpetrator, who was invited to look around the country’s counter-terrorism facilities and acquire sensitive information, is an agent of Hamas named Kifah Mustapha.

What a gift to the sworn enemies of the United States! He and they must be laughing fit to burst!

Patrick Poole reports at Big Peace:

A known Hamas operative and unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorism financing trial in U.S. history – Kifah Mustapha – was recently escorted into the top-secret National Counterterrorism Center and other secure government facilities, including the FBI’s training center at Quantico, during a six-week “Citizen’s Academy” hosted by the FBI as part of its “outreach” to the Muslim Community. The group was accompanied by reporter Ben Bradley of WLS-Chicago (ABC), who filed a report on the trip …

“Sheik Kifah Mustapha, who runs the Mosque Foundation in Bridgeview, asked some of the most pointed questions during the six week FBI Citizens’ Academy and trip to Washington. He pushed agents to fully explain everything from the bureau’s use of deadly force policy to racial and ethnic profiling. ‘I saw a very interesting side of what the FBI does and I wanted to know more,’ Sheik Mustapha explained after returning from D.C. …”

Yes, I bet he wanted to know everything about the FBI’s policies.

Curiously, Bradley’s report on the Citizen’s Academy fails to make note of Mustapha’s extensive terrorist ties and support for Hamas, including his former employment with the Holy Land Foundation, which was listed as a specially designated terrorist group by the U.S. government in December 2001, and whose executives were convicted of terrorism support in 2008 and sentenced to lengthy prison terms. Mustapha was personally named unindicted co-conspirator (#31) in the case and employment records submitted by federal prosecutors during the trial showed that he received more than $154,000 for his work for the Holy Land Foundation between 1996 and 2000. … In a deposition he gave in a civil trial concerned with the murder of a Chicago teenager killed by Hamas while waiting for a bus in Israel, Mustapha admitted that he was the registered agent for the Holy Land Foundation in Illinois, and also to his involvement with other Hamas front groups, including the Islamic Association for Palestine. He was later hired as an imam by the Mosque Foundation in Bridgeview, which the Chicago Tribune reported in 2004 has long been a hotbed of Hamas support. …

Why should terrorist operatives have to covertly case potential targets when the FBI will happily escort them and take them into areas they would never be able to reach on their own? Who’s next on the FBI’s “outreach” calendar, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his fellow GITMO detainees?

Sure, why not? After they’ve had a civil trial and been acquitted, they might be given jobs in the intelligence services. Their expertise would be of inestimable value to the state.

No terrorist left behind.