|
|
|||
|
|||
|
|
The Din That Heralds Terror Lowell Ponte Out of the Thursday night darkness, the shock waves hit my office window – thud, thud, thud – like the jolting sound of nearby thunder, next-door fireworks, or gunshots. Miles up the shore of the Pacific Ocean, named for its calmness, at Camp Pendleton U.S. Marines were practicing with high explosive weapons. Fireworks, indeed, and the thunder of a storm whose lightning bolts are being honed to strike soon somewhere, probably in Iraq, Syria, or Iran. Such noise is part of the shock and awe of modern battle, our scientific version of past armies' marrow-chilling, wall-shaking trumpets and rebel yells, using powerful sound quakes to shake an enemy. In his new book, "Noise," the Fuzzy Logic maven Bart Kosko turns his ear and pen to how such vibrations affect, and may even have played a role in creating, life. Kosko, an engineering professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, in "Noise" touches on how the military is developing new ways to use such vibrations as a weapon – via eardrum-shattering high decibels, fear and awe-inducing infrasound, emotion-wrenching music comingled with the screams of dying rabbits, and more. We have been watching terror rain down on Israel in recent days in the form of limited range, unguided rockets. But as the polymath Kosko cited in his remarkable 1997 novel "Nanotime," researchers now fear that with every decade the accuracy of cruise missiles is doubling and the cost of such missiles is falling by half.
Story Continues Below
Within a decade, therefore, Israel and the U.S. could awaken one morning to find a swarm of 50,000 cruise missiles flying over our borders from all directions. Each such missile, acquired by terrorists via the black market or from wealthy patron nations like Iran, could cost less than the average new car. But each such cruise missile would be able to fly, hugging the ground to avoid radar detection, for 1,100 miles. It would be able to do so with pinpoint accuracy, targeting the open window of the exact room where the president is giving a speech. (Parents, don't let your children grow up to be Secret Service agents protecting the president.) Such an attack could be launched across borders from small trucks or aircraft, or from small private boats offshore near major ports. Could a small nation such as Israel survive a mass attack of 50,000 such cruise missiles with chemical, biological or nuclear warheads saturating and potentially overwhelming its defenses? Both Israel and the United States have been working frantically to develop rapid reaction weapons – from self-aiming laser cannon systems to ultra-fast Gatling guns – to confront this threat.
Meanwhile our talk shows and cable news channels are filled with another kind of noise, the chatter of PsyOps – the psychological propaganda operations of partisans trying to turn the current Middle East conflicts to political advantage. The Shia Islamist terror group Hezbollah, whose cross-border attacks against Israelis triggered the current conflict in Lebanon, has its own satellite television station beaming to the Muslim world, Al Manar (Arabic for "The Beacon") TV. Al Manar features children's cartoons and other programs that honor and encourage Muslims to become martyrs by killing Jews. It has broadcast a game show resembling "Jeopardy" where contestants win prizes by parroting Islamist anti-American and anti-Israel propaganda. Al Manar TV receives funding from Shiite Iran, just like Hezbollah. But it has also been distributed elsewhere in the world with grants from such left-leaning American entities as the Knight Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and – a name familiar to viewers of our Public Broadcasting Service PBS – the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, a member of whose founding family also runs the far left Harper's Magazine. America's own left-skewed networks such as CNN and MSNBC during the past week have sounded more than a bit like Al Manar. These networks have relentlessly pushed images of death and destruction in Lebanon and overloaded their airtime with voices blaming Israel and President George W. Bush for the Israel-Hezbollah clash. Once again we see the anti-Semitism at the heart of the left, a hatred of Jews almost as evident today as it was in the National Socialism of Adolf Hitler and toxic anti-Semitism of the late Soviet Union. To understand the left-wing roots of modern anti-Semitism, seek out a copy of "The Socialism of Fools: Anti-Semitism on the Left," by the socialist editor of the journal Tikkun, Rabbi Michael Lerner. What socialism and anti-Semitism have in common is not only their hatred of capitalism but also their collectivism, their view that the individual is nothing, the collective everything, and that people are to be regarded and judged only as members of groups, not as unique individuals. As America's November mid-term elections draw near, the mainstream media is dropping any pretense of fairness or balance. On MSNBC's "Countdown," for example, sportscaster host Keith Olbermann now delivers an hour of entirely one-sided conservative-bashing and left-boosting – in effect, a free hour-long commercial for the Democratic Party courtesy of NBC. Olbermann, who was given his own show on this last-place cable news network with only a handful of viewers, has slightly increased his tiny audience. He has done this by pitching his show to True Believer neo-Marxists, the kind of loony left "Cossacks" who read the Daily KOS and Huffington Post on the Internet and contribute to MoveOn.org. Olbermann's notion of political discussion is to hurl infantile personal insults at everyone to the right of Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean. Needless to say, he has been promoted as a rising star by comrades in the leftist press, from The New York Times to The Washington Post-owned magazine Newsweek. America's left-wing media used to have a monopoly dominance that enabled its PsyOps to drown out all dissenting voices with noise. But as Kosko's new book notes, certain kinds of noise paradoxically can make other signals easier to hear. The left-wing media's noise has become so strident, screeching, and monolithic that American ears are tuning out and seeking more honest sounds.
Editor's note:
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||
Print Page 
Forward Page 
|
| All Rights Reserved © 2008 NewsMax.Com |