A delegation of politicians and community activists gathered on August 7 in La Leonesa, a small farm town in Argentina, to hear Dr. Andres Carrasco speak about a study linking a popular herbicide to birth defects in Argentina’s agricultural areas.

But the presentation never happened. A mob of about 100 people attacked the delegation before they could reach the local school where the talk was to be held.

Dr. Carrasco and a colleague locked themselves in a car as the mob yelled threats and beat on the vehicle for two hours. One delegate was hit in the spine and has since suffered lower-body paralysis. Another person was treated for blows to the head. A former provincial human rights official was hit in the face and knocked unconscious.

Witnesses said the angry crowd had ties to local officials and agribusiness bosses, and police made little effort to stop the violence, according to human rights group Amnesty International.

Carrasco is a lead embryologist at the University of Buenos Aires Medical School and the Argentinean national research council. His study, first released in 2009 and published in the United States this past summer, shows that glyphosate-based herbicides like Monsanto’s popular Roundup formula caused deformations in chicken embryos that resembled the kind of birth defects being reported in areas like La Leonesa, where big agribusinesses depend on glyphosate to treat genetically engineered crops.

The deformations resulted from much lower doses of herbicide than those commonly found on crops, according to the study.

Biotech chemical giant Monsanto patented glyphosate under the trade name Roundup in the 1970′s. The billion-dollar product is a main source of Monsanto’s revenue and one of the most widely used herbicides in the world. One Monsanto blogger recently wrote that decades of success has made the Roundup brand name and glyphosate “interchangeable similar to the case of facial tissue and the brand name Kleenex.”

Carrasco’s report was largely ignored in the mainstream American media, but gained international attention among those opposed to genetically modified (GM) crops like Monstano’s Roundup Ready crops, which are genetically engineered to tolerate the glyphosate-based herbicides.

The report is not the first to show that glyphosate herbicides like Roundup are more dangerous than government regulators and Monsanto have claimed, and Carrasco is not the first scientist to face intimidation after challenging the biotech industry, although he is the first to be threatened with violence.

Nevertheless, his report made an impact: journalists covered the results, environmentalists petitioned Argentina’s high court to ban glyphosate and the government of the Argentinean province of Chaco began studying an eerie increase in birth defects and child cancer near the soy and rice fields sprayed with thousands of gallons of herbicide.

According to a spring 2010 report released by the Chaco government, an increase in birth defects and child cancer cases coincided with years of agricultural expansion and increased herbicide use in the province. The number of child cancer cases in La Leonesa, the small town where Carrasco and the other concerned citizens were attacked, has tripled from 2000 to 2009 and the number of birth defects in the province nearly quadrupled during that time, according to the report.

The report acknowledges that some local agribusinesses were unlawfully spraying herbicides too close to residential populations, but the Chaco study soon caught the attention of researchers across the world.

In September, an international coalition of scientists released a report citing the attack in La Leonesa and human tragedy in Chaco as proof that Roundup and genetically engineered soy crops are dangerous and unsustainable. The report provides a conclusive rebuttal to the industry’s claims that spraying mutant crops with chemicals is the best way to feed the world. It’s just another chapter in an information war that has raged for more than a decade, pitting independent scientists and embattled whistleblowers against the world’s biggest biotech and petrochemical corporations.

Roundup and Monsanto

Monsanto has gained much of its international notoriety – or infamy, depending on whom you talk to – through its Roundup Ready line of crops that are genetically modified (GM) to be immune to the herbicide. To use the herbicide to combat weeds, farmers must buy patented Monsanto GM seeds with the genetic herbicide tolerant trait. Roundup herbicide is then sprayed to kill unwanted weeds, but the patented GM crops are spared.

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The Roundup Ready crop system was first made available in 1996. Since 2000, the percentage of Roundup Ready corn grown in the United States has exploded from 7 to 70 percent and now 93 percent of the soybeans grown in the US are GM, according to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).

Roundup accounts for about 40 percent of Monsanto’s annual revenues and is sprayed on about 12 million acres of American farmland each year. In April, Monsanto announced the completion of a $200 million expansion of its glyphosate production facility in Louisiana.

Monsanto’s Roundup Ready patent runs out in 2014, and the Justice Department began an antitrust investigation of Monsanto this year as its petrochemical competitors like DuPont clamor for a piece of the action. Monsanto has proven its tenacity in such disputes in the past; it forged new legal territory in the past decade, suing small farmers who saved Roundup Ready seeds or simply grew crops infected with GM traits after the patented Monsanto gene drifted and multiplied in their fields.

Superweeds

Monsanto’s domination of domestic agriculture has had a startling side effect in the fields: the rise of new glyphosate resistant weeds commonly called “superweeds.” Like the GM corn and soy, these weeds have bred themselves to tolerate Roundup and are invading farms across the country.

Monsanto shocked investors and environmentalists in October by announcing a new program that offers millions of dollars in rebates to farmers who combine Roundup with more herbicides manufactured by the company’s competitors to combat the glyphosate-resistant weeds threatening GM crops across the country.

The mere presence of superweeds and the fact that Monsanto is now paying farmers to spray additional chemicals that are more toxic than Roundup, is evidence of a complete regulatory breakdown, according to watchdog group Center for Food Safety (CFS).

In his September 30 testimony to Congress on superweeds, CFS senior policy analyst William Freese said that the USDA regulates GM crops and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulates herbicides, but there is no regulation of the combined system.

“And it is the system – the invariable use of glyphosate made possible and fostered by glyphosate-resistant seeds, for instance – that is responsible for the growing epidemic of glyphosate-resistant (GR) weeds,” Freese said in his testimony. “This is clearly demonstrated by the near complete absence of GR weeds for the first 20 plus years of glyphosate’s use and the explosion of weed resistance in the decade since the widespread adoption of Roundup Ready crop systems.”

Debate Gets Ugly

Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, has long been considered less toxic than other herbicides. The EPA considers glyphosate a noncarcinogen for humans and a chemical of relatively low toxicity.

Monsanto took the EPA’s initial evaluation and ran with it, and in 1996, the state of New York filed a lawsuit against Monsanto over an advertising campaign that claimed Roundup to be as safe as table salt.

In recent years, teams of independent scientists like Carrasco’s have come forward with studies showing that Roundup and glyphosate is more toxic than the regulators will admit. For years, Roundup critics charged that the “inert” ingredients like surfactants and solvents in Roundup and other glyphosate herbicides make the products more toxic to people and the environment.

Carrasco’s report, on the other hand, showed that glyphosate itself caused malformations in embryos similar to those found in humans who live in agricultural areas dominated by genetically engineered crops. The report establishes that the toxic “inert” ingredients made it easier for the glyphosate to invade cells and cause damage.

But Carrasco is not the first scientist to identify this relationship between glyphosate and Roundup’s “inert” ingredients.

Jeffrey Smith, GM critic and author of the books “Seeds of Deception” and “Genetic Roulette,” told Truthout that many scientists have been verbally threatened and denied tenure for publishing studies critical of Roundup and GM crops.

“The attack [on Carrasco] is the latest in a series of attempts to silence those who have discovered problems with Roundup,” Smith said.

Smith rattled off a list of scientists from Russia, Britain, the US, and beyond who have faced some kind of intimidation after going public with research on problems with GM foods and chemical products, including researcher Arpad Pusztai, who was famously relieved from his long-time position at a prominent Scottish research center in 1998 shortly after making public comments on potential problems with GM.

Smith is currently working with an international effort to support Gilles-Eric Seralini, a scientist at the University of Caen in France.

In 2009, Seralini and his team released a study showing that four different Roundup formulations diluted below suggested agricultural levels killed human placenta, umbilical chord and embryo cells.

“This clearly confirms that the [inert ingredients] in Roundup formulations are not inert,” Seralini’s team wrote. “Moreover, the proprietary mixtures available on the market could cause cell damage and even death around residual levels to be expected, especially in food and feed derived from [Roundup-treated] crops.”

Carrasco cited Seralini’s work in his groundbreaking study on glyphosate and birth defects.

Monsanto responded by calling Seralini’s research “political” and argued that the conditions of the study did not reflect real life conditions. One Monsanto blogger even compared a key “inert” ingredient identified by Seralini’s study to household soap.

Seralini and his team took on Monsanto again last year with a counteranalysis of lab data provided by Monsanto on the effects of three GM corn strains on lab rats. Seralini obtained the data after a German court ordered Monsanto to hand it over for review. Seralini’s team discovered that the original study poorly constructed and the results reported by Monsanto were misleading.

Seralini had basically refuted Monsanto’s ability to formally prove its GM products to be safe and that didn’t sit well with his peers who supported the industry.

Pro-GM scientists in France, including Seralini’s former colleague Marc Fellous of the French Association of Plant Biotechnology (AFBV), have since made public statements questioning Seralini’s credibility and calling him a “merchant of fear,” according to Seralini’s supporters in the European scientific community.

Smith said that the intimidation of scientists conducting independent research, whether coming from the industry or its researchers, sends a dangerous message to other scientists.

“There is an attitude that, if you dare do research in the field, then you are threatening your work and credibility,” Smith said.

As for Carrasco, the attack in La Leonesa did not keep him from speaking out. In September, just one month after being confronted by an angry mob, Carrasco was a featured speaker at the GMO-Free Europe conference.

Carrasco did not respond to a request for an interview.

Carrasco has his work cut out for him. On October 13, just days before initiating the plan to pay American farmers to use more herbicides, Monsanto announced that two more GM crops were approved in Argentina, according to a press release. Like the US, large Latin American countries like Argentina and Brazil are key growth markets for Monsanto.

This is the challenge facing Carrasco, Seralini, and others who use science to hold the biotech industry accountable for its push for control over the future of agriculture. Their stories show that taking on powerful financial interests of massive global corporations can be a difficult – and even dangerous – task: a war of information between those in search of profit and those in search of truth.

Former Gov. Jesse Ventura and his crew at Conspiracy Theory have blown the FEMA camp issue wide open in a truly groundbreaking episode from the program’s second season on TruTV. The “Police State” episode proves once and for all that the feds have trained to take on American citizens, planned for riots and disasters and made preparations to maintain order at any cost. Tune in this Friday, Nov. 12 at 10 PM Eastern/ 9 PM Central and leave the denial at the door.

This powerful episode is the largest and most in-depth investigation into FEMA camps to date– and it is scheduled to air on television. Radio host and filmmaker Alex Jones returns to the series yet again, as the team takes you to confirmed on-the-ground facilities, confronts the legislators who authorized FEMA camps and breaks down the full-scale technologically-integrated police state that includes Fusion Centers, FEMA, the Department of Homeland Security and more.

At one of many real and verified FEMA locations, Jesse Ventura and Alex Jones approach a “Residential Center” run by Homeland Security in central Texas where they find locked doors, double-fences and escape warnings around the entire perimeter. Further inside the facility, they witness a playground complex, swings and slides for children. The crew walks up to the front door and attempts to get some answers. But the officials refuse to either confirm or deny the facility’s purpose, including whether or not American citizens are being held inside. However, our past investigations into this facility reveal that it has confined both children and adults, including immigrants, refugee seekers and American citizens.

Despite hundreds of government documents identifying emergency and contingency plans, including plans to deal with mass fatalities, insurrection, internment and quarantines, Ventura and his team repeatedly encounter outrageous denial and avoidance by officials at every level. The mainstream media have avoided and downplayed these on-the-record plans for FEMA Camps and Homeland Security Emergency Facilities for years. Clearly, it is not meant to be a public relations talking point, and it is no surprise that members of Congress, including those who wrote the bill to create FEMA camps in America, are reluctant to discuss the matter.

So, Jesse Ventura, former Mayor and Governor, descends upon Washington to confront two important figures behind H.R. 645, the National Emergency Centers Establishment Act. Despite going through official channels, Ventura finds that Jim Gerlach (P-Pennsylvania) repeatedly “ducks” TV cameras and refuses to answer questions about H.R. 645.

Another Congressman who co-sponsored the bill starkly admits that FEMA camps exist, but rationalizes that they were put in place to deal with “happy children.” This bizarre admission is another confirmation that Congress and the leadership in Washington are out of touch with the oppressive measures that have been authorized against the American people.

Later, Ventura and Jones visit the Deep South and discover what appears to be an active cover-up to keep them from the truth. Outside the Atlanta, Georgia area is another confirmed location in FEMA’s disaster preparation network. They pay a visit to a facility storing thousands of plastic coffins where video has already confirmed the coffins in large numbers. Ventura and Jones discover upon arrival that a convoy of trucks has just left hauling away the evidence– thousands and thousands of liners the facility wanted to keep out of the way of cameras and public knowledge.

Various plastic coffin locations affiliated with FEMA, as well as plans for mass graves and large-scale fatalities, have been previously exposed and reported upon– including photographs sent by an Infowars listener of an Alabama facility in 2009 with thousands and thousands of plastic coffin liners. Why then would the officials in Georgia engage in such a desperate and hurried cover-up?

Further, the plans are already confirmed. DMORT and other divisions of Homeland Security have a contingency-structure in place to deal with mass fatalities and outbreaks in times of pandemics, natural disasters, terrorist attacks, national emergency or other disasters. Elements of these plans are in place on record, and coordinated via the 10 FEMA regions in the United States and via the “Fusion Centers” that are popping up at the Federal, State and Local levels all across the nation to spy on ordinary citizens.

National Guard to be deployed over 10 FEMA regions within the United States.
Concerned about the fact that these programs admittedly monitor ‘returning veterans,’ ‘Ron Paul, Bob Barr and Chuck Baldwin supporters’ and beyond, the TV show contacted a Fusion Center spokesman to find out more about why they are targeting ordinary Americans. Spokesman Lance Clem told the show point blank that these domestic intelligence gathering centers have no oversight. Clem shockingly admitted, “We police ourselves.”

The show’s producers have told Alex behind the scenes that this episode turned out to be the most exciting from its entire Second Season line-up. It not only confronts the FEMA camp issue head on, but uncovers significant reason to worry about the actions of Homeland Security and other agencies. At location after location, it is clear that its administrators are nervous to discuss what they are preparing, but it is clear from their records and public documents that they are preparing for something big. From TruTv’s episode guide:

“Police State” – NEW!
Premieres Fri, November 12 at 10P
It’s been said the government has a plan to declare martial law and round up millions of United State citizens into concentration camps. Jesse may have found a conspiracy in plain sight as he investigates the proliferation of law enforcement Fusion Centers around the country. And they may be connected to hundreds of detention centers ready to accept prisoners at the stroke of a Presidential pen.

Jerry Markon | WashingtonPost.com

A report by Inspector General Glenn A. Fine absolved the FBI of the most serious allegation: that domestic groups were targeted purely for their activism against the Iraq war and other political activity, which would have violated their First Amendment rights. Civil liberties groups and congressional Democrats had accused the FBI of employing such tactics during George W. Bush‘s administration.

But the report cited what it called “troubling” FBI practices in the Bush administration’s monitoring of domestic groups between 2001 and 2006. In one instance, the report said, FBI officials falsely said an agent photographed antiwar demonstrators as part of a terrorism investigation, which led FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III to unintentionally give incorrect information about the incident to Congress.

In another, agents investigated members of the environmental advocacy group Greenpeace over their protest activities “with little or no basis,” the report said. Agents kept the case open for more than three years, even though no charges were filed, and put the activists on a terrorist watch list, it said.

The groups that were monitored, which also include a Catholic organization that advocates for peace, compared the FBI’s actions to questionable domestic spying tactics the bureau usedagainst antiwar demonstrators and others in the 1960s under longtime director J. Edgar Hoover.

“The use of McCarthyite tactics against PETA and other groups that speak out against cruelty to animals and exploitative corporate and government practices is un-American, unconstitutional, and against the interests of a healthy democracy,” said a statement from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, an animal rights group that was among those monitored.

Ken Wainstein, former head of the Justice Department’s national security division, said the investigations of the groups reflect the FBI’s post-Sept. 11 challenge of transforming into an intelligence organization able to detect and dismantle terrorist plots.

“This isn’t McCarthyism or the excesses of the 1960s,” he said. “This is the Bureau developing the programs to be a fully functioning intelligence agency and trying not to step over the First Amendment lines in the process.”

FBI officials defended their tactics, saying they were trying to protect Americans. They noted that the express purpose of Fine’s report was to determine whether agents targeted activists purely for their political beliefs.

“After more than four years of investigation and an exhaustive review of hundreds of investigative decisions the FBI made after the September 11 attacks,” said FBI spokesman Michael P. Kortan, the report “did not uncover even a single instance where the FBI targeted any group or any individual based on the exercise of a First Amendment right.”

He added that although Fine had “disagreed with a handful of the FBI’s investigative determinations over the course of six years,” the inspector general “has not recommended any significant modifications to the FBI’s authority to investigate criminal conduct or national security threats.”

The FBI’s efforts to balance its fight against domestic terrorism with respect for the First Amendment have long been controversial. Under Hoover’s COINTELPRO program, halted in 1971, the bureau sought to monitor and disrupt leftist antiwar and civil rights groups by such tactics as infiltrating them with informants.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, that balance has been tested further. Civil liberties groups have long accused the bureau of overreacting to the hijackings by improperly monitoring antiwar demonstrators and environmental groups.

Fine’s investigation began in 2006 after the American Civil Liberties Union released documents, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, that it said showed that the FBI was monitoring left-leaning groups.

Michael German, an ACLU senior policy counsel and former FBI agent, said Fine’s report “clearly shows that the FBI was improperly spying on people’s First Amendment-protected activity, and that the FBI didn’t have enough internal controls to prevent abuse.”

Fine’s report says that in some cases, agents began investigations of people affiliated with activist groups for “factually weak” reasons. In others, the report said, the FBI extended probes “without adequate basis” and improperly kept information about activist groups in its files.

Much of the report is about a 2002 antiwar protest sponsored by the Thomas Merton Center, a Pittsburgh-based organization dedicated to promoting peace.

Mark Berry, a probationary FBI agent with little anti-terrorism experience, attended the rally and photographed demonstrators distributing leaflets. An internal FBI document said the bureau was investigating “Pittsburgh anti-war activity,” the report said.

After the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request, FBI officials seeking to respond produced an internal “routing slip” saying that Berry was monitoring a local Islamic leader and that his attendance was part of a terrorism probe.

Berry told Fine’s investigators that the routing slip was false, and Fine concluded that it was an “after-the-fact reconstruction that was not corroborated by any witnesses or contemporaneous documents.” Berry could not be located Monday night.

Plato’s Cave, one of human civilization’s most enduring narratives, is extremely relevant to understanding our celebrity-obsessed culture. A firm grasp of the meaning of illusion is crucial for our mental survival. Yet is our modern version all about illusion?

Plato‘s Cave: Version 2.0
In Empire of illusion: the End of Literary and the Triumph of Spectacle. Chris Hedges discusses the importance of the Allegory of Plato’s Cave to comprehending the implications of a culture awash in media entertainment.

In The Republic, Plato imagines human beings held prisoner in an underground cave: they are doomed to stare at a wall where shadows of carved animal figures are cast by a flickering fire.

These captives think that these shadow-images are reality. One prisoner is let free from the cave, goes outside, discovers the sun (actual reality), comes back to try to free the prisoners, but they are not interested. They prefer their illusions—their dark comfort zone—over the disturbing world of sun-drenched reality that blinds and disorients.

This Hedges says is like our modern society: “ We are chained to the flickering shadows of celebrity culture [ and] the lies of advertising , the endless personal dramas, many of them completely fictional, that have become the staple of news [ and ] celebrity gossip…”

The New Technology of Illusion
Certainly our modern cave is more hi-tech and wired. The Technology of Illusion has come a long way since ancient Greece. Gone are shadows, crudely carved puppets and fires, replaced by the Internet, High Definition Television,, various Personal Digital Devices (iPods, Blackberries, etc), and other electronic gadgets that fill our lives with images of glitz and glamour.

There is even a freedom of movement and communication not granted to the Prisoners in the Cave. We are wired to a vast global network full of people, not chained inside an isolated hole in the ground with assorted, smelly fellow captives.

We live in a giant open-air theatre–a spectacle- surrounded by the latest audio and visual technology- a “real life” showing of the film The Matrix (that, in fact, one critic William Irwin, has compared to a latter day depiction of Plato’s Cave).

However, our electronic communication systems also bring us important information—even literature and philosophy—not merely gossip about the latest celebrity scandals. . The Web has many sites where interested people can explore philosophical and literary texts. This New Technology of Illusion seems to be more than just a hi-tech version of Plato’s Cave.

The Analogy of the Torture Chamber without Walls (but without pain)
Perhaps a more appropriate analogy -that would still capture Plato’s key point- is that of our hi-tech world of “Reality” programming is a kind of torture chamber without walls. If the prisoners in Plato’s Cave are suffering from a kind of torture resembling sensory deprivation, then we are being tortured by endless sensory overload, bombarded by streams of celebrity images and facile entertainment: Reality Deprivation

But it is not about receiving excessive pain inflicted in dank dungeons, but being distracted by nonstop pleasures in a shiny pleasure dome without walls. Aldous Huxley’s vision of the future, as articulated in his 1932 novel Brave New World, seems to be advancing faster every day.

Social critic Neil Postman in his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business argued that Aldous Huxley, not George Orwell had been correct about cultural and social trends. In Orwell’s vision people are controlled by inflicting pain while in Huxley’s Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure.

No one would need to ban books as Big Brother did in 1984.People,distracted by trivial pleasures, would simply lose interest. Orwell feared that our Political Masters would ban information while Huxley feared those who would give us so much information that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.

There is a further key difference: we are our own jailers/ torturers because we choose to consume the images offered by the Master Programmers who manage our new Plato’s Cave. The Internet offers,as noted, more than just distraction and celebrity gossip,but we prefer to remain in the shadows.

A congressionally-mandated commission says the United States has an “urgent” need to implement changes in the way the U.S. Department of Defense plans for and would respond to a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive (CBRNE) incident.

The report of the “Advisory Panel on Department of Defense Capabilities for Support of Civil Authorities After Certain Incidents” provides more than 40 recommendations about how the nation can overcome obstacles that complicate the nation’s ability to respond effectively to CBRNE incidents.

The study, “Before Disaster Strikes – Imperatives for Enhancing Defense Support of Civil Authorities,” focuses mostly on the military-civil response issues which are generally beyond the subject matter of the blog. But I did want to mention the report for two reasons: 1) a statement made by the panel chair Adm. Steve Abbot in the RAND Corporation press release about the inevitability of such a major attack (”such an incident will happen”), and 2) while the military-civil emergency response balance is not a subject the average American needs to know in detail there is some value for the government to at least expose them to what is in fact what would be significant issue in the event of a crisis.

The panel’s full report can be found here.

The Pentagon says it plans to spend $100 million on air base expansions in Afghanistan with construction efforts continuing into at least 2011.

Despite growing disaffection with the war and President Obama’s pledge to begin withdrawing U.S. troops in July 2011, many of the projected installations have extended completion deadlines, The Washington Post reported Sunday.

All three of the bases are for the sole use of U.S. forces.

The House and Senate Appropriations committees have approved requests for an additional $1.3 billion for multiyear construction of military facilities in Afghanistan, the Post reported. The vote has yet to go before the full Senate.

The United States has already set aside $5.3 billion to build facilities for the Afghan army and national police, with most of the “enduring facilities … scheduled for construction over the next three to four years,” a Pentagon release said.

Troop withdrawal in 2011 does not mean the end of combat operations, as the three new projected bases indicate, the Post reported.

The broader expansion of U.S. air facilities all over Afghanistan will be used for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance using helicopters, manned and unmanned aircraft.

Yet another writing has surfaced authored by current science czar John P. Holdren, detailing his enduring vision of a depopulated planet and the global efforts that should be made to accomplish it. Although described in detail in Ecoscience and other publications from the 70s, this new find proves once again and beyond a shadow of a doubt that the fox has far from lost his eugenic tricks.

In a 1992 Cambridge Press Publication Energy Efficiency and Human Activity: Past Trends, Future Prospects, cosponsored by the Stockholm Environment Institute, John P. Holdren wrote a 52 page prologue called “The Transition to Costlier Energy”. In it, he repeats his long-cherished vision of a planetary regime under which population control would be implemented more effectively. From page 36 onward:

“(…) the population can’t be frozen. Indeed, short of a catastrophe, it can hardly be levelled off below 9 billion. Indeed, without a global effort at population limitation far exceeding anything that has materialized so far, the population of the planet could soar to 14 billion or more by the year 2100.”

Besides also mentioning to attempt reducing the world’s population to “manageable levels”, Holdren also pleads for a narrowing the “Rich-Poor gap”. Sounds noble enough, were it not that he is regurgitating Agenda 21: the UN program to redistribute wealth from the developed to the developing world. Holdren:

“What is most striking (…) is that even the most optimistic assumptions about “early” population stabilization, increased energy efficiency, and narrowing the rich-poor gap still lead to world energy use in 2050 more than double that of 1990.”

Early population stabilization isn’t early enough, according to the current science czar. At the end of his contribution, he gives thanks to Mr. Paul Ehrlich for “helpful suggestions”. This,of course, is the same Ehrlich with which Holdren authored the notorious Ecoscience- in which they both openly call for a plethora of dehumanizing measures to reduce the world’s population under a planetary regime. Besides having worked on the Ecoscience monstrosity, Holdren and Ehrlich also cooperated on the article Human Population and the Global Environment. In the last paragraph of the article, Holdren and Ehrlich declare acceleration on human population control efforts:

“There is a temptation”, the authors declare, “to “go slow” on population limitation because this component is politically sensitive and operationally difficult, but the temptation must be resisted.”

We know that these ideas have not faded in recent years. As recent as 2006, Holdren maintained the need to curb our numbers and introduce a “substantial carbon tax.” In a PowerPoint presentation in 2003, under the header “My own conclusions & recommendations, Holdren even calls for a global carbon tax:

“The most effective way to achieve this would be through a global carbon tax or equivalent cap-and-trade approach.”

How many examples of this talk on global efforts on population reduction and global carbon taxes does it take to dethrone this character- and by doing so, show the world that eugenics rules still.

A software company is developing revolutionary software which provides the ability to identify people from photographs posted on the internet.

Face.com has produced technology that can identify individuals on social networking sites and online galleries by comparing their image against a known picture of them.

It means detailed profiles of individuals can be built up purely from online photographs and critics have said it could lead to exploitation by employers.

The software works be creating an algorithim of the face – a measurement of the arrangement of features including the eyes, nose and mouth.

The company says it is 90 per cent accurate when scanning typical images which appear on social networking sites.

Face.com has previously limited the availability of the software over concerns about invasion of privacy.

But it has now released the Photo Finder software to developers building applications allowing people to search for anyone on the internet.

Gil Hirsch, chief executive of Face.com, told The Sunday Times: ‘We have launched a service that allows developers to take our facial recognition technology and apply it immediately to their own applications.

‘The technology is already being used by 5,000 developers. You can basically search for people in any photo.

‘You could search for family members on Flickr, in newspapers, or in videos on YouTube – but it would take a lot of processing power.’

The use of facial detection technology has only been used by the UK Border Agency.

Google has a tool – Picasa – which allows users to organise their photos by tagging matching faces and Facebook uses Photo Finder.

Supporters of the software, including the Red Cross, have said it could be used to track people lost in humanitarian disasters.

But there are strong concerns over the accuracy of the technology and its impact on privacy.

Simon Davies, director of Privacy International, said: ‘I think this will make many people very uneasy.

‘The regulators have been hugely behind the curve of protecting people’s privacy on the internet. We need to push for much tighter international rules.’

I know that the Green Goosesteppers mean well.

I know that they are saving the world from itself and preserving it for those who currently need to chew gum and smoke pot simultaneously in order to pass from one hour to the next.

However, I am a little concerned that, as we are all increasingly placed under surveillance, we will soon be called out for our supposed moral, as well as legal, deficiencies.

Please, for example, look at Cleveland. I don’t know whether the city has decided to climb the Mount of Moral High Ground because of the departure of the slightly self-regarding LeBron James. However, the city is currently instituting a technological trash surveillance program that might portend a future in which we will all tremble at the thought that more than 10 percent of our regular trash might have been recyclable.

You see, according to Cleveland.com, the city has decided to make an offer that your refuse cannot refuse. It has embedded chips in carts, so that those nice people who take away the trash can monitor how often your recyclable cart has been brought to the curb for servicing.

Should you fail to wheel out your nice, no doubt green-colored, bin for a few weeks, the trash collectors will dig into your regular trash to see whether it might contain more than the magic number of 10 percent of material that might be actually worthy of recycling. Should your trash show an 11 percent figure, you may be fined $100.

The Cleveland City Council is spending $2.5 million on these high-tech bins, in addition to money it has already spent on a pilot program.

I have a very emotional relationship to trash. I was once a trash collector, and the whole of our crew used to spend most of its time stopping the crusher at regular intervals to inspect the contents of almost every emptied trash can. We would find radios, fur coats, and all sorts of items that we then sold for quite a considerable amount.
We would compensate for this additional time by claiming that all the roads were blocked on Fridays, so the city had to send a special truck out while we took the day off.

So I know just what it means to go through someone’s trash in search of additional income. Which, I suspect, might also be a motivation for the Cleveland City Council. You see, much as we should all have faith in the council’s green credentials, Cleveland.com also informs us that the city pays $30 a ton to dump ordinary garbage. It makes, however, $26 a ton by selling recyclables.
So how heartening it will be for those fined $100 to know that this money will go some way to compensating the city for its lost revenue.

Visitors at the Coca Cola Village Amusement Park in Israel got a taste of Facebook in the real world when they were handed RFID-enabled Facebook bracelets. These bracelets allowed people to login into their Facebook accounts and then “like” the various attractions and recreational activities in the amusement park that would show up on their Facebook profiles. And since “tagging” is a big feature in Facebook, all the visitors had to do was flash their bracelets when the resident photographer takes their photo which would auto-tag them in the uploaded image on Facebook.