Faith!

      When you ask the Lord for an answer, expect an answer and take the first thing that comes. If you really believe and ask the Lord and want to hear or see, you won't be disappointed. That thing you see or hear with the eyes or ears of your spirit, that is the Lord--and it will be such a comfort to you. Expect God to answer. Open up your heart and let the sunshine in.

      If you are really desperate and crying with your whole heart and are asking Him, He will answer! A baby is such an illustration of faith. When he's crying for his mother, you wouldn't think of refusing him. Hearing from the Lord is our spiritual nourishment--and you have got to be able to hear from the Lord. That little baby has more faith than you do sometimes, because when the baby cries, he expects someone to hear him. Because he knows--God put it in him to know--that if he calls, you will answer. He expects the answer and he gets it. You must expect that what you get is from the Lord.

      Shutting your eyes helps you to see in the spirit and to become unconscious of the things and people around you. Get your mind on the Lord and in a relaxed position where nothing distracts you, and expect then that whatever you hear or see is something from the Lord.

      When you cry, you must expect the Lord to answer. The longer you practice receiving nourishment from God, the more you know where to grab it and you just open your eyes and see it and reach for it. When you cry out to God for something, He pushes it in your mouth, but if you don't start sucking, you will never get it. You have to have the faith to begin to pull. You absolutely have to draw God's nourishment. God can show it to you, stick it in your mouth even, but if you don't suck, you won't get anything. The sucking is the action of the faith. You have to put your faith into action.

      Faith is a kind of drawing power. It is you drawing power from God. It's kind of like a bank account: the money is there and the Father has put it there in your name--in the bank of heaven, but you will never get it, unless you are willing to go to the bank and sign the check by faith and draw on it. You see, the faith draws it.

      What is it that brings that milk out of the breast? The baby deliberately, when he sucks, creates a vacuum inside his mouth which pulls the milk out. You have to create a vacuum inside your heart: "Lord, here is this empty space--you fill it!" You reduce the pressure in a certain area--and in physics they call that a vacuum. Do you know what really fills that vacuum? It's not actually the child--all the child does is create the vacuum, thus reducing the pressure inside his mouth, which then becomes lower than the pressure inside the breast--and so the milk flows out from the mother's breast into the child's mouth.

      In prayer, you create a vacuum--there's a space that needs filling--you seek the Lord's help. You create the vacuum and it is the Lord's pressure that fills it. The power really comes from outside, not from inside. All you did was create the vacuum--but that vacuum drew the power. It draws and therefore the pressure from the Lord seeks the place where there is less pressure. There is an old saying, nature abhors a vacuum--but God really likes a vacuum: he likes to fill every place that's made for Him--every place where you open up your heart, your spirit, His spirit will flow in, in all His power!

      The Lord wants you to draw on the Word--not only the recorded Word, but the living Word. It is you drawing and you must believe it and start right from there. When you start sucking for dear life and really desire it with all your heart, you will finally get it. You have to believe when you create that vacuum in your heart--you draw on the Lord--that sucking action of your faith--and that the first thing that comes in your mouth is the Lord--the first thing you see, you must believe that that is from the Lord and you must go straight on from there. You must begin to speak those words He puts in your mouth and speak that scripture or phrase he gives you. He gives you a little, but then you have to expect more. Incidentally, the word "believe" in the new testament is that Greek word, "drinking in". "I believe" means "I drink in"--"I swallow." it's the word "pisteuo"--the new testament for "I believe," "I drink in."

      That's how you get revelations from the Lord. If it's a message in tongues and prophecy, you drink it into your mouth and then you show your belief by giving it. You only get one mouthful at a time. If you don't give that mouthful, you won't get another. When you ask the Lord for a picture and you get it, start describing it. Describe what you see and then the Lord will keep giving you more and more. What do you do when you see a movie? You go in there and have to keep drinking in scene by scene by scene by scene. You couldn't possibly get it all at once. You have to keep swallowing. You have to exercise your faith. You have to create a vacuum in your spirit and then the Lord will fill it.

      The radio is like a vacuum. In the air right now all around us, just like the spirit of the Lord, there are radio waves. Until you turn on this little switch on the radio, and in a sense create a vacuum in this receiver, you're not going to get anything. You have to open a channel, an electric circuit. You have to make contact by making a vacuum.

      Faithful people are people full of faith--full of a vacuum--and the Lord's high pressure fills the vacuum. You have to keep swallowing. In this case, the giving out is a swallowing. The Lord is not going to squirt milk out into thin air where it will be lost or into some baby who won't swallow it. He has to swallow it and digest it and assimilate it or he won't get it.

      The power is always on, the message is always there. God's spirit is like a broadcasting station broadcasting all the time. All you have to do is throw the switch and tune in. You have to have the vacuum and sincerely open your mouth and He will fill it. That drawing draws the power of God. You have to tell the vision, tell the dream, give the message, interpret the tongues. You have to keep moving. As long as you keep sucking, you will get more.

      God has unlimited capacity to give and what you get is only limited by your own capacity to receive. Pretty soon you get so full, you can not stand it. Your vacuum is full, and your spirit is content. the Lord will keep on feeding you until you're satisfied, until your spiritual vacuum is filled. It is a real spiritual effort of faith. Faith is like the hand of the soul.

     Faith is the hand of the spirit which reaches out and receives. It is the part that you do--your spiritual effort. That sucking on the part of the baby is his effort and the mother does all the rest. Sometimes the prophets were actually sick afterwards--it was so hard on their flesh. It left them absolutely exhausted. It actually took some physical strength. There is that link between the spiritual and the physical that we don't quite understand.

      It is so simple: you just have to have the faith of a little baby. You just have to show him where it is and after you've shown him, he knows where it is. Pretty soon you will recognise it when the Lord begins to speak. Some people get things from the Lord and don't even know it is from the Lord. I did that for years. I have been getting things like this all my life and for a long time I thought it was just me-and all the time the Lord was speaking to me. It just came like it was natural--I didn't realise what a supernatural thing it was--what a miracle. Just like the baby nursing--it seems so natural. yet it's such a miracle. Everything is a miracle! Everything is supernatural because God made it all.

      If you have an open channel and tune in, the Lord will fill you--your mind, your heart, your ears, your eyes! What the Lord is trying to show you is that you can get it yourself. The answer is always there if you are willing to receive it, but if you resist the answer He gives, He shuts up because you won't listen. You have to be willing to take what He gives, and give it!

David Berg

Edited by Almondtree Productions

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The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network

The Trouble with Transhumanism

Aug 9, 2011

Transhumanism

By Wesley J. Smith, J.D., Special Consultant to the CBC

Sometimes an article cuts through the fog of public debate and discourse to capture the true essence of a movement or belief system. Recently, a transhumanist named Kyle Munkittrick posted just such an article at the Discover magazine website, encapsulating in a nutshell everything that is wrong with transhumanism (about which nearly everything is wrong).

For those who may not know, transhumanism is a Utopian social movement and philosophy that looks toward a massive breakthrough in technological prowess, known as "the singularity," that will open the door for transhumanists to "seize control of human evolution" and create a "post human species" of near immortals. Don't roll your eyes. Transhumanists believe in their ageless post human future with a desperate passion that borders on--and often serves as a substitute for--religious faith.

Not only that, but the movement is getting good press. For example, Time recently published a laudatory profile of transhumanist author and futurist Raymond Kurzweil's quest to live forever, under the serious title "2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal." Similarly, Aubrey de Gray, who seeks to defeat human aging, receives much respectful media attention--even though I heard him give a speech in which he claimed his research should take precedence over funding health care aid to Africa, and indeed, that failing to fund the human immortality project is akin to terrorism.

Alas, when it comes to transhumanism, much attention is paid to immortality and quirky personalities, but little attention is paid to transhumanism's poisonous core beliefs and goals.

But it isn't the unlikely Singularity or other technologies required to transform us into posthumans that make transhumanism so potentially destructive. Rather, the movement's explicitly eugenic and anti-human exceptionalist values which cause one's neck hair to stand on end. Indeed, the dark soul (if you will) of Munkittrick's article is well worth studying because it reveals transhumanism's dark soul.

The structure of Munkittrick's article is to tell readers when we will know that the age of transhumanism has arrived. First, he writes, we will know we are in a transhumanist world when prosthetics are preferred over natural limbs. A "key social indicator" of the arrival of transhumanism, Munkittrick writes, will be when you "find yourself seriously considering having your birth-given hand lopped off and replaced with a cybernetic one." Don't roll your eyes. Serious writers in notable bioethics journals have already sincerely advocated treating Body Identity Integrity Disorder--in which people obsess on becoming amputees--by amputating healthy limbs.

Needless to say, transhumanists support brain implants and other measures taken to "improve" intelligence (never the ability to love, I notice)--including the ludicrous notion of uploading individual human consciousnesses into computers. And, of course, in keeping with the transhumanism's desperate materialist yearning for a corporeal eternal life, Munkittrick says we will know we are in a transhumanist world when the average age exceeds 120.

Things go downhill steeply from there. Shades of Brave New World and Gattaca--transhumanism would remove reproduction from intimacy and female child bearing. Dripping with eugenics values, Munkittrick expects future children to come into being via IVF or cloning technologies that will permit "genetic modification, health screening, and, eventually synthetic wombs" to allow "the child with the best possibility of a good life to be born." (Eugenics means "good in birth".) At the same time, freedom to have children would be legally constrained. Rather than anyone being able to "accidentally spawn a whelp"--the disgusting metaphor is not accidental--our future transhumanist masters would require "parental licensing" before one could cause a child to be brought into the world. Thus state control and official permitting over human manufacturing--including custom design, special order, quality and inventory control--are core goals of the transhumanist social revolution.

Transhumanism foresees doctors as mere order takers and an anything goes public morality that would be sanctioned by the state. Munkittrick writes:

Actions such as abortion, assisted suicide, voluntary amputation, gender reassignment, surrogate pregnancy, body modification, legal unions among adults of any number, and consenting sexual practices would be protected under law. One's genetic make-up, neurological composition, prosthetic augmentation, and other cybernetic modifications will be limited only by technology and one's own discretion. Transhumanism cannot happen without a legal structure that allows individuals to control their own bodies. When bodily freedom is as protected and sanctified as free speech, transhumanism will be free to develop.

Needless to say, creating such a society foresees the destruction of human exceptionalism, which transhumanists disdain as limiting their genetic recreationist (in Leon Kass's words) ambitions and establishing behavioral norms. Thus, being human in a transhumanist world would be morally irrelevant. Rather, Munkittrick writes, "Rights discourse will shift to personhood instead of common humanity."

In such a world, the value of human life would cease to be intrinsic, but would become relative. "Animals (including humans)," he writes--deploying yet another human-diminishing sentiment--"will be granted rights based on varying degrees of personhood . . . When African grey parrots, gorillas, and dolphins have the same rights as a human toddler, a transhuman friendly rights system will be in place." Indeed.

Transhumanism is a long way from being attained, and the world Munkittrick envisions will almost surely never come fully into being. But that doesn't mean we won't become crassly transhumanist in our personal and societal values. If we are going to preserve a culture founded on the Judeo/Christian ideal of equal human dignity and the obligation for individual behavioral restraint, transhumanism must be resisted intellectually and rejected, both in our public policies and the ways in which we lead our personal lives.

CBC Special Consultant Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute's Center on Human Exceptionalism.

Old-Thinker News

The Crossroads of History are Upon us

August 10, 2011

By Daniel Taylor

An era of "Absolute totalitarian global control," an "Age of Transitions"; The mysterious "Singularity." It has been written that "We can no more imagine the political order of this new world than a group of chimpanzees in the forest can comprehend what goes on among humans in a nearby village." We have approached the crossroads of history. The choices that we make now - on every level of society - will shape the road that we choose to embark upon.

As Old-Thinker News has documented, a Scientific Dictatorship is operating under national security, outside of public scrutiny. Technocrats with access to undisclosed future technology and classified intelligence are making decisions on public policy without debate. The "two souls" of the world, one that fully embraces the untrammeled expansion of technology, and the other that holds on to "outmoded" ideas of faith and tradition are at odds. Fred Charles Ikle, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy under President Reagan, outlines this divide in his book Annihilation from Within.

"Unabomber" Ted Kacynski's attacks are a vivid example of the societal chasm that Ikle is speaking of. Just today "anti-tech extremists" opposed to nanotechnology sent letter bombs to academics in Mexico. According to Mexico State Attorney General Alfredo Castillo, "The ITS is a movement that, in accordance with its ideals, opposes any development of neo- or nanotechnology anywhere in the world, and they are linked to attacks in several different countries of Europe, including Spain and France."

C. Dale Walton, writing in Geopolitics and the Great Powers in the Twenty-first Century, states that countries which hold on to ethical systems which hold back development of revolutionary technologies will lose strategic ground.

Globalization is expanding in lock step with the technological revolution, yet another issue sparking opposition from around the world. In truth, the elites constructing this global system have anticipated violent resistance, and have actively enabled - and staged - such violence. Out of chaos emerges greater control. In the words of H. G. Wells, writing in his 1940 book The New World Order,

"...when the struggle seems to be drifting definitely towards a world social democracy, there may still be very great delays and disappointments before it becomes an efficient and beneficent world system. Countless people ... will hate the new world order, be rendered unhappy by the frustration of their passions and ambitions through its advent and will die protesting against it. When we attempt to evaluate its promise, we have to bear in mind the distress of a generation or so of malcontents..."

The recent Norway terror attacks were held up by the media as an example of an extremist response to increasing immigration. The Wall Street Journal, reporting on the massive unrest in the U.K., admitted that globalization has played  a key role in creating the circumstances leading up to the present riots. The article also admits that the artificial booms in housing were created as a smokescreen for bankers to engage in massive looting, giving a sense of false prosperity to the new middle class. As reported,

"The middle classes only tolerated this," Albert Edwards of Societe Generale notes, "because central bankers created housing booms to keep the impoverished middle classes borrowing and spending to give them the illusion of prosperity and stop them from revolting."

The crossroads are indeed upon us. Every indicator from all branches of society are pointing to more unrest  in response to a variety of issues that will touch the lives of everyone on the planet. As violent acts are committed or staged by the establishment, more people will demand greater and greater government control in the name of protection from the revolutionaries.

Logos Apologia

The Singularity is Near!

The much mythologized Singularity which is said to be near by transhumanists is the point in time when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence prompting the exponential curve of technological growth to go vertical. The growth will be so rapid as to supersede our current abilities of imagination. You see, Ray Kurzweil and other transhumanists believe that through modeling the human brain artificial intelligence will become conscious.  In fact, he goes so far as to argue that machines will have spiritual experiences and will even worship:

Twenty‐first‐century machines--based on the design of human thinking--will do as their human progenitors have done--going to real and virtual houses of worship, meditating, praying, and transcending--to connect with their spiritual dimension. [1]

While one marvels at what precisely he thinks they would worship, he seems to intuitively acknowledge that consciousness entails a sense of the divine. While many may suppress the truth, people know in their hearts that God exists. God wired us to seek him. Solomon said it this way:

 He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man's heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end (Ec 3:11).

Kurzweil has been challenged by John Searle the distinguished philosopher at the University of California at Berkeley. Searle has criticized the view that AI can become conscious with his "Chinese Room" argument which holds that software cannot give a machine a mind or true understanding, regardless of how cleverly it behaves.  Kurzweil responded to this argument in the last chapter of The Singularity is Near with some sound counter-arguments. While the debate is interesting, ultimately they are both wrong because they are arguing from a naturalistic worldview.

The scientific paradigm of materialism reduces humanity to a byproduct of chemistry and physics. But if my thoughts are merely chemical reactions, then I would have no good reason to believe they are true. Atoms and chemical reactions just do not discern truth. In this way, scientism (the belief that science is the only way to know truth) is self-defeating. The atheistic material reductionist view of consciousness is that it is an emergent property of the brain. This is the dominant scientific view point. For instance, even Kurzweil's critic Searle has written:

The brain is a machine, a biological machine to be sure, but a machine all the same. So the first step is to figure out how the brain does it and then build an artificial machine that has an equally effective mechanism for causing consciousness. We know that brains cause consciousness with specific biological mechanisms.[2]

The understanding about consciousness in the case of artificial intelligence is that consciousness will arise from the material structure of electronic hardware as an emergent property.  Emergent properties are seen from a bottom up approach.

An emergent property is a property that emerges from a certain organization of matter. For instance, the taste of salt or saltiness is an emergent property of sodium and chloride when combined as NaCl or common salt. In this case, on the bottom we have subatomic particles forming sodium and chlorine atoms and then on the next level the matrix of atoms causes the property of saltiness to manifest. It is important to note that saltiness is an effect of the matter. Salty taste doesn't change the salt. It is simply the property that emerges as an effect when the salt molecules come together. The matter is a cause and the emergent property is an effect.

Given the naturalistic worldview, spirituality and consciousness are merely functions of the brain. If that is the case, then consciousness is also on the top not on the bottom. Therefore it's an effect not a cause. Accordingly, consciousness doesn't cause things.  It's simply the effect of fatty tissues, neurons and information. In the case of AI it is just a physical thing, computer hardware, programmed with software that allegedly produces consciousness. If the computer is producing consciousness, then consciousness is similarly an effect.

The problem is that consciousness is seen as the result of a purely material process. Being the effect it cannot also be the cause. If it is not a cause, then it does not make decisions or choices. Yet, the problem with that is, it seems that mental states do cause things. Think of it this way, you need legs to walk, but you'd never say that your legs are walking.  Another major problem with this is willful actions. It seems to me that I will something in my mind and then my body acts. In fact, I can imagine events in my mind that never physically occur at all. It seems to me that conscious beings do make choices. We do think about things and decide between alternate ideas and exercise rationality. This is what consciousness really means. Computers may mimic consciousness but they will never really achieve it.

Kurzweil's dream of the Age of Spiritual Machines is logically incoherent.  His point of view doesn't leave room for a soul that is a thing in itself with mental properties, but that mental properties are merely the effects of the physical thing itself.  The Christian view is that man is made up of two distinct substances: an immaterial substance (mind) and a material substance (body).  It is a top down approach in which you are not your body rather an eternal immaterial being that is having a temporal material experience. Evidence is mounting for this reality in the area of Near Death Experiences.  Look for a post on those coming soon.

If the singularity represents the event horizon of a major paradigm shift then I agree it is near. However, ultimately, the singularity is not at all what transhumanists expect. It will not mark the crowning achievement of mankind to godhood and the transcendence of machines. When it comes to human behavior, past performance is usually a good predictor of future results. A realistic view of history reveals that man is rapidly plunging himself into trouble. Some might even call it great tribulation. The real singularity will be when God decisively intervenes into the world in what is known as the Parousia or second coming of Jesus Christ.  Indeed, defined this way, I believe the Singularity is near:

Immediately after the tribulation of those days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Then will appear in heaven the sign of the Son of Man, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.(Mt 24:29-30)

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Technology Review putblished by MIT

Beyond Cell Phone Wallets, Biometrics Promise Truly Wallet-Free Future

The rollout of NFC payments in the U.S. has been so sluggish that a superior technology--biometrics--is about to catch up.

Christopher Mims 08/03/2011

Fujitsu's PalmSecure system can be used for security -- and identification

Ever since Google announced that its Android phones would be equipped with a "digital wallet" that allows users to pay for things simply by touching their phone to a pad, interest in our wallet-free future has taken off. Long in use in Asia and especially Japan, the enabling technology, Near Field Communication, has allowed users to more or less completely replace credit cards with phones--yet the technology has languished in the U.S.

That delay has dragged on so long that at least one competing, not to mention superior, technology has reached maturity. Manufactured by Fujitsu under the trade name PalmSecure, it's a system that requires no hardware on the user side. If you've got hands and you can wave them in front of a detector, you can use it to make purchases.

PalmSecure is a kind of identification / security scheme that falls under the umbrella of biometrics. Other biometric identifiers include your fingerprint, voice, iris, face, even the shape of your earlobe. Unlike those other measures, PalmSecure is uniquely unobtrusive. It's literally the same gesture required to use an NFC phone wallet or to swipe a credit card, only you don't have to have anything on your person to make it work.

The technology is affordable enough that one Florida school district is already deploying it in its cafeterias to allow students to make purchases. It's also being used to identify patients in New York University's Langone Medical Center, where 250 scanners have been deployed at a total system cost of $200,000.

A patient's hand imaged with near-infrared light

The technology is remarkably straightforward: near-infrared light shines up from a detector, allowing it to image the unique pattern of veins in a person's hand. This pattern is stored as a unique identifier, not an image.

All that's required to turn this system into a reliable payment mechanism is a service provider willing to link that unique identifier to a bank account or credit card. That's not trivial, but if the rise of payment system pioneers like iPhone-based Square tells us anything, it's that it's at least possible.

Unlike phone wallets, which aren't obviously superior to existing solutions like credit cards, a biometric-based payment system is not only more secure than existing cash alternatives, it actually has the potential to make the ones we already use more secure.

The unique pattern of veins in your hand can't be stolen, for example, and neither can your credit card if you choose to leave it at home. A biometric marker could also be used as a second authentication factor for existing payment systems, virtually eliminating credit card fraud at physical stores.

If the slow rollout of NFC holds any lessons, it's that breaking the monopoly of the existing payment system is difficult, especially when merchants bear the cost. But a biometric identification system could be a unique identifier that might justify its additional expense for some vendors. If you think waving your phone to pay for something is convenient enough to convince you to go to one coffee shop versus another, imagine how thrilled people will be to simply raise their hand?

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MailOnline

Chip and skin: How hi-tech 'tattoo' will monitor patients' vital signs

12th August 2011

Monitoring a patient's vital signs - such as temperature and heart rate - could soon be a simple as sticking on a tiny, wireless patch similar to a temporary tattoo.

Eliminating the bulky wiring and electrodes used in current monitors would make the devices more comfortable for patients, according to an international team of researchers who report their findings in today's edition of the journal Science.

The researchers embedded electronic sensors in a film thinner than the diameter of a human hair, which was placed on a polyester backing like those used for the temporary tattoos popular with children.

Scroll down for video

Skin deep: The sensor is so thin it can be worn comfortably on the skin without the patient noticing it

The result was a sensor that was flexible enough to move with the skin and would adhere without adhesives.

The researchers said the test devices had remained in place for up to 24 hours.

Although normal shedding of skin cells would eventually cause the monitors to come off, the team believe the new device could remain in place for as long as two weeks.

'What we are trying to do here is to really reshape and redefine electronics to look a lot more like the human body, in this case the surface layers of the skin,' said John A. Rogers of the University of Illinois.

'The goal is really to blur the distinction between electronics and biological tissue.'

In addition to monitoring patients in hospitals, other uses for the devices could include monitoring brain waves, muscle movement, sensing the larynx for speech, emitting heat to help heal wounds and perhaps even being made touch sensitive and placed on artificial limbs.

Changing face of electronics: the research team believe their new device merges electronics with the human body

The device will help fill the need for equipment that is more convenient and less stressful for patients, permitting easier and more reliable monitoring, said Zhenqiang Ma, an engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin, who was not part of the research team.

The electronic skin can simply be stuck on or peeled off like an adhesive bandage, he noted in a commentary on the report.

The team declined to speculate on how soon the electronic skin would be ready for market or what it would cost.

The monitor resembles a bandage and contains an antenna that could be used to transmit data, though a radio to do that transmitting has not yet been tested.

The current design has a small coil and could be powered by induction - by placing it near an electrical coil. This would permit intermittent use, and for longer-term monitoring a tiny battery or storage capacitor could be fitted.

The monitor does not use an adhesive, relying on a weak force that causes molecules and surfaces to stick together without interfering with motion. For longer-term use the electronic skin could be coated with an adhesive.

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CNN

Iran says U.S. 'will be taught the mother of all lessons'

Editorial warns of pending cyber attack on electrical grid

Posted: August 07, 2011

By Reza Kahlili - © 2011 WND

The Pentagon

Iran is planning to retaliate against the United States for the sabotage against its nuclear program, according to an editorial in the Kayhan newspaper, the mouthpiece of Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The U.S. has all of its infrastructure connected to the Internet, the editorial says, and as a result, "it is constantly worried about an unknown player, who they will never be able to identify ... sitting in some corner of the world who would launch an attack on a sector of (the Americans') foundations. They will be taught the mother of all lessons."

Specifically, Iran is looking into launching a cyber attack against U.S. electrical grid systems.

Iranian officials are furious over the July 23 assassination of nuclear scientist Dariush Rezai-Nejad, who was working on electric detonators for the Iranian nuclear program, which can be used on missiles or nuclear bombs. He was the third Iranian nuclear scientist assassinated since 2009.

The frustration over acts of sabotage started with the computer virus Stuxnet in which 1,000 of Iran's centrifuges at the Natanzs nuclear facility were destroyed and had to be replaced. The virus also attacked the Bushehr nuclear power plant, which has resulted in repeated delays in it joining the country's power grid.

The July 29 Kayhan editorial threatening America with retaliation said that during the last month, the United States has published two strategy documents regarding cyberspace, both of which emphasize the ever-evolving nature of Internet communications.

The first document, signed by President Obama, lays out the country's strategy on cyberspace, states that the Internet epitomizes great opportunity and says it is not viewed as a threat to the United States, the editorial says. It adds that "it can be suggested that the U.S. can play a leadership role in cyberspace in that the U.S. would create and maintain that position for the long term."

But then the editorial takes direct aim at Washington: "The second document is brimming with the over-confidence and hyper-intellectual posturing of the first. These documents, which the Pentagon published two weeks ago, use straight-forward war vernacular and (the Pentagon) has openly announced that from here on in, cyberspace will be considered a war zone.

"The laughable part of this document is when the neurotic American generals threaten hackers sitting behind their computers who attack America (that they) should be careful that a cruise missile does not fly in through their heating pipes to destroy their turf."

The United States is no longer the unequivocal leader of the Internet, the editorial says. "Diverse and interesting players have now come on the scene and have ... managed to inflict some costly and unprecedented damages on the American Internet infrastructure. ... Due to the convenient global nature of the 'players,' their network operates outside time and space. They can be anywhere from right under Mr. Obama's ear in Washington, D.C., to the depths of the African desert."

The editorial accuses the Americans, with the help of Israelis and Germans, of creating the Stuxnet virus to attack the Iranian nuclear enrichment facilities.

"Americans are under the (mistaken) impression that they are the only ones who can strike violent blows against their most ardent opponents and not sustain any real damage," the editorial warns.

Earlier this year Iranian officials announced that Iran's cyber war campaign would be activated under the Passive Defense Organization of Iran, which openly recruited hackers who would support the goals and ideals of the radicals ruling Iran. Also as reported earlier, in a recent meeting among Iran's Revolutionary Guard commanders and Iranian scientists, America's vulnerabilities for a cyber attack were discussed. They concluded that the U.S. power grids represent the best opportunity for such attacks, as more U.S. utilities are moving their control systems to the Internet and using smart-grid technology.

According to reports from the U.S. Department of Energy, America's power grid remains vulnerable to cyber attack, a result of slow implementation of computer security standards. A successful cyber attack on the North American power grid systems could disrupt the economy and possibly create a national trauma.

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London Riots

PressTV

Israelis brace for weekend protests

Wed Aug 10, 2011 2:11PM

More than 200,000 people have marched in Tel Aviv on August 6, 2011 in one of the biggest waves of protests in decades in Israel

The Israeli protest movement has once again called for massive demonstrations to be held across Israel to protest against the rising cost of living.

The demonstrations have been planned in all major cities on Saturday except in Tel Aviv which saw huge rallies last week.

"We decided not to stage demonstrations in Tel Aviv but to call for rallies across Israel," AFP quoted protest leader Stav Shafir as saying on Wednesday.

"The important thing is to prove that the protest is not limited to people from Tel Aviv," he added.

Student union leader Itzik Shmuli, however, told public radio that this weekend rallies were planned in Afula in the north and Beersheva in the south.

Israelis have been protesting against rising housing prices and social inequalities since mid-July.

Last Saturday, more than 200,000 Israelis took to the streets to demand cheaper housing, education and health care.

Similar protest rallies were also held in other Israeli cities, including al-Quds (Jerusalem).

Israeli protesters demand a new taxation system (lower indirect taxes, higher direct taxes), free education and childcare, an end to the privatization of state-owned companies and more investment in social housing and public transport.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has formed a committee to examine the demands of the protest movement.

An opinion poll published by Channel 10 television late on Tuesday showed that 88 percent of respondents support the protest movement, with 46 percent of those who voted for PM Netanyahu's Likud party saying that they had joined protests.

The Sovereign Independent

Irish Social Minister: Take Your Vaccines or Have Your Benefits Cut!

Joan Burton: 'Adminis(traitor) and Facili(traitor) of Irish Depopulation': Take Your Vaccines or Have Your Benefits Cut!

Neil Foster - - August 8, 2011

In an article in Friday's Irish Independent, current Minister for Social Protection, Joan Burton, outlined plans to link child benefit payments to school attendance and, wait for it, vaccinations!

http://www.independent.ie/national-news/burton-to-take-on-child-benefit-fraud-in-overhaul-2834761.html

This is nothing less than the role out of a program of FORCED vaccination of the nation's children, particularly from poor families, who rely heavily on such benefits

The theory is that parents should be 'incentivised' to vaccinate their children through the threat that their child benefit will be stopped should they fail to do so.

It would now appear that parents are to be given one of options, namely, to either deny the government the right to have your child injected with toxic chemicals widely proven to be detrimental to their health and face the consequences of starving your children due to dire poverty or imply going along with these psychopathic control freaks and killing your own children by allowing the government, as a proxy of big pharma to carry out their population control program on your family.

That to me sounds like despotism which I'm sure many of the readers of this would agree with.

Isn't it amazing at a time of forced 'austerity' the government just happen to come up with this idea all on their own with they'll say, no outside influence?

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"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places." (Ephesians 6:12)

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     Until next week...

Almondtree Productions