Nazi Super Science

Pentagon to make 'immortal organisms'

2010-02-08T05:51:00.000-08:00

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=118127§ionid=3510203

Press TV
Sun, 07 Feb 2010 14:58 EST

The Pentagon's advanced research division has allocated $6 million to create immortal synthetic organisms, which can die on command and keep a genetic record of what they have been doing, a report says.

Based on the 2011 budget of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the project, known as 'BioDesign,' aims to create artificial life, presumably with military purposes, Wired News reported.

The DNA of these genetically engineered organisms is altered to "produce the intended biological effect." These changes will ideally prevent cell death but induce the 'self-destruct option' in case of malfunction or falling into the wrong hands.

While genetic serial numbers enable the cells to be tracked, the genetic locks created in these "tamper proof" cells prevent enemies from reprogramming the cells.

"BioDesign eliminates the randomness of natural evolutionary advancement primarily by advanced genetic engineering and molecular biology technologies to produce the intended biological effect," the DARPA document stated.

DARPA scientists believe their findings will help "robust understanding of the collective mechanisms that contribute to cell death" so as to "enable a new generation of regenerative cells that could ultimately be programmed to live indefinitely."

The report said that the project received mixed reactions from experts who did not know what to make of it.

Secretary of Defense Reveals Earthquake and Volcano Weapons

2010-02-01T13:14:00.001-08:00

http://thememoryhole.org/mil/cohen-ecoweapons.htm

The Memory Hole
Mon, 07 Sep 2009 00:29 EDT

This one might seem beyond belief, but we have it from none other than a sitting Secretary of Defense.

In April 1997, then-Defense Secretary William Cohen was speaking at a terrorism conference at the University of Georgia. After some introductory remarks about the conference, Cohen takes questions from the media in attendance. A reporter asks a question based on the fake anthrax letters that had recently been sent to B'nai Brith. Cohen gives a strange answer, using the occasion to mention the exotic weapons being developed by terrorists (as well as--one would assume--governments).

Here's the exchange, taken verbatim from the transcript posted on the Defense Department's Website:
Q: Let me ask you specifically about last week's scare here in Washington, and what we might have learned from how prepared we are to deal with that (inaudible), at B'nai Brith.

A: Well, it points out the nature of the threat. It turned out to be a false threat under the circumstances. But as we've learned in the intelligence community, we had something called -- and we have James Woolsey here to perhaps even address this question about phantom moles. The mere fear that there is a mole within an agency can set off a chain reaction and a hunt for that particular mole which can paralyze the agency for weeks and months and years even, in a search. The same thing is true about just the false scare of a threat of using some kind of a chemical weapon or a biological one. There are some reports, for example, that some countries have been trying to construct something like an Ebola Virus, and that would be a very dangerous phenomenon, to say the least. Alvin Toeffler has written about this in terms of some scientists in their laboratories trying to devise certain types of pathogens that would be ethnic specific so that they could just eliminate certain ethnic groups and races; and others are designing some sort of engineering, some sort of insects that can destroy specific crops. Others are engaging even in an eco- type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves.

So there are plenty of ingenious minds out there that are at work finding ways in which they can wreak terror upon other nations. It's real, and that's the reason why we have to intensify our efforts, and that's why this is so important.
The entire transcript can be accessed at the Defense Department's Website here. It is also available below:

DoD News Briefing
Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen
Monday, April 28, 1997 - 8:45 a.m. EDT

Cohen's keynote address at the Conference on Terrorism, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and U.S. Strategy at the Georgia Center, Mahler Auditorium, University of Georgia, Athens, Ga. The event is part of the Sam Nunn Policy Forum being hosted by the University of Georgia. Secretary Cohen is joined by Sen. Sam Nunn and Sen. Richard G. Lugar.]

Secretary Cohen: Senator Nunn, thank you very much. As Senator Nunn has indicated, he and I have worked for many years together, along with Senator Lugar. The two of these gentlemen I feel are perhaps the most courageous and visionary to have served in the Senate. They were largely responsible, of course, for adopting the so-called Nunn/Lugar legislation.

I'll comment on that later during the course of the morning, but I've had occasion to meet with a number of Russian counterparts, and as we go through various translations of the communications that we're having, the two words they are able to articulate very clearly, they say 'Nunn/Lugar, Nunn/Lugar. So they know exactly what that means, and that means the Cooperative Thre'at Reduction Act that these two gentlemen were indispensable in shepherding through the United States Congress.

It was Nunn/Lugar I that dealt with the reduction of nuclear weapons between the United States and the Soviet Union in terms of trying to come to grips with how we helped the Russians dismantle hundreds of their nuclear weapons, and also helped them with their destruction of chemical weapons. But they, of course, have looked beyond simply that particular relationship, which is very important, but also looking to the future that we face as far as the rise of terrorism -- both international and domestic; and finding ways in which the Department of Defense can become involved in helping local states and local agencies to deal with the threat of terrorism which is quite likely to increase in the coming years.

It's a pleasure for me to be here. Both Senator Nunn and Senator Lugar are close friends and I look forward to, I think, a very productive seminar. Once again demonstrating that although Senator Nunn has left public service in the Senate, he has not left public service as far as the nation is concerned.

It's a pleasure for me to be here, Sam.

Senator Nunn: Thank you very much, Bill.

. ..Let me ask if there are any questions for Secretary of Defense Cohen.

Q: The dual containment policy in Iran and Iraq, do you think that's conducive to regional stability in that region? And do you think can cause further terrorism in the United States? That type of containment policy in the Middle East.

A: I think Secretary Albright articulated our policy as far as dealing with Iraq, that it's clear that we have been unable to strike any kind of a productive relationship with Saddam Hussein, and as soon as Saddam Hussein is no longer the head of that government, that there's new regime that follows him, that we will look forward to finding ways in which we could engage them in a much more productive fashion, particularly after they comply with all of the UN sanctions. There's an eagerness on our part to do that. But I think as long as he remains in office as the head of that state, it's unlikely that we could have anything but the current policy in place, with very little prospects for relief.

With respect to Iran, I think Iran continues to present a long term threat to the region. They are acquiring and have acquired weapons of mass destruction, substantial levels of chemicals and we believe biological weapons as well. They have made an effort to acquire nuclear capability. So I think that our policy of dual containment is the right one, and we are going to encourage our allies to support that one.

Q: What does it mean that Clinton (inaudible) proliferation?

A: To the extent that we see the level of communication available today, the Internet and other types of interwoven communicative skills and abilities, we're going to see information continue to spread as to how these weapons can be, in fact, manufactured in a home-grown laboratory, as such. So it's a serious problem as far as living in the information age that people who are acquiring this kind of information will not act responsibly, but rather act in a terrorist type of fashion.

We've seen by way of example of the World Trade Center the international aspects of international terrorism coming to our home territory. We've also seen domestic terrorism with the Oklahoma bombing. So it's a real threat that's here today. It's likely to intensify in the years to come as more and more groups have access to this kind of information and the ability to produce them.

Q: How prepared is the U.S. Government to deal with (inaudible)?

A: I think we have to really intensify our efforts. That's the reason for the Nunn/Lugar II program. That's the reason why it's a local responsibility, as such, but the Department of Defense is going to be taking the lead as far as supervising the interagency working groups, and to make the assessments as to what needs to be done. So we're going to identify those 120 cities and work with them very closely to make sure that they can prepare themselves for what is likely to be a threat well into the future.

Q: Let me ask you specifically about last week's scare here in Washington, and what we might have learned from how prepared we are to deal with that (inaudible), at B'nai Brith.

A: Well, it points out the nature of the threat. It turned out to be a false threat under the circumstances. But as we've learned in the intelligence community, we had something called -- and we have James Woolsey here to perhaps even address this question about phantom moles. The mere fear that there is a mole within an agency can set off a chain reaction and a hunt for that particular mole which can paralyze the agency for weeks and months and years even, in a search. The same thing is true about just the false scare of a threat of using some kind of a chemical weapon or a biological one. There are some reports, for example, that some countries have been trying to construct something like an Ebola Virus, and that would be a very dangerous phenomenon, to say the least.

Alvin Toeffler has written about this in terms of some scientists in their laboratories trying to devise certain types of pathogens that would be ethnic specific so that they could just eliminate certain ethnic groups and races; and others are designing some sort of engineering, some sort of insects that can destroy specific crops. Others are engaging even in an eco- type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves.

So there are plenty of ingenious minds out there that are at work finding ways in which they can wreak terror upon other nations. It's real, and that's the reason why we have to intensify our efforts, and that's why this is so important.

Q: What is response to (inaudible)?

A: We hope we will have access to the defector. In fact I was recently in South Korea and talked with various officials in South Korea. As soon as they complete their own interrogation of this defector, we will have access to that individual. But much of what he has said to date is reflected in the writings that he prepared last year. This is prior to his defection.

One would not expect a potential defector to be writing about anything other than what the official doctrine or dogma is of the North Korean government at that time. He is saying essentially what we have known for a long, long time. Namely, that North Korea poses a very serious threat against South Korea, and potentially even Japan, by virtue of having the fourth largest army in the world, by having 600,000 or more troops poised within 100 kilometers of Seoul, of possessing many SCUD missiles, also the potential of chemically armed warheads, the attempt to acquire nuclear weapons.

So we know they have this potential, and the question really is going to be what's in their hearts and minds at this point? Do they intend to try to launch such an attack in the immediate, foreseeable future? That we can only speculate about, but that's the reason why we are so well prepared to defend against such an attack to deter it; and to send a message that it would be absolutely an act of suicide for the North Koreans to launch an attack. They could do great damage in the short run, but they would be devastated in response. So we're hoping we can find ways to bring them to the bargaining table -- the Party of Four Talks -- and see if we can't put them on a path toward peace instead of threatening any kind of devastating attack upon the South.

Q: . ..a little bit about the situation in (inaudible)?

A: I really don't have much more information than has been in the press at this point. The Department has not been called upon to act in this regard just yet, so I'm not at liberty to give you any more information than you already have.

Q: . ..the Administration's plans to expand NATO to more European countries. Is there a terrorism element? Or will expanding NATO help you in any way in terms of (inaudible)? Or is it really unrelated?

A: I think the two are unrelated. There is a legitimate debate that will take place in terms of the pace of enlargement or whether there should be enlargement. Secretary Albright and I testified last week before the Senate Armed Services Committee, and it was a very, I think, productive debate. It's something that Senator Nunn, I think, feels very strongly about as well. The two of us, I think, found ourselves on the Senate Floor last year saying it was time for the American people to start debating this issue. So it's very important and there will be legitimate differences of opinion, but it's important that we bring this to the Senate for full debate and disclosure, and bring it to the American people. But I doubt if it's related to the spread of terrorism whatsoever.

Senator Nunn: Thank you very much.

Haiti’s Earthquake: Natural or Engineered?

2010-01-30T05:21:00.000-08:00

http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/01/haitis-earthquake-natural-or-engineered/

by Stephen Lendman / January 29th, 2010

Human activity can cause destructive harm. Columbia University geophysical hazards research scientist, Christian Klose, studies how, including from mining. In a recent paper, he said:

“mining activities disturb the in-situ stress in the upper continental crust and can trigger earthquakes (human-triggered seismicity).”

Past examples are numerous:

from potash and other mining in Germany since the 19th century;
potash mining in Bulgaria;
copper mining in Silesia;
ore mining in Russia;
coal and other mining in various parts of America, including New York state, Pennsylvania, and Wyoming; and
coal and other mining in China and throughout the world.
Klose also says geophysical data suggest that the Zipingpu Dam, a few kilometers from the epicenter of China’s 7.9 magnitude 2008 earthquake, likely triggered it. In a December 2008 presentation at the American Geophysical Union, he explained:

“Several geophysical observations suggest this (quake) was triggered by local and abnormal mass imbalances on the surface of the Earth’s crust. These observations include (1) elastostatic response of the crust to the mass changes, (2) slip distribution of the main rupture, and (3) aftershock distribution.”

A follow-up issue of Science magazine explained further stating:

“the added weight both eased the squeeze on the fault, weakening it, and increased the stress tending to rupture (it). The effect was 25 times that of a year’s worth of natural stress loading from tectonic motions. When the fault did finally rupture, it moved just the way the reservoir loading had encouraged it to….”

Klose also says that two centuries of coal mining triggered the 1989 Newcastle, Australia quake, killing 13 and causing billions of dollars in damage. Data show that increased post-WW II production “dramatic(ally increased) the stress change in the crust,” setting it off and raising questions about how mining operates.

“You have two chances to avoid this, whether you reduce the hazard or reduce the vulnerability – so whether you mine in a more sustainable way or have urban planning in other areas away from the mining regions.”

In addition, Klose estimates that human activity caused one-fourth of Britain’s quakes, not just from mining. An Andrew Alden geology.about.com article headlined, “Earthquakes in a Nutshell” says:

“Earthquakes are natural ground motions caused as the Earth releases energy. The science of earthquakes is seismology (the study of shaking). Earthquake energy comes from the stresses of plate tectonics. As plates move, the rocks on their edges deform and take up strain until the weakest point, a fault, ruptures and releases the strain.”

Five major types of human activity cause them:

(1) Damn construction

Since water is heavier than air, the crust beneath it is greatly stressed, easily setting off shocks that mostly are moderate. University of Alaska seismologist Larry Gedney explained:

“Since the (Hoover Dam) reached its peak of 475 feet in 1939, the level of seismicity has fluctuated in direct response to water level. None of the shocks have been particularly damaging – the largest was about magnitude 5 – but the area had no record of being seismically active.”

Klose says dams cause about one-third of human-caused quakes. No wonder given their global proliferation, 845,000 according to Discover magazine, including 80,000 in America. Hoover Dam is the largest, storing 1.2 trillion cubic feet of water. China’s Three Gorges Dam is the world’s largest, holding back 1.4 trillion cubic feet. In 1967, a human-triggered 7.0 magnitude western India quake may have been caused by the Koyna Dam. If so, damns in seismically active areas may be more destructive than believed.

(2) Liquid injection into the ground

In 1951, the US Army constructed Basin F at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal to handle 243 million gallons of contaminated liquid chemical wastes in about a 93 acre area. In 1961, another way was chosen — by drilling a 12,000-foot deep well in the Rocky Mountains to inject napalm toxic waste into the earth’s crust. From 1962-1966, 165 million gallons went in, likely triggering regional quakes and getting the Army to shut it down. According to seismologist Dave Wolney:

“If you are doing deep well injection, you are altering the stress on the underlying rocks and at some point, (it) will be relieved by generating an earthquake.”

Klose also worries about carbon dioxide sequestration, a process of compressing CO2 from coal plants and injecting it into underground deposits. They, too, can generate quakes close to cities, as that’s where facilities are located.

(3) Coal mining

Coal provides over half of America’s electricity and an even larger percentage in China. Mines produce millions of tons annually, extract up to a dozen times as much water as coal, and cause huge regional mass changes. They, in turn, increase stress that can cause quakes as explained above. According to Klose, mining produces over half of recorded ones.

(4) Oil and gas drilling

A June 23, 2009 New York Times article headlined, “Deep in Bedrock, Clean Energy and Quake Fears,” explaining that former oil man, Markus O. Haring, drilled a hole three miles deep in Basel, Switzerland prospecting for clean, renewable energy deep within the earth’s bedrock. On December 8, 2006, an earthquake terrified residents who remembered the devastating one striking the city 650 years earlier.

Haring terminated his project, but a US start-up company, AltaRock Energy, will use the same technology to drill deep into quake-prone areas two hours’ drive north of San Francisco for geothermal energy. The Energy Department backs it with more than $36 million, and several large venture capital firms are involved, despite the risk.

According the the Times:

The California project is the first of dozens that could be operating in the United States in the next several years, driven by a push to cut emissions of heat-trapping gases and the Obama administration’s support for renewable energy. Using the Basel method, it’s hoped a breakthrough can be achieved, even though it’s known that large quakes occur at great depths.

Three of the largest human-caused ones happened near an Uzbekistan natural gas field, the result of liquid extraction and injection changing its tectonic action. The most severe one registered 7.3, and according to Russian scientists:

“Few will deny that there is a relationship between hydrocarbon recovery and seismic activity, but exactly how strong a relationship exists has yet to be determined.”

In regions with high tectonic activity, like northern California near San Francisco or Haiti around Port-au-Prince, extraction could trigger severe quakes. It’s believed Haiti has significant oil, gas, and other mineral deposits, including gold, copper, and coal. Perhaps drilling around Port-au-Prince bay, the Gulf of La Gonave, and the Island of La Gonave set off the quake, why US occupation and human neglect are related to it, and why America, France, Canada and other nations seek to profit from disaster.

(5) Large building construction

On December 2, 2005 Kate Ravilious’ UK Guardian article headlined, “Skyscraper that may cause earthquakes.” It referred to Taipei 101 in Taiwan, the world’s tallest building at 1,667 feet, weighing 700,000 tons. According to National Taiwan Normal University geologist Cheng Horng Lin, the building’s stress may have reopened an ancient fault. Before its construction, the Taipei basin was very stable with no surface ones. Thereafter, “The number of earthquakes increased to around two micro-earthquakes per year during the construction period (1997-2003). After completion, two larger quakes were registered, strong enough to feel at magnitudes 3.8 and 3.2.”

Lin believes that “the considerable stress might be transferred into the upper crust due to the extremely soft sedimentary rocks beneath the Taipei basin. Deeper down this may have reopened an old earthquake fault.”

Other experts are more cautious. UCLA quake expert John Vidale says “A building will change the stress on the ground under the building, but this probably won’t reach down to around 10km, the level where earthquakes occur.” Compared with dams, coal mining, oil drilling, and underground waste deposits, skyscrapers cause minor stress to the earth’s surface. Klose shares that view.

Other Earthquake Causes

A January 23, 2010 Pravda online article headlined, “US weapon test aimed at Iran caused Haiti quake,” stating:

“An unconfirmed report by the Russian Northern Fleets says the Haiti earthquake was caused by a flawed US Navy ‘earthquake weapons’ test before (they) could be utilized against Iran. (Something) went ‘horribly wrong’ and caused the catastrophic quake in the Caribbean, the website of Venezuela’s ViVe TV recently reported, citing the Russian report.”

After its release, Hugo Chavez called it a drill, preparing to cause an earthquake in Iran. [According to Athelo News: "All quotes subsequently attributed to Chavez regarding Haiti and earthquake weapons ... none of which was ever uttered by Chavez." -- Ed.] Russia Today said Moscow has the same weapons. The unconfirmed Russian report said America carried out a similar test in the Pacific Ocean, causing a 6.5 magnitude quake near Eureka, CA. No deaths or injuries were reported, but many buildings were damaged.

ViVe said the US Navy may have had “full knowledge” of the test’s damage potential, and speculated it was why Deputy Southern Command General PK Keen was in Haiti when the quake struck, preparing to act in case of a disaster, perhaps an engineered one. In his January 21 Global Research article, Michel Chossudovsky said:

“A Haiti disaster relief scenario had been envisaged at the headquarters of US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) in Miami one day prior to the earthquake (since) pre-disaster simulations pertain(ing) to the impacts of a hurricane in Haiti” were conducted.

A “communication-information tool” called the Transnational Information Sharing Cooperation project (TISC) “links non-government organizations with the United States (government and military) and other nations for tracking, coordinating and organizing relief efforts.”

When the quake struck, TISC was in “an advanced stage of readiness.” The next day, SOUTHCOM implemented the system. “The (DOD’s) Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA)” set up a relief effort among “a range of Defense units and various” NGOs and aid groups operating “as part of a carefully planned military operation.” Did DOD have advance knowledge of the quake so could act immediately when it struck? Was the drill’s timing a coincidence or something more sinister?

On the morning of September 11, 2001, the CIA was running “a pre-planned simulation to explore the emergency response issues that would be created if a plane were to strike a building.” Held at the Agency’s Chantilly, Virginia Reconnaissance Office, it simulated a small jet hitting one of its four towers after supposedly experiencing mechanical failure. The media ignored it the way it’s suppressing the January 11 drill. It raises serious questions and great suspicions.

Earlier in October 2000, the Defense Protective Services Police and Pentagon’s Command Emergency Response Team conducted another exercise, simulating a plane striking the Pentagon — called “the Pentagon Mass Casualty Exercise.” Coincidence again, or were these drills part of readiness planning for 9/11, with advance knowledge of what was coming? Was similar Haiti planning also preparatory to the Pentagon’s militarized takeover? Was the catastrophe natural or engineered, and is there another way to trigger it?

HAARP Technology: High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program

HAARP manipulates the atmosphere, climate, and weather for military purposes. Based in Gokona, Alaska, it’s a jointly managed US Air Force/Navy weather warfare program, operating since 1992, yet the HAARP web site explains its purpose as follows:

HAARP is a scientific endeavor aimed at studying the properties and behavior of the ionosphere (the atmosphere’s upper layer), with particular emphasis on being able to understand and use it to enhance communications and surveillance systems for both civilian and defense purposes. (It will be used) to induce a small, localized change in ionospheric temperature so that resulting reactions can be studied by other instruments located either at or close to the HAARP site.

According to Rosalie Bertell, a distinguished scientific expert and president of the International Institute of Concern for Public Health:

HAARP functions as “a gigantic heater that can cause major disruptions in the ionosphere, creating not just holes, but long incisions in the protective layer that keeps deadly radiation from bombarding the planet.”

Writing in Earthpulse Press on November 5, 1996, Bertell explained that:

Military interest in space became intense during and after World War II because of the introduction of rocket science, the companion of nuclear technology…. During this time of intensive atmospheric nuclear testing, explosions at various levels above and below the surface of the earth were tried. Some of the now familiar descriptions of the earth’s protective atmosphere… were based on information gained through stratospheric and ionospheric experimentation.

Numerous projects preceded HAARP, including:

– Project Argus in 1958 “to assess the impact of high altitude nuclear explosions on radio transmission and radar operations,” and learn more about the geomagnetic field;

– Project Starfish in 1962, using nuclear detonations to disrupt the ionosphere and assess the effects on the earth’s magnetic field;

– SPS: Solar Power Satellite Project in 1968, using Solar Powered Satellites in geostationary orbit 40,000 km above the earth to intercept solar radiation with solar cells that potentially could be environmentally destructive;

– Poker Flat Rocket Launch from 1968 to the present to “understand chemical reactions in the atmosphere associated with global climate change;” perhaps more to influence climate for military purposes;

– Saturn V Rocket in 1975 — due to a malfunction, it burned unusually high in the atmosphere (above 300 km) producing a “large ionospheric hole,” resulting in over a 60% reduction in “total electron content” over a 1,000 km area lasting several hours; all telecommunications over the Atlantic Ocean were disrupted;

– SPS Military Implications in 1978 to develop a satellite-based beam weapon for anti-ballistic missile (ABM) use; also as a mind-control/anti-personnel weapon by affecting the human brain;

– Orbit Maneuvering System in 1981 to study the effect of Shuttle injected gases on the ionosphere; it was learned they could induce holes;

– Innovative Shuttle Experiments in 1985 using gases to create ionospheric holes;

– Mighty Oaks in 1986 to develop x-ray and particle beam weapons;

– Desert Storm in 1991, during which the US deployed an electromagnetic pulse weapon, designed to mimic the electricity flash of a nuclear detonation; and

– HAARP since 1992

Bertell says its:

“related to fifty years of intensive and increasingly destructive programs to understand and control the upper atmosphere. (It’s) an integral part of a long history of space research and development of a deliberate military nature. (Their) implications (are) alarming. Basic to this project is control of communications, both (their) disruption and reliability in hostile environments. The power wielded by such control is obvious.”

“The ability of the HAARP/Spacelab/rocket combination to deliver very large amounts of energy, comparable to a nuclear bomb, anywhere on earth via laser and particle beams, are frightening.” Yet the public is told it’s “a space shield against incoming weapons (or) a devise for repairing the ozone layer.”

By modifying the ionosphere, HAARP can be hugely destructive. Potentially, it can trigger floods, droughts, hurricanes, tsunamis, forest fires, and power blackouts over entire regions. It can disrupt radar, other communications, agriculture, ecology, and financial and other markets. It can use weather to wage war, and perhaps cause earthquakes like the one that struck Haiti.

The UN Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques (1977)

Its Article I states that:

“Each State Party to this Convention undertakes not to engage in military or any other hostile use of environmental modification techniques having widespread, long-lasting or severe effects as the means of destruction, damage or injury to any other State Party.”

Article II refers to “environmental modification (ENMOD) techniques (as) any technique for changing – through the deliberate manipulation of natural processes – the dynamics, composition or structure of the Earth, including its biota, lithosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere, or of outer space.”

Citing Ecology News, Sourcewatch.org defines environmental warfare as:

“(1) the intentional modification of a system of the natural ecology, such as climate and weather, earth systems such as the ionosphere, magnetosphere, tectonic plate system, and/or the triggering of seismic events (earthquakes);

(2) to cause intentional physical, economic, psycho-social, and physical destruction to an intended target geophysical or population location;” and

“(3) as part of strategic or tactical war.

Environmental war weapons systems can include chemtrails, chemical weapons systems (climate and weather modification) and electromagnetic weapons systems (climate and weather modification; seismic warfare).”

Other definitions are broader, including the use of depleted uranium and other environmentally destructive weapons, practices and techniques.

International standards on environmental protections during armed conflict date back as early as the 1868 Declaration of St. Petersburg. It stated that “the only legitimate object which States should endeavour to accomplish during war is to weaken the military forces of the enemy.”

The 1907 Hague Regulations stressed restraint, saying “The right of belligerents to adopt means of injuring the enemy is not unlimited,” and the Geneva Conventions (including Protocol I and Common Article 3) defined the principles of international humanitarian law.

In 1973, the US Senate adopted a resolution calling for an international agreement “prohibiting the use of any environmental or geophysical modification activity as a weapon of war….” President Nixon ordered the Defense Department to review the military aspects of weather and other ENMOD techniques.

During the July 1974 summit meeting in Moscow, Nixon and General Secretary Brezhnev agreed to hold bilateral talks to achieve “the most effective measures possible to overcome the dangers of the use of environmental modification techniques for military purposes.” Discussions continued in 1974 and 1975, resulting in an agreement on a common approach and language. The 1977 UN Convention followed, ratified 98-0 by the Senate on November 28, 1979. It took effect on January 17, 1980, but was violated thereafter by both sides.

Human environmental modification techniques (ENMOD) can cause irreversible damage. Yet international standards haven’t stopped their development.

Johann Hari: The age of the killer robot is no longer a sci-fi fantasy

2010-01-23T14:47:00.000-08:00

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-the-age-of-the-killer-robot-is-no-longer-a-scifi-fantasy-1875220.html

January 22, 2010

Johann Hari: The age of the killer robot is no longer a sci-fi fantasy

You can't appeal to robots for mercy or empathy - or punish them afterwards
Friday, 22 January 2010

In the dark, in the silence, in a blink, the age of the autonomous killer robot has arrived. It is happening. They are deployed. And - at their current rate of acceleration - they will become the dominant method of war for rich countries in the 21st century. These facts sound, at first, preposterous. The idea of machines that are designed to whirr out into the world and make their own decisions to kill is an old sci-fi fantasy: picture a mechanical Arnold Schwarzenegger blasting a truck and muttering: "Hasta la vista, baby." But we live in a world of such whooshing technological transformation that the concept has leaped in just five years from the cinema screen to the battlefield - with barely anyone back home noticing.

When the US invaded Iraq in 2003, they had no robots as part of their force. By the end of 2005, they had 2,400. Today, they have 12,000, carrying out 33,000 missions a year. A report by the US Joint Forces Command says autonomous robots will be the norm on the battlefield within 20 years.

The Nato forces now depend on a range of killer robots, largely designed by the British Ministry of Defence labs privatised by Tony Blair in 2001. Every time you hear about a "drone attack" against Afghanistan or Pakistan, that's an unmanned robot dropping bombs on human beings. Push a button and it flies away, kills, and comes home. Its robot-cousin on the battlefields below is called SWORDS: a human-sized robot that can see 360 degrees around it and fire its machine-guns at any target it "chooses". Fox News proudly calls it "the GI of the 21st century." And billions are being spent on the next generation of warbots, which will leave these models looking like the bulky box on which you used to play Pong.

At the moment, most are controlled by a soldier - often 7,500 miles away - with a control panel. But insurgents are always inventing new ways to block the signal from the control centre, which causes the robot to shut down and "die". So the military is building "autonomy" into the robots: if they lose contact, they start to make their own decisions, in line with a pre-determined code.

This is "one of the most fundamental changes in the history of human warfare," according to PW Singer, a former analyst for the Pentagon and the CIA, in his must-read book, Wired For War: The Robotics Revolution and Defence in the Twenty-First Century. Humans have been developing weapons that enabled us to kill at ever-greater distances and in ever-greater numbers for millennia, from the longbow to the cannon to the machine-gun to the nuclear bomb. But these robots mark a different stage.

The earlier technologies made it possible for humans to decide to kill in more "sophisticated" ways - but once you programme and unleash an autonomous robot, the war isn't fought by you any more: it's fought by the machine. The subject of warfare shifts.

The military claim this is a safer model of combat. Gordon Johnson of the Pentagon's Joint Forces Command says of the warbots: "They're not afraid. They don't forget their orders. They don't care if the guy next to them has been shot. Will they do a better job than humans? Yes." Why take a risk with your soldier's life, if he can stay in Arlington and kill in Kandahar? Think of it as War 4.0.

But the evidence punctures this techno-optimism. We know the programming of robots will regularly go wrong - because all technological programming regularly goes wrong. Look at the place where robots are used most frequently today: factories. Some 4 per cent of US factories have "major robotics accidents" every year - a man having molten aluminium poured over him, or a woman picked up and placed on a conveyor belt to be smashed into the shape of a car. The former Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi was nearly killed a few years ago after a robot attacked him on a tour of a factory. And remember: these are robots that aren't designed to kill.

Think about how maddening it is to deal with a robot on the telephone when you want to pay your phone bill. Now imagine that robot had a machine-gun pointed at your chest.

Robots find it almost impossible to distinguish an apple from a tomato: how will they distinguish a combatant from a civilian? You can't appeal to a robot for mercy; you can't activate its empathy. And afterwards, who do you punish? Marc Garlasco, of Human Rights Watch, says: "War crimes need a violation and an intent. A machine has no capacity to want to kill civilians.... If they are incapable of intent, are they incapable of war crimes?"

Robots do make war much easier - for the aggressor. You are taking much less physical risk with your people, even as you kill more of theirs. One US report recently claimed they will turn war into "an essentially frictionless engineering exercise". As Larry Korb, Ronald Reagan's assistant secretary of defence, put it: "It will make people think, 'Gee, warfare is easy.'"

If virtually no American forces had died in Vietnam, would the war have stopped when it did - or would the systematic slaughter of the Vietnamese people have continued for many more years? If "we" weren't losing anyone in Afghanistan or Iraq, would the call for an end to the killing be as loud? I'd like to think we are motivated primarily by compassion for civilians on the other side, but I doubt it. Take "us" safely out of the picture and we will be more willing to kill "them".

There is some evidence that warbots will also make us less inhibited in our killing. When another human being is standing in front of you, when you can stare into their eyes, it's hard to kill them. When they are half the world away and little more than an avatar, it's easy. A young air force lieutenant who fought through a warbot told Singer: "It's like a video game [with] the ability to kill. It's like ... freaking cool."

When the US First Marine Expeditionary Force in Iraq was asked in 2006 what kind of robotic support it needed, they said they had an "urgent operational need" for a laser mounted on to an unmanned drone that could cause "instantaneous burst-combustion of insurgent clothing, a rapid death through violent trauma, and more probably a morbid combination of both". The request said it should be like "long-range blow torches or precision flame-throwers". They wanted to do with robots things they would find almost unthinkable face-to-face.

While "we" will lose fewer people at first by fighting with warbots, this way of fighting may well catalyse greater attacks on us in the long run. US army staff sergeant Scott Smith boasts warbots create "an almost helpless feeling.... It's total shock and awe." But while terror makes some people shut up, it makes many more furious and determined to strike back.

Imagine if the beaches at Dover and the skies over Westminster were filled with robots controlled from Torah Borah, or Beijing, and could shoot us at any time. Some would scuttle away - and many would be determined to kill "their" people in revenge. The Lebanese editor Rami Khouri says that when Lebanon was bombarded by largely unmanned Israeli drones in 2006, it only "enhanced the spirit of defiance" and made more people back Hezbollah.

Is this a rational way to harness our genius for science and spend tens of billions of pounds? The scientists who were essential to developing the nuclear bomb - including Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, and Andrei Sakharov - turned on their own creations in horror and begged for them to be outlawed. Some distinguished robotics scientists, like Illah Nourbakhsh, are getting in early, and saying the development of autonomous military robots should be outlawed now.

There are some technologies that are so abhorrent to human beings that we forbid them outright. We have banned war-lasers that permanently blind people along with poison gas. The conveyor belt dragging us ever closer to a world of robot wars can be stopped - if we choose to.

All this money and all this effort can be directed towards saving life, not ever-madder ways of taking it. But we have to decide to do it. We have to make the choice to look the warbot in the eye and say, firmly and forever, "Hasta la vista, baby."

* On Saturday 30 January Johann Hari will be be speaking alongside Ken Livingstone and Harriet Harman at the Progressive London conference. For details and to get tickets, click here [http://www.progressivelondon.org.uk/conference/progressive-london-conference-2010.html] .

j.hari@independent.co.uk

HAARP, Haiti, Brzezinski and the NWO

2010-01-23T11:36:00.000-08:00

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/printer_5495.shtml

HAARP, Haiti, Brzezinski and the NWO
By Jerry Mazza
Online Journal Associate Editor

Jan 22, 2010, 00:30

On October 25, 2005, I wrote an article for Online Journal, headlined Is it the weather or government terror, detailing government manipulation of weather, including earthquakes, for terror and destruction, mentioning that “your local weatherman was surely not up to pointing this out,” and adding “let me help with the forecast, past, present and long-range. Well, déjà vu all over again seems to have struck in Haiti on January 12.

When I wrote that article, I was disturbed over the effects of Katrina, on August 25, 2005, not to mention the Indonesian tsunami preceding it on December 26, 2004. It seemed to me it would take a helluva lot more than the weatherman to explain such cosmic events within a year, four months and a day. Today, I ask you to read my first article to familiarize yourself with HAARP, the acronym for the government’s High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, which is about more than weather, but rather US Weapons of Meteorological Mass Destruction.

As I write that, I can hear the sirens of “conspiracy theory” going off on the airwaves as if a thief had broken into the dark hole of the Pentagon and was filling his pockets with all the secrets of these darker ops. Well, perhaps.

HAARP, as you will read in more detail, can shock the upper atmosphere with both a focused and navigable electromagnetic bolt. The ionosphere is the electrically charged sphere that surrounds the earth’s upper atmosphere, about 40 to 60 miles above the earth’s surface. Take a look also at the excellent Haiti Earthquake Raises HAARP Controversy at the phoenixaquua.blogspot, so you don’t think it’s just me thinking this. In fact, you can see filmed examples of how HAARP works, and how it has worked on Haiti.

You will particularly enjoy this article’s film clip of Pat Robertson’s analysis of the Haitian earthquake. Pat believes it’s due to the victory of the Haitians in their rebellion over Napoleon and the French in 1801. Their victory, he claims, was due to a pact the Haitians made with the Devil. And this pact, Pat iterates, haunts them to this day. This is a man who ran for president of the US, is the owner of a chain of TV and radio stations, and a leader of the Machiavellian Dominionists sect of Conservative Christianity. But I digress and I’m dizzy from this one.

HAARP has always been referred to by the US government as a tool for researching weather, but in fact has been developed and used by the military for Department of Defense purposes. This dark side of HAARP has been played down for obvious reasons, but Dr. Nick Begich and Jeane Manning have done an excellent expose of this “Military Pandora’s Box” in their book, Angel’s Don’t Play This Harp. There as an excellent summary of the book at this site. It debunks the notion that HAARP is no different than other ionospheric heaters operating safely through the world in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, Tromso, Norway, and the former Soviet Union.

Yet a 1990 government document claims that the radio frequency (RF) power bolt can drive the ionosphere to “unnatural” activities. Quoting the authors . . .”at the highest HF powers available in the West, the instabilities commonly studied are approaching their maximum RF energy dissipative capability, beyond which the plasma process will ‘runaway’ until the next limiting factor is reached.” The program operates out the University of Alaska Fairbanks (in Sarah Palin-land), providing a ground-based “Star Wars” technology, offering a relatively inexpensive defense shield.

But the University also boasts about the most mind-boggling geophysical manipulations since nuclear bombs of which HAARP is capable. It’s based on the work of electrical genius Nicholas Tesla and the work and patents of Texas’ physicist Bernard Eastlund. The military has deliberately underestimated the deadly possibilities of this uber technology, most pointedly in this case to create earthquakes with the generation of bolts of electrical power aimed at specific targets.

In fact, HAARP’s potential for havoc drew the attention of none other than Zbigniew Brzezinski, former NSA adviser to Jimmy Carter, science advisor to President Johnson, and political advisor to President Obama.

More than 25 years ago, when Brzezinski was a professor at Columbia University, he wrote, “Political strategists are tempted to exploit research on the brain and human behavior [another strange purpose HAARP can be put to]. Geophysicist Gordon J.F. MacDonald, a specialist in problems of warfare, says accurately-timed, artificially-excited electronic strokes could lead to a pattern of oscillations that produce relatively high power levels over certain legions of the earth . . . in this way one could develop a system that would seriously impair the brain performance of very large populations in selected regions over an extended period.”

He capped this statement with “no matter how deeply disturbing the thought of using the environment to manipulate behavior for national advantages, to some, the technology permitting such use will very probably develop within the next few decades.” Let me tell you, dear readers, it’s here.

As of 1970, Brzezinski predicted HAARP could be used for “a more controlled and directed society” linked to technology. This society would be dominated by an elite group which impresses voters by allegedly superior scientific know-how.” Furthermore, Dr. Strangelove states, “Unhindered by the restrains of traditional liberal values, this elite [the New World Order of today] would not hesitate to achieve its political ends by using the latest modern techniques for influencing public behavior and keeping society under close surveillance and control. Technical and scientific momentum would then feed on the situation it exploits.”

And thus spake Brzezinski, who also predicted that it would take an inciting incident like Pearl Harbor (i.e., 9/11) to engage the normally peaceful American population to go to war on a march for world hegemony (i.e., The War on Terror). And he was spot on.

Zbig is not afraid, in fact, is lauded for thinking down avenues that would make most of us shiver with disgust. Regrettably, his forecasts tend to prove accurate, because they inspire the worst people to do the worst things. And so, these “tools for the elite” and their temptation to use them increases incredibly. The policies to use them are in place. As to the “stepping stones” that could be used to reach this highly controlled techno-society, Brezinski expected them to be “persisting social crisis” and the use of mass media to gain the public’s confidence. Again, he’s spot on.

Way back in 1966, Professor Gordon J.F. MacDonald, then associate director of the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at UC, Los Angeles, was a member of President Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee and later a member of the President’s Council on Environmental Quality. He actually wrote a chapter called “How to Wreck the Environment” in his book, Unless Peace Comes. Of course, this came at the height of the Vietnam brutality. Given the aura of violence similar to today’s, Gordon described in his chapter, among other things, “polar ice cap melting or destabilization, ozone depletion techniques, earthquake engineering [italics mine], ocean wave control and brain wave manipulation using the planet’s energy fields.”

The outstanding peculiarity of the Haitian earthquake is that it devastated Haiti, which is the western part of the larger island of Hispaniola, while the eastern two-thirds of Hispaniola, the Dominican Republic, suffered some aftershocks but remained relatively unscathed, hotels operating, business booming, flights coming in and out. If this isn’t pinpoint targeting of an earthquake, it is a very strange, yet to be explained phenomena.

For the “official” statistics of the event, see the Tectonics of the Haitian earthquake by Chris Rowan at scienceblogs.com. Despite the fact that Rowan sees this as a “strike-slip in the Caribbean Plate with the crust on each side of the fault moving horizontally relative to the other side,” and so on, I still feel that the pinpointing of Haiti is not just another predictable earthquake. But read Chris’s full explanation. A bolt of HAARP energy could have caused that “strike-slip.”

What is far more interesting to note is an article from nextgov.com (Technology And The Business of Government), Defense launches online system to coordinate Haiti relief efforts, which was published last Friday but refers to a disaster relief drill that took place on Monday, January 11, a day before the earthquake. I quote, “As personnel representing hundreds of government and nongovernment agencies from around the world rush to the aid of earthquake-devastated Haiti, the Defense Information Systems Agency has launched a Web portal with multiple social networking tools to aid in coordinating their efforts.

“On Monday, [January 11, before the earthquake] Jean Demay, DISA’s technical manager for the agency’s Transnational Information Sharing Cooperation project, happened to be at the headquarters of the U.S. Southern Command in Miami preparing for a test of the system in a scenario that involved providing relief to Haiti in the wake of a hurricane. After the earthquake hit on Tuesday, Demay said SOUTHCOM decided to go live with the system [itlaics mine]. On Wednesday [the day after the earthquake], DISA opened up its All Partners Access Network, supported by the Transnational Information Sharing Cooperation project, to any organization supporting Haiti relief efforts.

“The information sharing project, developed with backing from both SOUTHCOM and the Defense Department’s European Command, has been in development for three years. It is designed to facilitate multilateral collaboration between federal and nongovernmental agencies . . .”

You’ll pardon my paranoia, but this is identical to drills being set up the day before 9/11/01 by FEMA in NYC on 9/10/01 and NORAD.

The political truth is that Haiti has historically been a thorn in the side of those from the US and Europe, who would exploit its natural resources and dare to genocide its people. See Wiki’s History of Haiti, which opens by with the tale of Christopher Columbus, colonizer extraordinaire, naming the entire island, Hispaniola.

From the very beginning, Wiki notes, “Following the arrival of Europeans, Haiti’s indigenous population suffered near-extinction, in possibly the worst case of depopulation in the Americas. A commonly accepted hypothesis attributes the high mortality of this colony in part to Old World diseases to which the natives had no immunity. The colonists also killed a considerable number of the natives both directly and indirectly by enslavement and murder.” And so the die was cast.

And, as Wayne Madsen reports, U.S. troops in Haiti to prevent Aristide’s return, “President Obama, in keeping with his CIA lineage, has permitted the Pentagon under Robert Gates to take charge of the humanitarian relief efforts in Haiti.

“As Cuban and Venezuelan field hospitals were already rendering first aid and trauma care to Haitians injured in the mega-quake, Obama was gathered at a White House photo op with Vice President Joe Biden and other Cabinet officers to state that U.S. military reconnaissance aircraft would fly over Haiti to assess the situation from the air. A U.S. P-3 Orion spy plane from Comalapa air base in El Salvador was dispatched to conduct the surveillance operation, an act that was already being accomplished by earth satellites, the images of which were available on Google Maps.

“As Obama was garnering praise from such sycophantic White House outlets as the largely-discredited Washington Post, a 37-person Icelandic search-and-rescue team was pulling trapped earthquake victims from the rubble of collapsed buildings in Port-au-Prince. Iceland, a nation bankrupted by Obama’s banker pals on Wall Street and in the City of London, was able to react in a way that the slumbering and oafish dying super-power, the United States, could not -- with action aimed at providing immediate assistance to the Haitian people . . .” Read the full article for all the details.

Madsen was not the only one to comment that in the middle of this havoc the US seems more set on occupying Haiti with its Army than delivering relief aid. Press TV reports that Nicaraguan President Ortega warns of US deployment in Haiti. He stated, “What is happening in Haiti seriously concerns me as US troops have already taken control of the airport,” Ortega said on Saturday ”The Pentagon says it has deployed more than 10,000 soldiers in Haiti to help victims of Tuesday’s earthquake.

”This is while US paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division took control of the main airport in the capital Port-au-Prince on Friday three days after a 7.0 magnitude earthquake brought death and misery to the impoverished nation.”

Said Press TV, ”The leftist Nicaraguan president denounced Washington’s move in deploying military forces in Haiti, saying ‘It seems that the bases (on Latin America) are not sufficient.’

”’There is no logic that US troops landed in Haiti. Haiti seeks humanitarian aid, not troops. It would be madness if we all began to send troops to Haiti,’ said Ortega.”

Given Nicaragua’s horrific experiences with the US and the Contras, his doubts, as Madsen’s, are to be seriously considered. Back then, we had Reagan and Bush I pulling the strings, which eventually exploded into the Iran-Contra debacle, which attempted to continue New World Order advancement from Central America to the Middle East. So what has changed?

Bottom line, am I asking you to blame anyone slipping on a banana peel to be the result of HAARP’s cataclysmic power? No, I’m not. But I am asking you to pursue the given links and seriously consider the possibility of HAARP’s ability to produce this highly targeted mega-earthquake. It is one more weapon in the US arsenal. And the more you know, the better to discern the big picture. All you have you to lose are your political chains and the specter of Zbigniew Brzezinski and his clones.

Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer and life-long resident of New York City. Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net. His new book, “State Of Shock: Poems from 9/11 on” is available at www.jerrymazza.com, Amazon or Barnesandnoble.com.

Kenya: Trial HIV Vaccine Leaves 46 Infected

2010-01-21T09:48:00.000-08:00

http://allafrica.com/stories/201001120938.html

Kenya: Trial HIV Vaccine Leaves 46 Infected
Elias Mbao
12 January 2010
Lusaka — A failed clinical trial HIV vaccine that left 46 Zambian women infected with the virus has sparked controversy.

The Microbicides Development Programme (MDP) 301 trial, which was testing if the gel PRO2000 would prevent HIV infection took place between September 2005 and 2009.

It was conducted at six research centres in South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia and 9,385 participated.

From the Zambian site in Mazabuka district - about 160 kilometres South West of the capital Lusaka - 1, 332

HIV negative women were recruited but the results, which the Ministry of Health does not wish to comment on, revealed that between 46 and 50 of women that participated in the clinical trial contracted HIV despite using PRO2000 gel before sex.

"Some participants did become HIV positive because the study was conducted in the normal environment," confirmed Dr Maureen Chisembele, principal investigator for Microbicides Development Programme Zambia - a subsidiary of the UK based research entity.

"Women who became infected during the study were given further counselling and referred to local health services for ART (antiretroviral therapy)."

The National Aids Council of Zambia (NAC), a government unit mandated to oversee HIV/Aids programme, confirmed that 50 out of the 1, 332 women that participated in the clinical trials contracted HIV.

Due to the sensitivity and repercussions of the issue, the Ministry of Health has remained tight-lipped on the outcome of the trials.

A vaginal microbicide is a product intended for use before sexual intercourse to reduce HIV infection and they are supposed to be used with condoms and complement other prevention strategies such as behaviour change, abstinence and other preventive methods.

It should be noted that vaginal microbicide should not be used alone or replace correct and consistent use of condoms in the fight against HIV and Aids, said Dr Swebby Macha - a gynaecologist at Zambia's University Teaching Hospital (UTH) in Lusaka, the largest hospital in the country.

The participants in the clinical trial were either assigned the PRO2000 gel or placebo gel (with inactive ingredient) and were instructed to apply gel about one hour before sexual intercourse.

The gel contains molecules that are intended to cluster around the virus before it can penetrate the vaginal wall.

To be effective, the women were counselled on safe sexual behaviour and encouraged to use condoms, which were provided free of charge.

According to Dr Macha, this clinical trial found that the risk of HIV infection in women that were supplied with PRO2000 gel was not significantly different than women supplied with placebo gel.

"The largest international clinical trial to date into a preventive HIV gel has found no evidence that the vaginal microbicide, PRO2000, reduces the risk of HIV infection in women," said Dr Macha, the former president of Zambia Medical Association (ZMA).

Dr Macha said to date no microbicide had been proved to be effective against HIV infection.

A local traditional ruler has demanded compensation for the infected women and prosecution of architects of the clinical trial.

Chief Mwanachingwala of the Tonga people in Mazabuka district where the clinical trials took place said the women that took part in the trials were "poor and uneducated" and did not know the consequences of the research, which has left some of them infected.

But Ministry of Health officials, speaking on anonymity basis, argued that MDP followed the laid down legal and clinical procedures, therefore, were not liable to prosecution over the outcome of clinical trials.

In an explanatory statement, Dr Chisembele said that during the clinical trial, a lot of emphasis was put on the fact that it was unknown whether PRO2000 gel would work to prevent HIV.

The infection of the 46 women has drawn outrage from many Zambians who are accusing MDP of using some African women as "guinea pig" because they are poor and ignorant.

Zambia is among African countries hardest hit by Hiv infections with prevalence rate of 14.3 per cent of its population estimated at about 13 million people.

Swine flu was as elusive as WMD. The real threat is mad scientist syndrome

2010-01-21T09:47:00.000-08:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/14/swine-flu-elusive-as-wmd

Remember the warnings of 65,000 dead? Health chiefs should admit they were wrong – yet again – about a global pandemic
Simon Jenkins
guardian.co.uk,
14 January 2010

Let me recap. Six months ago I reviewed the latest bit of terrorism to emerge from the government's Cobra bunker, courtesy of Alan Johnson, home secretary. Swine flu was allegedly ravaging the nation. The BBC was intoning nightly statistics on what "could" happen as "the deadly virus" took hold. The chief medical officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, bandied about any figure that came into his head, settling on "65,000 could die", peaking at 350 corpses a day.

Donaldson knew exactly what would happen. The media went berserk. The World Health Organisation declared a "six-level alert" so as to "prepare the world for an imminent attack". The happy-go-lucky virologist, John Oxford, said half the population could be infected, and that his lowest estimate was 6,000 dead.

The "Andromeda strain" was stalking the earth, and its first victims were clearly scientists. Drugs were frantically stockpiled and key workers identified as vital to be saved for humanity's future. Cobra alerted the army. Morgues were told to stand ready. The Green party blamed intensive pig farming. The Guardian listed "the top 10 plague books".

If anyone dared question this drivel, they were dismissed by Donaldson as "extremists". When people started reporting swine flu to be even milder than ordinary flu, he accused them of complacency and told them to "wait for next winter". He was already buying 32m masks and spending more than £1bn on Tamiflu and vaccines. Surgeries refused entry to those with flu symptoms, referring them to a government "hotline" where prescription drugs were ordered to be made available without examination or doctor's note. Who knows how many died of undiagnosed illness as a result? Lines were instantly jammed. It was pure, systematic government-induced panic – in which I accept that the media played its joyful part.

This week the authorities admitted that, far from a winter upturn in swine flu, there has been a slump. From 100,000 a week at the peak, there were just 12,000 last week. After the coldest winter for decades, when deaths might be expected to rise, the rate is below that of seasonal flu. In the UK, 360 people have died under its influence, most with prior "non-flu" conditions. Swine flu is not nice – I have had it – but bears no relation to the government hysteria.

I accept that anyone can make a mistake, and authority has some duty to err on the side of caution. As Alastair Campbell implied on Tuesday, Iraq might have had weapons of mass destruction, so Blair was right to go to war just in case. But it is reasonable to ask, as the Chilcot inquiry is doing, why precaution on such a colossal and potentially destructive scale was justified when those who questioned the need for it have since been proved right. Is anyone asking about flu?

Swine flu is not the first time we have suffered this nonsense. I have a stack of predictions by senior scientists on BSE/CJD in 1995. It would "lead to 136,000 deaths" – a spurious exactitude used to convey plausibility – and "could infect up to 10 million Britons". This led to an obscene £5bn campaign of cattle destruction and compensation. When the prediction proved wildly wrong, the government excused itself with a classic Rumsfeld-ism: "The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence."

This was followed by Sars 2003, a "panic gripping the world". The World Health Organisation declared that "One in four Britons could die". The medical doom-monger, Dr Patrick Dixon, said that Sars had "a 25% chance of killing tens of millions", whatever that meant. The madcap Tory health spokesman, Liam Fox, demanded the arrest and quarantining of all recent travellers from Asia, including 30,000 Asian students.

In the event, some 800 people died with Sars worldwide, against 21,000 who died in Britain in the seasonal flu epidemic of 1999/2000.

Undaunted, within a year the same alarmists were at work on avian flu. With now habitual hyperbole, Donaldson predicted 50,000 deaths, with "an upper limit", graciously conceded, of 750,000. When one dead swan slumped on a beach in Scotland, BBC reporters went crazy as inspectors stumbled through the seaweed, clad in anti-nuclear armour. Within a year the horror had passed. The global mortality was put at 262, with not one death in Britain. Another fiasco was brushed under the carpet.

The Blair government, and now Brown's, have proved adept at using scare politics to divert attention from other troubles. During foot-and-mouth Blair was quick to don a yellow jumpsuit for photographers and intone as if he alone stood between an illness (that is in fact harmless to humans) and armageddon. This time the swine flu coincided with two other "mystery diseases", MRSA and C-difficile, which killed 10,000 Britons in 2007 alone. But those deaths lay squarely at the doors of unclean NHS hospitals. Hence there were no scary stories or predictions about them from Donaldson.

Donaldson and his eager virologists will doubtless stick loyally to their predictions since it is "too early to be complacent". His allies at the BBC did their bit on Wednesday with a Horizon programme that turned a serious study of virology into grotesque scaremongering, with solemn music and voices crying, "there's no escape", "this could take a devilish turn", and "we don't even know how many viruses there are!" Children writhed in agony from smallpox.

Mad scientist syndrome is rampant. Had these scares been disseminated by a private firm, a local authority or a newspaper (as was anti-MMR), they would be damned from on high with demands that heads roll. As it is, the government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies sails gaily on, still graced by the presence of Sir Roy Anderson, who happens also to draw a six-figure salary as a non-executive director of GlaxoSmithKline, which made hundreds of millions from the government's panic. Anderson, and GSK, vigorously deny any conflict of interest.

The Council of Europe's head of health, Wolfgang Wodarg, is one of the few who have dared blow the whistle on the links between "Big Pharma" and national and supranational agencies. He this week persuaded the council to stage a debate on the "enormous gains" made by GSK and others from the swine flu pandemic. He seeks details of relations between the companies and the WHO, given that stockpile contracts kick in the moment that organisation uses the word "pandemic". It did so for the first time last year, with reckless alacrity.

I am not aware of the WHO or the General Medical Council or any of the medical colleges investigating these matters, or any check on conflicts of interest of government doctors who work for drugs companies. I am not aware of any Whitehall or Commons committee, any National Audit Office or competition inquiry into the supply of these drugs. All I know is that a huge amount of health money, time and effort was last year diverted from possibly critical therapies into what looked from the start to be yet more terror virology.

This is why people are ever more sceptical of scientists. Why should they believe what "experts" say when they can be so wrong and with such impunity? Weapons of mass destruction, lethal viruses, nuclear radiation, global warming … why should we believe a word of it? And it is a short step from don't believe to don't care.

Chavez: US Navy Tectonic Weapon Test Caused Haiti Earthquake

2010-01-21T09:34:00.000-08:00

DO I BELIEVE THIS? YES I DO. THE US HAS THIS KIND OF TECHNOLOGY AND ITS ELITES WANT TO CONQUER THE EARTH FOR A NEVER ENDING, PSYCHOPATHIC FASCIST EMPIRE. THE US GOVERNMENT GOT THIS TECHNOLOGY FROM OPERATION PAPERCLIP AND FROM ALL OF TESLA'S PAPERS THEY TOOK WHILE TESLA'S BODY WAS STILL WARM...CHAVEZ DOESN'T HAVE TO OFFER ANYONE ANY PROOF AS THE PROOF ALREADY EXISTS!!!

http://grantlawrence.blogspot.com/2010/01/chavez-us-navy-tectonic-weapon-test.html

JANUARY 20, 2010

There is little doubt that the US and Russia have the capability to cause massive earth movement along with weather modification.

Whether US weapons testing caused the Haiti earthquake may be a bit of a stretch, but it is a possibility.

At this point, Chavez should offer us some sort of proof.

Grant

Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez has once again accused the United States of playing God. But this time it's Haiti's disastrous earthquake that he thinks the U.S. was behind. Spanish newspaper ABC quotes Chavez as saying that the U.S. navy launched a weapon capable of inducing a powerful earthquake off the shore of Haiti. He adds that this time it was only a drill and the final target is ... destroying and taking over Iran.

Giant cattle to be bred back from extinction

2010-01-20T13:41:00.000-08:00

What's the purpose in bringing back an extinct, giant cow? What's next? A mammoth or a dinosaur? Can the modern earth handle it? Where would these animals live? What if they carried dangerous viruses or germs that killed modern people?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/7011035/Giant-cattle-to-be-bred-back-from-extinction.html

Aurochs were immortalised in prehistoric cave paintings and admired for their brute strength and "elephantine" size by Julius Caesar.
By Nick Squires in Rome
18 Jan 2010

Aurochs are depicted in ochre and charcoal in paintings found on the walls of cave galleries such as those at Lascaux in France Photo: ALAMY

But despite their having gone the way of the dodo and the woolly mammoth, there are plans to bring the giant animals back to life.

The huge cattle with sweeping horns which once roamed the forests of Europe have not been seen for nearly 400 years.

Now Italian scientists are hoping to use genetic expertise and selective breeding of modern-day wild cattle to recreate the fearsome beasts which weighed around 2,200lb and stood 6.5 feet at the shoulder.

Breeds of large cattle which most closely resemble Bos primigenius, such as Highland cattle and the white Maremma breed from Italy, are being bred with each other in a technique known as "back-breeding".

At the same time, scientists say they have for the first time created a map of the auroch's genome, so that they know precisely what type of animal they are trying to replicate.

"We were able to analyse auroch DNA from preserved bone material and create a rough map of its genome that should allow us to breed animals nearly identical to aurochs," said team leader Donato Matassino, head of the Consortium for Experimental Biotechnology in Benevento, in the southern Campania region.

"We've already made our first round of crosses between three breeds native to Britain, Spain and Italy. Now we just have to wait and see how the calves turn out."

The last animal disappeared from the British Isles in the Iron Age and the breed was declared extinct in 1627 after a female died in the forests of Poland.

Aurochs are depicted in ochre and charcoal in paintings found on the walls of cave galleries such as those at Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain. Caesar described them in The Gallic Wars as being "a little below the elephant in size" and a favourite hunting prey for wild Germanic tribesmen.

Their abiding mystique means they remain as the symbol of several states and cities in Europe, having figured prominently in Teutonic folklore. In ancient times, killing an auroch was seen as a great demonstration of courage, with the horns turned into silver-clad drinking cups.

The last time there was an attempt to recreate the animal was on the express orders of Hitler. The Nazis ordered a pair of German zoologists to recreate the auroch as part of the Third Reich's belief in racial superiority and eugenics.

Herman Goering hoped to use the aurochs to populate a vast hunting reserve which he planned to create in the conquered territories of Eastern Europe.

Many geneticists argue that though the Heck may resemble their ancient forebears, they will be genetically very different.

"There are a number of rare breeds that have been brought back to life in recent years, such as the Cumberland pig," said Dr Claire Barber, from the Rare Breeds Survival Trust. "But our view is that what has been recreated is something that looks like the old breed, but which is not genetically the same.

"You would need to interbreed animals that are very close to the auroch in their genetic make-up. The closest you could find in Britain are two semi-feral breeds: the Chillingham and the Vaynol. If there are breeds which maintain many of the attributes of an auroch, then it could well be feasible. It's certainly a very exciting project."

If the Italian-led project is successful, it will raise questions of what to do with an animal which boasts a size and temper akin to a tetchy rhinoceros.

"Even the wild cattle we have today are very hard to handle and an auroch would be even more difficult," said Dr Barber.

"Aurochs were significantly larger than any cattle in existence and they would be potentially dangerous.

"There would be some serious management issues – to look after their teeth and feet, for instance, you might have to sedate them with dart guns.

"You wouldn't want to try to milk one – that's assuming that the females produced milk when they didn't have calves."

Military Hush-Up: Incoming Space Rocks Now Classified

2010-01-10T07:41:00.000-08:00

This way, if we're toast, we can't say last prayers, kiss our loved ones goodbye and tell them one last time we love them, get our Minds/Souls in order, face our Fate with Calm and Bravado, so forth. The puppet masters want us terrified at the very last minute so they can get their harvest of loosh!

http://www.space.com/news/090610-military-fireballs.html

Military Hush-Up: Incoming Space Rocks Now Classified
By Leonard David
SPACE.com's Space Insider Columnist
10 June 2009

For 15 years, scientists have benefited from data gleaned by U.S. classified satellites of natural fireball events in Earth's atmosphere – but no longer.

A recent U.S. military policy decision now explicitly states that observations by hush-hush government spacecraft of incoming bolides and fireballs are classified secret and are not to be released, SPACE.com has learned.

The satellites' main objectives include detecting nuclear bomb tests, and their characterizations of asteroids and lesser meteoroids as they crash through the atmosphere has been a byproduct data bonanza for scientists.

The upshot: Space rocks that explode in the atmosphere are now classified.

"It's baffling to us why this would suddenly change," said one scientist familiar with the work. "It's unfortunate because there was this great synergy...a very good cooperative arrangement. Systems were put into dual-use mode where a lot of science was getting done that couldn't be done any other way. It's a regrettable change in policy."

Scientists say not only will research into the threat from space be hampered, but public understanding of sometimes dramatic sky explosions will be diminished, perhaps leading to hype and fear of the unknown.

Incoming!

Most "shooting stars" are caused by natural space debris no larger than peas. But routinely, rocks as big as basketballs and even small cars crash into the atmosphere. Most vaporize or explode on the way in, but some reach the surface or explode above the surface. Understandably, scientists want to know about these events so they can better predict the risk here on Earth.

Yet because the world is two-thirds ocean, most incoming objects aren't visible to observers on the ground. Many other incoming space rocks go unnoticed because daylight drowns them out.

Over the last decade or so, hundreds of these events have been spotted by the classified satellites. Priceless observational information derived from the spacecraft were made quickly available, giving researchers such insights as time, a location, height above the surface, as well as light-curves to help pin down the amount of energy churned out from the fireballs.

And in the shaky world we now live, it's nice to know that a sky-high detonation is natural versus a nuclear weapon blast.

Where the space-based surveillance truly shines is over remote stretches of ocean – far away from the prospect of ground-based data collection.

But all that ended within the last few months, leaving scientists blind-sided and miffed by the shift in policy. The hope is that the policy decision will be revisited and overturned.

Critical importance

"The fireball data from military or surveillance assets have been of critical importance for assessing the impact hazard," said David Morrison, a Near Earth Object (NEO) scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center. He noted that his views are his own, not as a NASA spokesperson.

The size of the average largest atmospheric impact from small asteroids is a key piece of experimental data to anchor the low-energy end of the power-law distribution of impactors, from asteroids greater than 6 miles (10 kilometers) in diameter down to the meter scale, Morrison told SPACE.com.

"These fireball data together with astronomical observations of larger near-Earth asteroids define the nature of the impact hazard and allow rational planning to deal with this issue," Morrison said.

Morrison said that fireball data are today playing additional important roles.

As example, the fireball data together with infrasound allowed scientists to verify the approximate size and energy of the unique Carancas impact in the Altiplano -- on the Peru-Bolivia border -- on Sept. 15, 2007.

Fireball information also played an important part in the story of the small asteroid 2008 TC3, Morrison said. That was the first-ever case of the astronomical detection of a small asteroid before it hit last year. The fireball data were key for locating the impact point and the subsequent recovery of fragments from this impact.

Link in public understanding

Astronomers are closing in on a years-long effort to find most of the potentially devastating large asteroids in our neck of the cosmic woods, those that could cause widespread regional or global devastation. Now they plan to look for the smaller stuff.

So it is ironic that the availability of these fireball data should be curtailed just at the time the NEO program is moving toward surveying the small impactors that are most likely to be picked up in the fireball monitoring program, Morrision said.

"These data have been available to the scientific community for the past decade," he said. "It is unfortunate this information is shut off just when it is becoming more valuable to the community interested in characterizing near Earth asteroids and protecting our planet from asteroid impacts."

The newly issued policy edict by the U.S. military of reporting fireball observations from satellites also caught the attention of Clark Chapman, a planetary scientist and asteroid impact expert at Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

"I think that this information is very important to make public," Chapman told SPACE.com.

"More important than the scientific value, I think, is that these rare, bright fireballs provide a link in public understanding to the asteroid impact hazard posed by still larger and less frequent asteroids," Chapman explained.

Those objects are witnessed by unsuspecting people in far-flung places, Chapman said, often generating incorrect and exaggerated reports.

"The grounding achieved by associating these reports by untrained observers with the satellite measurements is very useful for calibrating the observer reports and closing the loop with folks who think they have seen something mysterious and extraordinary," Chapman said.

Tracking Down the Climate Scanners

2010-01-10T07:40:00.001-08:00

Norway Time Hole “Leak” Plunges Northern Hemisphere Into Chaos

2010-01-06T09:37:00.000-08:00

[Ed. Note: This report should be read from its website location at
http://www.whatdoesitmean.com/index1319.htm as this copy does NOTcontain the links embedded in the original report.]

Norway Time Hole “Leak” Plunges Northern Hemisphere Into Chaos
By: Sorcha Faal, and as reported to her Western Subscribers
January 6, 2010

Russian scientists are reporting to Prime Minister Putin today that the high-energy beam [photo top left] fired into the upper heavens from the United States High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HHARP) radar facility in Ramfjordmoen, Norway this past month has resulted in a “catastrophic puncturing” of our Plant’s thermosphere thus allowing into the troposphere an “unimpeded thermal inversion” of the exosphere, which is the outermost layer of Earth's atmosphere.

To the West’s firing of this ‘quantum’ high-energy beam we had previously reported on in our December 10, 2009 report titled “Attack On Gods ‘Heaven’ Lights Up Norwegian Sky”.

To how catastrophic for our Planet this massive thermal inversion has been Anthony Nunan, an assistant general manager for risk management at Mitsubishi Corporation in Tokyo, is reporting today that the entire Northern Hemisphere is in winter chaos, with the greatest danger from this unprecedented Global event being the destruction of billions of dollars worth of crops in a World already nearing the end of its ability to feed its self.

So powerful has this thermal inversion become that reports from the United States are stating that their critical crops of strawberries, oranges, and other fruits and vegetables grown in their Southern States, are being destroyed by record cold temperatures. The US is further reporting record amounts of snowfall in what they are now warning may be their worst winter in 25 years.

Reports from the United Kingdom today are, likewise, showing a Nation in chaos as brutal cold temperatures continue to batter the British people suffering under the worst snow blizzards to hit them in almost 50 years. So dire has it become in the UK that their National Grid yesterday issued only its second warning in its entire history stating that their Nation’s gas supply was running out due to this unprecedented event.

Not just to the UK, but also to the entire European Union has this thermal inversion been affecting as reports from that region show continued chaos is occurring due to plunging temperatures and snows. In the UK, also, reports are showing that the military has been called out to rescue over 1,000 stranded vehicles.

Though the Motherland, and its people, are some of the best equipped in the World to handle such severe winter conditions, the Russian island of Sakhalin was inundated this past week by a rare Snow Cyclone setting off no less than avalanches.

But to the worst affected region of the Northern Hemisphere no one has been hit harder than China, where in what is being described as a “soul-destroying snowstorm” this Asian Nation has been plunged into such havoc the entire country has been brought to a standstill. China further reports that the massive snowstorms hitting them are their worst in 60 years and necessitating their military forces to save over 1,400 people trapped when their train became covered in snow. So overwhelmed by this unprecedented event has China become that they have ordered all of their citizens to help with snow removal too.

South Korea has not been spared either as reports from that Nation are reporting their worst snow storms in their modern history of recording these events.

Reports from Japan are also reporting record snowfall in their Northern Regions, where according to one unnamed Kushiro resident, “Snow falls hard here in Kushiro, but this is the most I have ever seen. The snow's piling up and we're running out of places to dump it.”

Canada, another Nation used to extreme winter events, reports that the storm that had hit their maritime provinces this past week was so powerful buildings were knocked off of their foundations in what one resident, Tom Jardine, described as being “worse than a hurricane”.

To the long-term consequences of this thermal inversion caused by the West, these reports further warn that by the puncturing of our atmosphere by the HHARP radars our Planet has, also, been “needlessly exposed” to the growing threat posed to us by the giant mysterious object currently approaching us (named by NASA as G1.9) which we had previously reported on in our January 3rd report titled “Russia Prepares For Asteroid Strike As New Comet Nears Sun”, and which has been blamed for the rapid shifting of our Earth’s North Pole that was first documented in 2005.

But to the most critical aspect of these events it surely lies with the Western World’s continued arrogance in regards to experimenting on both our Planets natural species and human beings, and though who may think that they are ‘gods’, are continuing to give evidence that they are acting more like devils.

© January 6, 2010 EU and US all rights reserved

The real Frankenstein experiment: One man's mission to create a living mind inside a machine

2010-01-04T11:15:00.000-08:00

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1240410/The-real-Frankenstein-experiment-One-mans-mission-create-living-mind-inside-machine.html

By Michael Hanlon
04th January 2010

Professor Markram is planning to create the world's most expensive 'baby'.

His words staggered the erudite audience gathered at a technology conference in Oxford last summer.

Professor Henry Markram, a doctor-turned-computer engineer, announced that his team would create the world's first artificial conscious and intelligent mind by 2018.

And that is exactly what he is doing.

On the shore of Lake Geneva, this brilliant, eccentric scientist is building an artificial mind. A Swiss - it could only be Swiss - precision- engineered mind, made of silicon, gold and copper.

The end result will be a creature, if we can call it that, which its maker believes within a decade may be able to think, feel and even fall in love.

Professor Markram's 'Blue Brain' project, must rank as one of the most extraordinary endeavours in scientific history.

If this 47-year-old South-African Israeli is successful, then we are on the verge of realising an age-old fantasy, one first imagined when an adolescent Mary Shelley penned Frankenstein, her tale of an artificial monster brought to life - a story written, quite coincidentally, just a few miles from where this extraordinary experiment is now taking place.

Success will bring with it philosophical, moral and ethical conundrums of the highest order, and may force us to confront what it means to be human.

But Professor Markram thinks his artificial mind will render vivisection obsolete, conquer insanity and even improve our intelligence and ability to learn.

What Markram's project amounts to is an audacious attempt to build a computerised copy of a brain - starting with a rat's brain, then progressing to a human brain - inside one of the world's most powerful computers.

This, it is hoped, will bring into being a sentient mind that will be able to think, reason, express will, lay down memories and perhaps even experience love, anger, sadness, pain and joy.

'We will do it by 2018,' says the professor confidently. 'We need a lot of money, but I am getting it. There are few scientists in the world with the resources I have at my disposal.'

There is, inevitably, scepticism. But even Markram's critics mostly accept that he is on to something and, most importantly, that he has the money.

Tens of millions of euros are flooding into his laboratory at the Brain Mind Institute at the Ecole Polytechnique in Lausanne - paymasters include the Swiss government, the EU and private backers, including the computer giant IBM. Artificial minds are, it seems, big business.

The human brain is the most complex object in the universe. But Markram insists that the latest supercomputers will soon have its measure.

Professor Markram believes that if his 'Blue Brain' project is successful, it will render vivisection obsolete
As I toured his glittering laboratories, it became clear that this is certainly no ordinary scientific endeavour. In fact, Markram's department looks like the interior of the Starship Enterprise, and is full of toys that would make James Bond's Q blush with envy.

But how on earth do you build a brain in a computer? And haven't scientists been trying to do that build an electronic brain for decades - without success?

To understand the sheer importance of what Blue Brain is, it is helpful to understand, first, what it is not.

Dr Markram is not trying to build the kind of clanking robot servant beloved of countless sci-fi movies.

Real robots may be able to walk and talk and are based around computers that are 'taught' to behave like humans, but they are, in the end, no more intelligent than dishwashers. Markram dismisses these toys as 'archaic'.

The professor is not mad, but he is unsettling

Instead, Markram is building what he hopes will be a real person, or at least the most important and complex part of a real person - its mind.

And so instead of trying to copy what a brain does, by teaching a computer to play chess, climb stairs and so on, he has started at the bottom, with the biological brain itself.

Our brains are full of nerve cells called neurons, which communicate with one another using minuscule electrical impulses.

The project literally takes apart actual brains cell by cell, using what amounts to extremely intricate dissecting techniques, analyses the billions of connections between the cells, and then plots these connections into a computer.

The upshot is, in effect, a blueprint or carbon copy of a brain, rendered in software rather than flesh and blood. The idea is that by building a model of a real brain, it might - just might - begin to behave like the real thing.

To demonstrate how he is achieving this, Markram shows me a machine that resembles an infernal torture engine; a wheel about 2ft across with a dozen ultra-fine glass 'spokes' aimed at the centre.

It is here that tiny slivers of rat brain are dissected, using tools finer than a human hair. Their interconnections are then mapped and turned into computer code.

Professor Markram is adamant the experiment will not result in a stereotypical Frankenstein, like the one seen here in 1970 film The Horror of Frankenstein

A bucket full of slop lies next to the gleaming high-techery. That's where the bits of old rat brain go - a gruesome reminder that amid this is a project based upon flesh and blood.

So far, Markram's supercomputer - an IBM Blue Gene - is able, using the information gleaned from the slivers of real brain tissue, to simulate the workings of about 10,000 neurones, amounting to a single rat's 'neocortical column' - the part of a brain believed to be the centre of conscious thought.

That, says Markram, is the hard part. To go further, he is going to need a bigger computer.

Using just 30 watts of electricity - enough to power a dim light bulb - our brains can outperform by a factor of a million or more even the mighty Blue Gene computer. But replicating a whole real brain is 'entirely impossible today', Markram says.

Even the next stage - a complete rat brain - needs a £200million, vastly more efficient supercomputer.

Then what? 'We need a billion-dollar machine, custom-built. That could do a human brain.'

But computing power is increasing exponentially and it is only a matter of time before suitable hardware is available.

'We will get there,' says Markram confidently.

In fact, he believes that he will have a computer sufficiently powerful to deal with all the data and simulate a human brain before the end of this decade.

The result? Perhaps a mind, a conscious, sentient being, able to learn and make autonomous decisions. It is a startling possibility.

When faced with such extraordinary claims, one must first ask the question: 'Is he mad?'

I have met several scientists who maintain they can change the world: men (they are always men) who say they can build a time machine or a starship, cure cancer or old age.

A glittering machine brain, perhaps many times more intelligent than our own, carries, perhaps, even more potential for evil, as well as good.

Men who believe telepathy is real, or that Earth has been visited by aliens or, indeed, or who claim they are on the verge of creating artificial minds. Most of these men are deluded.

Markram is not mad, but he is certainly unsettling. He comes across like a combination of Victorian gentleman scientist and New Age guru.

'You have to understand physics, the structure of the universe and philosophy,' he says, theatrically.

He talks about humans 'not reaching their potential', and of his conviction that more of us have the capacity for genius than we think.

He believes his artificial mind could show us how to exploit the untapped potential in our own minds. If we create a being more intelligent than us, maybe it could teach us how to catch up.

The best evidence that Markram is not crazy is that he gets his hands dirty. He knows his way around his machines and knows one end of a brain cell from another.

The principles underlying his work are firmly rooted in the scientific mainstream.

Professor Markram is hoping the artificial brain he will create could be used for medical research, but concedes this could cause ethical problems
He believes that the deepest and most fundamental properties of being human - thoughts, emotions, the mysterious feeling of self-awareness - arise from trillions of electrochemical interactions that take place in the lump of grey jelly in our heads.

He believes there is no mysterious 'soul' that gives rise to the feeling of self. On the contrary, he insists that this results from physical processes inside our skulls.

Of course, consciousness is one of the deepest scientific mysteries. How do millions of tiny electrical impulses in our heads give rise to the feeling of self, of pain, of love? No one knows.

But if Markram is right, this doesn't matter. He believes that consciousness is probably something that simply 'emerges' given a sufficient degree of organised complexity.

Imagine it this way: think of the marvellous patterns that emerge when a flock of starlings swoops in unison at dusk.

Thousands of birds are interacting to create a shape that resembles a single unified entity with a life of its own. Markram believes that this is how consciousness might emerge - from billions of separate brain cells combining to create a single sentient mind.

But what of the problems such an invention could generate? What if the machine makes demands? What if it begs you not to turn it off, or leave it alone at night?

'Maybe you will have to treat it like a child. Sometimes I will have to say to my child: "I have to go, sorry," ' he explains.

Indeed, the artificial brain would throw up a host of moral issues. Could you really use an artificial mind, which behaves like a real mind, to perform experiments on?

One of the key hopes for Markram's artificial mind is that it could be used for medical testing. But would it be right to cause a brain - even an artificial one - any 'pain'?

'If you accept that building a simulation is the same as building a real brain, then we have real problems,' he concedes.

'The process of building this is going to change society. We will have ethical problems that are unimaginable to us. If I saw signs of suffering I would stop,' Markram says.

But he also admits that his machines could be used for evil purposes - by the military, for instance, to create futuristic killing machines.

For this reason, in an extremely unusual move for a publicly funded scientist, he has decided to keep some of the computer coding for the Blue Brain project secret.

Markram's team is, in fact, not the only one trying to build an artificial brain, although he is probably in the lead. At the University of Manchester, the 'Brainbox' project is also attempting to model a human mind.

Dr David Lester, one of the project's lead scientists, says that they are effectively in a race with Markram, a race they will have to win with cunning rather than cash.

'We've got £4million,' Lester says. 'Blue Brain has serious funding from the Swiss government and IBM. Henry Markram is to be taken seriously.'

'The process of building this is going to change society. We will have ethical problems that are unimaginable to us'

Manchester is hoping it is possible to simplify key elements of the brain and thus dramatically reduce the computation power needed to replicate them.

Others doubt Markham can ever succeed. Imperial College professor Igor Aleksander claims that while Markram can build a copy of a human brain, it will be 'like an empty bucket', incapable of consciousness.

And, as Dr Lester points out, 'a newly minted real human brain can't do very much except lie on the floor and gurgle'. Indeed, Professor Markram may end up creating the world's most expensive baby.

But if Markram turns his machine on in 2018, and it utters the famous declaration that underpins Western philosophy, 'I think, therefore I am', he will have confounded his critics.

And his ambition is by no means impossible. In the past year, models of a rat brain produced totally unexpected 'brainwave patterns' in the computer software. Is it possible that, for a few seconds maybe, a fleeting rat-like consciousness emerged?

'Perhaps,' Markram says. It is not much, but if a rat, then why not a man?

During my meeting I tried to avoid bringing up the name of the most famous (fictional) creator of artificial life, on the grounds of taste. But in the end, I had to mention him.

'Yes, well, Dr Frankenstein. People have made that point,' Markram says with a thin smile.

Frankenstein's experiment, of course, went rather horribly wrong. And that was one man, with his monster made from bits of old corpse.

A glittering machine brain, perhaps many times more intelligent than our own and created by one of the best-equipped laboratories in the world, carries, perhaps, even more potential for evil, as well as good.

Science Corrupted

2009-12-29T05:56:00.000-08:00

Al Gore Won't Debate

Microbe and Machine Merged to Create First 'Cellborg'

2009-12-26T17:19:00.000-08:00

The QUESTION IS: Will Science Use this to Lift Up Man or Enslave Him???

http://www.livescience.com/technology/051027_cellborg_sensor.html

Microbe and Machine Merged to Create First 'Cellborg'
By Ker Than, LiveScience Staff Writer
27 October 2005

Fully merging microbe and machine for the first time, scientists have created gold-plated bacteria that can sense humidity.

The breakthrough is the first "cellborg" in what might become an array of devices that could sense dangerous gases or other hazardous substances.

The bioelectronic device swells and contracts in response to how much water vapor is in the air. It’s called a cellborg humidity sensor, and it is at least four times more sensitive than those that are solely electronic. It even works even when its biological parts are long dead.

How it was made

Scientists first coated a silicon chip with a layer of live Bacillus cereus bacteria. Some of the long, rod-shaped microbes lodged between two etched electrodes on the chip’s surface, forming a bridge. The chip was then washed in a solution containing tiny gold particles, each one about 30 nanometers across.

A nanometer is one billionth of a meter. A human hair is roughly 100,000 nanometers wide.

The gold nanoparticles attached to long hair-like proteins on the surface of the bacteria, transforming them into gold-plated bridges that completed an electronic circuit.

The hair-like proteins are called teichoic acid molecules. They are negatively charged and provide a surface for the positively-charged gold nanoparticles to attach to. Without them, the gold nanoparticles would repel one another due to their like-charges and no bridge between the two electrodes could ever form.

By wrapping themselves around the gold nanoparticles, the teichoic acid molecules therefore act as metal insulators, creating what engineers call a “dielectric barrier.”

“To any electronic person, that’s a field day,” said Ravi Saraf, a University of Nebraska chemical engineer who led the discovery. “You can go nuts with it.”

First of its kind

The bodies of the gold-plated bacteria swell as humidity increases and they absorb moisture; they contract when humidity decreases. The swelling causes the gold nanoparticles on the bacteria’s surface to grow farther apart, like stickers on an inflating balloon.

Even a tiny separation of 0.2 nanometers between the gold nanoparticles was enough to interfere with the flow of electric current between the circuit’s two electrodes. That’s because the farther apart the gold particles on the bacteria’s surface, the harder it becomes for electrons to “hop” between particles and get from one electrode to the other.

The cellborg sensor is extremely sensitive: a drop from 20 percent to zero humidity results in a 40-fold decrease in current flow. In humidity sensors that are solely electronic, the decrease is only 10-fold.

According to Saraf, their hybrid sensor is the first to incorporate microorganisms into an electronic device.

In the past, researchers have programmed bacteria to behave like biological computers or created electronic circuits that respond to glowing bacteria as a way to detect chemicals, but in those cases, the line separating microbe and machine was still distinct.

The nearest other attempt to merge the two occurred in March, when researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison reported using electrodes to trap and examine bacteria. One researcher from that team essentially predicted the experiment by Saraf and his graduate student, Vikas Berry, saying that it might be possible to attach microscopic gold particles to the shell of the bacteria to form “nanoscale gold wire.”

Bacteria zombies

Once assimilated, the gilded bacteria can survive for only about two days, but even when dead, their bodies still swell and contract in response to changes in humidity. They can go on working this way for months, Saraf said.

If scientists could coat bacteria with gold nanoparticles without killing them, it might be possible to make cellborg sensors that could power an electronic circuit instead of just completing one, Saraf told LiveScience.

Another possibility may be to tweak the bacteria so they respond to things other than humidity. They could be made to swell or contract, for example, when they feed on certain gases or hazardous chemicals.

The study was detailed in the Oct. 21 issue of the journal Angewandte Chemie.

Scientists Harness Bacteria to Turn Microscopic Gears

2009-12-26T17:18:00.000-08:00

http://www.livescience.com/technology/091222-bacteria-microgear-machines.html

Scientists Harness Bacteria to Turn Microscopic Gears
LiveScience.com
December 26, 2009

Scientists have demonstrated a way to harness the motion of swimming bacteria to turn tiny gears. This bacteria-driven mechanism could someday power micro-machines that combine living organisms and man-made materials.

To build their rudimentary device, the research team first fashioned silicon gears measuring a mere 0.01 inches (380 micrometers) across and 0.002 inches (50 micrometers) thick. With their slanted teeth, the gears look rather like tiny ninja stars.

The microgears were then placed into a nutrient broth swarming with the microbe Bacillus subtilis, the workhorses in this setup. When supplied with nutrients and oxygen the bacteria scoot about randomly.

When their concentration becomes high enough, though, the microorganisms exhibit what is known as collective swimming.

"Once they cross a certain threshold, the bacteria make a flow as they swim and other bacteria get pulled into this flow," explained study team member Igor Aronson, a physicist at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois.

In the experiment, some of these self-propelled bacteria got caught behind the gear's teeth but still continued to push forward. Though the gear weighed millions of times as much as an individual bacterium, the cumulative force of hundreds of the little swimmers succeeded in getting the gear to rotate.

Crucially, the researchers found that by adding oxygen they could increase the bacteria's pace, making the gears turn faster, while adding nitrogen slowed things down. "This lets us control the system," said Aronson.

This spinning was also demonstrated using two gears, whose teeth ratcheted the other gear along as cogs might in a full-fledged machine.

Real-life micro-machines

Even at full tilt, however, the gears achieved only a couple of revolutions per minute with power generation on the scale of quadrillionths of a watt - orders of magnitude below what real-world machines need.

But scaled-up versions could power biomechanical micro-machines and have the ability to adapt to their environment and even repair themselves, Aronson told TopTenREVIEWS.

Anita Goel, chair and scientific director of Nanobiosym, a nanotechnology company, thinks the new study is promising. "It provides tools and approaches to harness and even employ biological machines to achieve desired tasks on small scales," said Goel, who was not involved in the research.

Study author Aronson points out that yoking microorganisms as miniature beasts of burden may not be the best route for developing real-life applications. Instead, scientists may prefer to design tiny robots that swim in the same way as the bacteria.

The research was detailed in a recent issue of the journal for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Military Science: Hack Stormy Skies to Lord over Lightning

2009-12-22T15:37:00.000-08:00

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/12/military-science-hack-stormy-skies-to-lord-over-lightning/

Military Science: Hack Stormy Skies to Lord over Lightning
Katie Drummond
Wired News
Fri, 18 Dec 2009 14:52 EST

The military's scientific fringe has toyed with weather manipulation and geo-engineering for years. Recently, ideas like adding iron to the ocean, or covering the Arctic with dust, have been floated in a bid stave off global warming. But the Pentagon's also got a long track record of plotting to screw with enemy climates and improve their own operational abilities.

Now, Darpa's got a new target for geo-hacking science, and if they can make it work, we might see modern firearms making way for weapons of the mythological variety. The out-there research agency is soliciting proposals that would harness control over "the natural mechanism of lightning initiation" by coming up with a way to launch manmade lightning bolts, and prevent or redirect natural lightning strikes - and their accompanying destruction.

"Lightning causes more than $1B/year in direct damages to property in addition to the loss of lives, disruption of activities (for example, postponement of satellite launches) and their corresponding costs," the solicitation notes. Until now, no one's been too clear on how lightning is formed or how it travels, and the fact that most of the activity is going on inside thunderclouds doesn't help. That's why Darpa wants "rocket-triggered lightning" that can be shot off from the ground and then studied as it moves and touches down.

Once the natural mechanism of lightning formation and travel is understood, the agency wants a plan to predict lightning strikes - and then either stop the storms, or reroute them to a better strategic location.

And Americans everywhere should brace themselves for stormy skies, because Darpa wants the storm-brewing techniques to be tested nationwide:
The United States is home to thunderstorms of various type, duration, scale and intensity. This program would like to capitalize on the unique geographic features of various locations across the CONUS [Continental United States] that offer an increased likelihood of intercepting thunderstorms that exhibit unique characteristics.

IS THIS THE SECRET BEHIND CLIMATE SCIENCE?

2009-12-22T15:00:00.001-08:00

www.nomorefakenews.com

IS THIS THE SECRET BEHIND CLIMATE SCIENCE?
By Jon Rappoport
www.insolutions.info
www.nomorefakenews.com
www.PandemicFluOnline.com

DECEMBER 21, 2009. What I’m offering here is not meant to be a single theory that accounts for all factors in a massive global power struggle. Far from it. But perhaps there are important clues…

In 1945, Europe was devastated. It was lying on its back, looking up. Over the next 50 years, it followed a step-by-step plan to become a super-state, the EU. It became a player. In fact, it waged an economic war against the US. That war, on both sides, is ongoing.

From the EU’s point of view, the notion of freedom has to be punctured. The US has to be made into something politically resembling Europe: a socialist operation. A top-down society where “allocation of resources” and its deployment from a central point of control is the preferred and stifling method of “humanitarian economics.”

114 nations in the world produce oil. The Western European nations, starting at #12 (Norway), and dropping down to #101 (Sweden), produce about five million barrels a day, for a population of roughly 416 million.

The US produces 8.5 million barrels a day for a population of 300 million.

And the price of a gallon of gasoline, computed as a percentage of daily individual wealth, takes a much greater slice in Europe than in the US. According to the admittedly rough figures provided by The Oil Drum, the cost of a gallon of gasoline, as a % of the wealth available daily, per individual, is: Europe—7.53%; US—2.54%.

On this basis alone, it would be wise for Europe to find a way to level the oil playing field.

Yes, the EU can obtain foreign oil, but in order to support its socialist state-run enterprises and governments, the taxes it lays on oil make gasoline a very troublesome commodity. The citizens of Europe are not altogether happy about the price at the pump.

How about a daring end run around the problem? Suppose the entire global oil industry could be put under the gun. Would that work? Suppose the very notion of oil as energy could be discredited through a remarkable propaganda campaign. Suppose, somehow, science could be co-opted into this plan.

After all, scientists are famously pliable. With a pittance in research grants, they can be trained like messianic monkeys to support a particular outcome—and they will actually believe in that outcome.

THE EARTH IS WARMING.

THE PRIMARY CAUSE IS HUMANS.

THE PRIMARY HUMAN CAUSE IS OIL PRODUCTION.

THE PRIMARY CULPRIT IS CO2.

Absurd. That would never fly.

Oh…but it has.

Instead of trying to block the competitor’s access to the resource, in the traditional manner, why not discredit the whole resource? Why not call it a poison?

Why not try to level the playing field that way?

“Manmade CO2 is warming the world and the world as we know it will end soon, unless we all find new energies that will sustain us.”

“Let’s set up a primary research facility in England, and let’s begin to turn out studies that alarm the populace. Let’s find allies and use them to support our work.”

“If we can bamboozle the world into accepting this threat-to-the-planet scenario, we can level the field: we will all have to find non-oil energies to run on.”

This program ties in nicely with the overall environmental agenda, for which there is already much support and funding. In fact, at the elite levels of the movement (Rockefeller, Prince Charles, to a lesser degree Maurice Strong, etc.) the vision of a green planet involves far fewer people inhabiting it and far lower needs for energy.

Now—concerning the question of Peak Oil—do the oil companies believe in the concept? Do they think the world is running out of oil? If so, it’ll be easy to convince them to play along. Manmade CO2 at the root of devastating warming: it would even be a winner for them, if they muscle their way into the vanguard of corporations ready to supply the planet with alternative energies. And during the transition, they can clean up on carbon transfers and trading and make new fortunes.

The EU hopes that, in the end, the US will be brought down. It, as the sole threat to a controlled Earth, will have to sacrifice its notion of individual freedom. It will adapt to the plan for an organized society of Everyone. It will go along.

And then the EU, as the primary regional government now existing, will take its rightful premier place among other such organized regional power structures, and there will be de facto world government.

All right, I’ll stop here.

Yes, I know this sounds quite extreme. And yes, I know there are holes in this argument. I know there are unanswered questions. But I believe we have some clues here.

Several European nations once had far-flung empires. In modern times, they faltered and faded. Their star was trampled in two 20th-century wars. At the end of WW2, they were seething under the utter defeat of their long held ambitions. They were brought back from ruin by the US and its Marshall Plan.

Never again would their dreams of conquest be expressed through military conquest.

From 1945 on, they would have to proceed in a more clandestine fashion. For example, through financial manipulation. Upper echelons of European society were already aligned with internationalists in the US, and the globalist agenda was already a work in progress.

However, in terms of sheer industrial and military might, the US was in a class of its own.

The military/industrial world runs on energy, and that energy is oil.

Given the superior strength and operating power flowing from individual freedom and the capitalist system, America was more than formidable. It was nearly untouchable.

Perhaps, at some point, the target became oil.

Weaken that, and you weaken the US. You bring it closer to the level of the other players. If everyone suffers in the process, so be it.

Of course, there are real environmental problems. Industrial pollution, where it is severe, causes lung disease. Chemical spills, oil spills—these are not negligible events. Ongoing dumping in rivers kills life. And so forth and so on. But that is not enough to hook up the people of Earth to a doomsday scenario.

For that, you need science. You need a provocative theory about the end of all civilization. You need government agencies to feed stories to the compliant press. You need the United Nations, a stepchild of the Council on Foreign Relations, one of the important globalist think tanks on the planet. You need to coordinate many non-profit humanitarian groups. You need major PR. With time, with hard work, you can get it.

What we are now witnessing is the “kinder, gentler” rebirth of the Soviet Union, on a planetary scale. Not only the stifling of enterprise through complex forced interfaces with bureaucratic carbon red tape; not only that. The whole idea is to corral the entire productive capacity of the world under the umbrella of Resource Allocation.

This concept flows from the notion of Central Planning, where researchers determine what the world can produce and how many people it must distribute this largesse to. And how it will be done, on a “fair” basis.

It’s the Jesus Christ of industrial calculations. “We will bring Christmas on Earth to you. Just be patient. We’re figuring out the system. Nations will wage war no more. Swords will be turned into plowshares. We’re building the model.”

Part of my argument rests on the fact that, expressed nakedly, this sounds so absurd no one with a shred of intelligence would buy it. But, you see, we are already stepping out on that road, because Science has told us we must; it’s the only way to save ourselves. There is a thing called CO2, and it’s killing us, and it’s the Alien that was hiding under the surface of our hubris. It’s our recompense for all we did to attack Mother Nature, and it fits everything we’re taught to believe about ultimate justice and payback.

Oil must go down. Industry must go down. We must bring natural green back to every corner of the Earth. It’s not just a pretty idea anymore. No, we must do it because we have brought the planet to the brink.

Our only chance, and it is a long shot, is to place our future into the hands of wizards, who can determine how to allocate the riches of the world. Planning. From above.

The experiment with freedom is over. We proved how destructive we could become with it. Therefore, now we must put the house in order and bind up our reckless ways.

Burn your pride on the altar of Collectivist Realization. Humble yourselves. Await messages from the Planners.

CO2 was just one insight. The whole unruly world must be organized, so we can escape other threats.

It will be a beautiful thing.

They say.

By Jon Rappoport

Bacteria Engineered to Turn Carbon Dioxide Into Liquid Fuel

2009-12-13T04:52:00.000-08:00

Now the puppet masters don't have to have their 'cap and trade' bills and taxes1

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091210162222.htm

Bacteria Engineered to Turn Carbon Dioxide Into Liquid Fuel

ScienceDaily (Dec. 11, 2009) — Global climate change has prompted efforts to drastically reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas produced by burning fossil fuels.

In a new approach, researchers from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have genetically modified a cyanobacterium to consume carbon dioxide and produce the liquid fuel isobutanol, which holds great potential as a gasoline alternative. The reaction is powered directly by energy from sunlight, through photosynthesis.

The research appears in the Dec. 9 print edition of the journal Nature Biotechnology and is available online.

This new method has two advantages for the long-term, global-scale goal of achieving a cleaner and greener energy economy, the researchers say. First, it recycles carbon dioxide, reducing greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the burning of fossil fuels. Second, it uses solar energy to convert the carbon dioxide into a liquid fuel that can be used in the existing energy infrastructure, including in most automobiles.

While other alternatives to gasoline include deriving biofuels from plants or from algae, both of these processes require several intermediate steps before refinement into usable fuels.

"This new approach avoids the need for biomass deconstruction, either in the case of cellulosic biomass or algal biomass, which is a major economic barrier for biofuel production," said team leader James C. Liao, Chancellor's Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at UCLA and associate director of the UCLA-Department of Energy Institute for Genomics and Proteomics. "Therefore, this is potentially much more efficient and less expensive than the current approach."

Using the cyanobacterium Synechoccus elongatus, researchers first genetically increased the quantity of the carbon dioxide-fixing enzyme RuBisCO. Then they spliced genes from other microorganisms to engineer a strain that intakes carbon dioxide and sunlight and produces isobutyraldehyde gas. The low boiling point and high vapor pressure of the gas allows it to easily be stripped from the system.

The engineered bacteria can produce isobutanol directly, but researchers say it is currently easier to use an existing and relatively inexpensive chemical catalysis process to convert isobutyraldehyde gas to isobutanol, as well as other useful petroleum-based products.

In addition to Liao, the research team included lead author Shota Atsumi, a former UCLA postdoctoral scholar now on the UC Davis faculty, and UCLA postdoctoral scholar Wendy Higashide.

An ideal place for this system would be next to existing power plants that emit carbon dioxide, the researchers say, potentially allowing the greenhouse gas to be captured and directly recycled into liquid fuel.

"We are continuing to improve the rate and yield of the production," Liao said. "Other obstacles include the efficiency of light distribution and reduction of bioreactor cost. We are working on solutions to these problems."

The research was supported in part by a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy.

Whatever Happened to Nazi Synthetic Gas and Oil Technology? Scarcity Scams Examined

2009-12-13T04:48:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Whatever-Happened-to-Nazi-by-Grant-Lawrence-091207-70.html

December 11, 2009
Whatever Happened to Nazi Synthetic Gas and Oil Technology? Scarcity Scams Examined
By Grant Lawrence

As we continue to talk about Peak Oil and the claim that the world is running out of oil, some might recall that Nazi Germany during World War 2 ran it's war machine on synthetic gas and oil.

Today scientific studies have demonstrated that the earth forms its own oil, abiotic oil, from a process that appears to involve methane deep within the earth. Unfortunately, we don't know how much of this oil the earth produces and whether it is possible to economically extract it. But we do know that the 19th century Russian scientist was correct in his belief that oil was created within the earth from other than fossil material.

For an excellent understanding on abiotic oil read, "Project Savior's What We Know Wednesday: Abiotic Oil, Myths and Facts."

Still even if abiotic oil has little potential for future needs, there was the technology that existed in the early 1930s that allowed the Germans to produce its own synthetic gas and oil.

What happened to it?

Before World War 2, Germany had little natural oil reserves to call upon to run its massive war machine. The solution was to come up with the technology to run the equipment needed for war.

The Nazi's had to come up with a way to create synthetic fuels if they were to be able to engage their enemies in battle. When it comes to war, humans can often exceed perceived technological limitations and the Germans did.

It wouldn't be much of a stretch to assume Germany's brilliant scientists came up with the process alone. But, in reality the Germans had a little help from Standard Oil.

"....The Standard Oil group of companies, in which the Rockefeller family owned a one-quarter (and controlling) interest,1 was of critical assistance in helping Nazi Germany prepare for World War II. This assistance in military preparation came about because Germany's relatively insignificant supplies of crude petroleum were quite insufficient for modern mechanized warfare; in 1934 for instance about 85 percent of German finished petroleum products were imported. The solution adopted by Nazi Germany was to manufacture synthetic gasoline from its plentiful domestic coal supplies. It was the hydrogenation process of producing synthetic gasoline and iso-octane properties in gasoline that enabled Germany to go to war in 1940 and this hydrogenation process was developed and financed by the Standard Oil laboratories in the United States in partnership with I.G. Farben.....Source: Standard Oil Fuels World War 2

Although Americans were soon to be fighting and dying against the evils of Nazism, Multinational American corporations, like Standard oil, were ready to make a buck helping the Nazis no matter what the ethical considerations were.

But the history of Corporate America helping the Nazi war machine is well documented. What is not as well known is that the technology that created Nazi synthetic gas and oil is still around today and in use.

In South Africa, there is a company called Sosol that utilizes the same technology the Nazi's used to create synthetic oil.

"...In 1948, the newly elected National Party regime formally instituted apartheid. Two years later, it created Sasol. Aside from mining and manufacturing chemicals, Sasol set out to develop a domestic gasoline-production capability, a goal that became more urgent when many oil-producing nations refused to sell oil to the apartheid regime. In the late 1970s, using government loans, the firm built a huge complex at Secunda, where it has produced some 1.5 billion gallons of gasoline that is functionally no different than the gas produced from Texas crude.
Since the end of apartheid, Sasol has prospered, finding new markets and customers outside its borders. But with the spike in oil prices of the last few years, it has really caught fire. (Note this five-year chart of Sasol, whose shares were listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2003, against ExxonMobil.) And that has much to do with the company's technological promise....." Source: Slate

Evidently, the South African company finds it economically feasible to produce this synthetic gas.

So it is an interesting factoid that synthetic fuels utilizing Nazi technology from the 1930s is still being used.

But the larger point is that if there was 1930s technology that was efficient and sufficient enough to fuel the massive German war machine with synthetic gas and oil, we are likely capable of utilizing our advanced technology to move past our dependence on oil (biotic or abiotic).

I am not advocating that the world continue to run on fossil fuels. It is a dirty form of energy that kills a lot of life with the pollution that arises from it. It is also clear that it contributes to global climate change. But I am pointing out that our energy sources and technology are likely much more advanced and capable of meeting present and future energy needs than the public realizes.

After all, large profits are made from a perceived lack or scarcity. Look at the massive profits Enron generated out of creating a supposed scarcity of electricity in California. Most of us may recall the rolling blackouts that occurred in California from a supposed energy crisis. Later it was revealed that those blackouts were manufactured by Enron for maximum profits.

"...The traders also said that Enron's retail unit, Enron Energy Services, or EES, used the fear created by the blackouts to push large California businesses into more than $1 billion in long-term energy contracts...." Source: Market Watch

It is also known that the exorbitantly high prices Americans paid for gasoline over the last several years occurred because speculators made a fortune creating the price hikes in oil.

"....A Congressional investigation into energy trading in 2003 discovered that ICE was being used to facilitate "round-trip" trades. " Round-trip trades occur when one firm sells energy to another and then the second firm simultaneously sells the same amount of energy back to the first company at exactly the same price. No commodity ever changes hands. But when done on an exchange, these transactions send a price signal to the market and they artificially boost revenue for the company. This is nothing more than a massive fraud, pure and simple...." Source: Seekingalpha.com

So scarcity, lack, and fear, make for big profits. That is why we need to understand that we really know little of what we have in technology to meet our energy needs because we can't trust the power structure that controls that information and that technology.

But we do know that America is the Saudi Arabia of coal and the technology exists from the 1930s to create synthetic oil if we need it.

Still I believe that if Americans were to actually take control of their government and their economic system, we would soon find that we can move beyond oil dependency.

Or Americans can continue to live in a tightly controlled reality created and maintained by the Military Industrial Complex that pumps Americans full of lies and distortions for maximum manipulation and profit.

The Anthropogenic Climate Swindle

2009-12-10T16:23:00.001-08:00

http://www.larouchepac.com/node/12709

THE ANTHROPOGENIC CLIMATE SWINDLE: DO YOU REALLY WANT A WORLD DICTATORSHIP?
by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, president of The Schiller Institute and chairwoman of the German party Bürgerrechtsbewegung Solidarität, BüSo.

December 9, 2009 (LPAC)— The audacity with which a clique of climate-scientists, a majority of the media, and a range of governments are trying to uphold the fairy tale of anthropogenic climate change, even though the recently published e-mails from East Anglia University have totally confirmed the suspicion of innumerable serious scientists that there is no evidence for global warming, is unprecedented.

The reason for this is obvious: The monetarist system of globalization today is in most dimensions more bankrupt than the communist system was in 1989. The British Empire is especially desperate, the crisis in Dubai and other upcoming state bankruptcies make clear that a second wave of insolvencies threatens to pull the whole dilapidated thing into collapse—and this time the financial oligarchy does not assume that the taxpayers in all countries are ready to compensate for their gambling debts, which have been accumulated anew in grand style.

Attempt to Get World Dictatorship

So, what then is happening in Copenhagen? It is nothing less than an effort to establish a world dictatorship, in which the gambling casino will be funded in a new way, and, moreover, the goal of the long-desired population reduction can be covered up with an environmentalist cloak. Listen to what Lord Monckton had to say in Berlin on December 4:

"The Copenhagen Treaty says that it is going to establish a world government. This has been an ambition of certain bureaucrats, certain political groupings, fascists, freemasons, marxists, for hundreds of years. All these different groups all at once or one after another wanted to achieve world domination. Previously it was thought it might happen by force, by military force. Now they found a way of doing it by what one might call a bureaucratic coup d'etat in the name of saving the planet which doesn't need to be saved. There is no threat to the climate. They have decided that they can persuade even the free nations of the West to give up their democracy, give up their freedom, and transfer all ultimate economic as well as environmental power to an unelected world government.

"When Sir Maurice Strong first created the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in the UN, he created it not as a scientific body, but as a political entity. He said at the time that he hoped that this would become the nucleus of a world government. The whole idea of world government, according to people like Sir Maurice Strong, is not to trust the people. What they will talk of is that there has been market failure in that the policies and freedom and successes of the free market and of capitalism have led to the poisoning of the planet with CO2, and therefore we need to take democracy away, so that the institutions of democracy, which include the stock markets and companies which flourish best under freedom, all of those will in future be under the thumb of a tyranny. It won't seem brutal initially, but it will be extensive. It will stifle freedom in exactly the way that we have already begun to see with the European Union, where there is a European parliament, but it cannot propose legislation. If it decides something, it can be overruled by the commissars. If it wishes to amend legislation, only the commissars, who are unelected, can give it permission. So Europe already has a kind of regional model of what will become a world government with far greater powers even than the EU over the individual nations of the world. It will be a sad day for freedom and democracy if that treaty proceeds at Copenhagen in only a few days' time.

Climate-Gate Makes them Desperate

"The Climate-gate Affair, the revelation that all the leading scientific institutions and leading scientists around the world have been bending, inventing, fabricating, contriving, altering, hiding and destroying scientific data, will, if anything, put even more pressure on the world leaders who want a dictatorial world government, to act in haste and push it through before too many people find out about Climate-gate. At the moment the mainstream news media have indulged in what might be almost called a conspiracy of silence, not to admit these emails exist, and if they have to admit they exist, as the BBC did one month after receiving them, (but only after other people had mentioned it first), the BBC and most of the news media have still not said what is in these emails. So, the world political leaders who want to create a world government will try, and try really hard, extra hard as a result of Climate-gate, to push it through before it's too late. Once people find out what you and I know, they will not want any kind of world government, because they would realize the climate is not at risk; that's always been a fabrication, and those who are using that fabrication to close our liberties down, must not be allowed to get away with it.

"They have certainly destroyed data that had been validly requested under the British FOIA. That is a criminal offense, for which I think the professor in charge of it, and possibly one or two other officials there, including the FOIA-official at the University of East Anglia, will be prosecuted, and they will be heavily fined. I can't see how they can get out of it, given the very clear content of their emails, one of which is Professor Jones writing to his colleagues all over the world, saying 'Please, destroy your data, because otherwise we will have to give it to these people.' That is an outrage, and he must not be allowed to get away with it. I hope that he will be prosecuted, convicted, and fined."

"I think that Prof. Rahmsdorf will be there, I imagine Prof. Schellnuber will be there. I have heard Prof Rahmsdorf's lecture, and I have noticed in his slides that he never used a peer-reviewed source. He always used a website called realclimate.org; and what is that website? It is the website of this poisonous network of dishonest scientists to which Rahmsdorf and Schellnuber belongs; to which Jones belongs, Hansen and Schmidt of NASA belongs; Tom Karl, who runs the national climatic data center in the United States—all of these people, Kevin Trenberth, who raped the landmark paper in 1997 on the Earth's Radiation budget—all of these people are connected by these Emails. We have always suspected they were connected, and of course we have never been able to prove it, but now we can. ... I described how at various stages in the previous evolution of the climate scare people had bent, distorted and invented the data, used corrupt mathematical procedures, used incorrect science, deliberately pushed things only in one direction, a false direction towards greater alarm than there should be. There is nothing wrong with the climate, we are having virtually no effect on it, but they wanted to tell another story, for financial reasons because they all got rich on this, ...."

The fact that the majority of German industry adopted environmentalist technology long ago, and obviously intends to remain "market-leaders" in this area which is based on totally false scientific assumptions, changes nothing about the blindness of their members. Listen to what (to offer an exact description) Fred Singer had to say at the same conference in Berlin:

"The final word I have is for those of you who are concerned about Germany and the economy of Germany. I have here something which was put out by the BDI. They accept every bit of nonsense from the IPCC? How is it possible that people who are educated, maybe even have engineering degrees, can go along with this kind of nonsense? They think that perhaps they will benefit from it. They will not! Everybody will lose, everyone here will lose, and it is a shame that these things can happen. I read the names of some of the people: Keitel, Löscher, and Schulz.

The Population Will Lose

"First of all, it is clear that we have no climate problem, and certainly no climate problem that can be tackled by human efforts. The question is: why all this excitement? What is going on? And if you look into it closely, we can see that it is a question of money and power. I'm not into this business, but it is useful for those of you who are in the press or in the media to find out who benefits from all of this and who loses. Well, I can tell you who loses: the population as a whole.

"Now, what is the great disappointment to us from outside of Germany is to see what has happened here in this country when the government changed. We had expected and hoped for a change similar to what has happened, let's say, in Australia in the last week, when they turned down Cap and Trade, the Emissions Trading System, decisively. We would think the same thing will happen in the United States. Here we find that the Black-Green [CDU-FDP] is following steps that are no different from Red-Green [SPD-Green]; in fact, it's worse. A 40% cut by 2020? That is ridiculous! It doesn't make sense."

This monstrous dumbing down of the population must stop. There is only one reasonable theme to be discussed in Copenhagen, namely, how the greatest systemic crisis in the history of mankind can be overcome, how the poverty which cries to heaven, in which more than half of mankind lives, can be overcome.

The only practicable concept for doing that, has been proposed by Lyndon LaRouche, with his Four Power Alliance for a new credit system.

EPA's "endangerment finding" allows Big Government to regulate carbon emissions

2009-12-10T07:17:00.000-08:00

A new way for the elite to try to get their 'cap and trade' laws plus fund a world government! Don't the corrupt, foolish elite know we can see through this as well?

http://www.NaturalNews.com/z027685_CO2_emissions_EPA.html

December 8 2009
EPA's "endangerment finding" allows Big Government to regulate carbon emissions
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor

(NaturalNews) Carbon dioxide is a threat to human life, says the EPA under the direction of the Obama Administration. With this declaration, the agency has bypassed Congress and can now begin to regulate CO2 as a toxic substance.

The timing of this declaration was obviously planned to coincide with the Copenhagen climate summit: With the EPA now operating with some fangs, Obama can wheel and deal in Denmark with the credibility of some political weight behind his words. But is the sudden declaration warranted? Is it backed by real science?

Lisa Jackson of the EPA explains the decision "relied on decades of sound, peer-reviewed, extensively evaluated scientific data." But thanks to the recent discovery of leaked emails from climate change scientists (ClimateGate), I'm beginning to wonder how much of that scientific data was distorted in order to achieve a particular political goal.

Green living = population control?
For the record, I've been working hard to spread awareness about reducing our carbon footprint and living sustainably. And unlike many who just talk about it, I'm knee-deep in living it in Ecuador, where I grow roughly 80% of my diet from my own garden while living increasingly "green" off the local land. But even as a green living advocate, I'm more than little concerned how Big Government might twist these climate laws to encroach upon the rights and freedoms of the People.

If CO2 is regulated, for example, it means the very gas you exhale will be considered a hazard to life on Earth. Thus, regulating CO2 could be a sneaky way to start our nation down the road of population control or even population reduction. When a person reaches the age of 65, for example, and they're about to retire and collect social security, they might then be seen as a carbon-producing financial burden, and mass euthanasia programs could begin to be seriously considered. (This isn't science fiction. Nursing home patients are already being routinely euthanized with psychiatric drugs and painkillers right now...)

Of course, most carbon comes not from the respiration of human beings, but rather from the vehicles they drive and the carbon miles underlying the products they consume. There's no question that Americans, in particular, are extremely wasteful when it comes to energy usage. They drive huge, over-powered vehicles for hours a day as a way of life, and they purchase food and other products that have burned up gallons of fossil fuels just to arrive at the local stores. The American way of life is, without debate, extremely wasteful of energy resources. (In most cities, it is also ridiculously non-sustainable...)

There's a lot that can be done to reduce energy consumption in America and therefore reduce the nation's CO2 emissions, but at what cost, exactly? What will Americans have to give up in order to meet the new emissions goals?

The senseless wasting of energy must stop
That idea frightens a lot of people, but on the other hand, as someone who now lives permanently in a developing nation, I can say with rare authenticity that living in America causes you to become addicted to the luxuries of easy energy. There's a whole lot of room for Americans to reduce their carbon footprint, but it means giving up some of the luxuries we all tend to take for granted. Driving to Blockbuster to return a rented DVD, for example, is just plain stupid. Why burn gas to push a 4,000-pound vehicle around town to return a 6-oz. piece of circular plastic? It makes no sense.

Building new homes with poor insulation makes no sense, either. And yet the building codes all across America still favor the short-term profits of home construction companies rather than long-term sustainability and energy efficiency.

For many years, I lived in Tucson, Arizona. Tucson is a desert, with roughly 330 days of sunlight a year. It's the perfect environment for a rooftop-mounted solar hot water heater that would replace all the gas and electricity used to heat hot water for local homes. But how many homes in Tucson are built with rooftop solar hot water heaters? Virtually none. It's the same story in Phoenix, Albuquerque, San Diego and even Los Angeles. KB Home and other builders keep erecting these cookie-cutter homes with no renewable energy components whatsoever. And why? Because it makes the homes a thousand bucks cheaper to sell to someone.

This kind of short-sighted energy nonsense has got to stop in America. Even without the climate change debate, it's still senseless to go on burning up the world's fossil fuels when there's so much renewable energy available for the taking if we only had the foresight to think beyond the next fiscal quarter. There's enough spare sunlight in the deserts of Arizona to power the entire nation with solar, by the way. With enough solar panels, Arizona could position itself as the Middle East of America.

I would much rather see America embrace renewable energy (and some commonsense consumption modifications) than have Big Brother wade into the fray with carbon limits and punitive fines. Government is a crude weapon for social change. It only knows how to criminalize behavior it doesn't like. It's terrible at educating consumers and businesses to change in responsible, sustainable ways. My concern with the EPA's decision today is that instead of getting a push towards a sustainable future powered with more renewable energy, we're going to get a new layer of energy tyranny that smothers the freedoms Americans are already fighting desperately to preserve.

Ask yourself this question: What has Big Government done well?

Big Government = Big failures
Think about Big Government has done for you lately: The H1N1 vaccine program was a total fiasco. The national taxation system is a paperwork nightmare. Health care is a complete joke. The Wall Street investment system is a government-sponsored casino that favors the rich. The prison system is a disaster. Public education has fallen to new lows in both funding and innovation. The war in Afghanistan drags on as a failed imperialist catastrophe. Agricultural policy, farm subsidies and the regulation of food and drugs are all completely off course, causing far more harm than good.

Now imagine Big Government running a carbon trading system -- or even personal carbon footprint limits that result in you receiving heavy fines if you exceed the government-mandated personal quota. This is precisely what could happen under a new "energy tyranny" that has just been initiated by the EPA and the Obama Administration.

Don't get me wrong: I'm all for reducing our carbon emissions and living more sustainably. I just don't like to be told what to do under the threat of being fined, arrested or imprisoned.

Do I have a better plan? Actually, I do. Implement my radical, money-saving health reform proposals (www.HealthRevolutionPetition.org) and use the hundreds of billions of dollars in savings to invest in solar power generation centers that blanket the nation's deserts. Using CSP technology (Concentrated Solar Power) -- or even some of the more innovative stirling engine / solar concentrator inventions -- we could provide power for the entire nation for generations to come. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concen...)

Or end the war in Afghanistan (which, strangely, Obama the anti-war President has now chosen to escalate even more), bring the troops home and spend the military budget building solar arrays that power America. Why fight for oil at a million dollars a year per soldier (which is what the war is costing, astonishingly) (http://rawstory.com/2009/10/us-spen...) when you can spend a fraction of that building energy sovereignty right here on American soil?

The solutions to our energy problems and our CO2 problems are found in the same place: Renewable energy technology that exists right now, today! Solar and wind really can provide all the electrical power our country needs, and with electric vehicles coming on line over the next few years, we could see a massive shift away from combustion engines and toward electric vehicles powered by solar energy delivered through the power lines. This isn't radical stuff. It's doable right now.

But if there's one thing that I've learned about Big Government, it's that innovation is the enemy of the status quo. Government rarely likes to innovate. It's more interested in controlling people, and declaring CO2 to be a harmful substance could be just the pretext our bloated, indebted and morally inept national government needs to unleash a new era of carbon controls that suffocate the American people.

Let's reduce our carbon footprint, YES! But let's do it in a way that doesn't increase the reach and power of a government that's already so large and dangerous it poses a far greater threat to the livelihood of the people than climate change ever has.

Eight Ways In-Vitro Meat will Change Our Lives

2009-12-09T10:05:00.000-08:00

Now WHY do I think this crap will kill you?

http://www.hplusmagazine.com/articles/bio/eight-ways-vitro-meat-will-change-our-lives

Eight Ways In-Vitro Meat will Change Our Lives
Written By: Hank Hyena
Date Published: November 17, 2009 | View more articles in: Bio

"Future Flesh" is squatting on your plate. Are you nervous? Stab it with a fork. Sniff it. Bite! Chew, swallow. Congratulations! Relax and ruminate now because you're digesting a muscular invention that will massively impact the planet.

In-Vitro Meat -- aka tank steak, sci fi sausage, petri pork, beaker bacon, Frankenburger, vat-grown veal, laboratory lamb, synthetic shmeat, trans-ham, factory filet, test tube tuna, cultured chicken, or any other moniker that can seduce the shopper's stomach -- will appear in 3-10 years as a cheaper, healthier, "greener" protein that's easily manufactured in a metropolis. Its entree will be enormous; not just food-huge like curry rippling through London in the 1970's or colonized tomatoes teaming up with pasta in early 1800's Italy. No. Bigger. In-Vitro Meat will be socially transformative, like automobiles, cinema, vaccines.

H+ previously discussed In-Vitro Meat, as have numerous other publications [see references at the end of this article]. Science pundits examined its microbiological struggles in Dutch labs and at New Harvest, a Baltimore non-profit. Squeamish reporters wasted ink on its "yucky" and "unnatural" creation, while others wondered if its "vegan" or not (PETA supports it but many members complain). This article jumps past artificial tissue issues; anticipating success, I optimistically envision Eight Ways In-Vitro Meat Will Change Our Lives.

1. Bye-Bye Ranches.
When In-Vitro Meat (IVM) is cheaper than meat-on-the-hoof-or-claw, no one will buy the undercut opponent. Slow-grown red meat & poultry will vanish from the marketplace, similar to whale oil's flame out when kerosene outshone it in the 1870's. Predictors believe that IVM will sell for half the cost of its murdered rivals. This will grind the $2 trillion global live-meat industry to a halt (500 billion pounds of meat are gobbled annually; this is expected to double by 2050). Bloody sentimentality will keep the slaughterhouses briefly busy as ranchers quick-kill their inventory before it becomes worthless, but soon Wall Street will be awash in unwanted pork bellies.

Special Note: IVM sales will be aided by continued outbreaks of filthy over-crowded farm animal diseases like swine flu, Mad Cow, avian flu, tuberculosis, brucellosis, and other animal-to-human plagues. Public hysteria will demand pre-emptive annihilation of the enormous herds and flocks where deadly pathogens form, after safe IVM protein is available.

2. Urban Cowboys.
Today's gentle drift into urbanization will suddenly accelerate as unemployed livestock workers relocate and retrain for city occupations. Rural real estate values will plummet as vast tracts of ranch land are abandoned and sold for a pittance (70% of arable land in the world is currently used for livestock, 26% of the total land surface, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization). New use for ex-ranch land? Inexpensive vacation homes; reforested parks; fields of green products like hemp or bamboo. Hot new city job? Techies and designers for In-Vitro Meat factories.

3. Healthier Humans.
In-Vitro Meat will be 100% muscle. It will eliminate the artery-clogging saturated fat that kills us. Instead, heart-healthy Omega-3 (salmon oil) will be added. IVM will also contain no hormones, salmonella, e. coli, campylobacter, mercury, dioxin, or antibiotics that infect primitive meat. I've noted above that IVM will reduce influenza, brucellosis, TB, and Mad Cow Disease. Starvation and kwashiokor (protein deficiency) will be conquered when compact IVM kits are delivered to famine-plagued nations. The globe's water crises will be partially alleviated, due to our inheritance of the 8% of the H2O supply that was previously gulped down by livestock and their food crops. We won't even choke to death because IVM contains no malicious bones or gristle. (Although Hall of Fame slugger Jimmy Foxx choked to death on a chicken bone, about 90% of meat victims are murdered by steak).

4. Healthier Planet.
Today's meat industry is a brutal fart in the face of Gaia. A recent Worldwatch Institute report ("Livestock and Climate Change") accuses the world's 1.5 billion livestock of responsibility for 51% of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. Statistics are truly shitty: cattle crap 130 times more volume than a human, creating 64 million tons of sewage in the United States that's often flushed down the Mississippi River to kill fish and coral in the Gulf of Mexico. Pigs are equally putrid. There's a hog farm in Utah that oozes a bigger turd total than the entire city of Los Angeles. Livestock burps and farts are equally odious and ozone-destroying. 68% of the ammonia in the world is caused by livestock (creating acid rain), 65% of the nitrous oxide, 37% of the methane, 9% of the CO2, plus 100 other polluting gases. Big meat animals waste valuable land -- 80% of Amazon deforestation is for beef ranching, clear-cutting a Belgium-sized patch every year. Water is prodigiously gulped -- 15,000 liters of H20 produces just one kilogram of beef. 40% of the world's cereals are devoured by livestock. This scenario is clearly unsustainable, and In-Vitro Meat is the sensible alternative. (Although skeptics warn that IVM factories will produce their own emissions, research indicates that pollution will be reduced by at least 80%.) Once we get over the fact that IVM is oddly disembodied, we'll be thankful that it doesn't shit, burp, fart, eat, over graze, drink, bleed, or scream in pain.

5. Economic Upheaval.

Soy Burger. Photo credit: greenbang.com
The switch to In-Vitro Meat will pummel the finances of nations that survive on live animal industries. Many of the world leaders in massacred meat (USA, China, Brazil) have diversified incomes, but Argentina will bellow when its delicious beef is defeated. New Zealand will bleat when its lamb sales are shorn. And ocean-harvesting Vietnam and Iceland will have to fish for new vocations. Industries peripherally dependent on meat sales, like leather, dairy and wool, will also be slaughtered. Hide and leather-exporting nations like Pakistan and Kenya will be whipped, but South Korea will profit on its sales of "Koskin" and other synthetic leathers. Huge plantations of livestock crops (soybeans & corn) in Brazil, USA, Argentina, and China can be replaced with wool substitutes like sisal. Smaller nations that excel in food processing will thrive because they'll export IVM instead of importing tonnage of frozen meat. Look for economic upticks in The Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, France, and especially Japan, who's currently one of the globe's largest importers of beef.

6: Exotic & Kinky Cuisine.
In-Vitro Meat will be fashioned from any creature, not just domestics that were affordable to farm. Yes, ANY ANIMAL, even rare beasts like snow leopard, or Komodo Dragon. We will want to taste them all. Some researchers believe we will also be able to create IVM using the DNA of extinct beasts -- obviously, "DinoBurgers" will be served at every six-year-old boy's birthday party.

Humans are animals, so every hipster will try Cannibalism. Perhaps we'll just eat people we don't like, as author Iain M. Banks predicted in his short story, "The State of the Art" with diners feasting on "Stewed Idi Amin." But I imagine passionate lovers literally eating each other, growing sausages from their co-mingled tissues overnight in tabletop appliances similar to bread-making machines. And of course, masturbatory gourmands will simply gobble their own meat.

7: FarmScrapers.
The convenience of buying In-Vitro Meat fresh from the neighborhood factory will inspire urbanites to demand local vegetables and fruits. This will be accomplished with "vertical farming" -- building gigantic urban multi-level greenhouses that utilize hydroponics and interior grow-lights to create bug-free, dirt-free, quick-growing super veggies and fruit (from dwarf trees), delicious side dishes with IVM. No longer will old food arrive via long polluting transports from the hinterlands. Every metro dweller will purchase fresh meat and crispy plants within walking distance. The success of FarmScrapers will cripple rural agriculture and enhance urbanization.

8. We Stop the Shame.
In-Vitro Meat will squelch the subliminal guilt that sensitive people feel when they sit down for a carnivorous meal. Forty billion animals are killed per year in the United States alone; one million chickens per hour. I list this last even though it's the top priority for vegetarians, because they represent only 1-2% of the population, but still... IVM is a huge step forward in "Abolitionism" -- the elimination of suffering in all sentient creatures. Peter Singer, founding father of Animal Liberation, supports IVM. So does every European veggie group I contacted: VEBU (Vegetarian Federation of Germany), EVA (Ethical Vegetarian Alternative of Belgium), and the Dutch Vegetarian Society. And PETA, mentioned earlier, offers $1 million to anyone who can market a competitive IVM product by 2012.

My final prediction is this: In-Vitro Meat relishes success first in Europe, partly because its "greener," but mostly they already eat "yucky" delicacies like snails, smoked eel, blood pudding, pig's head cheese, and haggis (sheep's stomach stuffed with oatmeal). In the USA, IVM will initially invade the market in Spam cans and Hot Dogs, shapes that salivating shoppers are sold on as mysterious & artificial, but edible & absolutely American.

Scientists create 'plastic' blood

2009-12-09T06:01:00.000-08:00

http://www.viewzone.com/plasticblood.html

Scientists create 'plastic' blood

The researchers said the artificial blood was easier to store Scientists have developed an artificial plastic blood which could act as a substitute in emergencies.

Researchers at Sheffield University said their creation could be a huge advantage in war zones.

They say that the artificial blood is light to carry, does not need to be kept cool and can be kept for longer.

The new blood is made up of plastic molecules that have an iron atom at their core, like haemoglobin, that can carry oxygen through the body.

The scientists said the artificial blood could be cheap to produce and they were looking for extra funding to develop a final prototype that would be suitable for biological testing.

'Very excited'

Dr Lance Twyman, of the university's Department of Chemistry, said: "We are very excited about the potential for this product and about the fact that this could save lives.

"Many people die from superficial wounds when they are trapped in an accident or are injured on the battlefield and can't get blood before they get to hospital.

"This product can be stored a lot more easily than blood, meaning large quantities could be carried easily by ambulances and the armed forces."

A sample of the artificial blood prototype will be on display at the Science Museum in London from 22 May as part of an exhibition about the history of plastics.

How plastic blood could move from test tube to battlefield

We're all familiar with the calls for blood donors. But donated blood, while valuable, also poses risks to the recipient, including diseases such as hepatitis C or HHIV, the virus that causes Aids.

Wouldn't an artificial form be better? It could be made completely sterile, and might even be manufactured in dehydrated form: just add water and you have a litre of O negative, the universally transfusible version, which could be easily transported to locations where it was needed, or stored against future need.

Lance Twyman is trying to do just that: with a PhD from the University of Kent, he's working to make usable plastic blood in his University of Sheffield laboratory.

Twyman has long been interested in creating molecules that mimic nature, including synthetic enzymes to catalyse novel reactions. Early in his career he came across porphyrins, hollow square-shaped molecules which combine readily with metals like iron. "The iron is in the centre of the molecule, just like haemoglobin," says Twyman.

Things are not quite the same in nature, of course. Although the oxygen-carrying protein haemoglobin in your red blood cells contains an iron-based porphyrin to bind oxygen reversibly (so it can grab oxygen from the air in the lungs, and then give it up at the tissues), porphyrin alone won't work. "It clumps together or ends up reacting with the oxygen rather than just binding it," says Twyman. "But if you combine porphyrin chemistry and polymer chemistry, you can make a molecule which mimics haemoglobin."

Oxygen binding

Making an artificial blood might not have occurred to Twyman were it not for a chance discussion with a cardiologist. Although perfect blood substitutes are a clinician's dream, creating something just to carry oxygen around the bloodstream seemed intriguingly feasible.

Developed over the past five years, Twyman has now done just that by combining a porphyrin with monomers that build together in a hyper-branching or tree-like structure. His molecule is remarkably similar to haemoglobin in size and shape, while providing exactly the right environment around the porphyrin core for iron to bind and release oxygen. And the polyethylene glycol (PEG), a water-soluble polymer used to assemble the branched structure is already used for medical applications.

So what does it look like? Twyman's plastic blood is a dark red water-soluble paste with the consistency of honey. As with real blood, the colour comes from the porphyrin.

Putting plastic blood into your body - even to save your life - sounds risky. But Twyman points out that porphyrins are natural. He also reckons that the polymer component would be ignored by the body's immune system; there is some reassurance from existing medical uses. So far, though, his experimentation is confined to the test tube.

"At the moment, we have no idea regarding the polymer's lifetime in the body. However, for its intended application, a short lifetime is an advantage," says Twyman. "One obvious application is the battlefield or site of a major incident where replacing blood loss quickly can save lives."

Unlike donated blood, it's easy to store and is stable at room temperature. A second-generation molecule is now being developed for more rigorous investigation and, if all goes well, human use may eventually follow.

Professor Adrian Newland, president of the Royal College of Pathologists, says that people have worked on artificial blood for many years. It remains the medical equivalent of the holy grail - mainly because small foreign molecules in blood substitutes are swiftly removed from the bloodstream by the kidneys. "The drive has been to develop a larger molecule that will stay in the circulation and carry oxygen to the tissues," Newland says.

The EU-funded Euro Blood Substitutes consortium is also undertaking such research and includes biochemist Professor Chris Cooper of the University of Essex. He says that there are two types of blood substitutes - haemoglobin-based substitutes, which use human or bovine haemoglobin, and the perfluorocarbons. "Many compounds have gone into clinical trials and there are currently two products licensed for use," Cooper says.

Twyman's work now offers a third possibility that doesn't depend on haemoglobin supplies. "It's an interesting bit of chemistry. What they have to do is prove that the molecule is stable for hours in the presence of oxygen," Cooper says. "The phrase 'plastic blood' is cute, but a bit of a red herring as all blood substitutes add PEGs [polyethylene gycols]."

Body's defences

Newland worries about using PEGs in the body in transfusion quantities, although small-scale medical use is well established in association with drug delivery. "The amount of PEG that you'd give with artificial blood is several times larger than the amount we give attached to a simple drug. There needs to be some idea of what happens to PEG if it's given in that volume," Newland says.

While Twyman cannot yet answer such concerns, he says his approach uses a branched PEG, not the simple linear PEGs found with haemoglobin-based blood substitutes. "Hb [haemoglobin] work uses Hb extracted from animal or human blood. This has to be protected from the body's defences, usually using linear PEGs. These do work, but they migrate into the fatty lining of veins, which causes toxic effects. They also cause high blood pressure and there are ethical/religious issues regarding their general use," Twyman says.

Newland says that modified haemoglobin doesn't stay in the blood circulation long and can cause allergic-type reactions. But once haemoglobin is removed from the body's red blood cells, no cross-matching is needed before use.

An oxygen-carrying molecule that mimics haemoglobin would have universal donor characteristics - although the immune response and clearance time from the bloodstream is as yet unknown.

"If you are giving artificial blood, you don't have to worry about the transmission of infection from blood from donors, shelf life and the lack of availability from donations," Newland says. "It's a very interesting concept."

While Twyman believes his work might find military use one day, the Ministry of Defence is unwilling to comment until more research has been done. Meanwhile, the plastic blood will be in "Plasticity - 100 years of making plastics" at London's Science Museum from May 22. Plastic blood may yet benefit people beyond laboratories.

Copenhagen's Hidden Agenda: The Multibillion Trade in Carbon Derivatives

2009-12-08T12:29:00.000-08:00

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16449

Copenhagen's Hidden Agenda: The Multibillion Trade in Carbon Derivatives
Architect of Credit Default Swaps behind the Development of "Carbon Derivatives"

By Washington's Blog

Global Research, December 8, 2009
Washington's Blog

As I have previously shown, speculative derivatives (especially credit default swaps) are a primary cause of the economic crisis.

And I have pointed out that (1) the giant banks will make a killing on carbon trading, (2) while the leading scientist crusading against global warming says it won't work, and (3) there is a very high probability of massive fraud and insider trading in the carbon trading markets.

Now, Bloomberg notes that the carbon trading scheme will be centered around derivatives:

The banks are preparing to do with carbon what they’ve done before: design and market derivatives contracts that will help client companies hedge their price risk over the long term. They’re also ready to sell carbon-related financial products to outside investors.

[Blythe] Masters says banks must be allowed to lead the way if a mandatory carbon-trading system is going to help save the planet at the lowest possible cost. And derivatives related to carbon must be part of the mix, she says. Derivatives are securities whose value is derived from the value of an underlying commodity -- in this case, CO2 and other greenhouse gases...

Who is Blythe Masters?

She is the JP Morgan employee who invented credit default swaps, and is now heading JPM's carbon trading efforts. As Bloomberg notes (this and all remaining quotes are from the above-linked Bloomberg article):

Masters, 40, oversees the New York bank’s environmental businesses as the firm’s global head of commodities...

As a young London banker in the early 1990s, Masters was part of JPMorgan’s team developing ideas for transferring risk to third parties. She went on to manage credit risk for JPMorgan’s investment bank.

Among the credit derivatives that grew from the bank’s early efforts was the credit-default swap.

Some in congress are fighting against carbon derivatives:

“People are going to be cutting up carbon futures, and we’ll be in trouble,” says Maria Cantwell, a Democratic senator from Washington state. “You can’t stay ahead of the next tool they’re going to create.”

Cantwell, 51, proposed in November that U.S. state governments be given the right to ban unregulated financial products. “The derivatives market has done so much damage to our economy and is nothing more than a very-high-stakes casino -- except that casinos have to abide by regulations,” she wrote in a press release...

However, Congress may cave in to industry pressure to let carbon derivatives trade over-the-counter:

The House cap-and-trade bill bans OTC derivatives, requiring that all carbon trading be done on exchanges...The bankers say such a ban would be a mistake...The banks and companies may get their way on carbon derivatives in separate legislation now being worked out in Congress...

Financial experts are also opposed to cap and trade:

Even George Soros, the billionaire hedge fund operator, says money managers would find ways to manipulate cap-and-trade markets. “The system can be gamed,” Soros, 79, remarked at a London School of Economics seminar in July. “That’s why financial types like me like it -- because there are financial opportunities”...

Hedge fund manager Michael Masters, founder of Masters Capital Management LLC, based in St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands [and unrelated to Blythe Masters] says speculators will end up controlling U.S. carbon prices, and their participation could trigger the same type of boom-and-bust cycles that have buffeted other commodities...

The hedge fund manager says that banks will attempt to inflate the carbon market by recruiting investors from hedge funds and pension funds.

“Wall Street is going to sell it as an investment product to people that have nothing to do with carbon,” he says. “Then suddenly investment managers are dominating the asset class, and nothing is related to actual supply and demand. We have seen this movie before.”

Indeed, as I have previously pointed out, many environmentalists are opposed to cap and trade as well. For example:

Michelle Chan, a senior policy analyst in San Francisco for Friends of the Earth, isn’t convinced.

“Should we really create a new $2 trillion market when we haven’t yet finished the job of revamping and testing new financial regulation?” she asks. Chan says that, given their recent history, the banks’ ability to turn climate change into a new commodities market should be curbed...

“What we have just been woken up to in the credit crisis -- to a jarring and shocking degree -- is what happens in the real world,” she says...

Friends of the Earth’s Chan is working hard to prevent the banks from adding carbon to their repertoire. She titled a March FOE report “Subprime Carbon?” In testimony on Capitol Hill, she warned, “Wall Street won’t just be brokering in plain carbon derivatives -- they’ll get creative.”

Yes, they'll get "creative", and we have seen this movie before ...an inadequately-regulated carbon derivatives boom will destabilize the economy and lead to another crash.

Excluded from the Copenhagen Agenda: Environmental Modification Techniques (ENMOD) and Climate Change

2009-12-08T12:27:00.000-08:00

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16413

Excluded from the Copenhagen Agenda: Environmental Modification Techniques (ENMOD) and Climate Change
Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research
Sat, 05 Dec 2009 16:23 EST

To what extent is 'climate change' the result of HAARP's activation? Are some natural catastrophes directed energy weapons at work in the Pathocracy's war against the people?

The manipulation of climate for military use

The term "environmental modification techniques" refers to any technique for changing - through the deliberate manipulation of natural processes - the dynamics, composition or structure of the Earth, including its biota, lithosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere, or of outer space. (Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques, United Nations, Geneva: 18 May 1977)

"Environmental warfare is defined as the intentional modification or manipulation of the natural ecology, such as climate and weather, earth systems such as the ionosphere, magnetosphere, tectonic plate system, and/or the triggering of seismic events (earthquakes) to cause intentional physical, economic, and psycho-social, and physical destruction to an intended target geophysical or population location, as part of strategic or tactical war." (Eco News)

"[Weather modification] offers the war fighter a wide range of possible options to defeat or coerce an adversary... Weather modification will become a part of domestic and international security and could be done unilaterally... It could have offensive and defensive applications and even be used for deterrence purposes. The ability to generate precipitation, fog and storms on earth or to modify space weather... and the production of artificial weather all are a part of an integrated set of [military] technologies." (US Air Force document AF 2025 Final Report)
World leaders are meeting in Copenhagen in December 2009 with a view to reaching an agreement on Global Warming. The debate on Climate Change focuses on the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions and measures to reduce manmade CO2 emissions under the Kyoto Protocol.

The underlying consensus is that greenhouse gas emissions constitute the sole cause of climate instability. Neither the governments nor the environmental action groups, have raised the issue of "weather warfare" or "environmental modification techniques (ENMOD)." for military use. Despite a vast body of scientific knowledge, the issue of climatic manipulations for military use has been excluded from the UN agenda on climate change.

John von Neumann noted at the height of the Cold War (1955), with tremendous foresight that:
"Intervention in atmospheric and climatic matters ....will unfold on a scale difficult to imagine at present... [T]his will merge each nation's affairs with those of every other, more thoroughly than the threat of a nuclear or any other war would have done." (Quoted in Spencer Weart, 'Environmental Warfare: Climate Modification Schemes', Global Research, December 5, 2009)
In 1977, an international Convention was ratified by the UN General Assembly which banned "military or other hostile use of environmental modification techniques having widespread, long-lasting or severe effects." (AP, 18 May 1977). Both the US and the Soviet Union were signatories to the Convention.
Guided by the interest of consolidating peace, ... and of saving mankind from the danger of using new means of warfare, (...) Recognizing that military ... use of such [environmental modification techniques] could have effects extremely harmful to human welfare, Desiring to prohibit effectively military ... use of environmental modification techniques in order to eliminate the dangers to mankind. ... and affirming their willingness to work towards the achievement of this objective, (...) Each State Party to this Convention undertakes not to engage in military ... use of environmental modification techniques having widespread, long-lasting or severe effects as the means of destruction, damage or injury to any other State Party. (Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques, United Nations, Geneva, May 18, 1977. Entered into force: 5 October 1978, see full text of Convention in Annex)
The Convention defined "'environmental modification techniques' as referring to any technique for changing--through the deliberate manipulation of natural processes--the dynamics, composition or structure of the earth, including its biota, lithosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere or of outer space." ('Environmental Modification Ban Faithfully Observed', States Parties Declare, UN Chronicle, July, 1984, Vol. 21, p. 27)

The substance of the 1977 Convention was reasserted in very general terms in the Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) signed at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro:
"States have... in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations and the principles of international law, the (...) responsibility to ensure that activities within their jurisdiction or control do not cause damage to the environment of other States or of areas beyond the limits of national jurisdiction." (UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, New York, 1992)
Following the 1992 Earth Summit, the issue of Climate Change for military use was never raised in subsequent climate change summits and venues under the auspices of the UNFCCC. The issue was erased, forgotten. It is not part of the debate on climate change.

In February 1998, however, the European Parliament's Committee on Foreign Affairs, Security and Defense Policy held public hearings in Brussels on the U.S based weather warfare facility developed under the HAARP program.

The Committee's "Motion for Resolution" submitted to the European Parliament:

"Considers HAARP [The High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program based in Alaska]... by virtue of its far-reaching impact on the environment to be a global concern and calls for its legal, ecological and ethical implications to be examined by an international independent body...; [the Committee] regrets the repeated refusal of the United States Administration... to give evidence to the public hearing ...into the environmental and public risks [of] the HAARP program." (European Parliament, Committee on Foreign Affairs, Security and Defense Policy, Brussels, doc. no. A4-0005/99, 14 January 1999).

The Committee's request to draw up a "Green Paper" on "the environmental impacts of military activities", however, was casually dismissed on the grounds that the European Commission lacked the required jurisdiction to delve into "the links between environment and defense". Brussels was anxious to avoid a showdown with Washington. (see European Report, 3 February 1999).

In 2007, The Daily Express reported --following the release and declassification of British government papers from the National Archives-- that:

"The [declassified] documents reveal that both the US, which led the field, and the Soviet Union had secret military programmes with the goal of controlling the world's climate. "By the year 2025 the United States will own the weather, " one scientist is said to have boasted.

[...]

These claims are dismissed by sceptics as wild conspiracy theories and the stuff of James Bond movies but there is growing evidence that the boundaries between science fiction and fact are becoming increasingly blurred. The Americans now admit that they invested $12million over five years during the Vietnam war on "cloud seeding" - deliberately creating heavy rainfall to wash away enemy crops and destroy supply routes on the Ho Chi Minh trail, in an operation codenamed Project Popeye.

It is claimed that rainfall was increased by a third in targeted areas, making the weather-manipulation weapon a success. At the time, government officials said the region was prone to heavy rain. ('Weather War?', Daily Express, July 16, 2007)
The possibility of climatic or environmental manipulations as part of a military agenda, while formally acknowledged by official government documents and the US military, has never been considered relevant to the Climate debate. Military analysts are mute on the subject. Meteorologists are not investigating the matter, and environmentalists are strung on global warming and the Kyoto protocol.

The HAARP Program

The High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) based in Gokona, Alaska, has been in existence since 1992. It is part of a new generation of sophisticated weaponry under the US Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Operated by the Air Force Research Laboratory's Space Vehicles Directorate, HAARP constitutes a system of powerful antennas capable of creating "controlled local modifications of the ionosphere" [upper layer of the atmosphere]:

HAARP has been presented to public opinion as a program of scientific and academic research. US military documents seem to suggest, however, that HAARP's main objective is to "exploit the ionosphere for Department of Defense purposes." (See Michel Chossudovsky, 'The Ultimate Weapon of Mass Destruction: "Owning the Weather" for Military Use', Global Research, September 27, 2004)

Without explicitly referring to the HAARP program, a US Air Force study points to the use of "induced ionospheric modifications" as a means of altering weather patterns as well as disrupting enemy communications and radar. (Ibid)

HAARP also has the ability of triggering blackouts and disrupting the electricity power system of entire regions:
"Rosalie Bertell, president of the International Institute of Concern for Public Health, says HAARP operates as 'a gigantic heater that can cause major disruptions in the ionosphere, creating not just holes, but long incisions in the protective layer that keeps deadly radiation from bombarding the planet'.

Physicist Dr Bernard Eastlund called it 'the largest ionospheric heater ever built'. HAARP is presented by the US Air Force as a research programme, but military documents confirm its main objective is to 'induce ionospheric modifications' with a view to altering weather patterns and disrupting communications and radar.

According to a report by the Russian State Duma: 'The US plans to carry out large-scale experiments under the HAARP programme [and] create weapons capable of breaking radio communication lines and equipment installed on spaceships and rockets, provoke serious accidents in electricity networks and in oil and gas pipelines, and have a negative impact on the mental health of entire regions.'

Weather manipulation is the pre-emptive weapon par excellence. It can be directed against enemy countries or 'friendly nations' without their knowledge, used to destabilise economies, ecosystems and agriculture. It can also trigger havoc in financial and commodity markets. The disruption in agriculture creates a greater dependency on food aid and imported grain staples from the US and other Western countries." (Michel Chossudovsky, 'Weather Warfare: Beware the US military's experiments with climatic warfare', The Ecologist, December 2007)
An analysis of statements emanating from the US Air Force points to the unthinkable: the covert manipulation of weather patterns, communications systems and electric power as a weapon of global warfare, enabling the US to disrupt and dominate entire regions of the World. According to an official US Air force report
"Weather-modification offers the war fighter a wide-range of possible options to defeat or coerce an adversary... In the United States, weather-modification will likely become a part of national security policy with both domestic and international applications. Our government will pursue such a policy, depending on its interests, at various levels." (US Air Force, emphasis added. Air University of the US Air Force, AF 2025 Final Report, emphasis added.)
Copenhagen CO15

The manipulation of climate for military use is potentially a greater threat to humanity than CO2 emissions.

Why has it been excluded from the debate under COP15, when the UN 1977 Convention states quite explicitly that "military or any other hostile use of such techniques could have effects extremely harmful to human welfare"? (Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques United Nations, Geneva, 1977)

Why the camouflage?

Why are environmental modification techniques (ENMOD) not being debated by the civil society and environmentalist organizations under the auspices of the Alternative Forum KlimaForum09?
Annex

Adopted by Resolution 31/72 of the United Nations General Assembly on 10 December 1976. The Convention was opened for signature at Geneva on 18 May 1977.

Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques

The States Parties to this Convention, Guided by the interest of consolidating peace, and wishing to contribute to the cause of halting the arms race, and of bringing about general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control, and of saving mankind from the danger of using new means of warfare,

Determined to continue negotiations with a view to achieving effective progress towards further measures in the field of disarmament,

Recognizing that scientific and technical advances may open new possibilities with respect to modification of the environment,

Recalling the Declaration of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, adopted at Stockholm on 16 June 1972,

Realizing that the use of environmental modification techniques for peaceful purposes could improve the interrelationship of man and nature and contribute to the preservation and improvement of the environment for the benefit of present and future generations,

Recognizing, however, that military or any other hostile use of such techniques could have effects extremely harmful to human welfare,

Desiring to prohibit effectively military or any other hostile use of environmental modification techniques in order to eliminate the dangers to mankind from such use, and affirming their willingness to work towards the achievement of this objective,

Desiring also to contribute to the strengthening of trust among nations and to the further improvement of the international situation in accordance with the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations,

Have agreed as follows:

Article I 1. Each State Party to this Convention undertakes not to engage in military or any other hostile use of environmental modification techniques having widespread, long-lasting or severe effects as the means of destruction, damage or injury to any other State Party.

2. Each State Party to this Convention undertakes not to assist, encourage or induce any State, group of States or international organization to engage in activities contrary to the provisions of paragraph 1 of this article.

Article II As used in article 1, the term "environmental modification techniques" refers to any technique for changing - through the deliberate manipulation of natural processes - the dynamics, composition or structure of the Earth, including its biota, lithosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere, or of outer space.

Article III 1. The provisions of this Convention shall not hinder the use of environmental modification techniques for peaceful purposes and shall be without prejudice to the generally recognized principles and applicable rules of international law concerning such use.

2. The States Parties to this Convention undertake to facilitate, and have the right to participate in, the fullest possible exchange of scientific and technological information on the use of environmental modification techniques for peaceful purposes. States Parties in a position to do so shall contribute, alone or together with other States or international organizations, to international economic and scientific co-operation in the preservation, improvement and peaceful utilization of the environment, with due consideration for the needs of the developing areas of the world.

Article IV Each State Party to this Convention undertakes to take any measures it considers necessary in accordance with its constitutional processes to prohibit and prevent any activity in violation of the provisions of the Convention anywhere under its jurisdiction or control.

Article V 1. The States Parties to this Convention undertake to consult one another and to co-operate in solving any problems which may arise in relation to the objectives of, or in the application of the provisions of, the Convention. Consultation and co-operation pursuant to this article may also be undertaken through appropriate international procedures within the framework of the United Nations and in accordance with its Charter. These international procedures may include the services of appropriate international organizations, as well as of a Consultative Committee of Experts as provided for in paragraph 2 of this article.

2. For the purposes set forth in paragraph 1 of this article, the Depositary shall within one month of the receipt of a request from any State Party to this Convention, convene a Consultative Committee of Experts. Any State Party may appoint an expert to the Committee whose functions and rules of procedure are set out in the annex which constitutes an integral part of this Convention. The Committee shall transmit to the Depositary a summary of its findings of fact, incorporating all views and information presented to the Committee during its proceedings. The Depositary shall distribute the summary to all States Parties.

3. Any State Party to this Convention which has reason to believe that any other State Party is acting in breach of obligations deriving from the provisions of the Convention may lodge a complaint with the Security Council of the United Nations. Such a complaint should include all relevant information as well as all possible evidence supporting ItS validity.

4. Each State Party to this Convention undertakes to cooperate in carrying out any investigation which the Security Council may initiate, in accordance with the provisions of the Charter of the United Nations, on the basis of the complaint received by the Council. The Security Council shall inform the States Parties of the results of the investigation.

5. Each State Party to this Convention undertakes to provide or support assistance, in accordance with the provisions of the Charter of the United Nations, to any State Party which so requests, if the Security Council decides that such Party has been harmed or is likely to be harmed as a result of violation of the Convention.

Article VI 1. Any State Party to this Convention may propose amendments to the Convention. The text of any proposed amendment shall be submitted to the Depositary, who shall promptly circulate it to all States Parties.

2. An amendment shall enter into force for all States Parties to this Convention which have accepted it, upon the deposit with the Depositary of instruments of acceptance by a majority of States Parties. Thereafter it shall enter into force for any remaining State Party on the date of deposit of its instrument of acceptance.

Article VII This Convention shall be of unlimited duration.

Article VIII 1. Five years after the entry into force of this Convention, a conference of the States Parties to the Convention shall be convened by the Depositary at Geneva, Switzerland. The conference shall review the operation of the Convention with a view to ensuring that its purposes and provisions are being realized, and shall in particular examine the effectiveness of the provisions of paragraph 1 of article I in eliminating the dangers of military or any other hostile use of environmental modification techniques.

2. At intervals of not less than five years thereafter, a majority of the States Parties to this Convention may obtain, by submitting a proposal to this effect to the Depositary, the convening of a conference with the same objectives.

3. If no conference has been convened pursuant to paragraph 2 of this article within ten years following the conclusion of a previous conference, the Depositary shall solicit the views of all States Parties to this Convention concerning the convening of such a conference. If one third or ten of the States Parties, whichever number is less, respond affirmatively, the Depositary shall take immediate steps to convene the conference.

Article IX 1. This Convention shall be open to all States for signature. Any State which does not sign the Convention before its entry into force in accordance with paragraph 3 of this article may accede to it at any time.

2. This Convention shall be subject to ratification by signatory States. Instruments of ratification or accession shall be deposited with the Secretary-General of the United Nations.

3. This Convention shall enter into force upon the deposit of instruments of ratification by twenty Governments in accordance with paragraph 2 of this article.

4. For those States whose instruments of ratification or accession are deposited after the entry into force of this Convention, it shall enter into force on the date of the deposit of their instruments of ratification or accession.

5. The Depositary shall promptly inform all signatory and acceding States of the date of each signature, the date of deposit of each instrument of ratification or accession and the date of the entry into force of this Convention and of any amendments thereto, as well as of the receipt of other notices.

6. This Convention shall be registered by the Depositary in accordance with Article 102 of the Charter of the United Nations.

Article X This Convention, of which the Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish texts are equally authentic, shall be deposited with the Secretary-General of the United Nations, who shall send duly certified copies thereof to the Governments of the signatory and acceding States.

In witness whereof, the undersigned, being duly authorized thereto, have signed this Convention

Done at Geneva, on the 18 day of May 1977.

Annex to the Convention

Consultative Committee of Experts 1. The Consultative Committee of Experts shall undertake to make appropriate findings of fact and provide expert views relevant to any problem raised pursuant to paragraph 1 of article V of this Convention by the State Party requesting the convening of the Committee.

2. The work of the Consultative Committee of Experts shall be organized in such a way as to permit it to perform the functions set forth in paragraph 1 of this annex. The Committee shall decide procedural questions relative to the organization of its work, where possible by consensus, but otherwise by a majority of those present and voting. There shall be no voting on matters of substance.

3. The Depositary or his representative shall serve as the Chairman of the Committee.

4. Each expert may be assisted at meetings by one or more advisers.

5. Each expert shall have the right, through the Chairman, to request from States, and from international organizations, such information and assistance as the expert considers desirable for the accomplishment of the Committee's work.

EPA's "endangerment finding" allows Big Government to regulate carbon emissions

2009-12-08T06:20:00.000-08:00

Now that 'crap and trade' has been exposed, the puppet masters must find another 'threat' so they can get their new derivative and eugenics market plus tax to support a new world order. Below is probably their new scam for this!

http://www.naturalnews.com/027685_CO2_emissions_EPA.html

December 08, 2009
EPA's "endangerment finding" allows Big Government to regulate carbon emissions
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor

(NaturalNews) Carbon dioxide is a threat to human life, says the EPA under the direction of the Obama Administration. With this declaration, the agency has bypassed Congress and can now begin to regulate CO2 as a toxic substance.

The timing of this declaration was obviously planned to coincide with the Copenhagen climate summit: With the EPA now operating with some fangs, Obama can wheel and deal in Denmark with the credibility of some political weight behind his words. But is the sudden declaration warranted? Is it backed by real science?

Lisa Jackson of the EPA explains the decision "relied on decades of sound, peer-reviewed, extensively evaluated scientific data." But thanks to the recent discovery of leaked emails from climate change scientists (ClimateGate), I'm beginning to wonder how much of that scientific data was distorted in order to achieve a particular political goal.

Green living = population control?
For the record, I've been working hard to spread awareness about reducing our carbon footprint and living sustainably. And unlike many who just talk about it, I'm knee-deep in living it in Ecuador, where I grow roughly 80% of my diet from my own garden while living increasingly "green" off the local land. But even as a green living advocate, I'm more than little concerned how Big Government might twist these climate laws to encroach upon the rights and freedoms of the People.

If CO2 is regulated, for example, it means the very gas you exhale will be considered a hazard to life on Earth. Thus, regulating CO2 could be a sneaky way to start our nation down the road of population control or even population reduction. When a person reaches the age of 65, for example, and they're about to retire and collect social security, they might then be seen as a carbon-producing financial burden, and mass euthanasia programs could begin to be seriously considered. (This isn't science fiction. Nursing home patients are already being routinely euthanized with psychiatric drugs and painkillers right now...)

Of course, most carbon comes not from the respiration of human beings, but rather from the vehicles they drive and the carbon miles underlying the products they consume. There's no question that Americans, in particular, are extremely wasteful when it comes to energy usage. They drive huge, over-powered vehicles for hours a day as a way of life, and they purchase food and other products that have burned up gallons of fossil fuels just to arrive at the local stores. The American way of life is, without debate, extremely wasteful of energy resources. (In most cities, it is also ridiculously non-sustainable...)

There's a lot that can be done to reduce energy consumption in America and therefore reduce the nation's CO2 emissions, but at what cost, exactly? What will Americans have to give up in order to meet the new emissions goals?

The senseless wasting of energy must stop
That idea frightens a lot of people, but on the other hand, as someone who now lives permanently in a developing nation, I can say with rare authenticity that living in America causes you to become addicted to the luxuries of easy energy. There's a whole lot of room for Americans to reduce their carbon footprint, but it means giving up some of the luxuries we all tend to take for granted. Driving to Blockbuster to return a rented DVD, for example, is just plain stupid. Why burn gas to push a 4,000-pound vehicle around town to return a 6-oz. piece of circular plastic? It makes no sense.

Building new homes with poor insulation makes no sense, either. And yet the building codes all across America still favor the short-term profits of home construction companies rather than long-term sustainability and energy efficiency.

For many years, I lived in Tucson, Arizona. Tucson is a desert, with roughly 330 days of sunlight a year. It's the perfect environment for a rooftop-mounted solar hot water heater that would replace all the gas and electricity used to heat hot water for local homes. But how many homes in Tucson are built with rooftop solar hot water heaters? Virtually none. It's the same story in Phoenix, Albuquerque, San Diego and even Los Angeles. KB Home and other builders keep erecting these cookie-cutter homes with no renewable energy components whatsoever. And why? Because it makes the homes a thousand bucks cheaper to sell to someone.

This kind of short-sighted energy nonsense has got to stop in America. Even without the climate change debate, it's still senseless to go on burning up the world's fossil fuels when there's so much renewable energy available for the taking if we only had the foresight to think beyond the next fiscal quarter. There's enough spare sunlight in the deserts of Arizona to power the entire nation with solar, by the way. With enough solar panels, Arizona could position itself as the Middle East of America.

I would much rather see America embrace renewable energy (and some commonsense consumption modifications) than have Big Brother wade into the fray with carbon limits and punitive fines. Government is a crude weapon for social change. It only knows how to criminalize behavior it doesn't like. It's terrible at educating consumers and businesses to change in responsible, sustainable ways. My concern with the EPA's decision today is that instead of getting a push towards a sustainable future powered with more renewable energy, we're going to get a new layer of energy tyranny that smothers the freedoms Americans are already fighting desperately to preserve.

Ask yourself this question: What has Big Government done well?

Big Government = Big failures
Think about Big Government has done for you lately: The H1N1 vaccine program was a total fiasco. The national taxation system is a paperwork nightmare. Health care is a complete joke. The Wall Street investment system is a government-sponsored casino that favors the rich. The prison system is a disaster. Public education has fallen to new lows in both funding and innovation. The war in Afghanistan drags on as a failed imperialist catastrophe. Agricultural policy, farm subsidies and the regulation of food and drugs are all completely off course, causing far more harm than good.

Now imagine Big Government running a carbon trading system -- or even personal carbon footprint limits that result in you receiving heavy fines if you exceed the government-mandated personal quota. This is precisely what could happen under a new "energy tyranny" that has just been initiated by the EPA and the Obama Administration.

Don't get me wrong: I'm all for reducing our carbon emissions and living more sustainably. I just don't like to be told what to do under the threat of being fined, arrested or imprisoned.

Do I have a better plan? Actually, I do. Implement my radical, money-saving health reform proposals (www.HealthRevolutionPetition.org) and use the hundreds of billions of dollars in savings to invest in solar power generation centers that blanket the nation's deserts. Using CSP technology (Concentrated Solar Power) -- or even some of the more innovative stirling engine / solar concentrator inventions -- we could provide power for the entire nation for generations to come. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concen...)

Or end the war in Afghanistan (which, strangely, Obama the anti-war President has now chosen to escalate even more), bring the troops home and spend the military budget building solar arrays that power America. Why fight for oil at a million dollars a year per soldier (which is what the war is costing, astonishingly) (http://rawstory.com/2009/10/us-spen...) when you can spend a fraction of that building energy sovereignty right here on American soil?

The solutions to our energy problems and our CO2 problems are found in the same place: Renewable energy technology that exists right now, today! Solar and wind really can provide all the electrical power our country needs, and with electric vehicles coming on line over the next few years, we could see a massive shift away from combustion engines and toward electric vehicles powered by solar energy delivered through the power lines. This isn't radical stuff. It's doable right now.

But if there's one thing that I've learned about Big Government, it's that innovation is the enemy of the status quo. Government rarely likes to innovate. It's more interested in controlling people, and declaring CO2 to be a harmful substance could be just the pretext our bloated, indebted and morally inept national government needs to unleash a new era of carbon controls that suffocate the American people.

Let's reduce our carbon footprint, YES! But let's do it in a way that doesn't increase the reach and power of a government that's already so large and dangerous it poses a far greater threat to the livelihood of the people than climate change ever has.

The carbon trading fraud

2009-12-08T06:13:00.000-08:00

http://www.NaturalNews.com/z027676_carbon_trading_emissions.html

December 8 2009
The carbon trading fraud
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor

(NaturalNews) I was recently purchasing an airline ticket (there goes my carbon quota for the year, huh?) when I noticed that for an extra $12, I could buy an "offset" to the carbon emissions incurred for my flight.

Really? For twelve bucks I can buy off my own guilt? Wow, sweet deal!

The problem with this scheme is that even if I pay the $12, the plane on which I'm flying still produces carbon dioxide as part of its jet fuel combustion process. My paying of the fee, in other words, doesn't actually reduce any carbon being dumped into the atmosphere.

In fact, I have no idea where the fee goes. And probably no one else does either. Reportedly, this money goes to various non-profits that plant trees to offset the carbon. At perhaps a dollar a tree, you're buying the planting of 12 trees which, over a lifetime, might theoretically offset the amount of carbon from your plane ride. But are these trees really getting planted? If so, where? And how do I know they wouldn't be planted anyway? How do I know they'll live out their full tree lives and actually offset all the carbon that was claimed?

Recently at my farm in Ecuador, we planted over 500 trees as part of a hillside reclamation effort. Does that then mean I have earned enough "carbon Karma" to take 45 plane trips, knowing that I've already offset all those jet fumes with the hillside trees now growing on my farm? Can I sprout a few dozen acorns, stick them in the dirt, and use that as permission to jet set around the world?

Carbon trading is a slippery issue. It's hard to know whether the money actually makes any real difference in reducing carbon emissions. That's why carbon trading for the business sector is also a complex issue. The intention seems good: Allow free-market principles to arrive at a price on carbon emissions, then require companies to engage in the trading of credits so that a fixed upper limit of emissions is not exceeded.

But underneath the whole trading scheme, are carbon emissions really being reduced in any sort of meaningful way? To me, it all seems that carbon trading is just a clever way for polluters to buy their way out of environmental responsibility. With enough cash, they can legally keep on polluting the skies and driving us ever closer to CO2 tipping points.

The real issue with cap-and-trade solutions is that someone in Indonesia, for example, could theoretically plant a hundred thousand trees and use that act as carbon credit currency to sell into the system that allows U.S. polluters to simply buy more pollution credits. So the pollution continues under the illusion of environmental responsibility. But underneath it all, it's really just a shell game. A climate con, if you will.

I agree that we need to reduce our energy consumption on planet Earth. We need to greatly scale back the pollution of our skies, our rivers, oceans and lands. Businesses that pollute need to radically scale back their emissions, and some sort of pollution-tracking system is obviously required to accomplish all this, but I'm skeptical that "carbon trading" is going to accomplish any meaningful reduction in emissions.

More likely, it will simply allow the first world's biggest polluters to claim they are "green polluters" who have been certified by a dysfunctional cap-and-trade system.

Climate Change Brainwashing

2009-12-08T05:52:00.001-08:00

Climategate reveals 'the most influential tree in the world'

2009-12-07T09:04:00.000-08:00

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/6738111/Climategate-reveals-the-most-influential-tree-in-the-world.html

Climategate reveals 'the most influential tree in the world'
Leaked emails from the Climatic Research Unit show how the world's weightiest climate data has been distorted, says Christopher Booker
By Christopher Booker
05 Dec 2009

The magical faraway tree: a larch in the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia, sampled by Dr Keith Briffa, has been called 'the most influential tree in the world' Photo: NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVE

Coming to light in recent days has been one of the most extraordinary scientific detective stories of our time, bizarrely centred on a single tree in Siberia dubbed "the most influential tree in the world". On this astonishing tale, it is no exaggeration to say, could hang in considerable part the future shape of our civilisation. Right at the heart of the sound and fury of "Climategate" – the emails leaked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in East Anglia – is one story of scientific chicanery, overlooked by the media, whose implications dwarf all the rest. If all those thousands of emails and other documents were leaked by an angry whistle-blower, as now seems likely, it was this story more than any other that he or she wanted the world to see.

To appreciate its significance, as I observed last week, it is first necessary to understand that the people these incriminating documents relate to are not just any group of scientists. Professor Philip Jones of the CRU, his colleague Dr Keith Briffa, the US computer modeller Dr Michael Mann, of "hockey stick" fame, and several more make up a tightly-knit group who have been right at the centre of the last two reports of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). On their account, as we shall see at this week's Copenhagen conference, the world faces by far the largest bill proposed by any group of politicians in history, amounting to many trillions of dollars.

It is therefore vitally important that we should trust the methods by which these men have made their case. The supreme prize that they have been working for so long has been to establish that the world is warmer today than ever before in recorded history. To do this it has been necessary to eliminate a wealth of evidence that the world 1,000 years ago was, for entirely natural reasons, warmer than today (the so-called Medieval Warm Period).

The most celebrated attempt to demonstrate this was the "hockey stick" graph produced by Dr Mann in 1999, which instantly became the chief icon of the IPCC and the global warming lobby all over the world. But in 2003 a Canadian statistician, Steve McIntyre, with his colleague Professor Ross McKitrick, showed how the graph had been fabricated by a computer model that produced "hockey stick" graphs whatever random data were fed into it. A wholly unrepresentative sample of tree rings from bristlecone pines in the western USA had been made to stand as "proxies" to show that there was no Medieval Warm Period, and that late 20th-century temperatures had soared to unprecedented levels.

Although McIntyre's exposure of the "hockey stick" was upheld in 2006 by two expert panels commissioned by the US Congress, the small group of scientists at the top of the IPCC brushed this aside by pointing at a hugely influential series of graphs originating from the CRU, from Jones and Briffa. These appeared to confirm the rewriting of climate history in the "hockey stick", by using quite different tree ring data from Siberia. Briffa was put in charge of the key chapter of the IPCC's fourth report, in 2007, which dismissed all McIntyre's criticisms.

At the forefront of those who found suspicious the graphs based on tree rings from the Yamal peninsula in Siberia was McIntyre himself, not least because for years the CRU refused to disclose the data used to construct them. This breached a basic rule of scientific procedure. But last summer the Royal Society insisted on the rule being obeyed, and two months ago Briffa accordingly published on his website some of the data McIntyre had been after.

This was startling enough, as McIntyre demonstrated in an explosive series of posts on his Climate Audit blog, because it showed that the CRU studies were based on cherry-picking hundreds of Siberian samples only to leave those that showed the picture that was wanted. Other studies based on similar data had clearly shown the Medieval Warm Period as hotter than today. Indeed only the evidence from one tree, YADO61, seemed to show a "hockey stick" pattern, and it was this, in light of the extraordinary reverence given to the CRU's studies, which led McIntyre to dub it "the most influential tree in the world".

But more dramatic still has been the new evidence from the CRU's leaked documents, showing just how the evidence was finally rigged. The most quoted remark in those emails has been one from Prof Jones in 1999, reporting that he had used "Mike [Mann]'s Nature trick of adding in the real temps" to "Keith's" graph, in order to "hide the decline". Invariably this has been quoted out of context. Its true significance, we can now see, is that what they intended to hide was the awkward fact that, apart from that one tree, the Yamal data showed temperatures not having risen in the late 20th century but declining. What Jones suggested, emulating Mann's procedure for the "hockey stick" (originally published in Nature), was that tree-ring data after 1960 should be eliminated, and substituted – without explanation – with a line based on the quite different data of measured global temperatures, to convey that temperatures after 1960 had shot up.

A further devastating blow has now been dealt to the CRU graphs by an expert contributor to McIntyre's Climate Audit, known only as "Lucy Skywalker". She has cross-checked with the actual temperature records for that part of Siberia, showing that in the past 50 years temperatures have not risen at all. (For further details see the science blog Watts Up With That.)

In other words, what has become arguably the most influential set of evidence used to support the case that the world faces unprecedented global warming, developed, copied and promoted hundreds of times, has now been as definitively kicked into touch as was Mann's "hockey stick" before it. Yet it is on a blind acceptance of this kind of evidence that 16,500 politicians, officials, scientists and environmental activists will be gathering in Copenhagen to discuss measures which, if adopted, would require us all in the West to cut back on our carbon dioxide emissions by anything up to 80 per cent, utterly transforming the world economy.

Little of this extraordinary story been reported by the BBC or most of our mass-media, so possessed by groupthink that they are unable to see the mountain of evidence now staring them in the face. Not for nothing was Copenhagen the city in which Hans Andersen wrote his story about the Emperor whose people were brainwashed into believing that he was wearing a beautiful suit of clothes. But today there are a great many more than just one little boy ready to point out that this particular Emperor is wearing nothing at all.

I will only add two footnotes to this real-life new version of the old story. One is that, as we can see from the CRU's website, the largest single source of funding for all its projects has been the European Union, which at Copenhagen will be more insistent than anyone that the world should sign up to what amounts to the most costly economic suicide note in history.

The other is that the ugly, drum-like concrete building at the University of East Anglia which houses the CRU is named after its founder, the late Hubert Lamb, the doyen of historical climate experts. It was Professor Lamb whose most famous contribution to climatology was his documenting and naming of what he called the Medieval Warm Epoch, that glaring contradiction of modern global warming theory which his successors have devoted untold efforts to demolishing. If only they had looked at the evidence of those Siberian trees in the spirit of true science, they might have told us that all their efforts to show otherwise were in vain, and that their very much more distinguished predecessor was right after all.

Rex Murphy on Climategate

2009-12-05T13:49:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgIEQqLokL8&feature=player_embedded

Military Soldier Cyborgs - Digital destiny, or Prophetic Holocaust?

2009-12-05T13:16:00.001-08:00

http://www.blacklistednews.com/news-6567-0-22-22--.html

Military Soldier Cyborgs - Digital destiny, or Prophetic Holocaust?
Tactical War Fighter Gear
Fri, 04 Dec 2009 22:59 EST

Cyborg soldiers are a logical evolutionary link between humans and robots. Yesterdays soldier went into combat alone. Todays soldier is enhanced by human controlled robots. Tommorows soldier will be a soldier cyborg, a cybernetic organism enhanced by everything technology has to offer. The future of combat holds even greater prospects for autonomous robots that kill at their own discretion.

The idea of combining man and machine is nothing new. Ocular cochlear implants have been helping people see and hear for years. Paralytics like Stephen Hawking have been assisted by technology that allows them to speak what they think. Other cases like Prof. Kevin Warwick department of Cybernetics, University of Reading Project Cyborg 1.0, and 2.0 have been documented as well. Artificial Intelligence AI research is exploring organic brains for computing use, that is organic computers that use living neurons as their CPU . Private companies like Digital Angel, Verichip and Applied Digital Solutions are already contracting whole scale human implantation of RFID microchip technology.

Brain Computer Interface and Neural Interfacing is becoming more of a reality in advanced military research. The military implants members of the Special Operations community for GPS tracking and casualty identification purposes. Implants for tracking elderly persons with Alzheimer's, child kidnap victims, and convicted felons are all now commonplace. DARPA is woking on several projects to ready fleets of insect cyborgs and other mammals, monkeys, dogs, even sharks.

Now science is braving a new frontier. Soldiers at Fort Bragg are conducting ongoing tests on Future Force combat systems designed to make the 21st century American cyborg soldier a more effective instrument of war, a veritable cyborg able to communicate with augmented cognition more speedily and efficiently. The U.S. military is funding projects to integrate human with artificial intelligence. Problem: Human brains are superior to computers at visual recognition but inferior at information processing. Solution: human-machine integration. Human component: A soldier or analyst who scans scenes or images.

Machine component: Sensors that monitor the brain's activity and relay information about it to commanders or computers. Analytical application: Computers identify images and image areas flagged by the human scan and select those for more thorough scrutiny. Battlefield applications : 1) A prototype helmet already delivers "a visual readout for combat commanders showing the cognitive patterns of individual Soldiers." 2) "Brain pattern and heart rate data from system-equipped soldiers will be transmitted wirelessly to commanders in real-time to improve overall battlefield information management and decision-making." Project buzzwords : "real-time cognitive state assessment," "networked soldiers," "Augmented Cognition," "human-computer warfighting integral." Translation: We're fielding cyborgs. Human Nature's prediction: The next step will be to remove the human component from the battlefield and let machines provide the sensor mobility as well as the information processing.

Ethics: The ethical dilema has been bought and paid for already. A group of ethicists are being paid $250,000 to ask how much we should use nanotechnology to enhance humans. Should we implant future nanotech-enabled computers and actuators into soldiers to make them more effective? If nanochips can help kids do better in school or help locate a kidnapper, are parents obligated to provide them with it? Does it make a difference if these enhancements are implanted, rather than just worn outside the body?

The US Army is experimenting with connecting neuro-physiological sensors to soldiers to assist them in cognition and sensemaking during tense warfare situations:
The augmented cognition system uses neuro-physiological sensors that assess a warfighter's attention by measuring and recording location, brain activity and body responses, including heart rate, and adapting to his preferred learning style.

Using that data, the system will then influence the way the soldier gets information, according to a statement from the Army's Natick Soldier Center in Natick, Mass. The technology will help individual warfighters determine the most important information available and decide the best course of action in varying environments.

"The technology we are developing will ultimately help warfighters when they are faced with information overload, especially under stress, and will significantly improve mission performance," said Henry Girolamo, the Natick Soldier Center's DARPA agent for the Army's Augmented Cognition Program.

Here are some examples of current DARPA 'Human-enhancing' projects:

The 'Brain Interface Program' is the most lavishly funded of nearly all the DARPA bioengineering efforts (the project has been given over $24 million budget). It is aimed at developing ways to 'integrate' soldiers into machines -literally- by wiring them (remotely or directly) to their planes, tanks, or computers. An implantable brain chip has been implemented as well via the integration of stimulus-response signals in the brain via electrodes. The Pentagon hopes to use these 'modified' creatures in mine clearance. DARPA is quoted "The human is becoming the weakest link in defense systems."

Enhancement efforts at the Brain Interface Program are now progressing nicely. The chief of the project, Alan S. Rudolph, now wants to be able to transmit images or sound directly into the brains of soldiers...or prisoners of war.

The ' Metabolic Dominance and Engineered Tissue ' program is aimed at being able to artificially pump up soldier endurance and muscle strength.

The ' Persistence in Combat ' program is a combat self-treatment scheme which will include pain-reducing and blood-stopping devices and techniques soldiers would apply to their own wounds -even moderately severe ones- thereby bypassing the need for a medic and enabling a soldier to keep fighting, despite serious wounds! Pain-obliterating electrodes in the brain activate to nullify pain.

The ' Continuous Assisted Perfomance ' program hopes to find biotechnological ways (implants, metabolic manipulation, etc) to make it possible to push exhausted cyborg soldiers on without loss of performance for up to seven days without sleep.

The above technologies are referred to by DARPA under the subheading of 'neuroengineering.' Now they are looking at micro processing chips that can be implanted beneath the skull and remotely manipulated. Rudolph estimates that a usable chip that could be field-tested soon. Ted Berger of the University of Southern California , envisions pilots who will be able to pilot their planes by thought alone, thanks to brain implants.

Abstract : " Combining man and machine to enhance innate soldier capabilities is the hallmark of a soldier-cyborg transformation. Increasing the man-machine interface in the unpredictable environment of war has enormous potential to change the human dimension of war. This paper discusses the issues of values, ethics, and leadership concerning technologically advanced armed forces as they move warfare into the unfamiliar world of the cyborg."

Conclusion: The immediate future holds some very interesting prospects for cyborg soldiers that remain largely unexamined by the general populace.

Massachusetts company plans to market wireless electricity system

2009-12-05T12:14:00.000-08:00

If mobile phones give people brain cancer, what will this kind of technology do to the human body? More, will it be able to control the human mind?

Massachusetts company plans to market wireless electricity system
David Colker
Los Angeles Times
Tue, 28 Jul 2009 13:58 EDT

WiTricity says the technology will be able to power lights, computers, TVs and even charges for electric cars through the air, without power cords.

Could this be the end of electric power cords?

A Massachusetts company said that within 18 months it will have on the market a wireless electricity system to power -- through the air -- lights, computers, televisions and even the chargers for electric cars.

The announcement was made at the TEDGlobal conference, a gathering of technologists and scientists, that wrapped up Friday in Oxford, England.

The company, WiTricity of Watertown, Mass., had previously demonstrated the technology, as had Intel Corp., which is also working on a wireless electricity project.

But the WiTricity announcement marked the first time that a company unveiled plans to commercialize the technology. At the conference, WiTricity's chief executive, Eric Giler, showed how an electrical coil -- placed in a wall or under a piece of furniture -- could power an LCD television several feet away, sans wires.

The basic premise isn't new. Legendary inventor Nikola Tesla, who gave us alternating current that made electricity practical, demonstrated low-power wireless electricity in the 1890s and worked on a plan to send it out over long distances.

The system from WiTricity (Wi-Fi plus electricity) is based on work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to focus the energy transfer, giving it enough oomph to make it useful.

Giler said the system was perfectly safe for humans. But people who left comments, both on The Times' Technology blog and its Facebook version, were skeptical.

"Do you expect this to be really safe?" asked Yasushi Zenno from Japan. "Would it not nuke someone by mistake sometimes?"

Climategate, who is really tilting at windmills?

2009-12-05T10:53:00.000-08:00

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/climategate_who_is_really_tilting_at_windmills/

Brian Lilley | Saturday, 5 December 2009
Climategate, who is really tilting at windmills?

Responsible citizen and responsible politicians should ask questions about climategate and whether the science was manipulated.

When news of climategate first broke and spread across the blogosphere, the reaction from the scientists involved and their many supporters was much like Frank Morgan in The Wizard of Oz, "Do you presume to criticize The Great Oz?" Now that Toto has pulled back the curtain by posting emails, computer codes and other materials online for Dorothy and the world to see, things in the world of climate science will never be the same.

Phil Jones, the man whose emails are now open for all to see, has stepped down as Director of the Climatic Research Centre at the University of East Anglia. East Anglia says it will review the leaked material "to determine whether there is any evidence of the manipulation or suppression of data which is at odds with acceptable scientific practice." Climate scientists who support global warming and the Copenhagen process continue to say there is nothing in the leaks to show data was manipulated and that nothing has changed. Yet the university, one of the premiere institutions for climate science and the one which provided the research backbone to many reports on global warming, says it sees enough to investigate.

So does the United Nations. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says the United Nations will do its own investigation, citing serious concerns raised by the leaks. Pachauri says, "We will certainly go into the whole lot and then we will take a position on it. We certainly don't want to brush anything under the carpet." Just to add a third investigation to the mix, Penn State, the university that is the home of Jones' American counterpart Michael Mann, is also investigating to see if there was any academic misconduct.

Meanwhile the politicians are trying to continue to act like the Wizard, telling everyone to ignore the man behind the curtain. There have been several prominent people in Britain question climate change and say these emails deserve greater scrutiny. Javier Cuadros and Nigel Lawson say the leaks show problems with the accepted wisdom and Britain's climate change secretary Ed Miliband calls them “climate saboteurs","flat Earthers" and “irresponsible.”

In Canada, where the scandal has barely registered in the media, politicians are simply saying there is nothing to see here. Jim Prentice, Minister of the Environment says that, “The science overall is relatively clear on all of this.” Prentice’s environment critic David McGuinty says that the email leaks are a ruse; the fact that they are now public and raising questions about the science should change nothing.

From the Great White North to the Land Down Under, the difference could not be starker. While the Canadian Parliament tells its citizens that there is nothing to see or be concerned about in the climategate revelations, Australian politicians stymied a government cap and trade bill. The push to curb carbon emissions by Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was deferred at least until after Copenhagen by a group of emboldened climate sceptics teaming up with the Greens looking for stricter emissions. Rudd's main opponent in Parliament, Tony Abbott, is a climate sceptic, elected as Liberal Party Leader just this week, because the former leader was too enthusiastic in his support for tough action on climate change.

In the United States, reaction to climategate is even stronger. Reaching far beyond the confines of blogs and talk radio, the scandal has reached Washington, where Republicans have written to the Environmental Protection Agency and questioned President Obama's top science advisor John Holdren over what the leaks reveal he said in the emails. It should be noted that these moves in Washington come from people that already question climate science. Those who fully back global warming and the move to curb carbon emissions through legislative means are taking a different tack. Senator Barbara Boxer, a Democrat from California, says if there is to be an investigation it should be a criminal investigation into who hacked into the CRUs computers and took the emails. She calls this scandal "E-mail-theft-gate."

The United Nations, the University of East Anglia and Penn State University are investigating this because to refuse to do so would bring all future research into question. To ignore this would destroy their reputations. Meanwhile, the politicians pushing for a deal on climate change at Copenhagen next week can't afford to push for an investigation, because to do so could destroy their reputations and plans for wealth distribution under the guise of global warming.

The reactions of most politicians reminds me of a women I interviewed years ago. Her husband, a terror suspect, was being detained based on information from Canada's spy agency CSIS. As she marched around the grounds outside of the spy agency headquarters, the woman carried a sign with the slogan "question authority"; yet when I asked what proof she could offer that her husband was innocent, she became indignant. Our political leaders want us to follow the science, unless that science may have been compromised, then we should just trust them. What responsible citizens must do is continue to act like Toto and pull back the curtain to see if there is a wizard or just an old humbug hiding behind smoke and mirrors.

Climategate: Science Is Dying (from Corruption)

2009-12-04T14:36:00.000-08:00

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052748704107104574572091993737848.html

Climategate: Science Is Dying
Daniel Henninger
The Wall Street Journal
Thu, 03 Dec 2009 09:31 EST

Surely there must have been serious men and women in the hard sciences who at some point worried that their colleagues in the global warming movement were putting at risk the credibility of everyone in science. The nature of that risk has been twofold: First, that the claims of the climate scientists might buckle beneath the weight of their breathtaking complexity. Second, that the crudeness of modern politics, once in motion, would trample the traditions and culture of science to achieve its own policy goals. With the scandal at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, both have happened at once.

I don't think most scientists appreciate what has hit them. This isn't only about the credibility of global warming. For years, global warming and its advocates have been the public face of hard science. Most people could not name three other subjects they would associate with the work of serious scientists. This was it. The public was told repeatedly that something called "the scientific community" had affirmed the science beneath this inquiry. A Nobel Prize was bestowed (on a politician).

Global warming enlisted the collective reputation of science. Because "science" said so, all the world was about to undertake a vast reordering of human behavior at almost unimaginable financial cost. Not every day does the work of scientists lead to galactic events simply called Kyoto or Copenhagen. At least not since the Manhattan Project.

What is happening at East Anglia is an epochal event. As the hard sciences - physics, biology, chemistry, electrical engineering - came to dominate intellectual life in the last century, some academics in the humanities devised the theory of postmodernism, which liberated them from their colleagues in the sciences. Postmodernism, a self-consciously "unprovable" theory, replaced formal structures with subjectivity. With the revelations of East Anglia, this slippery and variable intellectual world has crossed into the hard sciences.

This has harsh implications for the credibility of science generally. Hard science, alongside medicine, was one of the few things left accorded automatic stature and respect by most untrained lay persons. But the average person reading accounts of the East Anglia emails will conclude that hard science has become just another faction, as politicized and "messy" as, say, gender studies. The New England Journal of Medicine has turned into a weird weekly amalgam of straight medical-research and propaganda for the Obama redesign of U.S. medicine.

The East Anglians' mistreatment of scientists who challenged global warming's claims - plotting to shut them up and shut down their ability to publish - evokes the attempt to silence Galileo. The exchanges between Penn State's Michael Mann and East Anglia CRU director Phil Jones sound like Father Firenzuola, the Commissary-General of the Inquisition.

For three centuries Galileo has symbolized dissent in science. In our time, most scientists outside this circle have kept silent as their climatologist fellows, helped by the cardinals of the press, mocked and ostracized scientists who questioned this grand theory of global doom. Even a doubter as eminent as Princeton's Freeman Dyson was dismissed as an aging crank.

Beneath this dispute is a relatively new, very postmodern environmental idea known as "the precautionary principle." As defined by one official version: "When an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically." The global-warming establishment says we know "enough" to impose new rules on the world's use of carbon fuels. The dissenters say this demotes science's traditional standards of evidence.

The Environmental Protection Agency's dramatic Endangerment Finding in April that greenhouse gas emissions qualify as an air pollutant - with implications for a vast new regulatory regime - used what the agency called a precautionary approach. The EPA admitted "varying degrees of uncertainty across many of these scientific issues." Again, this puts hard science in the new position of saying, close enough is good enough. One hopes civil engineers never build bridges under this theory.

The Obama administration's new head of policy at EPA, Lisa Heinzerling, is an advocate of turning precaution into standard policy. In a law-review article titled "Law and Economics for a Warming World," Ms. Heinzerling wrote, "Policy formation based on prediction and calculation of expected harm is no longer relevant; the only coherent response to a situation of chaotically worsening outcomes is a precautionary policy. . . ."

If the new ethos is that "close-enough" science is now sufficient to achieve political goals, serious scientists should be under no illusion that politicians will press-gang them into service for future agendas. Everyone working in science, no matter their politics, has an stake in cleaning up the mess revealed by the East Anglia emails. Science is on the credibility bubble. If it pops, centuries of what we understand to be the role of science go with it.

Climategate: Follow the Money

2009-12-04T07:30:00.000-08:00

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/198259-Climategate-Follow-the-Money

Climategate: Follow the Money
Bret Stephens
Wall Street Journal
Tue, 01 Dec 2009

Last year, ExxonMobil donated $7 million to a grab-bag of public policy institutes, including the Aspen Institute, the Asia Society and Transparency International. It also gave a combined $125,000 to the Heritage Institute and the National Center for Policy Analysis, two conservative think tanks that have offered dissenting views on what until recently was called - without irony - the climate change "consensus."

To read some of the press accounts of these gifts - amounting to about 0.00027% of Exxon's 2008 profits of $45 billion - you might think you'd hit upon the scandal of the age. But thanks to what now goes by the name of climategate, it turns out the real scandal lies elsewhere.

Climategate, as readers of these pages know, concerns some of the world's leading climate scientists working in tandem to block freedom of information requests, blackball dissenting scientists, manipulate the peer-review process, and obscure, destroy or massage inconvenient temperature data - facts that were laid bare by last week's disclosure of thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, or CRU.

But the deeper question is why the scientists behaved this way to begin with, especially since the science behind man-made global warming is said to be firmly settled. To answer the question, it helps to turn the alarmists' follow-the-money methods right back at them.

Consider the case of Phil Jones, the director of the CRU and the man at the heart of climategate. According to one of the documents hacked from his center, between 2000 and 2006 Mr. Jones was the recipient (or co-recipient) of some $19 million worth of research grants, a sixfold increase over what he'd been awarded in the 1990s.

Why did the money pour in so quickly? Because the climate alarm kept ringing so loudly: The louder the alarm, the greater the sums. And who better to ring it than people like Mr. Jones, one of its likeliest beneficiaries?

Thus, the European Commission's most recent appropriation for climate research comes to nearly $3 billion, and that's not counting funds from the EU's member governments. In the U.S., the House intends to spend $1.3 billion on NASA's climate efforts, $400 million on NOAA's, and another $300 million for the National Science Foundation. The states also have a piece of the action, with California - apparently not feeling bankrupt enough - devoting $600 million to their own climate initiative. In Australia, alarmists have their own Department of Climate Change at their funding disposal.

And all this is only a fraction of the $94 billion that HSBC Bank estimates has been spent globally this year on what it calls "green stimulus" - largely ethanol and other alternative energy schemes - of the kind from which Al Gore and his partners at Kleiner Perkins hope to profit handsomely.

© AP
Al Gore wins the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize: Doing well by doing good?

Supply, as we know, creates its own demand. So for every additional billion in government-funded grants (or the tens of millions supplied by foundations like the Pew Charitable Trusts), universities, research institutes, advocacy groups and their various spin-offs and dependents have emerged from the woodwork to receive them.
The Climate Emails

Today these groups form a kind of ecosystem of their own. They include not just old standbys like the Sierra Club or Greenpeace, but also Ozone Action, Clean Air Cool Planet, Americans for Equitable Climate Change Solutions, the Alternative Energy Resources Association, the California Climate Action Registry and so on and on. All of them have been on the receiving end of climate change-related funding, so all of them must believe in the reality (and catastrophic imminence) of global warming just as a priest must believe in the existence of God.

None of these outfits is per se corrupt, in the sense that the monies they get are spent on something other than their intended purposes. But they depend on an inherently corrupting premise, namely that the hypothesis on which their livelihood depends has in fact been proved. Absent that proof, everything they represent - including the thousands of jobs they provide - vanishes. This is what's known as a vested interest, and vested interests are an enemy of sound science.

Which brings us back to the climategate scientists, the keepers of the keys to the global warming cathedral. In one of the more telling disclosures from last week, a computer programmer writes of the CRU's temperature database: "I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seems to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. . . . Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight. . . . We can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!"

This is not the sound of settled science, but of a cracking empirical foundation. And however many billion-dollar edifices may be built on it, sooner or later it is bound to crumble.

Another Nobel Prize Winner Says That Intellectual Property Is Harming Science

2009-12-04T05:00:00.000-08:00

http://techdirt.com/articles/20091130/0314097110.shtml

Mike Masnick
Wed, Dec 2nd 2009
Yet Another Nobel Prize Winner Says That Intellectual Property Is Harming Science

We've discussed in the past how Noble Prize winning economists have been worried about the impact of intellectual property laws, and how at least one Nobel Prize winning physicist is warning that strict intellectual property laws are harming science and innovation. Now we can add a Nobel Prize winning biologist to the list (his Nobel was for medicine). Sir John Sulston has written up a column for The Guardian explaining how intellectual property is "shackling" science:

The myth is that IP rights are as important as our rights in castles, cars and corn oil. IP is supposedly intended to encourage inventors and the investment needed to bring their products to the clinic and marketplace. In reality, patents often suppress invention rather than promote it: drugs are "evergreened" when patents are on the verge of running out -- companies buy up the patents of potential rivals in order to prevent them being turned into products. Moreover, the prices charged, especially for pharmaceuticals, are often grossly in excess of those required to cover costs and make reasonable profits.

He goes on to attack the massive growth in things like gene patents, which has resulted in: "research on certain genes [being] largely restricted to the companies that hold the patents, and tests involving them are marketed at prohibitive prices. We believe that this poses a very real danger to the development of science for the public good." He points to the long history of how scientific advance has come from collaboration and the sharing of knowledge, rather than the hoarding of it, and fears where things are heading now that knowledge is so often locked up:

For science to continue to flourish, it is necessary that the knowledge it generates be made freely and widely available. IP rights have the tendency to stifle access to knowledge and the free exchange of ideas that is essential to science. So, far from stimulating innovation and the dissemination of the benefits of science, IP all too often hampers scientific progress and restricts access to its products.

We keep hearing more and more people who recognize all of this speaking out against what is happening. But the politicians only seem to listen to the lawyers and the lobbyists who have every incentive to ignore the reality around them. How do we change that?

Global Warming: "Fixing the Climate Data around the Policy"

2009-12-01T16:54:00.000-08:00

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16339

Global Warming: "Fixing the Climate Data around the Policy"
Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research
Mon, 30 Nov 2009 06:38 EST

More than 15,000 people will be gathering in Copenhagen for COP 15: the 15th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

Official delegations from 192 nations will mingle with the representatives of major multinational corporations, including Royal Dutch Shell, British Petroleum. The representatives of environmental and civil society organizations will also be in attendance. Parties & Observers

Heads of state and heads of government are slated to be in appearance in the later part of the Summit event. (See The essentials in Copenhagen - COP15 United Nations Climate Change Conference Copenhagen 2009)

It is worth noting that key decisions and orientations on COP15 had already been wrapped up at the World Business Summit on Climate Change (WBSCC) held in May in Copenhagen, six months ahead of COP15.

The WBSCC brought together some of the World's most prominent business executives and World leaders including Al Gore and UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon. (The World Business Summit on Climate Change, includes webcast)

The results of these high level consultations were forwarded to the Danish government as well as to the governments of participating member states. A so-called summary report for policymakers was drafted by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, on behalf the corporate executives participating in the event. This report has very little to do with environmental protection. It largely consists in a profit driven agenda, which uses the global warming consensus as a justification. (For details see Climate Council: The World Business Summit on Climate Change)

The underlying ambition of the Summit was to address the twin challenges of climate change and the economic crisis. Participants at the Summit considered how these risks can be turned into opportunity if business and governments work together, and what policies, incentives, and investments will most effectively stimulate low-carbon growth. (Copenhagen Climate Council)

The agenda of the Copenhagen Climate Summit (7-18 December 2009), is upheld both by the governments, the business executives and the NGO community as "one of the most significant gatherings in history. It is being called the most complex and vital agreement the world has ever seen."

CO2 emissions are heralded as the single and most important threat to the future of humanity.

The focus of the Summit is on strictly environmental issues. No mention of the word "war" --i.e. the US-NATO led war and its devastating environmental consequences.

No mention of the pre-emptive use of nuclear weapons as an instrument of "peacemaking".

No mention, as part of an environmental debate, of the radioactive fallout resulting from the Pentagon's humanitarian nuclear bombs. Tactical nuclear weapons, according to scientific opinion commissioned by the Pentagon are "safe for the surrounding civilian population".

No mention of "weather warfare" or "environmental modification techniques" (ENMOD) and climatic warfare.

No mention in the debate on climate change of the US Air Force 2025 project entitled "Owning the Weather" for military use. (See FAS, AF2025 v3c15-1 | Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning... | (Ch 1) see also SPACE.com -- U.S. Military Wants to Own the Weather)

Despite a vast body of scientific knowledge, the issue of deliberate climatic manipulations for military use is no longer part of the UN agenda on climate change. It was, however, part of the agenda of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. (See Michel Chossudovsky, Environmental Warfare and Climate Change, Global Research, 27 November 2005, See also Michel Chossudovsky, Weather Warfare: Beware the US military's experiments with climatic warfare, The Ecologist, December 2007 )

CO2 is the logo, which describes the Worldwide crisis. No other variable is contemplated.

Moreover, no meaningful anti-pollution clean air policy directed against CO2 emissions can be formulated as an objective in its own right, because the reduction of CO2 emissions is subordinate to the Global Warming consensus.

The words "poverty", "unemployment" and "disease" resulting from a global economic depression are not a matter of emphasis because authoritative financial sources state unequivocally: "the economic recession is over".

And the war in the Middle East and Central Asia is not a war but "a humanitarian operation directed against terrorists and rogue states."

The Real Crisis

The Copenhagen Summit not only serves powerful corporate interests, which have a stake in the global multibillion dollar carbon trading scheme, it also serves to divert public attention from the devastation resulting from the "real crisis" underlying the process of economic globalization and a profit driven war without borders, which the Pentagon calls "the long war".

We are at the crossroads of the most serious crisis in modern history. War and economic depression constitute the real crisis, yet both the governments and the media have focused their attention on the environmental devastation resulting from CO2 emissions, which is upheld as the greatest threat to humanity.

The Multibillion Dollar Carbon Trading System

The carbon trading system is a multibillion money-making bonanza for the financial establishment. The stakes are extremely high and the various lobby groups on behalf of Wall Street have already positioned themselves.

According to a recent report, "the carbon market could become double the size of the vast oil market, according to the new breed of City players who trade greenhouse gas emissions through the EU's emissions trading scheme... The speed of that growth will depend on whether the Copenhagen summit gives a go-ahead for a low-carbon economy, but Ager says whatever happens schemes such as the ETS will expand around the globe." (Terry Macalister, Carbon trading could be worth twice that of oil in next decade, The Guardian, 28 November 2009)

The large financial conglomerates, involved in derivative trade, including JP Morgan Chase, Bank America Merrill Lynch, Barclay's, Citi Bank, Nomura, Société Générale, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs are actively involved in carbon trading.( FACTBOX: Investment banks in carbon trading | Reuters, 14 September 2009)

The legitimacy of the carbon trading system rests on the legitimacy of the Global Warming Consensus, which views CO2 emissions as the single threat to the environment. And for Wall Street the carbon trading system is a convenient and secure money-making safety-net, allowing for the transfer of billions of dollars into the pockets of a handful of conglomerates.
Every major financial house in New York and London has set up carbon trading operations. Very big numbers are dancing in their heads, and they need them to replace the "wealth" that evaporated in the housing bust. Louis Redshaw, head of environmental markets at Barclays Capital, told the New York Times, "Carbon will be the world's biggest market over all."

Barclays thinks the current $60 billion carbon market could grow to $1 trillion within a decade. Four years ago Redshaw, a former electricity trader, couldn't get anyone to talk to him about carbon." (Mark Braly, The Multibillion Dollar Carbon Trading, RenewableEnergyWorld.com, 5 March 2008)
The Global Warming Data Base

Is the Global Warming Consensus based on reliable data?

There are indications that both the concepts and the data on temperature and greenhouse gas emissions including CO2 have been adjusted and shaped to fit the agenda of the UN Panel on Climate Change.

For several years, the claims of the UN Panel on Climate Change (UNPCC) including the database have been questioned. (See Global Research's Climate Change Dossier: Archive of more than 100 articles)

Critical analysis of the climate change consensus has been conveyed in reports by several prominent scientists.

There has been, in this regard, a persistent attempt to silence the critics as conveyed in the writings of MIT meteorologist Richard S. Lindzen (See Richard Lindzen, Climate of Fear: Global-warming alarmists intimidate dissenting scientists into silence, Global Research, 7 April 2007)

Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libelled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis. (Ibid)
ClimateGate and the Emails' Scandal

In November 2009, barely a few weeks before the inauguration of the Copenhagen Summit, a vast data bank of over 3000 email exchanges between key Climate Change scientists and researchers was revealed.

While the emails do not prove that the entire data was falsified, they nonetheless point to scientific dishonesty and deceit on the part of several prominent scientists who are directly linked to the UNPCC.

The emails suggest that the data was shaped, with a view to supporting a predetermined policy agenda. "Fixing the climate data to fit the policy" is modus operandi as revealed in the email messages of top scientists, directly linked to the work of the UN Panel on Climate Change.

The British media has acknowledged that the scientists were intent upon manipulating the data on Climate Change as well as excluding the critics:
[the comments below the quotes are by The Telegraph].

From: Phil Jones. To: Many. Nov 16, 1999
"I've just completed Mike's Nature [the science journal] trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."

Critics cite this as evidence that data was manipulated to mask the fact that global temperatures are falling. Prof Jones claims the meaning of "trick" has been misinterpreted

From Phil Jones To: Michael Mann (Pennsylvania State University). July 8, 2004
"I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"
The IPCC is the UN body charged with monitoring climate change. The scientists did not want it to consider studies that challenge the view that global warming is genuine and man-made.

From: Kevin Trenberth (US National Center for Atmospheric Research). To: Michael Mann. Oct 12, 2009
"The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't... Our observing system is inadequate"

Prof Trenberth appears to accept a key argument of global warming sceptics - that there is no evidence temperatures have increased over the past 10 years.

From: Phil Jones. To: Many. March 11, 2003
"I will be emailing the journal to tell them I'm having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor."

Prof Jones appears to be lobbying for the dismissal of the editor of Climate Research, a scientific journal that published papers downplaying climate change.

From Phil Jones. To: Michael Mann. Date: May 29, 2008
"Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise."
Climate change sceptics tried to use Freedom of Information laws to obtain raw climate data submitted to an IPCC report known as AR4. The scientists did not want their email exchanges about the data to be made public.

From: Michael Mann. To: Phil Jones and Gabi Hegerl (University of Edinburgh). Date: Aug 10, 2004
"Phil and I are likely to have to respond to more crap criticisms from the idiots in the near future."
The scientists make no attempt to hide their disdain for climate change sceptics who request more information about their work

(University of East Anglia emails: the most contentious quotes - Telegraph, 23 November 2009).
The complete list of contentious emails can be consulted at Alleged CRU Emails - Searchable published by eastangliaemails.com.

What is significant is that the authors of the emails are directly involved in the UN Panel on Climate Change:
"[They are] the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Professor Philip Jones, the CRU's director, is in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports. Through its link to the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office, which selects most of the IPCC's key scientific contributors, his global temperature record is the most important of the four sets of temperature data on which the IPCC and governments rely - not least for their predictions that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are spent to avert it.

Dr Jones is also a key part of the closely knit group of American and British scientists responsible for promoting that picture of world temperatures conveyed by Michael Mann's "hockey stick" graph which 10 years ago turned climate history on its head by showing that, after 1,000 years of decline, global temperatures have recently shot up to their highest level in recorded history. (Prof. Christopher Booker, Climate Change: This is the Worst Scientific Scandal of our Generation, The Telegraph, 28 November 2009)

One of the contentious emails by Dr Jones (published by eastangliaemails.com) points to the deliberate manipulation of the data:
Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim's got a diagram here we'll send that either later today or
first thing tomorrow.
I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps
to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from
1961 for Keith's to hide the decline. Mike's series got the annual
land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land
N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999
for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with
data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.
Thanks for the comments, Ray.

Cheers
Phil

Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 xxx xxxx xxxx
School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 xxx xxxx xxxx
University of East Anglia
Norwich Email p.jones@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
NR4 7TJ
UK
Source: Alleged CRU Emails - Searchable published by eastangliaemails.com

US Congressional Probe

Barely two weeks before the inauguration of the Copenhagen Summit, the US Congress is now probing into "the Global Warming Emails":
"U.S. congress has begun investigating climate scientists whose emails and documents were hacked into to see if their global warming theories have misrepresented the truth behind the cause of climate change.

Investigators have begun "studying" the 1,079 e-mails and over 3,800 documents that hackers stole last week from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia University in the U.K, Rep. Darrel Issa from California told the Wall Street Journal.

Some of the leaked e-mails and files - which were posted on sites like www.Wikileaks.org and www.EastAngliaEmails.com - show growing tensions between scientists and skeptics. Others are mundane announcements of upcoming conferences or research trips.

According to his website, Rep. James Inhofe from Oklahoma said on Monday the leaked correspondence suggested researchers "cooked the science to make this thing look as if the science was settled, when all the time of course we knew it was not."

The White House Science Adviser John Holdren has also come under investigation, after one of his emails written in 2003 to Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University, was hacked.

"I'm happy to stand by my contribution to this exchange. I think anybody who reads what I wrote in its entirety will find it a serious and balanced treatment of the question of 'burden of proof' in situations where science germane to public policy is in dispute," Holdren said.

Meanwhile, The University of East Anglia said it will cooperate with police and proceed with its own internal investigation. The University posted a statement calling the disclosure "mischievous" and saying it is aiding the police in an investigation.

The statement also quotes Jones, CRU's director, explaining his November 1999 e-mail, which said: "I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."

Jones said that the word trick was used "colloquially as in a clever thing to do" and that it "is ludicrous to suggest that it refers to anything untoward."

The leaked data comes just two weeks before the U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen will begin on Dec. 7 -18, when 192 nations will meet to discuss a solution on how to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases worldwide. (International Business Times, November 24, 2009)
Meanwhile, the "international community" (supported by the mainstream media) has launched a counteroffensive, accusing the critics of waging a smear campaign:
The chairman of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, stood by his panel's 2007 findings last week. That study is the foundation for a global climate response, including carbon emission targets proposed this week by both the US and China.

So far, climate scientists say nothing in the leaked emails [that] takes away from the fact that the climate change evidence is solid. In fact, a new study in the journal Science shows the polar ice cap melting is happening at a faster rate than predicted just a few years ago.

In a teleconference call with reporters this week, one of the scientists whose emails were leaked, Pennsylvania State University paleoclimatologist Michael Mann, said that "regardless of how cherry-picked" the emails are, there is "absolutely nothing in any of the emails that calls into the question the deep level of consensus of climate change."

...

This is a "smear campaign to distract the public," added Mann, a coauthor of the Copenhagen Diagnosis, the report on climate change released this week ahead of the Copenhagen. "Those opposed to climate action, simply don't have the science on their side," he added.

Professor Trevor Davies of the East Anglia CRU called the stolen data the latest example of a campaign intended "to distract from reasoned debate" about global climate change ahead of the Copenhagen summit. (As Copenhagen summit nears, 'Climategate' dogs global warming debate, Christian Science Monitor, 28 November 2009, emphasis added)
But what is significant in this counteroffensive, is that the authenticity of the emails has not been challenged by the IPCC scientists.

The scientists are not saying "we did not do it". What they are saying is that the Global Warming Consensus holds irrespective of their actions to selectively manipulate the data as well as exclude the critics from the scientific debate on climate change.

What is the Stance of the Civil Society and Environmentalist Organizations

Civil society organisations are currently mobilizing with a view to pressuring the official governmental delegations:
Two years ago, at a previous UN climate conference in Bali, all UN governments agreed on a timetable that would ensure a strong climate deal by the time of the Copenhagen conference. The implications of not achieving this goal are massive, and nearly unthinkable. Turn to our great partners film - the Age of Stupid - if you need to be convinced why.

The meeting - which should include major heads of state for the last three days, will attempt to reach a massively complex agreement on cutting carbon, providing finance for mitigation and adaptation, and supporting technology transfer from the North to the South.

This is a major milestone in history, and one where civil society must speak with one voice in calling for a fair, ambitious and binding deal. We are ready, but we need to let the leaders know the world is ready too. Are you? (COP-15 Copenhagen Climate Conference | TckTckTck)

Where do civil society activists stand in relation to the climate change email scandal?

Will these civil society organizations, many of which are funded by major foundations and governments, continue to unreservedly endorse the Global Warming consensus?

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Greenpeace are among several key civil society organizations which are pushing the Copenhagen agenda. Their position is unchanged.

Environmentalist organizations are demanding a reduction in CO2 emissions, not as a means to tackling pollution, but as an instrument to reverse the process of global warming. For many of these organizations, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is the "bible". It cannot be challenged even if the climate database which supports the Global Warming Consensus turns out to be questionable or contentious.

While the mainstream NGO lobby groups including Greenpeace and WWF continue to support the consensus, there is a small and growing movement which challenges the legitimacy of the Copenhagen CO15 Summit agenda, while also accusing the UNPCC of manipulating the data. This manipulation of the data also serves the profit driven carbon trading scheme.

The Alternative Summit: KlimaForum09

The NGOs will be meeting in a parallel alternative summit, KlimaForum09. More than 10,000 people a day are expected to attend the sessions of KlimatForum09.

Major international NGOs and environmentalist groups will be in attendance including Friends of the Earth, Campaign against Climate Change among others.

Klimaforum09 is to finalize a draft declaration which "will put forth a vision of a more socially just world society, [while] emphasizing the need to create substantial changes in the social and economic structures of society in order to meet the challenges of global warming and food sovereignty." (See Declaration · Klimaforum09)

While there is fierce opposition to the multibillion carbon trading system the Alternative Summit will not challenge the Global Warming consensus and its underlying data base. (All events · Klimaforum09).

While critical and active voices will emerge from within the various sessions of the Alternative Forum, the organizational envelope of KlimaForum09 remains compliant to the official agenda. In many regards, the rhetoric of the KlimaForum09's Danish organizers ties in with that of the host government of the official Summit, which coincidentally also funds the Alternative Summit. (Political Platform · Klimaforum09). What this means is that the boundaries of dissent within the Alternative Summit have been carefully defined.

There can be no real activism unless the falsehoods and manipulations underlying the activities of the UNPCC, including the data base and the multibillion profit driven carbon trading scheme, are fully revealed, debated and understood.

Scientists Grow Pork Meat in a Laboratory

2009-12-01T16:46:00.000-08:00

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/article6936352.ece

Scientists Grow Pork Meat in a Laboratory
Lois Rogers & Georgia Warren
Times Online
Sun, 29 Nov 2009 17:49 EST

Scientists have grown meat in the laboratory for the first time. Experts in Holland used cells from a live pig to replicate growth in a petri dish.

The advent of so-called "in-vitro" or cultured meat could reduce the billions of tons of greenhouse gases emitted each year by farm animals - if people are willing to eat it.

So far the scientists have not tasted it, but they believe the breakthrough could lead to sausages and other processed products being made from laboratory meat in as little as five years' time.

They initially extracted cells from the muscle of a live pig. Called myoblasts, these cells are programmed to grow into muscle and repair damage in animals.

The cells were then incubated in a solution containing nutrients to encourage them to multiply indefinitely. This nutritious "broth" is derived from the blood products of animal fetuses, although the intention is to come up with a synthetic solution.

The result was sticky muscle tissue that requires exercise, like human muscles, to turn it into a tougher steak-like consistency.

"You could take the meat from one animal and create the volume of meat previously provided by a million animals," said Mark Post, professor of physiology at Eindhoven University, who is leading the Dutch government-funded research.

Post and his colleagues have so far managed to develop a soggy form of pork and are seeking to improve its texture. "What we have at the moment is rather like wasted muscle tissue," Post said.

"We need to find ways of improving it by training it and stretching it, but we will get there. This product will be good for the environment and will reduce animal suffering. If it feels and tastes like meat, people will buy it."

At present there is a question mark over the taste as laboratory rules prevent the scientists eating the fruits of their labor.

The Dutch experiments follow the creation of "fish fillets" derived from goldfish muscle cells in New York and pave the way for laboratory-grown chicken, beef and lamb.

The project, which is backed by a sausage manufacturer and has received £2m from the Dutch government, is seeking additional public funds to improve the technology.

Global meat and dairy product consumption is expected to double by 2050, according to the United Nations. This could have an unprecedented impact on climate change because the warming effect on the atmosphere of methane, a digestive by-product from farm animals, is 23 times greater than that of carbon dioxide. The UN has attributed 18% of the world's greenhouse gases to livestock.

The Vegetarian Society reacted cautiously yesterday, saying: "The big question is how could you guarantee you were eating artificial flesh rather than flesh from an animal that had been slaughtered. It would be very difficult to label and identify in a way that people would trust." Peta, the animal rights group, said: "As far as we're concerned, if meat is no longer a piece of a dead animal there's no ethical objection."

Must Watch! Story of Cap and Trade Science Scam & Derivative Scam

2009-12-01T14:21:00.000-08:00

http://storyofstuff.com/capandtrade/

They Blinded Us With Science: Alex Berezow on the Not-So-New “Science Presidency”

2009-12-01T13:37:00.000-08:00

http://www.independent.org/blog/?p=4110

They Blinded Us With Science: Alex Berezow on the Not-So-New “Science Presidency”
By Jonathan Bean on Nov 24, 2009

[One of my fellow bloggers at NASblog.org, Alex Berezow, posted a lengthy post on how the Obama Left is just a change in fashion when it comes to science policy: "Right-wing anti-science policies are out; left-wing anti-science policies are in," Berezow writes. Read the abridged version of his post below.]

Alex Berezow is a Ph.D. candidate in microbiology at the University of Washington.

Remember when President Obama said that he was going to “restore science to its rightful place”? Apparently, that statement needed to be translated from the vagaries of “hope and change” to modern English: Right-wing anti-science policies are out; left-wing anti-science policies are in.

For starters, President Obama appointed Cass Sunstein as the head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Mr. Sunstein believes that all recreational hunting should be banned. He also believes that meat consumption should be phased out in the United States, and he holds the unique belief that animals should have the right to sue humans in court. Naturally, the animal would be represented by a human lawyer—a policy other than that would just be silly. But who exactly would represent the animals in court is unclear at this point. Dr. Doolittle might be available, though.

All satire aside, with someone this disconnected from reality working in the White House, one wonders what impact he could have on the ability of scientists to conduct biomedical animal research.

Also, remember Mr. Obama’s obsession with creating green technology jobs as a way of leading us out of the recession? According to a report described by George Will in his Washington Post column, Spain’s massive subsidization of renewable energy has cost that country 110,000 jobs. Far from helping Spain’s economic crisis, this foolish subsidization appears to have contributed to its mind-blowing 19.3% unemployment rate.

As if this weren’t bad enough, a fantastic op/ed by Joel Frezza brought up several more examples of “junk science” coming from the White House, a few of which I’ll summarize and expand upon.

Mr. Frezza describes how the Obama Administration is asking for areas of Alaska to be deemed “critical habitat” for polar bears. This move could severely limit the ability to drill for oil and gas in the region, in a time when our nation is in desperate need of energy sources. It appears that, once again, Mr. Obama has caved to propaganda-spewing environmentalists who have ignored recent evidence indicating that polar bear populations are increasing. In fact, polar bear researcher Mitch Taylor claims that of the 19 populations of polar bears, only two have exhibited declining numbers. As a side issue, it’s also interesting to note that people like Captain Planet (Al Gore) who refer to polar bears as “endangered” don’t even have their facts straight: Polar bears are officially listed as “vulnerable”—an entirely different conservation status. This status is given to animals which may become endangered if conditions don’t change. Arguably, however, conditions are changing because their population has been increasing.

Finally, Mr. Frezza points out the economically ludicrous and scientifically unsound subsidization of biofuels. Liberals see the subsidization of biofuels as killing two birds with one stone: Fixing the planet and helping out America’s farmers. However, science has something entirely different to say about biofuels. The production of biofuels emits nitrous oxide, otherwise known as laughing gas. The planet, unfortunately, doesn’t find it very funny, since nitrous oxide is a much more potent contributor to the greenhouse effect than is carbon dioxide. As The Economist points out in this article, a policy meant to make things better is merely an expensive way of making things worse.

Honestly, this list could go on and on. What is so infuriating is the fact that Mr. Obama self-righteously proclaimed to be the protector of science, when the truth is that he simply replaced Mr. Bush’s special interests with his own. In what has to be the most stunning broken promise in Mr. Obama’s presidency, instead of “restoring science,” he has simply resorted to “politics as usual.”

Proposed Military Robot Would Literally Feed off Dead Battlefield Bodies to Power Itself

2009-12-01T05:59:00.000-08:00

This is so horrific that I can't leave it alone and will post all the different articles about it...

http://www.NaturalNews.com/z027584_military_robots.html

November 26 2009
Military Horror: Proposed Military Robot Would Literally Feed off Dead Battlefield Bodies to Power Itself
by David Gutierrez, staff writer

(NaturalNews) Controversy erupted when reports emerged that the Pentagon was close to completing a robot designed to forage for its own fuel by consuming "biomass in the environment," raising concerns that the Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot (EATR) might be intended to fuel itself from the bodies of the dead.

The EATR was designed by Robotic Technology Inc. (RTI), in cooperation with Cyclone Power Technologies Inc.

According to RTI, EATR is an autonomous robotic platform able to perform long-range, long-endurance military missions without the need for manual or conventional re-fueling. The patent pending robotic system can find, ingest and extract energy from biomass in the environment, as well as use conventional and alternative fuels (such as gasoline, diesel, propane and solar) when suitable."

The vagueness of the term "biomass" led many commentators to ask whether the Pentagon was actually developing a cannibal killer robot. Responding to such allegations, RTI insisted that the robot will be programmed to consume only vegetable matter.

"Despite the far-reaching reports that ["biomass"] includes "human bodies," the public can be assured that the engine Cyclone has developed to power the EATR runs on fuel no scarier than twigs, grass clippings and wood chips – small, plant-based items for which RTI's robotic technology is designed to forage. Desecration of the dead is a war crime under Article 15 of the Geneva Conventions."

RTI president Bob Finkelstein was vague as to how the robots would be programmed to avoid human or animal flesh.

"There are certain signatures from different kinds of materials," he said.

Even if the robot does not feed on humans, its use may still constitute a war crime.

"The robot steamers are envisaged as being equipped with powerful articulated arms in order to rip trees or bushes out of the earth and stuff them into their glowing maws," wrote Lewis Page in The Register.

"By way of a treat, it seems that the machines will also be able to loot or forage more conventional fuel supplies from the petrol tanks of cars," he wrote. "Hapless drivers or householders will be in no position to object to such robotic plundering."

Psychic computer shows your thoughts on screen

2009-12-01T05:56:00.000-08:00

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/living/article6898177.ece

November 1, 2009
Psychic computer shows your thoughts on screen
The telepathic abilities that feature in the film X2 are a step closer to reality
Chris Gourlay

Scientists have discovered how to “read” minds by scanning brain activity and reproducing images of what people are seeing — or even remembering.

Researchers have been able to convert into crude video footage the brain activity stimulated by what a person is watching or recalling.

The breakthrough raises the prospect of significant benefits, such as allowing people who are unable to move or speak to communicate via visualisation of their thoughts; recording people’s dreams; or allowing police to identify criminals by recalling the memories of a witness.

However, it could also herald a new Big Brother era, similar to that envisaged in the Hollywood film Minority Report, in which an individual’s private thoughts can be readily accessed by the authorities.

Earlier this year, Jack Gallant and Thomas Naselaris, two neurologists from the University of California, Berkeley, managed to 'decode' static images seen by the person from activity in the brain's visual cortex. Last week Gallant and Shinji Nishimoto - another neurologist - went one step further by revealing that it is possible to decode signals generated in the brain by moving scenes.

In an experiment which has yet to be peer reviewed, Gallant and Nishimoto, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology, scanned the brains of two patients as they watched videos.

A computer programme was used to search for links between the configuration of shapes, colours and movements in the videos, and patterns of activity in the patients’ visual cortex.

It was later fed more than 200 days’ worth of YouTube internet clips and asked to predict which areas of the brain the clips would stimulate if people were watching them.

Finally, the software was used to monitor the two patients’ brains as they watched a new film and to reproduce what they were seeing based on their neural activity alone.

Remarkably, the computer programme was able to display continuous footage of the films they were watching — albeit with blurred images.

In one scene which featured the actor Steve Martin wearing a white shirt, the software recreated his rough shape and white torso but missed other details, such as his facial features.

Another scene, showing a plane flying towards the camera against a city skyline, was less successfully reproduced. The computer recreated the image of the skyline but omitted the plane altogether.

“Some scenes decode better than others,” said Gallant. “We can decode talking heads really well. But a camera panning quickly across a scene confuses the algorithm.

“You can use a device like this to do some pretty cool things. At the moment when you see something and want to describe it to someone you have to use words or draw it and it doesn’t work very well.

“You could use this technology to transmit the image to someone. It might be useful for artists or to allow you to recover an eyewitness’s memory of a crime.”

Such technology may not be confined to the here and now. Scientists at University College London have conducted separate tests that detect, with an accuracy of about 50%, memories recalled by patients.

The discoveries come amid a flurry of developments in the field of brain science. Researchers have also used scanning technology to measure academic ability, detect early signs of Alzheimer’s and other degenerative conditions, and even predict the decision a person is about to make before they are conscious of making it.

Such developments may have controversial ramifications. In Britain, fMRI scanning technology has been sold to multinational companies, such as Unilever and McDonald’s, enabling them to see how we subconsciously react to brands.

In America, security agencies are researching the use of brain scanners for interrogating prisoners, and Lockheed Martin, the US defence contractor, is reported to have studied the possibility of scanning brains at a distance.

This would allow an individual’s thoughts and anxieties to be examined without their knowledge in sensitive locations such as airports.

Russell Foster, a neuroscientist at Oxford University, said rapid advances in the field were throwing up ethical dilemmas.

“It’s absolutely critical for scientists to inform the public about what we are doing so they can engage in the debate about how this knowledge should be used,” he said.

“It’s the age-old problem: knowledge is power and it can be used for both good and evil.”

Climategate: Science corrupted

2009-12-01T05:51:00.000-08:00

Intel Wants Brain Implants in Its Customers' Heads by 2020

2009-11-30T09:09:00.001-08:00

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2009-11/intel-wants-brain-implants-consumers-heads-2020

Intel Wants Brain Implants in Its Customers' Heads by 2020
Researchers expect brain waves to operate computers, TVs and cell phones
By Jeremy HsuPosted 11.20.2009 at 2:00 pm31 Comments

If the idea of turning consumers into true cyborgs sounds creepy, don't tell Intel researchers. Intel's Pittsburgh lab aims to develop brain implants that can control all sorts of gadgets directly via brain waves by 2020.

The scientists anticipate that consumers will adapt quickly to the idea, and indeed crave the freedom of not requiring a keyboard, mouse, or remote control for surfing the Web or changing channels. They also predict that people will tire of multi-touch devices such as our precious iPhones, Android smart phones and even Microsoft's wacky Surface Table.

Turning brain waves into real-world tech action still requires some heavy decoding of brain activity. The Intel team has already made use of fMRI brain scans to match brain patterns with similar thoughts across many test subjects.

Technology, brain implants, brain scans, brain waves, cybernetic, cyborgs, fmri, intel, interface, matrix, multi-touch, virtual reality, wirelessPlenty of other researchers have also tinkered in this area. Toyota recently demoed a wheelchair controlled with brainwaves, and University of Utah researchers have created a wireless brain transmitter that allows monkeys to control robotic arms.

There are still more implications to creating a seamless brain interface, besides having more cyborgs running around. If scientists can translate brain waves into specific actions, there's no reason they could not create a virtual world with a full spectrum of activity tied to those brain waves. That's right -- we're seeing Matrix creep.

Artificial Triple-Helixed DNA: Will It Trigger Unintended Consequences?

2009-11-30T07:41:00.000-08:00

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/11/artificial-triplehelixed-dna-will-it-trigger-unintended-consequences.html

November 16, 2009
Artificial Triple-Helixed DNA: Will It Trigger Unintended Consequences?

Cyborgs have been the sci-fi dream of a generation, merging man and machine in amazing new combinations. Most of which seem to look like major action stars. But a team at the University of Copenhagen think that's amateur hour. In fact they find the entirety of life of planet Earth to be distinctly underwhelming, which is why they're working on an upgrade - triple-helixed DNA.

The idea is to add a third Peptide Nucleic Acid (PNA) strand to the two Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) strands we started with. This ultimate artificial additive can regulate the activity of the existing genes, blocking some or enhancing others, and that's just for starters: the cyber-strand is not limited to the four letter vocabulary of GATC, meaning that extra characters could be added tothat very exclusive club.

When a team at the Center for Biomolecular Recognition first attempted to install a PNA strand into the "Major Groove" of regular DNA (yes, this concept is so cool that even the scientific terms involved are funky), they were excited by a surprising and sophisticated effect. Because unintended consequences of far greater complexity than anticipated are exactly what you want to happen in a lab working on
life-capable chemicals.

Gene Instead of a single PNA strand joining into the genetic party, two PNAs would muscle out one of the existing strands and create a region of two-thirds artificial triple-tagged helix. The displaced DNA would hang loose outside this region, forming a "p-loop" which has since been found to speed up replication of the structure. Also, the PNA-DNA bonds are stronger than the originals.

To recap: you have artificial cyber-genetics with capabilities beyond those of weak organics, they're stronger, and they can replicate faster. It's clear that this entire branch of science has escaped from a movie somehow, a conclusion strengthened by the fact that the PNA has a ridiculous weakness: water. Yes, just like Signs. No, we don't think it's on purpose.

Inside a squishy organic creature isn't a great place for chemicals that don't like water, and any PNA in a living organism is rapidly excreted - but not too rapidly for it to have effects. PNA has already been used to cure muscular dystrophy in lab animals, meaning that even without a chemical raincoat (which scientists are already working on) it's a powerful tool for controlling the very code of
creation.

Scientists currently researching in the field think waterproofing their work is only a matter of time, meaning that we could be looking at triple-stranded DNA in the future. We still have a long way to go though - if expository movie computer-graphics can be believed, we need eight to recreate Leloo from the Fifth Element.

It'll be a lot of work, but we're sure you'll agree it's worth it.

Posted by Luke McKinney.

Viscount Monckton on Climategate: ‘They Are Criminals’

2009-11-30T07:29:00.000-08:00

THEY ARE CRIMINALS! THIS WAS A SCAM FOR THE ELITE TO KILL OF HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF 'USELESS EATERS' WHILE STARTING A NEW 'BUBBLE' (TRADING CARBON DERIVATIVES) FOR THEIR EVIL ECONOMICS SYSTEM! THEY SHOULD BE PUT IN CHAINS AND TRIED BEFORE A WORLD COURT!!!! THIS INCLUDES AL GORE WHOSE COMPANY HAS MADE SHITLOADS OF MONEY ON THIS SCAM ALREADY!

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/viscount-monckton-on-global-warminggate-they-are-criminals-pjm-exclusive/

Viscount Monckton on Climategate: ‘They Are Criminals’ (PJM Exclusive)
Posted By Christopher Monckton
November 23, 2009

This is what they did — these climate “scientists” on whose unsupported word the world’s classe politique proposes to set up an unelected global government this December in Copenhagen, with vast and unprecedented powers to control all formerly free markets, to tax wealthy nations and all of their financial transactions, to regulate the economic and environmental affairs of all nations, and to confiscate and extinguish all patent and intellectual property rights.

The tiny, close-knit clique of climate scientists who invented and now drive the “global warming” fraud — for fraud is what we now know it to be [1] — tampered with temperature data so assiduously that, on the recent admission of one of them, land temperatures since 1980 have risen twice as fast as ocean temperatures. One of the thousands of emails recently circulated by a whistleblower at the University of East Anglia, where one of the world’s four global-temperature datasets is compiled, reveals that data were altered so as to prevent a recent decline in temperature from showing in the record. In fact, there has been no statistically significant “global warming” for 15 years — and there has been rapid and significant cooling for nine years.

Worse, these arrogant fraudsters — for fraudsters are what we now know them to be — have refused, for years and years and years, to reveal their data and their computer program listings. Now we know why: As a revealing 15,000-line document from the computer division at the Climate Research Unit shows, the programs and data are a hopeless, tangled mess. In effect, the global temperature trends have simply been made up. Unfortunately, the British researchers have been acting closely in league with their U.S. counterparts who compile the other terrestrial temperature dataset — the GISS/NCDC dataset. That dataset too contains numerous biases intended artificially to inflate the natural warming of the 20th century.

Finally, these huckstering snake-oil salesmen and “global warming” profiteers — for that is what they are — have written to each other encouraging the destruction of data that had been lawfully requested under the Freedom of Information Act in the UK by scientists who wanted to check whether their global temperature record had been properly compiled. And that procurement of data destruction, as they are about to find out to their cost, is a criminal offense. They are not merely bad scientists — they are crooks. And crooks who have perpetrated their crimes at the expense of British and U.S. taxpayers.

I am angry, and so should you be.

What have the mainstream news media said about the Climategate affair? Remarkably little [2]. The few who have brought themselves to comment, through gritted teeth, have said that all of this is a storm in a teacup, and that their friends in the University of East Anglia and elsewhere in the climatological community are good people, really.

No, they’re not. They’re criminals. With Professor Fred Singer, who founded the U.S. Satellite Weather Service, I have reported them to the UK’s Information Commissioner, with a request that he investigate their offenses and, if thought fit, prosecute. But I won’t be holding my breath: In the police state that Britain has now sadly become, with supine news media largely owned and controlled by the government, the establishment tends to look after its own.

At our expense, and at the expense of the truth.

ClimateGate scandal demonstrates intellectual protectionism of modern scientists

2009-11-30T05:52:00.000-08:00

http://www.naturalnews.com/027620_ClimateGate_global_warming.html

November 30 2009
ClimateGate scandal demonstrates intellectual protectionism of modern scientists
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor

(NaturalNews) The inconvenient release of private email conversations among climate change scientists has been a boon for climate change skeptics. What emerges from the leaked emails is a depiction of a group of scientists who practice "intellectual protectionism" -- meaning they know they're right and they'll do anything to protect their beliefs, even if it means hiding or manipulating data.

Sound familiar? Scientists in the pharmaceutical industry have been practicing this for decades. If you think the ClimateGate emails are revealing, just imagine what kind of similar emails are flying around between Big Pharma scientists who routinely manipulate study data and commit scientific fraud in the name of medicine. Time and time again, we see revelations of manipulated clinical trials where data was intentionally distorted in order to make a dangerous, useless drug appear to be safe and effective.

What ClimateGate scientists and Big Pharma scientists have in common is that they have both abandoned the core principles of good science in their quest to be right. Rather than asking questions of nature and humbly listening to the answers provided by the data, these scientists have staked out a position and decided to defend that position at all costs -- even if it requires hiding or distorting data!

That approach is entirely unscientific, of course. In my mind, it now puts much of the recent global warming science in the same category as Big Pharma's research: Pure quackery.

As Christopher Booker explains in The Telegraph, "The reason why even the Guardian's George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated. What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)." (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/...)

Claiming to save the planet is no excuse for scientific fraud
Global warming may, indeed, be a real phenomenon. But trying to "prove" it by conspiring to manipulate the data in order to be right is absolutely the wrong way to go about studying the issue. In fact, these ClimateGate revelations have soundly discredited much of the global warming scientific community to the point where whatever these people say from now on simply cannot be trusted.

And that's a shame because the question remains: What if the global warming scientists are really right? What if they're right for all the wrong reasons, and they let their egos and their professional pride get in the way of conducting real science, thereby discrediting the very notion they were attempting to prove? That's a possibility we would still do well to consider.

Yet, from their released emails, it's quite clear these scientists were manipulating data to make the "science" fit their beliefs. They weren't focused solely on the real facts; they were interested in forwarding their climate change theories using any means necessary -- including scientific trickery.

What's truly sad about all this -- both in the climate change community and the pharmaceutical community -- is that real science has seemingly been replaced by pseudoscientific quackery. I've known for a long time that you can't trust scientists who work for pharmaceutical companies because they tend to distort their findings to support their employer. Now learning that a similar approach to junk science was apparently pursued by climate change scientists is more than a little disconcerting. It makes me wonder: Are there any honest scientists left anywhere?

The structure of scientific revolutions
It seems that in all realms of science, egos are more important than observational data. Whether you're dealing with astronomy, oceanography, anthropology or biology, every scientist wants to be right, and most will do whatever it takes to defend their proclaimed theories and beliefs. This is why it remains so ridiculously difficult to penetrate the minds of modern doctors with facts about vitamin D and cancer, for example: These "scientific thinkers" have already decided what to believe, and they'll defend those beliefs at all costs, even in the face of strong evidence that contradicts their beliefs.

What I've come to realize in all this is that many of today's scientists aren't scientific thinkers. They're really just followers of their own private cult. Some "scientists" belong to the Cult of Pharmacology, and they believe pharmaceuticals are the answer to everything. Others belong to the Cult of Climatology, where scientific evidence is replaced with "faith" beliefs that are not allowed to be questioned. These micro-cults of scientific "truth" explain why science usually doesn't advance until a whole generation of scientists either retires or expires.

It all brings us back to the amazing book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. As this book explains, science almost never advances based entirely on new research, new ideas and new data. Instead, these new understandings collide with a wall of ego-driven resistance from the established scientific community. At times, such new ideas may linger for decades or even centuries before finally being seriously considered by the scientific community and then adopted as "truth." The classic example of this is the "Earth is the center of the universe" belief that was eventually replaced with the current sun-centric solar system model -- but not before many scientific thinkers were condemned (and even put to death) for their "preposterous" belief that the Earth was not the center of the universe.

In reality, modern science advances much like vomit -- in sudden wretched heaves that are both painful and revealing. The modern scientist is far more interested in being right than in being humbly informed about the mysteries of nature, and this makes much of so-called science more of a laughing matter than anything to be taken seriously. There are, no doubt, many very good scientists operating today who truly take to heart the Scientific Method and who avoid entangling their egos in their work, but I'm coming to discover that the number of such scientists may be far smaller than I had hoped.

In my mind, all of this further discredits the very idea that science is a reliable pathway to knowledge. There are many ways to glean knowledge about the world around us, and science is only one of them. Other methods included meditation, "communing" with nature, spiritual study or even embarking on spirit journeys with the help of plant medicines. Western science has given us much in terms of practical discoveries in fields like electricity, chemistry and physics, but it has utterly failed to provide us with answers on the things that really count: What is the meaning of life? What is the nature of human consciousness? What is the human soul?

None of these questions, it seems, will ever be answered by an ego-driven, profit-focused scientific community that would rather be right than enlightened.

Three questions we need to be asking
In order to know what's truly happening with human-caused climate change, we need to get accurate answers to the following three questions:

Question #1) Are CO2 emissions on the rise? And by how much? (The answer to this is clearly yes. This part isn't being debated.)

Question #2) Will high CO2 levels in the atmosphere cause global warming? If so, what will be the climate effects at different CO2 levels? (This is the part being debated.)

Question #3) What can we do to prevent devastating climate change from occurring? (This is also being heavily debated.)

In my mind, there's no question that what we dump into the air affects the climate in some way, but as I'm not a climate scientist, I must rely on others to determine what levels of carbon dioxide are correlated with observable climate effects (such as a change in atmospheric temperature or lack thereof). What I've learned from the ClimateGate scandal is that I really can't trust these scientists to tell the truth about their findings, and that leaves me in a position of having more questions than ever before.

It won't change my behavior, though. I'll still engage in recycling. I'll continue with my plans to install solar panels to power my house. I'll keep planting trees and growing most of my own food locally. Regardless of who's right about ClimateGate, we all have a responsibility to reduce our footprint on this planet, or we may someday discover some other environmental tsunami rising up to haunt us in ways we may have never imagined.

The ClimateGate scientists may have made complete fools of themselves, but I believe we must still practice ecologically-sound "green living" in our own way, each and every day, to the best of our abilities. In other words, don't let the egos of a small group of scientists distract you from the very real need to protect the future of life on our planet. Reduce your own environmental footprint in ways that you can. Conserve and protect what we have on this planet, and we may yet have a planet left for our children a few generations down the line.

Remember: Just because these scientists manipulated the data doesn't mean we all have free license to endlessly pollute the planet. If these scientists really were hiding data indicating global warming isn't as bad as we thought, that would only be a blessing because it would mean we have more time than we thought to reduce the eco-footprint of human life on Earth (hopefully without invoking nefarious Big Brother population control measures...)

It will be fascinating to see how this story develops. We'll continue to cover it here on NaturalNews.com.

Climategate e-mails sweep America, may scuttle Barack Obama's Cap and Trade laws

2009-11-28T17:37:00.000-08:00

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/geraldwarner/100018034/climategate-%20%20e-mails-sweep-america-may-scuttle-barack-obamas-cap-and-trade-laws/

Climategate e-mails sweep America, may scuttle Barack Obama's Cap and Trade laws
By Gerald Warner Politics
November 26th, 2009

Just a few considerations in addition to previous remarks about the explosion of the East Anglia Climategate e-mails in America. The reaction is growing exponentially there. Fox News, Barack Obama’s Nemesis, is now on the case, trampling all over Al Gore’s organic vegetable patch and breaking the White House windows. It has extracted some of the juiciest quotes from the e-mails and displayed them on-screen, with commentaries. Joe Public, coast-to-coast, now knows, thanks to the clowns at East Anglia’s CRU, just how royally he has been screwed.

Senator James Inhofe’s Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works has written to all the relevant US Government agencies, acquainting them with the nature of the e-mails. But the real car crash for Obama is on Capitol Hill where it is now confidently believed his Cap and Trade climate legislation is toast. It was always problematic; but with a growing awakening to the scale of the scientific imposture sweeping the world, as far as the Antipodes, the clever money is on Cap and Trade laws failing to pass, with many legislators sceptical and the mid-term elections looming ever closer.

At the more domestic level, the proposed ban on incandescent light bulbs, so supinely accepted in this servile state of Britain, is now provoking a huge backlash in America. US citizens do not like the government coming into their houses and putting their lights out. Voters may not understand the cut and thrust of climate debate at the technical level, but they know when the Man from Washington has crossed their threshold uninvited.

The term that Fox News is now applying to the Climategate e-mails is “game-changer”. For the first time, Anthropogenic Global Warming cranks are on the defensive, losing their cool and uttering desperate mantras such as “You can be sceptical, not denial.” Gee, thanks, guys. In fact we shall be whatever we want to be, without asking your permission.

At this rate, Copenhagen is going to turn into a comedy convention with the real world laughing at these liars. Now is the time to mount massive resistance to the petty tyrants and hit them where it hurts – in the wallet. Further down the line there may be, in many countries, a question of criminal prosecution of anybody who has falsified data to secure funds and impose potentially disastrous fiscal restraints on the world in deference to a massive hoax. It’s a new world out there, Al, and, as you may have noticed, the climate is very cold indeed.

Three Things You Absolutely Must Know About Climategate

2009-11-27T07:33:00.000-08:00

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/three-things-you-absolutely-must-know-about-climategate/

Three Things You Absolutely Must Know About Climategate
This could prove to be climate science's Vietnam.

November 24, 2009 - by Iain MurrayPage 1 of 2 Next ->

They’re calling it “Climategate.” The scandal that the suffix –gate implies is the state of climate science over the past decade or so revealed by a thousand or so emails, documents, and computer code sets between various prominent scientists released following a leak from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in the UK.

This may seem obscure, but the science involved is being used to justify the diversion of literally trillions of dollars of the world’s wealth in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by phasing out fossil fuels. The CRU is the Pentagon of global warming science, and these documents are its Pentagon Papers.

Here are three things everyone should know about the Climategate Papers. Links are provided so that the full context of every quote can be seen by anyone interested.

First, the scientists discuss manipulating data to get their preferred results. The most prominently featured scientists are paleoclimatologists, who reconstruct historical temperatures and who were responsible for a series of reconstructions that seemed to show a sharp rise in temperatures well above historical variation in recent decades.

In 1999, Phil Jones, the head of CRU, wrote to activist scientist Michael “Mike” Mann that he has just “completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps … to hide the decline”(0942777075). This refers to a decline in temperatures in recent years revealed by the data he had been reconstructing that conflicted with the observed temperature record. The inconvenient data was therefore hidden under a completely different set of data. Some “trick.”

Mann later (2003) announced that “it would be nice to try to ‘contain’ the putative ‘MWP,’ even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back” (1054736277). The MWP is the Medieval Warm Period, when temperatures may have been higher than today. Mann’s desire to “contain” this phenomenon even in the absence of any data suggesting that this is possible is a clear indication of a desire to manipulate the science. There are other examples of putting political/presentational considerations before the science throughout the collection.

Secondly, scientists on several occasions discussed methods of subverting the scientific peer review process to ensure that skeptical papers had no access to publication. In 2003, Tom Wigley of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, complained that paleoclimatologist Hans von Storch was responsible for “the publication of crap science ‘in order to stimulate debate’” and that they “must get rid of von Storch” (1051190249) as an editor of the journal Climate Research (he indeed subsequently resigned).

In 2005, Michael Mann said that there was a “fundamental problem w/ GRL now,” referring to the journal Geophysical Research Letters published by the American Geophysical Union (AGU), because “they have published far too many deeply flawed contrarian papers in the past year or so” and “it is probably best to do an end run around GRL now where possible.” Tom Wigley responded that “we could go through official AGU channels to get him [the editor of GRL] ousted” (1106322460). A few months later, the editor of GRL having left his post, Mann comments, “The GRL leak may have been plugged up now w/ new editorial leadership there” (1132094873).

Having seemingly succeeded with Climate Research and Geophysical Research Letters, the most recent target of the scientists’ ire has been Weather, a journal of the Royal Meteorological Society (RMS). Phil Jones commented in March 2009, “I’m having a dispute with the new editor of Weather. I’ve complained about him to the RMS Chief Exec. If I don’t get him to back down, I won’t be sending any more papers to any RMS journals and I’ll be resigning from the RMS” (1237496573).

This issue is all the more important because the scientists involved in these discussions have repeatedly accused their critics of being irrelevant because they fail to publish in the peer reviewed literature. For example, in October this year, Mr. Mann told Andy Revkin of the New York Times:

[L]egitimate scientific skepticism is exercised through formal scientific circles, in particular the peer review process. Those such as [Stephen] McIntyre [the target of much of the criticism in the CRU Papers] who operate almost entirely outside of this system are not to be trusted.

Climategate's Perry Mason Moment

2009-11-27T07:32:00.000-08:00

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/steve-milloy-climategate’s-perry-mason-moment-pjm-exclusive/

Climategate's Perry Mason Moment

Steve Milloy
pajamasmedia.com
Fri, 27 Nov 2009 07:52 EST

What's the real smoking gun among the emails allegedly "hacked" from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit? We'll get to that in a moment, but let's first address the alarmists' first line of defense - that the emails were stolen, and more than likely by some dastardly skeptic.

Since news of embarrassing, if not incriminating emails broke last Friday, it has become clear that the CRU computer system was not "hacked" and the emails were not stolen. In fact, the file containing the emails had been assembled by CRU staff in preparation for compliance with a Freedom of Information request. The file was then stored in a publicly accessible portion of the CRU computer network - making it just a matter of time before someone discovered it. Why the file was so stored may never be known, but that's not really what's important.

Nothing illegal or unethical was done to affect the file's release.

Moving on.

Much has been written already about the now infamous "trick" to explain away recent global cooling, and the alarmists' conspiratorial machinations to silence their critics. But the real "mushroom cloud" among the emails comes from Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research and a lead author of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports on global warming.

In an October 14 email to fellow alarmist Tom Wigley, Trenberth plaintively writes:
How come you do not agree with a statement that says we are no where close to knowing where energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter. We are not close to balancing the energy budget. The fact that we can not account for what is happening in the climate system makes any consideration of geoengineering quite hopeless as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not! It is a travesty!
It's a Perry Mason moment.

First, by admitting that we "are nowhere close" to understanding atmospheric energy flows, the much-vaunted Trenberth has trashed all the climate models on which the gloom-and-doom IPCC forecasts are based. If energy flows in the climate system cannot be accounted for, then they cannot be modeled - and there can be no basis upon which to make predictions of future temperatures.

That's case closed, right there. But there's more.

Two years ago, I privately surveyed U.S. scientists who participated in the IPCC's review of climate science. Trenberth was one of those who responded to the survey.

One question asked:
Which best describes the role of manmade CO2 emissions in climate change?

Trenberth checked off the following answer:
Manmade CO2 emissions drive climate change, but other natural and human-related factors are also important.
So - while in October 2007 Trenberth seemed pretty convinced that he understood energy flows in the climate system, two years later he underwent such an about-face that he is now trying to get his colleagues to admit, at least privately, that they really don't know squat.

It's not surprising that Trenberth had a hard time convincing Wigley, since Wigley's responses to the survey were extreme in terms of the significance of manmade CO2 emissions. On that same question, Wigley checked off this answer:
Manmade CO2 emissions are the principal driver of climate change.

Were the framing of CO2 as climate-culprit a TV drama, at this point Perry Mason would be cruising off into the sunset with Della Street in his gas-guzzling black 1957 Cadillac El Dorado convertible. But the magnitude of the global warming fraud is immense and widespread - too many politician/celebrity egos, corporate fortunes, and activist political dreams have too much invested in the scam to simply say "nevermind."

They have no shame, and they will not go away. So our struggle against them will continue.

The difference now is that we are no longer The Skeptics. We are The Vindicated.

Climategate Roundup: What's It All About?

2009-11-26T13:56:00.000-08:00

http://grantlawrence.blogspot.com/2009/11/climategate-roundup-whats-it-all-about.html

NOVEMBER 24, 2009
Climategate Roundup: What's It All About?

Computer hackers were able to obtain emails from the Climate Research Unit in Britain, a world renown academic research center on climate change.

Some of what they found can be read below.

It shows how institutional agendas are pushed on the public and how science is manipulated. I think this should be common knowledge, even if it isn't. I really don't find Climategate that surprising, since we see this type of institutional manipulation with drug and bio tech studies, with social and psychological data, and with government and economic numbers (unemployment data for example).

The larger issue of Climategate is that the world's public simply cannot trust institutional data and agendas. When we hear the talking heads in the media and supposed experts spout on this or that subject, we have to have an attitude of 'Buyer Beware.' They usually have an agenda that promotes the people paying for their services.

Still the scientific consensus has overwhelmingly been that there is climate change and humanity is contributing to the problem. Some believe that climate change is just part of a natural cycle. Climates do cool and warm without human intervention. Some promote, without merit, that climate change is totally a man made phenom.

But it is also clear that the fossil fuels are polluting the planet and sickening life. This cannot be denied.

So we can argue about how much of the climate change is man made, or we can go about supporting the life of humanity and the planet by moving away from this dangerous form of dirty energy.

It is clearly time to use our technology to find better and safer forms of energy even if our present climate change is not man made.

--Computer hackers have obtained 160 megabytes of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England. These e-mails, which have now been confirmed as real, involved many researchers across the globe with ideologically similar advocates around the world. They were brazenly discussing the destruction and hiding of data that did not support global warming claims. The academics here also worked closely with the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.....Source: Fox News

— Congressional Republicans are investigating e-mails stolen from a British climate change research center that they say show scientists attempting to suppress data that does not support man-made global warming.

Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe, a global warming skeptic, sent letters Tuesday to the inspectors general of several agencies and to scientists asking them to retain records related to the e-mails....Source: Huffington Post

--To climate skeptics, the e-mails prove that global warming is a conspiracy theory.....Source: Newsvine.com

Here are some of the highlights of Climate Gate
--Manipulation of evidence:

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

Private doubts about whether the world really is heating up:

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

Suppression of evidence:

Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?

Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.

Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.

We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.

Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP):
……Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back–I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to “contain” the putative “MWP”, even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back….

“This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?”

“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”“It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice !”

Source: Telegraph.com

Climategate! Fox Rips Global Warming Advocate! 1000's of Emails - Documents Reveal Fraud

2009-11-26T13:26:00.000-08:00

Nazi Mystery: A Town Full of Blond, Blue-eyed Twins

2009-11-25T15:59:00.001-08:00

http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/series/explorer/4087/Overview#tab-Videos/07485_00

Nazi Mystery: A Town Full of Blond, Blue-eyed Twins
National GeoGraphic
Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00 CST

Seeing double is normal in Cândido Godói, Brazil, where the rate of twin births is nearly a thousand percent above the global average. One theory is that the Nazi doctor, Josef Mengele, may be behind the phenomenon

Joseph Mengele, the escaped Nazi war criminal and SS physician, known as the Angel of Death, spent years doing bizarre medical experiments on twins at Auschwitz working to determine if twins held the key to building a blond-haired, blue-eyed master race for Adolf Hitler. Now a historian says he has evidence that Mengele's attempts may not have ended at Auschwitz, and that his obsession to engineer an Aryan master race continued, and that succeeded while he was on the run in South America. Deep in the Brazilian outback in a tiny town among the 80 households in a one-square-mile area are reportedly some 38 pairs of twins. Blond, blue-eyed twins. Bizarre and inexplicable, could they be the product of Mengele's machinations? Now, with exclusive access, EXPLORER goes inside the investigation; From the secret agents who trailed him, to the scientists now uncovering the facts behind the fantastical phenomenon, no stone is left unturned.

Scientists follow in the footsteps of Mengele's ghost to solve the mystery behind the town of twins.

Twinning researcher, Dr. Gary Steinman, explains how an injection may have triggered twins.

A local historian tells the tales of a mysterious German doctor's visits to a tiny town in Brazil.

Clues to Mengele's story are locked inside the archives of the Brazilian Federal Police.

Grassroots vs. Astroturf: The Climate Spin Machine Goes Into Overdrive

2009-11-25T15:38:00.000-08:00

http://solveclimate.com/blog/20091124/grassroots-vs-astroturf-climate-spin-machine-goes-overdrive

November 24, 2009 by SolveClimate
Grassroots vs. Astroturf: The Climate Spin Machine Goes Into Overdrive
by Leslie Berliant

Grassroots - adjective of, pertaining to, or involving the common people, esp. as contrasted with or separable from an elite.

Astroturf - trademark used for an artificial grass-like ground covering.

In the lead up to next month's climate negotiations in Copenhagen and the possibility of the U.S. Congress voting a climate bill, many groups are claiming to "represent Americans" and their views on energy and climate legislation.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has claimed to speak for 3 million American businesses in their rejection of cap-and-trade. After Mother Jones reporter Josh Harkinson did some math on that claim, however, the Chamber amended its membership number to 300,000 - a 90% reduction in its mandate to speak for America's businesses. Facing a number of high-profile defections over its opposition to climate legislation, the Chamber sent a letter to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee to clarify its position. Less clear is whether its members agree on what that would be.

Repower America, a campaign of the Alliance for Climate Protection - an organization closely linked to former Vice President Al Gore - has created a wall for people to show their support for clean energy, some of which will be used in advertising campaigns. Sprinkled among the teachers, actors, students, workers, veterans and other "ordinary" folks, are a number of celebrities, organizations and corporate logos, including Exelon, eBay, Starbucks and Avon, NAACP, National Wildlife Federation, United Steel Workers and Republicans for Environmental Protections. It is difficult to know from looking at the wall what the participants are supporting other than the broad idea of "clean energy".

There have been other, perhaps more definitive, demonstrations of broad support for addressing the climate crisis. On October 24, for example, 5,200 events in 181 countries were organized for 350.org's International Day of Climate Action. The organization has collected 22,000 photos of both the ordinary and extraordinary ways in which participants were making a common statement: address climate change by doing what is necessary to reduce atmospheric CO2 to 350 parts per million.

In their own effort to mobilize for a common purpose the American Petroleum Institute (API), held rallies and mobilized "energy citizens" over the summer to show their opposition to climate legislation. It later was discovered through a leaked memo written by API President Jack Gerard that among those "ordinary" folks were paid employees, retirees, vendors and contractors. Those claiming to be real grassroots activists call this "astroturfing".

I asked Climate Cover Up author James Hoggan to explain the difference between a truly grassroots organization and one practicing astroturf.

"The main difference is in the level of transparency and intention. With a real grass roots organization, it's not very difficult to find out who is funding it and what they're up to," he said. "With astroturf, there are often attempts to hide where the money is coming from and some level of deception involved."

Hoggan cites the example of the recent Bonner and Associates/American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE) scandal involving forged letters claiming to be from community groups unhappy with climate legislation and sent to members of Congress:

"I've seen (Bonner and Associates) contracts where they're charging $1,800 a picket, $75 a letter. A grass roots organization doesn't do that; the people holding the pickets want to be there. The reason the $1,800-a-picket strategy works is because of lazy journalism. If journalists don't bother to ask who's paying you or to find out where the trail of money leads, they don't get the full story. And a lot of journalists don't bother.

"Usually, by following the money, you can find out the intention. If we go back to the early work that Phillip Morris was doing with the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, they were actually constructing an arms-length organization; arms length from the tobacco industry and energy industry designed to attack science in order to come up with the right phrases and position to influence the public and further their business interests. Just in their mission is an attempt to disguise what they're up to.

"It's the same with a phone call from Bonner and Associates when they don't tell people they are calling that they're with a D.C. public relations firm. They say they're with a certain seniors group or women's group.

"There's a kind of slight of hand, a kind of shell game, going on with astroturf that doesn't happen with grassroots."

Underneath the rhetoric and spin, is there any American consensus on solving the climate crisis?

A CNN poll, released in October, suggests that 60% of Americans support a cap-and-trade mechanism as part of climate legislation, while 37% opposie it. For the under-50 crowd, the numbers are even higher, with 68% supporting cap and trade. Broken down along partisan lines, the poll finds that 75% of Democrats, 60% of Independents and 40% of Republicans support a cap-and-trade proposal.

Clearly, Americans support cap-and-trade. Or do they?

Around the same time as the CNN poll, a Pew Research Poll indicated that American belief in anthropogenic climate change is slipping, and not by a small amount. The number of Americans who believe that global warming is real, despite the scientific evidence, is now 57% compared to 71% in April 2008, the poll found. Only 36% of those surveyed now believe that human activity is causing the climate to change, compared to 47% in the earlier survey.

How can these two polls be reconciled?

Jim Hoggan believes the Pew poll reflects a more complex set of circumstances:

"The numbers actually didn't go up to 71% because 71% of people became aware of climate change. There were other reasons that drove that number up and other reasons that made it slip back down: Hurricane Katrina, unusual weather, extreme weather events and a high level of media attention on it. That happens much more easily when people are in an uninformed state of mind."

That "uninformed state of mind" - and the organizations looking to fill the vacuum it creates - is the crux of the problem when it comes to consensus.

"If you really want to come to some public judgment on something, people need to understand more about climate change than they have, and that trickles through community leaders and influencers. We look to community leaders for guidance on issues we don't understand ourselves, so what's happening with influencers is critical.

"Much of the debate in the U.S. among influencers has been so partisan that it has little to do with facts. There's a dramatic difference between the number of Republicans and Democrats that believe climate change is happening. This has its roots in the deception campaign that the energy industry has been so good at pushing."

Hoggan believes that if activists and influencers want to combat disinformation on climate change, they need to look back at a campaign that successfully changed social mores and beliefs, despite an organized attempt to deceive.

"You overcome deception when you have very credible repetition of messages. In the case of cancer and tobacco, we had so much medical response to the dangers of smoking, and among people who were very trusted, that there was a high level of credibility, a low level of partisanship and a high level of repetition.

"The Surgeon General, the American Medical Association and doctors were all giving the same message: Smoking is dangerous. The media coverage overwhelmed any attempt to oppose it, and those that opposed were very marginalized.

"With climate change, there hasn't been that sustained repetition from known credible sources. The messaging has been sporadic and heavily partisan. People in the U.S. associate climate change with Al Gore. He's been the blessing and the curse on the issue from the partisan point of view. Plus, it's much easier to understand cancer than it is to understand climate change. We know people who have cancer and who don't breathe very well because of smoking. Climate change is still a distant problem for someone living in North America."

The combination of the public's low understanding of climate change science, the lack of repetition of the truth from credible sources, and the high stakes have left room for widely disparate organizations with opposing agendas to claim to speak on behalf of "ordinary" Americans. And that has led to perceptions of grassroots involvement in the climate discussion that turn out to be special interest-orchestrated fakes - aka astroturf.

© 2009 Solve Climate

Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of 'Anthropogenic Global Warming'?

2009-11-23T13:19:00.002-08:00

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100017393/climategate-the-final-nail-in-the-coffin-of-anthropogenic-global-warming/

Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of 'Anthropogenic Global Warming'?
James Delingpole
Telegraph.co.uk
Sat, 21 Nov 2009 17:27 CST

If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (aka Hadley CRU) and released 61 megabites of confidential files onto the internet. (Hat tip: Watts Up With That)

When you read some of those files - including 1079 emails and 72 documents - you realise just why the boffins at Hadley CRU might have preferred to keep them confidential. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be "the greatest in modern science". These alleged emails - supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing AGW theory - suggest:

Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.
One of the alleged emails has a gentle gloat over the death in 2004 of John L Daly (one of the first climate change sceptics, founder of the Still Waiting For Greenhouse site), commenting:
"In an odd way this is cheering news."

But perhaps the most damaging revelations - the scientific equivalent of the Telegraph's MPs' expenses scandal - are those concerning the way Warmist scientists may variously have manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause.

Here are a few tasters. (So far, we can only refer to them as alleged emails because - though Hadley CRU's director Phil Jones has confirmed the break-in to Ian Wishart at the Briefing Room - he has yet to fess up to any specific contents.) But if genuine, they suggest dubious practices such as:

Manipulation of evidence:

I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline.

Private doubts about whether the world really is heating up:

The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

Suppression of evidence:

Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?

Keith will do likewise. He's not in at the moment - minor family crisis.

Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don't have his new email address.

We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.

Fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Sceptic scientists:

Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I'll be tempted to beat
the crap out of him. Very tempted.

Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP):
......Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back - I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to "contain" the putative "MWP", even if we don't yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back....

And, perhaps most reprehensibly, a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority.

"This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the "peer-reviewed literature". Obviously, they found a solution to that - take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering "Climate Research" as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board...What do others think?"

"I will be emailing the journal to tell them I'm having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.""It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I've had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice !"

Hadley CRU has form in this regard. In September - I wrote the story up here as "How the global warming industry is based on a massive lie" - Hadley CRU's researchers were exposed as having "cherry-picked" data in order to support their untrue claim that global temperatures had risen higher at the end of the 20th century than at any time in the last millenium. Hadley CRU was also the organisation which - in contravention of all acceptable behaviour in the international scientific community - spent years withholding data from researchers it deemed unhelpful to its cause. This matters because Hadley CRU, established in 1990 by the Met Office, is a government-funded body which is supposed to be a model of rectitude. Its HadCrut record is one of the four official sources of global temperature data used by the IPCC.

I asked in my title whether this will be the final nail in the coffin of Anthropenic Global Warming. This was wishful thinking, of course. In the run up to Copenhagen, we will see more and more hysterical (and grotesquely exaggerated) stories such as this in the Mainstream Media. And we will see ever-more-virulent campaigns conducted by eco-fascist activists, such as this risible new advertising campaign by Plane Stupid showing CGI polar bears falling from the sky and exploding because kind of, like, man, that's sort of what happens whenever you take another trip on an aeroplane.

The world is currently cooling; electorates are increasingly reluctant to support eco-policies leading to more oppressive regulation, higher taxes and higher utility bills; the tide is turning against Al Gore's Anthropogenic Global Warming theory. The so-called "sceptical" view is now also the majority view.

Unfortunately, we've a long, long way to go before the public mood (and scientific truth) is reflected by our policy makers.

There are too many vested interests in AGW, with far too much to lose either in terms of reputation or money, for this to end without a bitter fight.

But if the Hadley CRU scandal is true,it's a blow to the AGW lobby's credibility which is never likely to recover.

James Delingpole is a writer, journalist and broadcaster who is right about everything. He is the author of numerous fantastically entertaining books including Welcome To Obamaland: I've Seen Your Future And It Doesn't Work, How To Be Right, and the Coward series of WWII adventure novels. His website is www.jamesdelingpole.com

Climategate: how the MSM reported the greatest scandal in modern science

2009-11-23T13:19:00.001-08:00

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100017451/climategate-how-the-msm-reported-the-greatest-scandal-in-modern-science/

Climategate: how the MSM reported the greatest scandal in modern science
By James Delingpole Politics Last updated: November 21st, 2009

E-mails allegedly written by some of the world’s leading climate scientists have been stolen by hackers and published on websites run by climate change sceptics.

The sceptics claim that the e-mails are evidence that scientists manipulated data in order to strengthen their argument that human activities were causing global warming.

(Yep – definitely an improvement on their earlier, non-existent coverage; but not exactly pointing up the scandalousness of this scandal).

And the Independent:

(Yep. Nada).

And here’s how The New York Times (aka Pravda) reported it:
Hundreds of private e-mail messages and documents hacked from a computer server at a British university are causing a stir among global warming skeptics, who say they show that climate scientists conspired to overstate the case for a human influence on climate change.

(Yep. That’s right. It has only apparently caused a stir among ’skeptics’. Everyone else can rest easy. Nothing to see here.)
And here’s how the Guardian has reported it:

Hundreds of private emails and documents allegedly exchanged between some of the world’s leading climate scientists during the past 13 years have been stolen by hackers and leaked online, it emerged today.

The computer files were apparently accessed earlier this week from servers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, a world-renowned centre focused on the study of natural and anthropogenic climate change.

(Oh. I get it. It’s just a routine data-theft story, not a scandal. And a chance to remind us of the CRU’s integrity and respectability. And – see below – to get in a snarky, ‘let’s have a dig at the deniers’ quote from Greenpeace).

A spokesman for Greenpeace said: “If you looked through any organisation’s emails from the last 10 years you’d find something that would raise a few eyebrows. Contrary to what the sceptics claim, the Royal Society, the US National Academy of Sciences, Nasa and the world’s leading atmospheric scientists are not the agents of a clandestine global movement against the truth. This stuff might drive some web traffic, but so does David Icke.”

Here’s the Washington Post:

Hackers broke into the electronic files of one of the world’s foremost climate research centers this week and posted an array of e-mails in which prominent scientists engaged in a blunt discussion of global warming research and disparaged climate-change skeptics.

The skeptics have seized upon e-mails stolen from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in Britain as evidence that scientific data have been rigged to make it appear as if humans are causing global warming. The researchers, however, say the e-mails have been taken out of context and merely reflect an honest exchange of ideas.

(Ah, so what the story is really about is ’skeptics’ causing trouble. Note how as high as the second par the researchers are allowed by the reporter to get in their insta-rebuttal, lest we get the impression that the scandal in any way reflects badly on them).

Here is the BBC:

E-mails reportedly from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), including personal exchanges, appeared on the internet on Thursday.

A university spokesman confirmed the email system had been hacked and that information was taken and published without permission.

An investigation was underway and the police had been informed, he added.

(Ah yes, another routine data-theft story so dully reported – “the police had been informed, he added” – that you can’t even be bothered to reach the end to find out what information was stolen).

Meanwhile, the Climategate scandal (and I do apologise for calling it that, but that’s how the internet works: you need obvious, instantly memorable, event-specific search terms) continues to set the Blogosphere ablaze.

For links to all the latest updates on this, I recommend Marc Morano’s invaluable Climate Depot site.
And if you want to read those potentially incriminating emails in full, go to An Elegant Chaos org where they have all been posted in searchable form.

Like the Telegraph’s MPs’ expenses scandal, this is the gift that goes on giving. It won’t, unfortunately, derail Copenhagen (too many vested interests involved) or cause any of our many political parties to start talking sense on “Climate change”. But what it does demonstrate is the growing level of public scepticism towards Al Gore’s Anthropogenic Global Warming theory. That’s why, for example, this story is the single most read item on today’s Telegraph website.

What it also demonstrates – as my dear chum Dan Hannan so frequently and rightly argues – is the growing power of the Blogosphere and the decreasing relevance of the Mainstream Media (MSM).

This is not altogether the MSM’s fault. Partly it is just the way of things that more and more readers prefer their news and opinion served up in snappier, less reverent, more digestible and instant for.

But in the case of “Climate Change”, the MSM has been caught with its trousers down. The reason it has been so ill-equipped to report on this scandal is because almost all of its Environmental Correspondents and Environmental Editors are parti pris members of the Climate-Fear Promotion lobby. Most of their contacts (and information sources) work for biased lobby groups like Greenpeace and the WWF, or conspicuously pro-AGW government departments and Quangos such as the Carbon Trust.

How can they bring themselves to report on skullduggery at Hadley Centre when the scientists involved are the very ones whose work they have done most to champion and whose pro-AGW views they share?

As Upton Sinclair once said:

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.”

So don’t expect this scandal to be written up in the MSM any time soon. But why would you want to anyway? It’s all here, where the free spirits and independent thinkers are, on the Blogosphere.

UPDATE: I particularly recommend Bishop Hill’s superb summary of some of the key points of the CRU correspondence.

Also, Andrew Bolt’s summary of the correspondence likely to be most damaging to the reputation – and career, we can but pray – of Professor Phil Jones, the head of the CRU.

And do check out Watts Up With That, whose traffic went through the roof yesterday, enabling to demonstrate scientifically that Hockey Stick is after all a genuine phenomenon – and not merely a figment of Michael Mann’s overactive imagination.

A Photocontrolled Molecular Switch Regulates Paralysis in a Living Organism

2009-11-23T05:53:00.000-08:00

ABSTRACT: New On-Off “Switch” Triggers and Reverses Paralysis in Animals with a Beam of Light

"In an advance with overtones of Star Trek phasers and other sci-fi ray guns, scientists in Canada are reporting development of an internal on-off 'switch' that paralyzes animals when exposed to a beam of ultraviolet light. The animals stay paralyzed even when the light is turned off."

http://pubs.acs.org/stoken/presspac/presspac/full/10.1021/ja903070u?cookieSet=1

A Photocontrolled Molecular Switch Regulates Paralysis in a Living Organism

AbstractFull Text HTMLHi-Res PDF[1982 KB]PDF w/ Links[133 KB]Supporting InfoFiguresReferences
Usama Al-Atar†, Rylan Fernandes‡, Bob Johnsen‡, David Baillie‡ and Neil R. Branda*†
4D LABS, Department of Chemistry, Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry, Simon Fraser University, 8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, Canada V5A 1S6
J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2009, 131 (44), pp 15966–15967
DOI: 10.1021/ja903070u
Publication Date (Web): October 7, 2009
Copyright © 2009 American Chemical Society
nbranda@sfu.ca, † 4D LABS, Department of Chemistry., ‡ Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry.

Using light to modulate biochemical agents in living organisms has a significant impact on photodynamic therapy and drug release. We demonstrate that a photoresponsive system can reversibly induce paralysis in nematodes as a model for living organisms when two different wavelengths of light are used to toggle the molecular switch between its two structural forms. This example illustrates how photoswitches offer great potential for advancing biomedical technologies.

The use of light to trigger changes in molecular systems has great importance in biochemistry and medicine.(1) Systems based on the reversible photoreactions of diarylethenes have advanced the area of ‘smart’ materials, and their potential use as components of molecular electronics, optical memory, and variable-transmission filters has been well documented.(2) Their appeal is based on the fact that light can be tuned to reversibly and specifically trigger optical and electronic changes such as color, emission, and refractive index in materials that contain the versatile molecular architecture.(3) However, despite the large body of literature describing the use of diarylethene photoswitches in Materials Science technologies, their ability to reversibly control chemical and biochemical reactivity has only recently been demonstrated.(4) They have not been used in vivo as drug delivery vehicles or to unmask therapeutic agents,(5) where issues such as whether the photoresponsive systems can be absorbed by a living organism, if they retain their reversible photoactivity, and if the two forms of the molecular switch have unique effects on the function of the living organism must be considered.

Here we demonstrate for the first time that the light-induced reactions of a photoresponsive dithienylethene can be reversibly triggered in a living organism and that the photoswitch induces paralysis in Caenorhabditis elegans only when specific wavelengths of light convert it to one of its structural forms.

The photoswitch used in the in vivo studies described in this communication is bis(pyridinium) DTE 1 (Scheme 1), which undergoes cyclization from a colorless, ring-open isomer (1-o) to a colored, ring-closed isomer (1-c) when exposed to UV light (300−400 nm). The reverse, ring-opening process is triggered with visible light of wavelengths greater than 490 nm. The specific photoresponsive architecture has many appealing features. (1) Neither isomer spontaneously converts to the other at ambient temperatures (25−40 °C) in the absence of light. (2) The photoreactions tend to proceed with a high degree of efficiency and with minimal degradation. (3) The charged nature of 1-o renders it soluble in an aqueous solution that can be orally administered. (4) The compound emits light, which allows its uptake in living organisms to be easily monitored using fluorescence microscopy. (5) Most importantly, the two isomers of the photoswitch have significantly different abilities to act as electron-accepting species. In the medium used to administer the compound to the nematodes (10% DMSO in pH 7.0 phosphate buffer), isomer 1-c is easily reduced (at −350 mV) while 1-o is reduced along with the solvent at potentials more negative than −1.0 V suggesting that only the ring-closed isomer will interfere with the metabolic pathway required for energy production in C. elegans.(6) Compounds with reduction potentials ranging from −230 to −720 mV in phosphate buffer (pH 7.0) are known to have this effect, while compounds with reduction potentials similar to that for the ring-open isomer (1-o) do not.(7)

Scheme 1. (8)
Caenorhabditis elegans is the model organism of choice for the in vivo photoswitching experiments. It has the advantage of being a simple multicellular eukaryotic organism that has been studied in great detail. It is also one of the simplest organisms with a nervous system, having 302 neurons, which explains why it has been extensively used as a model for neuroactivity and metabolism.(9) Moreover, its transparent nature makes it an ideal candidate for monitoring color changes in vivo.

The in vivo effect 1 has on C. elegans nematodes was demonstrated by feeding them the compound and toggling the photoswitch back-and-forth between its two isomers using UV and visible light. This was achieved by incubating 3−4 day old wild-type N2 hermaphrodite C. elegans with the photoswitch in either of its forms (1-o and 1-c) at room temperature in aqueous phosphate buffer (12 mM) containing 10% v/v DMSO. When aliquot amounts of the C. elegans were withdrawn from each sample within the first 10 min and after 60 min of incubation, washed twice with phosphate buffer, and imaged using fluorescence microscopy, significant oral uptake of both forms of the photoswitch is evident as demonstrated by the observable fluorescence emitting from the body of the nematodes fed the photoswitch compared to samples fed only DMSO (Figure 1a vs 1b and 1c). This clearly illustrates that the organisms have orally consumed the photoswitch, an observation that has been confirmed by multiple experiments.(10)

Figure 1. Fluorescence microscopy images of C. elegans incubated with 10% DMSO (a) and photoswitch 1-c (12 mM) within the first 10 min (b) and after 60 min (c).(11) Similar results were achieved with nematodes incubated with 1-o. Optical microscopy shows the photoswitch being interconverted between colorless 1-o (d) and blue 1-c (e) with light of wavelengths greater than 490 nm and UV light (365 nm) for 20 and 2 min, respectively. (f) The number of mobile, nonresponsive, and paralyzed nematodes for samples that have been treated with the ring-open or the ring-closed form of the photoswitch compared to controls after 60 min incubation and (g) for samples exposed to varying amounts of 1-c. Error bars represent the Standard Error of Mean.

Importantly, the photoresponsive compound retains its photoactivity (1-o 1-c) even when inside the body of the nematodes as confirmed by light microscopy (Figure 1d and 1e). Exposing the colorless nematodes, which were fed the ring-open form of the compound, to 365-nm light for 2 min resulted in an immediate appearance of the blue color that is typical for this specific photoswitch as it undergoes the ring-closing reaction. The fact that the color is apparent throughout the body illustrates that the photoswitch has either diffused or has been transported by the organisms. Visible light of wavelengths greater than 490 nm triggered the reverse reaction, regenerating the ring-open isomer, and the nematodes became colorless. This coloration−decoloration cycle can be repeated several (at least three) times. Nematodes that were fed the ring-closed form of the compound (1-c) had an apparent blue color and could be transferred to being colorless upon exposure to visible light of wavelengths greater than 490 nm for 20 min. Nematodes incubated with DMSO alone did not react to UV light at 365 nm and appeared viable.

The presence of 1 has a remarkable effect on the mobility of the nematodes depending on which isomer is present. Control nematodes (those fed only DMSO) plated on agar containing Escherichia coli OP50 as a food source appear mobile and lively, moving by chemotaxis toward the bacteria where they can feed and lay eggs (676 worms). However, nematodes fed 1-c (12 mM) for 60 min (313 worms) appeared paralyzed and immobile (Figure 1f).(12) The dose−response curve of using 1-c at 0, 2, 4, 8, and 12 mM (average of 250 worms per experiment) showed that 12 mM is the most effective concentration (Figure 1g).

The ring-open form (1-o) appears to induce significantly less paralysis in the nematodes (260 worms), albeit, both forms are eventually toxic to the organisms. The paralysis induced by 1-c can be reversed by exposing the nematodes to visible light (20 to 25 min) at the wavelengths required to convert 1-c to 1-o, by which time the nematodes regain their mobility and appear as if they had never been paralyzed. The paralysis can be turned ‘on’ and ‘off’ by cycling the photoswitch between its ring-open and ring-closed form within the same nematodes by alternating 365-nm light (for 2 min; paralysis is observed 10 to 15 min later) and visible light (>490 nm; for 20 to 25 min).(13) The paralysis is clearly an effect of the presence of the photoswitch, as the control nematodes (676 worms) not treated with the compound appear unaffected by exposure to either UV or visible light.

The differing response of the nematodes to the presence of the photoswitch may be due to the extent the organisms process the compound. Initially, the uptake is mainly in the mouth region. After 60 min, some nematodes appeared to process the compound further throughout their bodies, which may lead to ‘nonresponsive’ behavior. Most of these nematodes were actually alive as observed by the pumping of their pharyngeal bulbs when viewed under the microscope. In other worms, the compound was less distributed throughout the bodies and was concentrated mainly in the head region, which may result in the reversible paralysis. In the extreme cases, some nematodes showed either no uptake of the compound or localization of it only in the head region resulting in minimal effects.

The unique ability of the photoresponsive dithienylethene to reversibly isomerize between biologically active (1-c) and inactive (1-o) forms when irradiated with different wavelengths of light proves that ‘on−off’ control of biological functions can be achieved. This example illustrates how photoswitches offer great potential for advancing biomedical technologies such as photodynamic therapy as alternative, noninvasive surgical treatments. In these studies we have demonstrated that an appropriately chosen photoswitch can be taken up by a living organism and still retain its photoswitching behavior in vivo. In this particular example, the unique electron-accepting ability of one of the photoisomers to induce paralysis in C. elegans is likely a result of interruption of the metabolic electronic pathway and the resulting loss of energy production. Future work will focus on determining the validity of this claim.

Acknowledgment
This research was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada, the Canada Research Chairs Program and Simon Fraser University (SFU) through the Community Trust Endowment Fund. This work made use of 4D LABS shared facilities supported by the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), British Columbia Knowledge Development Fund (BCKDF), and Simon Fraser University.

Supporting Information
Methods and video file of reversible nematode paralysis. This material is available free of charge via the Internet at http://pubs.acs.org.

References
This article references 13 other publications.

1. Gorostiza, P. and Isacoff, E. Y. Science 2008, 322, 395[CrossRef], [PubMed], [ChemPort]
2. Irie, M. Chem. Rev. 2000, 100, 1685[ACS Full Text ], [PubMed], [ChemPort]Irie, M. In Molecular Switches; Feringa, B. L., Ed.; Wiley-VCH: Weinheim, Germany, 2001; p 37.Irie, M. In Photochromic and Thermochromic Compounds; Crano, J. C. and Guglielmetti, R. J., Eds.; Plenum: New York, 1999; Vol., 1, p 207.
3. Tian, H. and Yang, S. J. Chem. Soc. Rev. 2004, 33, 85[CrossRef], [PubMed], [ChemPort]Tian, H. and Wang, S. Chem. Commun. 2007, 781[CrossRef]Ubaghs, L., Sud, D. and Branda, N. R. In Thiophene-Based Materials for Electronics and Photonics; Perepichka, I. D. and Perepichka, D. F., Eds.; Wiley-VCH, Germany, 2009; Vol 2, p 783.
4. Vomasta, D., Hgner, C., Branda, N. R. and Knig, B. Angew. Chem., Int. Ed. 2008, 47, 7644[CrossRef], [PubMed], [ChemPort]Samachetty, H. D., Lemieux, V. and Branda, N. R. Tetrahedron 2008, 64, 8392[CrossRef]Lemieux, V., Spantulescu, M. D., Baldridge, K. K. and Branda, N. R. Angew. Chem., Int. Ed. 2008, 120, 5112[CrossRef]Sud, D., Wigglesworth, T. J. and Branda, N. R. Angew. Chem., Int. Ed. 2007, 46, 8017[CrossRef], [PubMed], [ChemPort]
5. Goeldner, M. and Givens, R. Dynamic Studies in Biology: Phototriggers, Photoswitches and Caged Biomolecules; Wiley-VCH: Weinheim, Germany, 2005.
6. Braeckman, B. P., Houthoofd, K. and Vanfleteren, J. R.Intermediary metabolism (February 16, 2009), WormBook, ed. The C. elegans Research Community, WormBook, doi/10.1895/wormbook.1.146.1, http://www.wormbook.org.
7. Livertoux, M.-H., Lagrange, P. and Minn, A. Brain Res. 1996, 725, 207[PubMed], [ChemPort]
8. The counterions are initially PF6− but likely exchange for PO42− when the compound is dissolved in the buffer used for in vivo experiments.
9. Hobert, O.Specification of the nervous system (August 8, 2005), WormBook, ed. The C. elegans Research Community, WormBook, doi/10.1895/wormbook.1.12.1, http://www.wormbook.org.
10. Each experiment was performed multiple times on different batches of nemotodes: control, 8 studies, 16 plates, 676 worms; 1-c, 3 studies, 10 plates, 313 worms; 1-o, 2 studies, 6 plates, 260 worms.
11. Worms showed differing amounts of uptake and processing of the dye within the first 60 min. See Supporting Information for details.
12. In these studies, three different states of mobility were observed (Figure 1f). After being plated, the nematodes were gently prodded with a small metal wire. Any nematodes that moved rapidly were considered ‘mobile’, those that showed small movements in parts of their bodies but lacked mobility were considered ‘paralyzed’, and those that showed no response were considered ‘nonresponsive’. In many cases, ‘paralyzed’ nematodes appeared ‘nonresponsive’ until prodded .
13. See online Supporting Information for details.

Digital cloud plan for city skies

2009-11-18T14:31:00.000-08:00

It won't be art. More like advertisements and messages from the government to obey!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8350770.stm

Digital cloud plan for city skies
By Jonathan Fildes
Technology reporter, BBC News

A giant "digital cloud" that would "float" above London's skyline has been outlined by an international team of architects, artists and engineers.

The construction would include 120m- (400ft-) tall mesh towers and a series of interconnected plastic bubbles that can be used to display images and data.

The Cloud, as it is known, would also be used an observation deck and park.

The unconventional structure was originally envisaged as a centre piece of the city's Olympic village.

Its designers plan to raise the funds to build it by asking for micro-donations from millions of people.

"It's really about people coming together to raise the Cloud," Carlo Ratti, one of the architects behind the design from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) told BBC News.

"We can build our Cloud with £5m or £50m. The flexibility of the structural system will allow us to tune the size of the Cloud to the level of funding that is reached."

The size of the structure will evolve depending on the number of contributions, he said.

Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York who has seen the design described it as a "sculptural spectacle" and "a celebration of technology".

'Data streams'

The Cloud was shortlisted in a competition set up by London Mayor Boris Johnson.

The mayor has committed to build a tourist attraction in the Olympic Park "with a legacy for the east end [of London]".

Other finalists are thought to include the former Turner prize winner Anish Kapoor and Antony Gormley, the designer of the Angel of the North.

The mayor is still in the "process of deciding" which design will be commissioned, according to a spokesperson.

However, the team, which also includes the writer Umberto Eco and engineers from Arup, has decided to push ahead and publish details of its design.

The structure draws on work by artist Tomas Saraceno, a German-based designer who has previously shown off huge inflatable sculptures.

It is envisaged that the spheres would be made of a plastic known as Ethylene tetrafluoroethylene (ETFE), the material used to build the Beijing Aquatic Centre.

The different spheres would act as structural elements, habitable spaces, decoration and LCD screens on which data could be projected.

"We could provide a custom feed of… searches made by Londoners during the Olympics to give a real time 'barometer' of the city's interests and mood," said Google, one of the supporters of the project, which has also offered to provide the information feeds.

The team also envisage projecting weather information, spectator numbers, race results or even images of the Olympic Torch on to the building.

Ramps, stairs and lifts would carry people to the top of the structure to look out over the city.

'Zero power'

The inflatable elements of the building would sit on top of slender, lightweight towers, stabilised by a net of metal cables.

Damping technology, similar to that used in Japanese skyscrapers to resist earthquakes, would prevent the towers being buffeted by the wind.

"Many tall towers have preceded this, but our achievement is the high degree of transparency, the minimal use of material and the vast volume created by the spheres," said professor Joerg Schleich, the structural engineer behind the towers.

Professor Schleich was responsible for the Olympic Stadium in Munich as well as numerous lightweight towers built to the same design as the Cloud.

The structure would also be used to harvest all the energy it produces according to Professor Ratti.

"It would be a zero power cloud," he said.

As well as solar cells on the ground and inside some of the spheres, the lifts would use regenerative braking, similar to that in some hybrid cars.

That way, the designers say, potential energy from visitors to the top of the tower can be harnessed into useful electricity.

The team have launched a fundraising website called raisethecloud.org and are now looking for a site for the tower.

Google has already offered to provide free advertising for the so-called "cloud-raising" effort.

The firm has offered a sponsored link at the top of the page advertising a "£1 for 1 pixel" concept to people who search for terms relevant to London 2012.

"It will be a monument to crowd-sourcing," said Professor Ratti.

One word: bioplastics

2009-11-17T08:53:00.000-08:00

You know what this means, don't you? Well besides another commodity bubble wal-street can exploit to make double-digit returns on, it will mean that more people in the world will starve! Remember ethanol and how food (corn) was taken off the market to make it? Then of course, there are priorities of the demonic evil elite including feeding cattle corn instead of people. Like everything else, this idea will become corrupted in demonic hands. More, I remember reading over twenty years ago that scientists already knew how to make biodegradable plastic from plants. Like I said, this is just another wal-street bubble and a new way to starve people to death for the depopulation agenda of the ruling elite!

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/bioplastics.html
One word: bioplastics
New Iowa plant, based on technology developed at MIT, will use bacteria to produce biodegradable plastics from corn.
Anne Trafton, MIT News Office
November 17, 2009

Every year, more than 250 billion pounds of plastic are produced worldwide. Much of it ends up in the world’s oceans, a fact that troubles MIT biology professor Anthony Sinskey.

“Plastic does not degrade in the ocean. It just gets ground up into tiny particles,” he says. In the Pacific Ocean, a vast swath twice the size of Texas teems with tiny bits of oil-based plastic that can poison ocean life.

Sinskey can’t do much about the plastic that’s already polluting the Earth’s oceans, but he is trying to help keep the problem from getting worse. Next month, a company he founded with his former postdoc, Oliver Peoples, will open a new factory that uses MIT-patented technology to build plastic from corn. The plant aims to produce annually 110 million pounds of the new bioplastic, which biodegrades in soil or the ocean.

That’s a fraction of one percent of the United States’ overall plastic production, which totaled 101.5 billion pounds in 2008. Though it will take bioplastics a long time before they can start making a dent in that figure, the industry has significant growth potential, says Melissa Hockstad, vice president for science, technology and regulatory affairs for SPI: The Plastics Industry Trade Association.

“Bioplastics are making inroads into new markets and are an important area to watch for the future of the plastics industry,” says Hockstad, who noted that the current global market for biodegradable polymers is estimated at about 570 million pounds per year but is expected to more than double by 2012.

‘Timing is everything’

For Sinskey and Peoples, the road started 25 years ago. Peoples, who had just earned his PhD in molecular biology from the University of Aberdeen, arrived in Sinskey’s lab in 1984 and set out to sequence a bacterial gene. Today, high-speed sequencing machines could do the job in about a week. Back then, it took three years.

That gene, from the bacterium R. eutropha, turned out to code for an enzyme that allows bacteria to produce polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA) — a naturally occurring form of polyester — starting with only sunlight, water, and a carbon source. (Bacteria normally manufacture PHA as a way to store carbon and energy.)

Sinskey and Peoples realized that if they could ramp up the bacteria’s plastic producing abilities, they could harness the organisms for industrial use. In 1994, they started a company called Metabolix and took out exclusive patents from MIT on the gene work they had done on PHA-synthesizing bacteria.

Thus began a 15-year effort to develop the technology into a robust, large-scale process, and to win support for such an approach.

On the scientific side, Peoples and the scientists at Metabolix developed a method to incorporate several genes from different bacteria into a strain of E. coli. Using this process, now called metabolic engineering, they eventually created a strain that produces PHA at levels several-fold higher than naturally occurring bacteria.

However, they had some difficulty generating support (and funding) for the idea. In the early 1990s, the public was not very receptive to the idea of alternative plastics. “Oil was $20 a barrel, and people didn’t believe in global warming,” Peoples recalls.

“Timing is everything,” says Sinskey. “There has to be a market for these materials” for them to be successful.

‘Growing interest’

The scientists believe that consumers are now ready for bioplastics. Such plastics have been commercially available for about a decade, mostly in the form of plastic cups, bottles and food packaging. Most of those products are made from a type of plastic called polylactic acid (PLA), which is also produced from corn. PLA is similar to PHA, but PHA has higher heat resistance, according to Peoples.

Possible uses for the Metabolix bioplastics include gift cards, pens, golf tees and other consumer products. Products like these, along with existing bioplastic products, tap into a “growing interest in materials that can be made from renewable resources or disposed of through practices such as composting,” says Hockstad.

The new Metabolix plant, located in Clinton, Iowa, is a joint venture with Archer Daniels Midland. Although the plant is using corn as a starting material, the process also works with other materials such as cellulose (including switchgrass), vegetable oil and cane sugar.

Turning to those agricultural starting materials could help reduce the amount of petroleum needed to manufacture traditional plastics, which currently requires about 2 million barrels of oil per day (10 percent of total U.S. daily oil consumption). “It’s important to develop alternative ways to make these chemicals,” says Peoples.

Lab-Grown Meat: The Answer to Animal Cruelty and Environmental Ruin From Feedlots? By Ari LeVaux, AlterNet Posted on November 13, 2009, Printed on Nov

2009-11-13T10:25:00.000-08:00

Lab-Grown Meat: The Answer to Animal Cruelty and Environmental Ruin From Feedlots?
By Ari LeVaux, AlterNet
November 13, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143887/

A philosophy paper recently published in Neuroethics presents the current state of biotech research on the use of genetic engineering to eliminate pain in animals.

Author Adam Shriver, a graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis, argues that it's our moral obligation to use such technology to reduce the suffering of animals on factory farms.

"If we can't do away with factory farming, we should at least take steps to minimize the amount of suffering that is caused," he told New Scientist recently.

Shriver, a vegetarian, says his personal preference would be that nobody eat meat and that factory farms had no reason to exist. But given the demand for meat, he assumes factory farms are here to stay and sees pain-free meat (meat from animals genetically engineered to not feel pain) as a compromise that would at least reduce the amount of suffering in the world.

Shriver isn't the only one in the ivory tower thinking about pain-free meat. The problem with their argument, and the reason it's unlikely to advance beyond an intellectual exercise, is that factory-farmed meat is problematic in so many ways aside form suffering, and knocking out certain "pain genes" would further encourage and enable a horrible practice.

When I was 5 years old, I wrote a letter to President Carter, asking him to stop people from killing animals for meat. I probably wouldn't have felt so strongly if my parents had said, "don't worry honey, the animals don't feel pain."

By numbing animals, we'd be numbing ourselves to the ills of factory farming, which we should be anything but numb to. Nearly one-fifth of global carbon emissions come from factory farms -- more than the combined emissions of the world's transport activities, including cars, planes, trucks, trains and boats.

Factory farms use and pollute incredible amounts of water, degrading hundreds of rivers and killing millions of fish, and help create a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico the size of Massachusetts.

Slaughterhouse suffering isn't limited to the animals that die there. Uncomfortable and unhealthy working conditions, repetitive-stress injuries and the occasional major trauma are the norm for slaughterhouse workers -- who are often exploited, undocumented and poorly paid immigrants whose status helps keep them from unionizing for better conditions.

Those who eat factory-farm products can be victimized, too, by meat contaminated with bacteria and pumped full of hormones and antibiotics. Factory-meat victims also include the many people who go hungry because land that could have been used to grow food for people is used to grow food for animals. With the world's meat consumption expected to double in the next 40 years, such problems are likely to increase.

Few issues divide the human diet more than the eating of animal flesh. While some argue that meat-eating played an integral part in the evolution of our minds and bodies, others believe it's completely unnecessary -- and both sides may have a point.

While Shriver's plan falls short of addressing all the problems associated with factory farms, his assessment of the forces that create factory farms is realistic. It probably is a given that cheap meat will be consumed. The question remains: How will it be produced?

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has put its money on the prospect of death-free, animal-free meat. The animal-rights group has a standing offer of $1 million to the first person or company to come up with a safe, affordable and commercially marketable process to create meat without raising or killing animals.

PETA's interests are aligned with a growing network of scientists. The In-Vitro Meat Consortium is an international alliance of environmentally concerned scientists collaborating to facilitate the establishment of large-scale carne-culture.

While the group has gained momentum and believers, the goal of lab-grown meat that's affordable enough to compete with factory farms is still five to 10 years off, according to Jason Matheny of New Harvest, a U.S. nonprofit that channels funding to animal-free meat research.

The science behind this young field is borrowed partly from medical research into tissue regrowth. The idea is to take cells from tasty farm animals that are stimulated and fed so they grow into edible masses of muscle meat that vaguely resemble animal tissue -- perfect for nuggets or burgers.

New Harvest commissioned a recent Oxford University study to estimate the environmental impact of lab-grown meat. The study found that replacing factory farms with meat labs would create 80 percent fewer greenhouse-gas emissions, use 90 percent less land and water, and be cost-comparable.

Many slow-food/small-farm types are calling foul at the prospect of further distancing the eater from the source of his or her food. And they're right. I personally wouldn't want to eat it. But while meat labs seem vaguely disturbing, factory farms are completely disgusting.

Some argue that cultured meat is unnatural. But neither is it natural that chickens are bred to grow so fast their legs snap under their own weight. Nor is it natural when cattle are overbred to the point that they can't even safely have sex and must rely on artificial insemination to procreate.

Some farmers and agriculture experts are convinced that small farms could feed the world all the meat it needs. This may be so, depending on how we define "need." If small farmers really think they can quench the world's thirst for blood, they have a five- to 10-year window in which to make their case.

One of the biggest obstacles to cultured meat is the development of a suitable growth medium, which is a soup of salts, sugars, amino acids and vitamins. Medical-tissue cultures use animal-derived sources, like blood, but using animal fluids would defeat the purpose for meat production. Matheny says the most promising source of growth media is algae, but making the production process cost effective will take time.

If and when that time comes, and lab-grown meat begins filling the processed-food troughs of the masses, the question becomes: Will the Oscar Mayer wiener-eaters of the world even notice?

If not, and if it can be made safely, and if the environmental benefits turn out to be true, I say let them eat from the meatri dish!

I won't be joining them, though, just as I don't join them at the troughs where factory-farmed mystery meat is served.