President Obama’s press conference yesterday—in which he only took questions from left-leaning reporters apparently–contained an amazing statement. It should be noted the first two instances of the first person singular pronoun in the sentence refer to Barack Obama, President of the United States. The second two refer to Barack Obama, taxpaying citizen:

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Iniquity Abounding

“The robbery•Strongs 7701: showd (Job 5:21), shode; from 7736; violence, ravage:—desolation, destruction, oppression, robbery, spoil(-ed, -er, -ing), wasting. of the wicked shall destroy them; because they refuse to do judgment.”
—Proverbs 21:7

“And because iniquity•Strongs 458: anomia, an-om-ee´-ah; from 459; illegality, i.e. violation of law or (genitive case) wickedness:—iniquity, x transgress(-ion of) the law, unrighteousness.
•Strongs 459: anomos, an´-om-os; from 1 (as a negative particle) and 3551; lawless, i.e. (negatively) not subject to (the Jewish) law; (by implication, a Gentile), or (positively) wicked:—without law, lawless, transgressor, unlawful, wicked. shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold.”
—Matthew 24:12

And I do not want, and I will not accept, a deal in which I am asked to do nothing, in fact, I’m able to keep hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional income that I don’t need, while a parent out there who is struggling to figure out how to send their kid to college suddenly finds that they’ve got a couple thousand dollars less in grants or student loans.

There is, of course, nothing whatever stopping Barack Obama, taxpaying citizen, from donating his excess income to the United States Treasury. But his statement demonstrates an astonishing economic illiteracy. To be sure, someone earning a great deal of money has an income greater than what he spends. You can only spend so much on luxurious living however hard you try, a reality so rich with comic possibilities that a 1902 novel called Brewster’s Millions has been made into a movie no fewer than nine times.

But, unlike Scrooge McDuck, the rich do not put the excess in a vast money bin and frolic about in it. They invest it. What a concept! Where does Obama think new capital comes from, the tooth fairy? It’s nothing more than the excess of income over outgo. Take away the income the rich “don’t need” and spend it on social programs, and capital formation in this country drops to zero.

So determined is Obama to deprive “the rich” of excess income–as defined by him, of course–he is even willing to adversely impact government income in order to do so. Read this colloquy between Obama and ABC’s Charlie Gibson in a 2008 debate with Hillary Clinton:

MR. GIBSON: And in each instance, when the [capital gains tax] rate dropped, revenues from the tax increased. The government took in more money. And in the 1980s, when the tax was increased to 28 percent, the revenues went down. So why raise it at all, especially given the fact that 100 million people in this country own stock and would be affected?

SENATOR OBAMA: Well, Charlie, what I’’ve said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness.

MR. GIBSON: But history shows that when you drop the capital gains tax, the revenues go up.

SENATOR OBAMA: Well, that might happen or it might not. It depends on what’’s happening on Wall Street and how business is going.

Actually, it doesn’t. Every time capital gains tax rates have gone up, revenues have gone down and vice versa. High capital gains tax rates, because the tax liability is only incurred when an asset is sold, have the effect of locking in capital, which is economically pernicious, preventing capital from flowing to its most productive, i.e wealth creating, use.

Shortly after Obama’s election in 2008, I wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal (irritatingly no longer available on their website, which archives back only two years) saying Obama might not turn out to be the vanguard of the future but rather the last liberal president. I am more confident in that prediction every day.

OAKLAND, Calif. – They spent months warning the world of the apocalypse, some giving away earthly belongings or draining their savings accounts. And so they waited, vigilantly, on Saturday for the appointed hour to arrive.

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False Proplets

“Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.”
—Matthew 7:15

“And through covetousness shall they with feigned•Strongs 4112: plastos, plas-tos´; from 4111; moulded, i.e. (by implication) artificial or (figuratively) fictitious (false): — feigned.
•Strongs 4111: plasso, plas´-so; a primary verb; to mould, i.e. shape or fabricate: — form. words make merchandise of you: whose judgment now of a long time lingereth not, and their damnation slumbereth not.”
—2Peter 2:3

“Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try•Strongs 1381: dokimazo, dok-im-ad´-zo; from 1384 ;to test (literally or figuratively); by implication, to approve: — allow, discern, examine, x like, (ap-)prove,
•Strongs 1384: dokimos, dok´-ee-mos; from 1380; properly, acceptable (current after assayal), i.e. approved: — approved, tried. the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world.”
—1 John 4:1

When 6 p.m. came and went across the United States and various spots around the globe, and no extraordinary cataclysm occurred, some believers expressed confusion, while others reassured each of their faith. Still, some others took it in stride.
“I had some skepticism but I was trying to push the skepticism away because I believe in God,” said Keith Bauer — who hopped in his minivan in Maryland and drove his family 3,000 miles to California for the Rapture.
He started his day in the bright morning sun outside the gated Oakland headquarters of Family Radio International, whose founder, Harold Camping, has been broadcasting the apocalyptic prediction for years.
“I was hoping for it because I think heaven would be a lot better than this earth,” said Bauer, a tractor-trailer driver who began the voyage west last week, figuring that if he “worked last week, I wouldn’t have gotten paid anyway, if the Rapture did happen.”
The May 21 doomsday message was sent far and wide via broadcasts and websites by Camping, an 89-year-old retired civil engineer who has built a multi-million-dollar Christian media empire that publicizes his apocalyptic prediction. According to Camping, the destruction was likely to have begun its worldwide march as it became 6 p.m. in the various time zones, although some believers said Saturday the exact timing was never written in stone.
In New York’s Times Square, Robert Fitzpatrick, of Staten Island, said he was surprised when the six o’clock hour simply came and went. He had spent his own money to put up advertising about the end of the world.
“I can’t tell you what I feel right now,” he said, surrounded by tourists. “Obviously, I haven’t understood it correctly because we’re still here.”
Many followers said the delay was a further test from God to persevere in their faith.
“It’s still May 21 and God’s going to bring it,” said Family Radio’s special projects coordinator Michael Garcia, who spent Saturday morning praying and drinking two last cups of coffee with his wife at home in Alameda. “When you say something and it doesn’t happen, your pride is what’s hurt. But who needs pride? God said he resists the proud and gives grace to the humble.”
The Internet was alive with discussion, humorous or not, about the end of the world and its apparent failure to occur on cue. Many tweets declared Camping’s prediction a dud or shared, tongue-in-cheek, their relief at not having to do weekend chores or take a shower.
The top trends on Twitter at midday included, at No. 1, “endofworldconfessions,” followed by “myraptureplaylist.”
As 6 p.m. approached in California, some 100 people gathered outside Family Radio International headquarters in Oakland, although it appeared none of the believers of the prophecy were among them. Camping’s radio stations, TV channels, satellite broadcasts and website are controlled from a modest building sandwiched between an auto shop and a palm reader’s business.
Christian leaders from across the spectrum widely dismissed the prophecy, and members of a local church concerned followers could slip into a deep depression come Sunday were part of the crowd outside Family Radio International. They held signs declaring Camping a false prophet as motorists drove by.
“The cold, hard reality is going to hit them that they did this, and it was false and they basically emptied out everything to follow a false teacher,” the Rev. Jacob Denys, of the Milpitas-based Calvary Bible Church, said earlier. “We’re not all about doom and gloom. Our message is a message of salvation and of hope.”
About a dozen people in a partying mood were also outside Family Radio International, creating a carnival-like atmosphere as they strolled in a variety costumes that portrayed monks, Jesus Christ and other figures.
“Am I relieved? Yeah. I’ve got a lot going on,” Peter Erwin, a student from Oakland, said, with a hint of sarcasm. “Trying to get specific about the end of the world is crazy.”
Revelers counted down the seconds before the anticipated hour, and people began dancing to music as the clock struck 6 p.m. Some released shoe-shaped helium balloons into the sky in an apparent reference to the Rapture.
Camping has preached that some 200 million people would be saved, and that those left behind would die in a series of scourges visiting Earth until the globe is consumed by a fireball on Oct. 21.
Family Radio International’s message has been broadcast in 61 languages. He has said that his earlier apocalyptic prediction in 1994 didn’t come true because of a mathematical error.
“I’m not embarrassed about it. It was just the fact that it was premature,” he told The Associated Press last month. But this time, he said, “there is … no possibility that it will not happen.”
As Saturday drew nearer, followers reported that donations grew, allowing Family Radio to spend millions on more than 5,000 billboards and 20 RVs plastered with the doomsday message. In 2009, the nonprofit reported in IRS filings that it received $18.3 million in donations, and had assets of more than $104 million, including $34 million in stocks or other publicly traded securities.
Marie Exley, who helped put up apocalypse-themed billboards in Israel, Jordan and Lebanon, said the money allowed the nonprofit to reach as many souls as possible.
She said she and her husband, mother and brother read the Bible and stayed close to the television news on Friday night awaiting word of an earthquake in the southern hemisphere. When that did not happen, she said fellow believers began reaching out to reassure one another of their faith.
“Some people were saying it was going to be an earthquake at that specific time in New Zealand and be a rolling judgment, but God is keeping us in our place and saying you may know the day but you don’t know the hour,” she said Saturday, speaking from Bozeman, Mont. “The day is not over, it’s just the morning, and we have to endure until the end.”
On Sunday, a magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck near a group of South Pacific islands about 600 miles off New Zealand, but there were no reports of damage or risk of tsunami. The temblor struck under the Kermadec Islands, which has no permanent population.
New Zealand, shaken by a series of quakes and aftershocks since a Feb. 22 temblor devastated the city of Christchurch and killed 181 people, sits in an area where two tectonic plates collide. More than 14,000 earthquakes are recorded in New Zealand each year.
A much smaller earthquake also was recorded at 7:05 p.m. Saturday in the San Francisco Bay Area, a seismically active region of California that includes Oakland. There were no reports that the minor magnitude 3.6 temblor, centered 8 miles north of Berkeley, caused damages or injuries.
Camping, who lives few miles from his radio station, was not home late morning Saturday, and an additional attempt to seek comment from him late in the evening also was unsuccessful, with no one answering his front door.
Earlier in the day, Sheila Doan, 65, Camping’s next-door-neighbor of 40 years, was outside gardening and said the worldwide spotlight on his May 21 forecast has attracted far more attention than the 1994 prediction.
Doan said she is a Christian and while she respects her neighbor, she doesn’t share his views.
“I wouldn’t consider Mr. Camping a close friend and wouldn’t have him over for dinner or anything, but if he needs anything, we are there for him,” Doan said.
___
Associated Press reporters Terry Chea in Oakland, Don Babwin in Chicago, Mike Householder in Detroit, Janet McConnaughey in New Orleans, David R. Martin in New York and video journalist Haven Daley in San Francisco contributed to this report.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2048138,00.html#ixzz1DaWC7d6a

On Feb. 15, 1965, a diffident but self-possessed high school student named Raymond Kurzweil appeared as a guest on a game show called I’ve Got a Secret. He was introduced by the host, Steve Allen, then he played a short musical composition on a piano. The idea was that Kurzweil was hiding an unusual fact and the panelists — they included a comedian and a former Miss America — had to guess what it was.

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Knowledge Increased

“And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined•Strongs 2161: zamam, zaw-mam´; a primitive root; to plan, usually in a bad sense:—consider, devise, imagine, plot, purpose, think (evil). to do.”
—Genesis 11:6

“Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain•Strongs 3154: mataioo, mat-ah-yo´-o; from 3152; to render (passively, become) foolish, i.e. (morally) wicked or (specially), idolatrous:—become vain.
•Strongs 3152: mataios, mat´-ah-yos; from the base of 3155; empty, i.e. (literally) profitless, or (specially), an idol:—vain, vanity. in their imaginations•Strongs 1261: dialogismos, dee-al-og-is-mos´; from 1260; discussion, i.e. (internal) consideration (by implication, purpose), or (external) debate:—dispute, doubtful(-ing), imagination, reasoning, thought. , and their foolish heart was darkened.”
—Romans 1:21

“And he had power to give life unto the image•Strongs 1504: eikon, i-kone´; from 1503; a likeness, i.e. (literally) statue, profile, or (figuratively) representation, resemblance:—image. of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed.”
—Revelation 13:15

On the show (you can find the clip on YouTube), the beauty queen did a good job of grilling Kurzweil, but the comedian got the win: the music was composed by a computer. Kurzweil got $200. (See TIME’s photo-essay “Cyberdyne’s Real Robot.”)

Kurzweil then demonstrated the computer, which he built himself — a desk-size affair with loudly clacking relays, hooked up to a typewriter. The panelists were pretty blasé about it; they were more impressed by Kurzweil’s age than by anything he’d actually done. They were ready to move on to Mrs. Chester Loney of Rough and Ready, Calif., whose secret was that she’d been President Lyndon Johnson’s first-grade teacher.

But Kurzweil would spend much of the rest of his career working out what his demonstration meant. Creating a work of art is one of those activities we reserve for humans and humans only. It’s an act of self-expression; you’re not supposed to be able to do it if you don’t have a self. To see creativity, the exclusive domain of humans, usurped by a computer built by a 17-year-old is to watch a line blur that cannot be unblurred, the line between organic intelligence and artificial intelligence.

That was Kurzweil’s real secret, and back in 1965 nobody guessed it. Maybe not even him, not yet. But now, 46 years later, Kurzweil believes that we’re approaching a moment when computers will become intelligent, and not just intelligent but more intelligent than humans. When that happens, humanity — our bodies, our minds, our civilization — will be completely and irreversibly transformed. He believes that this moment is not only inevitable but imminent. According to his calculations, the end of human civilization as we know it is about 35 years away. (See the best inventions of 2010.)

Computers are getting faster. Everybody knows that. Also, computers are getting faster faster — that is, the rate at which they’re getting faster is increasing.

True? True.

So if computers are getting so much faster, so incredibly fast, there might conceivably come a moment when they are capable of something comparable to human intelligence. Artificial intelligence. All that horsepower could be put in the service of emulating whatever it is our brains are doing when they create consciousness — not just doing arithmetic very quickly or composing piano music but also driving cars, writing books, making ethical decisions, appreciating fancy paintings, making witty observations at cocktail parties.

If you can swallow that idea, and Kurzweil and a lot of other very smart people can, then all bets are off. From that point on, there’s no reason to think computers would stop getting more powerful. They would keep on developing until they were far more intelligent than we are. Their rate of development would also continue to increase, because they would take over their own development from their slower-thinking human creators. Imagine a computer scientist that was itself a super-intelligent computer. It would work incredibly quickly. It could draw on huge amounts of data effortlessly. It wouldn’t even take breaks to play Farmville.

Probably. It’s impossible to predict the behavior of these smarter-than-human intelligences with which (with whom?) we might one day share the planet, because if you could, you’d be as smart as they would be. But there are a lot of theories about it. Maybe we’ll merge with them to become super-intelligent cyborgs, using computers to extend our intellectual abilities the same way that cars and planes extend our physical abilities. Maybe the artificial intelligences will help us treat the effects of old age and prolong our life spans indefinitely. Maybe we’ll scan our consciousnesses into computers and live inside them as software, forever, virtually. Maybe the computers will turn on humanity and annihilate us. The one thing all these theories have in common is the transformation of our species into something that is no longer recognizable as such to humanity circa 2011. This transformation has a name: the Singularity. (Comment on this story.)

The difficult thing to keep sight of when you’re talking about the Singularity is that even though it sounds like science fiction, it isn’t, no more than a weather forecast is science fiction. It’s not a fringe idea; it’s a serious hypothesis about the future of life on Earth. There’s an intellectual gag reflex that kicks in anytime you try to swallow an idea that involves super-intelligent immortal cyborgs, but suppress it if you can, because while the Singularity appears to be, on the face of it, preposterous, it’s an idea that rewards sober, careful evaluation.

See pictures of cinema’s most memorable robots.)

From TIME’s archives: “Can Machines Think?”

See TIME’s special report on gadgets, then and now.

People are spending a lot of money trying to understand it. The three-year-old Singularity University, which offers inter-disciplinary courses of study for graduate students and executives, is hosted by NASA. Google was a founding sponsor; its CEO and co-founder Larry Page spoke there last year. People are attracted to the Singularity for the shock value, like an intellectual freak show, but they stay because there’s more to it than they expected. And of course, in the event that it turns out to be real, it will be the most important thing to happen to human beings since the invention of language. (See “Is Technology Making Us Lonelier?”)

The Singularity isn’t a wholly new idea, just newish. In 1965 the British mathematician I.J. Good described something he called an “intelligence explosion”:

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion,” and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.

The word singularity is borrowed from astrophysics: it refers to a point in space-time — for example, inside a black hole — at which the rules of ordinary physics do not apply. In the 1980s the science-fiction novelist Vernor Vinge attached it to Good’s intelligence-explosion scenario. At a NASA symposium in 1993, Vinge announced that “within 30 years, we will have the technological means to create super-human intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.”

By that time Kurzweil was thinking about the Singularity too. He’d been busy since his appearance on I’ve Got a Secret. He’d made several fortunes as an engineer and inventor; he founded and then sold his first software company while he was still at MIT. He went on to build the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind — Stevie Wonder was customer No. 1 — and made innovations in a range of technical fields, including music synthesizers and speech recognition. He holds 39 patents and 19 honorary doctorates. In 1999 President Bill Clinton awarded him the National Medal of Technology. (See pictures of adorable robots.)

But Kurzweil was also pursuing a parallel career as a futurist: he has been publishing his thoughts about the future of human and machine-kind for 20 years, most recently in The Singularity Is Near, which was a best seller when it came out in 2005. A documentary by the same name, starring Kurzweil, Tony Robbins and Alan Dershowitz, among others, was released in January. (Kurzweil is actually the subject of two current documentaries. The other one, less authorized but more informative, is called The Transcendent Man.) Bill Gates has called him “the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence.”(See the world’s most influential people in the 2010 TIME 100.)

In real life, the transcendent man is an unimposing figure who could pass for Woody Allen’s even nerdier younger brother. Kurzweil grew up in Queens, N.Y., and you can still hear a trace of it in his voice. Now 62, he speaks with the soft, almost hypnotic calm of someone who gives 60 public lectures a year. As the Singularity’s most visible champion, he has heard all the questions and faced down the incredulity many, many times before. He’s good-natured about it. His manner is almost apologetic: I wish I could bring you less exciting news of the future, but I’ve looked at the numbers, and this is what they say, so what else can I tell you?

Kurzweil’s interest in humanity’s cyborganic destiny began about 1980 largely as a practical matter. He needed ways to measure and track the pace of technological progress. Even great inventions can fail if they arrive before their time, and he wanted to make sure that when he released his, the timing was right. “Even at that time, technology was moving quickly enough that the world was going to be different by the time you finished a project,” he says. “So it’s like skeet shooting — you can’t shoot at the target.” He knew about Moore’s law, of course, which states that the number of transistors you can put on a microchip doubles about every two years. It’s a surprisingly reliable rule of thumb. Kurzweil tried plotting a slightly different curve: the change over time in the amount of computing power, measured in MIPS (millions of instructions per second), that you can buy for $1,000.

As it turned out, Kurzweil’s numbers looked a lot like Moore’s. They doubled every couple of years. Drawn as graphs, they both made exponential curves, with their value increasing by multiples of two instead of by regular increments in a straight line. The curves held eerily steady, even when Kurzweil extended his backward through the decades of pretransistor computing technologies like relays and vacuum tubes, all the way back to 1900. (Comment on this story.)

Kurzweil then ran the numbers on a whole bunch of other key technological indexes — the falling cost of manufacturing transistors, the rising clock speed of microprocessors, the plummeting price of dynamic RAM. He looked even further afield at trends in biotech and beyond — the falling cost of sequencing DNA and of wireless data service and the rising numbers of Internet hosts and nanotechnology patents. He kept finding the same thing: exponentially accelerating progress. “It’s really amazing how smooth these trajectories are,” he says. “Through thick and thin, war and peace, boom times and recessions.” Kurzweil calls it the law of accelerating returns: technological progress happens exponentially, not linearly.

See TIME’s video “Five Worst Inventions.”

See the 100 best gadgets of all time.

Then he extended the curves into the future, and the growth they predicted was so phenomenal, it created cognitive resistance in his mind. Exponential curves start slowly, then rocket skyward toward infinity. According to Kurzweil, we’re not evolved to think in terms of exponential growth. “It’s not intuitive. Our built-in predictors are linear. When we’re trying to avoid an animal, we pick the linear prediction of where it’s going to be in 20 seconds and what to do about it. That is actually hardwired in our brains.”

Here’s what the exponential curves told him. We will successfully reverse-engineer the human brain by the mid-2020s. By the end of that decade, computers will be capable of human-level intelligence. Kurzweil puts the date of the Singularity — never say he’s not conservative — at 2045. In that year, he estimates, given the vast increases in computing power and the vast reductions in the cost of same, the quantity of artificial intelligence created will be about a billion times the sum of all the human intelligence that exists today. (See how robotics are changing the future of medicine.)

The Singularity isn’t just an idea. it attracts people, and those people feel a bond with one another. Together they form a movement, a subculture; Kurzweil calls it a community. Once you decide to take the Singularity seriously, you will find that you have become part of a small but intense and globally distributed hive of like-minded thinkers known as Singularitarians.

Not all of them are Kurzweilians, not by a long chalk. There’s room inside Singularitarianism for considerable diversity of opinion about what the Singularity means and when and how it will or won’t happen. But Singularitarians share a worldview. They think in terms of deep time, they believe in the power of technology to shape history, they have little interest in the conventional wisdom about anything, and they cannot believe you’re walking around living your life and watching TV as if the artificial-intelligence revolution were not about to erupt and change absolutely everything. They have no fear of sounding ridiculous; your ordinary citizen’s distaste for apparently absurd ideas is just an example of irrational bias, and Singularitarians have no truck with irrationality. When you enter their mind-space you pass through an extreme gradient in worldview, a hard ontological shear that separates Singularitarians from the common run of humanity. Expect turbulence.

In addition to the Singularity University, which Kurzweil co-founded, there’s also a Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, based in San Francisco. It counts among its advisers Peter Thiel, a former CEO of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook. The institute holds an annual conference called the Singularity Summit. (Kurzweil co-founded that too.) Because of the highly interdisciplinary nature of Singularity theory, it attracts a diverse crowd. Artificial intelligence is the main event, but the sessions also cover the galloping progress of, among other fields, genetics and nanotechnology. (See TIME’s computer covers.)

At the 2010 summit, which took place in August in San Francisco, there were not just computer scientists but also psychologists, neuroscientists, nanotechnologists, molecular biologists, a specialist in wearable computers, a professor of emergency medicine, an expert on cognition in gray parrots and the professional magician and debunker James “the Amazing” Randi. The atmosphere was a curious blend of Davos and UFO convention. Proponents of seasteading — the practice, so far mostly theoretical, of establishing politically autonomous floating communities in international waters — handed out pamphlets. An android chatted with visitors in one corner.

After artificial intelligence, the most talked-about topic at the 2010 summit was life extension. Biological boundaries that most people think of as permanent and inevitable Singularitarians see as merely intractable but solvable problems. Death is one of them. Old age is an illness like any other, and what do you do with illnesses? You cure them. Like a lot of Singularitarian ideas, it sounds funny at first, but the closer you get to it, the less funny it seems. It’s not just wishful thinking; there’s actual science going on here.

For example, it’s well known that one cause of the physical degeneration associated with aging involves telomeres, which are segments of DNA found at the ends of chromosomes. Every time a cell divides, its telomeres get shorter, and once a cell runs out of telomeres, it can’t reproduce anymore and dies. But there’s an enzyme called telomerase that reverses this process; it’s one of the reasons cancer cells live so long. So why not treat regular non-cancerous cells with telomerase? In November, researchers at Harvard Medical School announced in Nature that they had done just that. They administered telomerase to a group of mice suffering from age-related degeneration. The damage went away. The mice didn’t just get better; they got younger. (Comment on this story.)

Aubrey de Grey is one of the world’s best-known life-extension researchers and a Singularity Summit veteran. A British biologist with a doctorate from Cambridge and a famously formidable beard, de Grey runs a foundation called SENS, or Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence. He views aging as a process of accumulating damage, which he has divided into seven categories, each of which he hopes to one day address using regenerative medicine. “People have begun to realize that the view of aging being something immutable — rather like the heat death of the universe — is simply ridiculous,” he says. “It’s just childish. The human body is a machine that has a bunch of functions, and it accumulates various types of damage as a side effect of the normal function of the machine. Therefore in principal that damage can be repaired periodically. This is why we have vintage cars. It’s really just a matter of paying attention. The whole of medicine consists of messing about with what looks pretty inevitable until you figure out how to make it not inevitable.”

Kurzweil takes life extension seriously too. His father, with whom he was very close, died of heart disease at 58. Kurzweil inherited his father’s genetic predisposition; he also developed Type 2 diabetes when he was 35. Working with Terry Grossman, a doctor who specializes in longevity medicine, Kurzweil has published two books on his own approach to life extension, which involves taking up to 200 pills and supplements a day. He says his diabetes is essentially cured, and although he’s 62 years old from a chronological perspective, he estimates that his biological age is about 20 years younger.

From TIME’s archives: “The Immortality Enzyme.”

See Healthland’s 5 rules for good health in 2011.

But his goal differs slightly from de Grey’s. For Kurzweil, it’s not so much about staying healthy as long as possible; it’s about staying alive until the Singularity. It’s an attempted handoff. Once hyper-intelligent artificial intelligences arise, armed with advanced nanotechnology, they’ll really be able to wrestle with the vastly complex, systemic problems associated with aging in humans. Alternatively, by then we’ll be able to transfer our minds to sturdier vessels such as computers and robots. He and many other Singularitarians take seriously the proposition that many people who are alive today will wind up being functionally immortal.

It’s an idea that’s radical and ancient at the same time. In “Sailing to Byzantium,” W.B. Yeats describes mankind’s fleshly predicament as a soul fastened to a dying animal. Why not unfasten it and fasten it to an immortal robot instead? But Kurzweil finds that life extension produces even more resistance in his audiences than his exponential growth curves. “There are people who can accept computers being more intelligent than people,” he says. “But the idea of significant changes to human longevity — that seems to be particularly controversial. People invested a lot of personal effort into certain philosophies dealing with the issue of life and death. I mean, that’s the major reason we have religion.” (See the top 10 medical breakthroughs of 2010.)

Of course, a lot of people think the Singularity is nonsense — a fantasy, wishful thinking, a Silicon Valley version of the Evangelical story of the Rapture, spun by a man who earns his living making outrageous claims and backing them up with pseudoscience. Most of the serious critics focus on the question of whether a computer can truly become intelligent.

The entire field of artificial intelligence, or AI, is devoted to this question. But AI doesn’t currently produce the kind of intelligence we associate with humans or even with talking computers in movies — HAL or C3PO or Data. Actual AIs tend to be able to master only one highly specific domain, like interpreting search queries or playing chess. They operate within an extremely specific frame of reference. They don’t make conversation at parties. They’re intelligent, but only if you define intelligence in a vanishingly narrow way. The kind of intelligence Kurzweil is talking about, which is called strong AI or artificial general intelligence, doesn’t exist yet.

Why not? Obviously we’re still waiting on all that exponentially growing computing power to get here. But it’s also possible that there are things going on in our brains that can’t be duplicated electronically no matter how many MIPS you throw at them. The neurochemical architecture that generates the ephemeral chaos we know as human consciousness may just be too complex and analog to replicate in digital silicon. The biologist Dennis Bray was one of the few voices of dissent at last summer’s Singularity Summit. “Although biological components act in ways that are comparable to those in electronic circuits,” he argued, in a talk titled “What Cells Can Do That Robots Can’t,” “they are set apart by the huge number of different states they can adopt. Multiple biochemical processes create chemical modifications of protein molecules, further diversified by association with distinct structures at defined locations of a cell. The resulting combinatorial explosion of states endows living systems with an almost infinite capacity to store information regarding past and present conditions and a unique capacity to prepare for future events.” That makes the ones and zeros that computers trade in look pretty crude. (See how to live 100 years.)

Underlying the practical challenges are a host of philosophical ones. Suppose we did create a computer that talked and acted in a way that was indistinguishable from a human being — in other words, a computer that could pass the Turing test. (Very loosely speaking, such a computer would be able to pass as human in a blind test.) Would that mean that the computer was sentient, the way a human being is? Or would it just be an extremely sophisticated but essentially mechanical automaton without the mysterious spark of consciousness — a machine with no ghost in it? And how would we know?

Even if you grant that the Singularity is plausible, you’re still staring at a thicket of unanswerable questions. If I can scan my consciousness into a computer, am I still me? What are the geopolitics and the socioeconomics of the Singularity? Who decides who gets to be immortal? Who draws the line between sentient and nonsentient? And as we approach immortality, omniscience and omnipotence, will our lives still have meaning? By beating death, will we have lost our essential humanity?

Kurzweil admits that there’s a fundamental level of risk associated with the Singularity that’s impossible to refine away, simply because we don’t know what a highly advanced artificial intelligence, finding itself a newly created inhabitant of the planet Earth, would choose to do. It might not feel like competing with us for resources. One of the goals of the Singularity Institute is to make sure not just that artificial intelligence develops but also that the AI is friendly. You don’t have to be a super-intelligent cyborg to understand that introducing a superior life-form into your own biosphere is a basic Darwinian error. (Comment on this story.)

If the Singularity is coming, these questions are going to get answers whether we like it or not, and Kurzweil thinks that trying to put off the Singularity by banning technologies is not only impossible but also unethical and probably dangerous. “It would require a totalitarian system to implement such a ban,” he says. “It wouldn’t work. It would just drive these technologies underground, where the responsible scientists who we’re counting on to create the defenses would not have easy access to the tools.”

Kurzweil is an almost inhumanly patient and thorough debater. He relishes it. He’s tireless in hunting down his critics so that he can respond to them, point by point, carefully and in detail.

See TIME’s photo-essay “A Global Look at Longevity.”

See how genes, gender and diet may be life extenders.

Take the question of whether computers can replicate the biochemical complexity of an organic brain. Kurzweil yields no ground there whatsoever. He does not see any fundamental difference between flesh and silicon that would prevent the latter from thinking. He defies biologists to come up with a neurological mechanism that could not be modeled or at least matched in power and flexibility by software running on a computer. He refuses to fall on his knees before the mystery of the human brain. “Generally speaking,” he says, “the core of a disagreement I’ll have with a critic is, they’ll say, Oh, Kurzweil is underestimating the complexity of reverse-engineering of the human brain or the complexity of biology. But I don’t believe I’m underestimating the challenge. I think they’re underestimating the power of exponential growth.”

This position doesn’t make Kurzweil an outlier, at least among Singularitarians. Plenty of people make more-extreme predictions. Since 2005 the neuroscientist Henry Markram has been running an ambitious initiative at the Brain Mind Institute of the Ecole Polytechnique in Lausanne, Switzerland. It’s called the Blue Brain project, and it’s an attempt to create a neuron-by-neuron simulation of a mammalian brain, using IBM’s Blue Gene super-computer. So far, Markram’s team has managed to simulate one neocortical column from a rat’s brain, which contains about 10,000 neurons. Markram has said that he hopes to have a complete virtual human brain up and running in 10 years. (Even Kurzweil sniffs at this. If it worked, he points out, you’d then have to educate the brain, and who knows how long that would take?) (See portraits of centenarians.)

By definition, the future beyond the Singularity is not knowable by our linear, chemical, animal brains, but Kurzweil is teeming with theories about it. He positively flogs himself to think bigger and bigger; you can see him kicking against the confines of his aging organic hardware. “When people look at the implications of ongoing exponential growth, it gets harder and harder to accept,” he says. “So you get people who really accept, yes, things are progressing exponentially, but they fall off the horse at some point because the implications are too fantastic. I’ve tried to push myself to really look.”

In Kurzweil’s future, biotechnology and nanotechnology give us the power to manipulate our bodies and the world around us at will, at the molecular level. Progress hyperaccelerates, and every hour brings a century’s worth of scientific breakthroughs. We ditch Darwin and take charge of our own evolution. The human genome becomes just so much code to be bug-tested and optimized and, if necessary, rewritten. Indefinite life extension becomes a reality; people die only if they choose to. Death loses its sting once and for all. Kurzweil hopes to bring his dead father back to life.

We can scan our consciousnesses into computers and enter a virtual existence or swap our bodies for immortal robots and light out for the edges of space as intergalactic godlings. Within a matter of centuries, human intelligence will have re-engineered and saturated all the matter in the universe. This is, Kurzweil believes, our destiny as a species. (See the costs of living a long life.)

Or it isn’t. When the big questions get answered, a lot of the action will happen where no one can see it, deep inside the black silicon brains of the computers, which will either bloom bit by bit into conscious minds or just continue in ever more brilliant and powerful iterations of nonsentience.

But as for the minor questions, they’re already being decided all around us and in plain sight. The more you read about the Singularity, the more you start to see it peeking out at you, coyly, from unexpected directions. Five years ago we didn’t have 600 million humans carrying out their social lives over a single electronic network. Now we have Facebook. Five years ago you didn’t see people double-checking what they were saying and where they were going, even as they were saying it and going there, using handheld network-enabled digital prosthetics. Now we have iPhones. Is it an unimaginable step to take the iPhones out of our hands and put them into our skulls?

Already 30,000 patients with Parkinson’s disease have neural implants. Google is experimenting with computers that can drive cars. There are more than 2,000 robots fighting in Afghanistan alongside the human troops. This month a game show will once again figure in the history of artificial intelligence, but this time the computer will be the guest: an IBM super-computer nicknamed Watson will compete on Jeopardy! Watson runs on 90 servers and takes up an entire room, and in a practice match in January it finished ahead of two former champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. It got every question it answered right, but much more important, it didn’t need help understanding the questions (or, strictly speaking, the answers), which were phrased in plain English. Watson isn’t strong AI, but if strong AI happens, it will arrive gradually, bit by bit, and this will have been one of the bits. (Comment on this story.)

A hundred years from now, Kurzweil and de Grey and the others could be the 22nd century’s answer to the Founding Fathers — except unlike the Founding Fathers, they’ll still be alive to get credit — or their ideas could look as hilariously retro and dated as Disney’s Tomorrowland. Nothing gets old as fast as the future.

But even if they’re dead wrong about the future, they’re right about the present. They’re taking the long view and looking at the big picture. You may reject every specific article of the Singularitarian charter, but you should admire Kurzweil for taking the future seriously. Singularitarianism is grounded in the idea that change is real and that humanity is in charge of its own fate and that history might not be as simple as one damn thing after another. Kurzweil likes to point out that your average cell phone is about a millionth the size of, a millionth the price of and a thousand times more powerful than the computer he had at MIT 40 years ago. Flip that forward 40 years and what does the world look like? If you really want to figure that out, you have to think very, very far outside the box. Or maybe you have to think further inside it than anyone ever has before.

RALEIGH, N.C. – If there had been time, Marie Exley would have liked to start a family. Instead, the 32-year-old Army veteran has less than six months left, which she’ll spend spreading a stark warning: Judgment Day is almost here.

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Editors Note: Well meaning brethren, however, the verse below warns us about such exact predictions.

We do believe this wonderful event “Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.”
—1 Thessalonians 4:17, the Harpazo•Strongs 726: harpazo, har-pad´-zo; from a derivative of 138; to seize (in various applications): — catch (away, up), pluck, pull, take (by force). can happen at any time. We also believe it is the proper spiritual season for this event to take place but stay away from naming the day.

Therefore, we stand with other believers and look up for our redemption is drawing near.

“But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.”
—Matthew 24:36

Exley is part of a movement of Christians loosely organized by radio broadcasts and websites, independent of churches and convinced by their reading of the Bible that the end of the world will begin May 21, 2011.
To get the word out, they’re using billboards and bus stop benches, traveling caravans of RVs and volunteers passing out pamphlets on street corners. Cities from Bridgeport, Conn., to Little Rock, Ark., now have billboards with the ominous message, and mission groups are traveling through Latin America and Africa to spread the news outside the U.S.
“A lot of people might think, ‘The end’s coming, let’s go party,’” said Exley, a veteran of two deployments in Iraq. “But we’re commanded by God to warn people. I wish I could just be like everybody else, but it’s so much better to know that when the end comes, you’ll be safe.”
In August, Exley left her home in Colorado Springs, Colo., to work with Oakland, Calif.-based Family Radio Worldwide, the independent Christian ministry whose leader, Harold Camping, has calculated the May 21 date based on his reading of the Bible.
She is organizing traveling columns of RVs carrying the message from city to city, a logistics challenge that her military experience has helped solve. The vehicles are scheduled to be in five North Carolina cities between now and the second week of January, but Exley will shortly be gone: overseas, where she hopes to eventually make it back to Iraq.
“I don’t really have plans to come back,” she said. “Time is short.”
Not everyone who’s heard Camping’s message is taking such a dramatic step. They’re remaining in their day-to-day lives, but helping publicize the prophecy in other ways. Allison Warden, of Raleigh, has been helping organize a campaign using billboards, post cards and other media in cities across the U.S. through a website, We Can Know.
The 29-year-old payroll clerk laughs when asked about reactions to the message, which is plastered all over her car.
“It’s definitely against the grain, I know that,” she said. “We’re hoping people won’t take our word for it, or Harold Camping’s word for it. We’re hoping that people will search the scriptures for themselves.”
Camping, 89, believes the Bible essentially functions as a cosmic calendar explaining exactly when various prophecies will be fulfilled.
The retired civil engineer said all his calculations come from close readings of the Bible, but that external events like the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948 are signs confirming the date.
“Beyond the shadow of a doubt, May 21 will be the date of the Rapture and the day of judgment,” he said.
The doctrine known as the Rapture teaches that believers will be taken up to heaven, while everyone else will remain on earth for a period of torment, concluding with the end of time. Camping believes that will happen in October.
“If May 21 passes and I’m still here, that means I wasn’t saved. Does that mean God’s word is inaccurate or untrue? Not at all,” Warden said.
The belief that Christ will return to earth and bring an end to history has been a basic element of Christian belief since the first century. The Book of Revelation, which comes last in the New Testament, describes this conclusion in vivid language that has inspired Christians for centuries.
But few churches are willing to set a date for the end of the world, heeding Jesus’ words in the gospels of Mark and Matthew that no one can know the day or hour it will happen. Predictions like Camping’s, though, aren’t new. One of the most famous in history was by the Baptist leader William Miller, who predicted the end for Oct. 22, 1844, which came to be known as the Great Disappointment among his followers, some of whom subsequently founded the Seventh Day Adventist church.
“In the U.S., there is still a significant population, mostly Protestant, who look at the Bible as kind of a puzzle, and the puzzle is God’s word and it’s predicting when the end times will come,” said Catherine Wessinger, a professor at Loyola University in New Orleans who studies millennialism, the belief in pending apocalypse.
“A lot of times these prophecies gain traction when difficulties are happening in society,” she said. “Right now, there’s a lot of insecurity, and this is a promise that says it’s not all random, it’s part of God’s plan.”
Past predictions that failed to come true don’t have any bearing on the current calculation, believers maintain.
“It would be like telling the Wright brothers that every other attempt to fly has failed, so you shouldn’t even try,” said Chris McCann, who works with eBible Fellowship, one of the groups spreading the message.
For believers like McCann, theirs is actually a message of hope and compassion: God’s compassion for people, and the hope that there’s still time to be saved.
That, ultimately, is what spurs on Exley, who said her beliefs have alienated her from most of her friends and family. Her hope is that not everyone who hears her message will mock it, and that even people who dismiss her now might still come to believe.
“If you still want to say we’re crazy, go ahead,” she said. “But it doesn’t hurt to look into it.”

Commentary: A magic metric that predicts America’s future

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Perplexity

“…upon the earth distress•Strongs 4928: sunoche, soon-okh-ay´; from 4912; restraint, i.e. (figuratively) anxiety: — anguish, distress. of nations, with perplexity•Strongs 640: aporia, ap-or-ee´-a; from the same as 639; a (state of) quandary:—perplexity.
•Strongs 639: aporeo, ap-or-eh´-o; from a compound of 1 (as a negative particle) and the base of 4198; to have no way out, i.e. be at a loss (mentally):— (stand in) doubt, be perplexed….”
—Luke 21:25

Divided Nation

“But he, knowing their thoughts, said unto them, Every kingdom•Strongs 932: basileia, bas-il-i´-ah; from 935; properly, royalty, i.e. (abstractly) rule, or (concretely) a realm (literally or figuratively): — kingdom, + reign. divided•Strongs 1266: diamerizo, dee-am-er-id´-zo; from 1223 and 3307; to partition thoroughly (literally in distribution, figuratively in dissension): — cloven, divide, part. against itself is brought to desolation•Strongs 2049: eremoo, er-ay-mo´-o; from 2048; to lay waste (literally or figuratively): — (bring to, make) desolate(-ion), come to nought.; and a house divided against a house falleth.”
—Luke11:17

“Ah sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a seed of evildoers, children that are corrupters: they have forsaken the LORD, they have provoked the Holy One of Israel unto anger, they are gone away backward.”
—Isaiah 1:4

It’s inevitable: Wall Street banks control the Federal Reserve system , it’s their personal piggy bank. They’ve already done so much damage, yet have more control than ever.

Warning: That’s a set-up. They will eventually destroy capitalism, democracy, and the dollar’s global reserve-currency status. They will self-destruct before 2035 … maybe as early as 2012 … most likely by 2020.

Last week we cheered the Tea Party for starting the countdown to the Second American Revolution. Our timeline is crucial to understanding the historic implications of Taleb’s prediction that the Fed is dying, that it’s only a matter of time before a revolution triggers class warfare forcing America to dump capitalism, eliminate our corrupt system of lobbying, come up with a new workable form of government, and create a new economy without a banking system ruled by Wall Street.

Read ‘America on the brink of a Second Revolution.’

Let’s reexamine the timeline closely:

Stage 1: The Democrats just put the nail in their coffin confirming they’re wimps when they refused to force the GOP to filibuster Bush tax cuts for billionaires.

Stage 2: In the elections the GOP takes over the House, expanding its strategic war to destroy Obama with its policy of “complete gridlock” and “shutting down government.”

Stage 3: Post-election Obama goes lame-duck, buried in subpoenas and vetoes.

Stage 4: In 2012, the GOP wins back the White House and Senate. Health care returns to insurers. Free-market financial deregulation returns. Lobbyists intensify their anarchy.

Stage 5: Before the end of the second term of the new GOP president, Washington is totally corrupted by unlimited, anonymous donations from billionaires and lobbyists. Wall Street’s Happy Conspiracy triggers the third catastrophic meltdown of the 21st century that Robert Shiller of “Irrational Exuberance” fame predicts, resulting in defaults of dollar-denominated debt and the dollar’s demise as the world’s reserve currency.

Stage 6: The Second American Revolution explodes into a brutal full-scale class war with the middle class leading a widespread rebellion against the out-of-touch, out-of-control Happy Conspiracy sabotaging America from within.

Stage 7: The domestic class warfare is exaggerated as the Pentagon’s global warnings play out: That by 2020 “an ancient pattern of desperate, all-out wars over food, water, and energy supplies would emerge” worldwide and “warfare is defining human life.”

In this rapidly unfolding scenario, the Fed cannot survive. Why? Not because the Fed is at the center of America’s economic problems, beyond repair, a dying institution. But because the Fed is a pawn of Wall Street’s Happy Conspiracy, which is incapable of seeing the train wreck that it set up.

This out-of-control, conspiracy of greedy Wall Street bankers, corporate CEOs, corrupt politicians and Forbes 400 billionaires will, in the near future, trigger the third catastrophic meltdown of the 21st century, a collapse that paradoxically can transform America into a new, stronger post-capitalist economy … but only after a revolution and brutal class warfare. But few will talk about what’s coming.

Warning: Never trust the American Treasury Secretary

So who can you trust to tell us the truth? Taleb says it’s very simple. His “simple metric” was made clear at a recent “Washington Ideas Forum” in a piece by Atlantic editor Nicole Allan: Unfortunately most fail Taleb’s test. Most get it wrong. Many lie, exaggerate, speak half-truths or, worse, say nothing.

Here’s Taleb’s “simple metric for judging whose economic opinions are worth his time: ‘Did someone predict the crisis before it happened” in the past? “If the answer is no, I don’t want to hear what the person says. If the person saw the crisis coming then I want to hear what they have to say” about future crises.

Taleb target No. 1: Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, who spoke just before Taleb at the forum. Of course, experience tells us you really can’t trust anyone in government. All politicians fudge the numbers, cherry-pick data to suit their personal goals, biases and political rhetoric.

Remember Hank Paulson, Wall Street’s Trojan Horse inside Washington? Earlier he had made over half a billion as Goldman’s CEO. Back in July 2007 before the meltdown he bragged to Fortune that this is “the strongest global economy I’ve seen in my business lifetime.” Never trust anything “leaders” like him say. Never.

Worse, he and our clueless Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke later lied to the public that the subprime crisis was “contained.” No, my friends, you cannot trust politicians and government insiders. Never.

Warning: Never trust economists and bestselling authors

Allan continues: “Other unlucky economic figures who failed Taleb’s test included writers Paul Krugman and Thomas Friedman. ‘You have a million people on this planet who call themselves economists,’ Taleb said. ‘How many people understood the risks of the system” before the crisis? Paul Krugman was not one of them.’”

Taleb warns: Nobel economist Krugman not only supports Keynesian deficit spending, he favors the “transformation of private debt, with all the moral hazard it entails, into public debt” that’s toxic from a “risk standpoint.” Worse, it’s “immoral.” Our “grandchildren should not bear the debts of the grandparents.” OK, add Nobel economists to the list of people Taleb says you can’t trust to speak “the truth.

Actually, using Taleb’s “metric,” you can’t trust any economists. Why? Because all economists, even the best, are capable of making catastrophic errors: Remember Greenspan’s sad apologies during congressional hearings after undermining America for 18 years. And remember Michael Boskin’s classic $12 trillion error? Bush Sr’s chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, a respected Stanford economist, attempted to justify some cockamamie logic that his newfound Social Security savings would lower America’s debt, giving a political boost for his party. He was $12 trillion wrong.

No, folks, you can’t trust any economists, they’re just average humans. Most have strong political biases. They’re hired mercenaries who say whatever their employers ask them to say, pawns working for some Wall Street bank, corporation or politicians.

Yes, Allan reveals another character Taleb can’t trust for economic advice. Prizewinning authors like NY Times columnist Tom Friedman who’s book, The World is Flat is “very bad for society,” misleading, having failed to “assess risk.” So scratch celebrity authors from the list you can trust to tell you the truth about the future of America.

Warning: Never trust Congress, the Fed chairman or the president

Taleb is merciless when it comes to politicians like President Obama, Congress and The Fed chairman: You can’t trust any of them. Earlier Bernanke’s reappointment “stunned” Taleb: He “doesn’t even know he doesn’t understand how things work or that the tools he uses are not empirical,” wrote Taleb in HuffPost. But it’s “the Senators appointing him who are totally irresponsible … The world has never, never been as fragile,” and we’re stuck with an economist running The Fed whose methods make “homeopath and alternative healers look empirical and scientific.”

Obama’s reappointment of Bernanke left Taleb so distraught he “withdrawing into the Platonic tranquility of my library, to work on my next book, find solace in science and philosophy, and … structure trades betting on the next mistake by Bernanke, Summers and Geithner.”

Taleb’s “metric” essentially warns Americans to trust no one, certainly not Washington and Wall Street insiders. The vast majority fail his simple metric, “Did someone predict the last crisis before it happened? … If the answer is no, I don’t want to hear what the person says. If the person saw the crisis coming, then I want to hear what they have to say’.”

In fact, back in 2008 as the subprime credit meltdown accelerated and it was obvious to virtually everyone worldwide, we reported on the cascading bogus predictions made by well-known gurus flooding prime-time news, highlighted in BusinessWeek, Kiplinger’s and USAToday, comments made even as the 2008 crash was spreading worldwide:

Bernanke: “I don’t anticipate any serious failures among large internationally active banks.” Wow, was he ever wrong.

Billionaire Ken Fisher: “This year will end in the plus column … so keep buying.” Main Street lost trillions on advice like this.

‘Mad Money’ Jim Cramer: “Bye-bye bear market, say hello to the bull.”

Goldman Sachs’ Abby Joseph Cohen: “The fear priced into stocks is likely to abate as recession fears fade.” Soon after, Goldman was essentially bankrupt.

Congressman Barney Frank: “Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are fundamentally sound.”

Barron’s: “Home prices about to bottom.” Three years later they still haven’t

Worth: “Emerging markets are the global investors’ safe haven.”

Kiplinger’s: “Stock investors should beat the rush to the banks.” Costly advice.

Bernie Madoff: “It’s virtually impossible to violate the rules.” But it’ll happen again.

Bad calls? Yes, very bad. Back in mid 2008 we reviewed 20 who would meet Taleb’s “metric” and earned our trust for the future. These twenty did warn America between 2000 and 2008. Although few listened: We reported on warnings from economists Gary Shilling, Marc Faber and Nouril Roubini, the St. Louis Fed president (Greenspan ignored him, just as Bernanke is ignoring the Kansas City Fed president today), former Nixon Commerce Secretary and SEC chairman, billionaires Warren Buffett and oilman Richard Rainwater, institutional portfolio managers Jeremy Grantham, Bill Gross and Robert Rodriguez, and major cover stories in Fortune, Harper’s, Vanity Fair, The Economist and The Wall Street Journal.

But for every one warning back then, there were hundreds of happy-talkers inside the Happy Conspiracy’s propaganda machine, conning the public, either unconsciously denying reality or consciously lying about it.

Remember: Bloomberg Markets magazine reported that even Paulson predicted a meltdown was coming. But all he did was privately warn Bush two years earlier, in 2006, then he and the Fed chairman failed to tell the truth to the public for two years. That’s immoral, dishonest, a lie.

So who can you trust? Nobody, not me, not even Taleb. Why? In the final analysis the Buddha said it best: “Believe nothing, no matter where you read it or who has said it, not even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.”

Unfortunately, America is losing its capacity to reason, its common sense, its values, its vision of the future. More of us need to trust Taleb’s “simple metric.”

Economists peddling dire warnings that the world’s number one economy is on the brink of collapse, amid high rates of unemployment and a spiraling public deficit, are flourishing here.

To view dictionary popup window put your cursor on the blue words

Perplexity

“…upon the earth distress•Strongs 4928: sunoche, soon-okh-ay´; from 4912; restraint, i.e. (figuratively) anxiety: — anguish, distress. of nations, with perplexity•Strongs 640: aporia, ap-or-ee´-a; from the same as 639; a (state of) quandary:—perplexity.
•Strongs 639: aporeo, ap-or-eh´-o; from a compound of 1 (as a negative particle) and the base of 4198; to have no way out, i.e. be at a loss (mentally):— (stand in) doubt, be perplexed….”
—Luke 21:25

Divided Nation

“But he, knowing their thoughts, said unto them, Every kingdom•Strongs 932: basileia, bas-il-i´-ah; from 935; properly, royalty, i.e. (abstractly) rule, or (concretely) a realm (literally or figuratively): — kingdom, + reign. divided•Strongs 1266: diamerizo, dee-am-er-id´-zo; from 1223 and 3307; to partition thoroughly (literally in distribution, figuratively in dissension): — cloven, divide, part. against itself is brought to desolation•Strongs 2049: eremoo, er-ay-mo´-o; from 2048; to lay waste (literally or figuratively): — (bring to, make) desolate(-ion), come to nought.; and a house divided against a house falleth.”
—Luke11:17

The guru of this doomsday line of thinking may be economist Nouriel Roubini, thrust into the forefront after predicting the chaos wrought by the subprime mortgage crisis and the collapse of the housing bubble.

“The US has run out of bullets,” Roubini told an economic forum in Italy earlier this month. “Any shock at this point can tip you back into recession.”

But other economists, who have so far stayed out of the media limelight, are also proselytizing nightmarish visions of the future.

Boston University professor Laurence Kotlikoff, who warned as far back as the 1980s of the dangers of a public deficit, lent credence to such dark predictions in an International Monetary Fund publication last week.

He unveiled a doomsday scenario — which many dismiss as pure fantasy — of an economic clash between superpowers the United States and China, which holds more than 843 billion dollars of US Treasury bonds.

“A minor trade dispute between the United States and China could make some people think that other people are going to sell US treasury bonds,” he wrote in the IMF’s Finance & Development review.

“That belief, coupled with major concern about inflation, could lead to a sell-off of government bonds that causes the public to withdraw their bank deposits and buy durable goods.”

Kotlikoff warned such a move would spark a run on banks and money market funds as well as insurance companies as policy holders cash in their surrender values.

“In a short period of time, the Federal Reserve would have to print trillions of dollars to cover its explicit and implicit guarantees. All that new money could produce strong inflation, perhaps hyperinflation,” he said.

“There are other less apocalyptic, perhaps more plausible, but still quite unpleasant, scenarios that could result from multiple equilibria.”

According to a poll by the StrategyOne Institute published Friday, some 65 percent of Americans believe there will be a new recession.

And the view that America is on a decline seems rather well ingrained in many people’s minds supported by 65 percent of people questioned in a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll published last week.

“It is true: Today’s economic problems are structural, not cyclical,” argued New York Times editorial writer David Brooks.

He said the United Sates is losing its world dominance much in the same way the British Empire began to crumble more than a century ago.

“We are in the middle of yet another jobless recovery. Wages have been lagging for decades. Our labor market woes are deep and intractable,” Brooks said.

Nobel Economics Prize winner Paul Krugman also voiced concern about the fate of the fragile economic recovery if voters return the Republicans to political power.

“It’s hard to overstate how destructive the economic ideas offered earlier this week by John Boehner, the House minority leader, would be if put into practice,” he wrote in a recent editorial.

“Fewer jobs and bigger deficits — the perfect combination.”

The Wall Street Journal, usually more favorable to Boehner’s call for tax cuts, ran a commentary from another Nobel Prize-winning economist — Vernon Smith — that failed to provide much comfort for readers.

“This fact needs to be confronted: We are almost surely in for a long slog,” Smith wrote.

And it seems such pessimism has even filtered into the IMF, which warned on Friday that high levels of national debt and a still shaky financial sector threaten to derail the global economic recovery.

“The foreclosure backlog in US property markets is large and growing, in part due to the recent expiration of the home buyer’s tax credit. When realized, this could further depress real estate prices.”

This could lead to “disproportionate losses” for small and medium-sized banks, which could in turn “precipitate a loss of market confidence in the recovery,” the IMF warned.

Inflation—or stagflation—remains the more serious danger than deflation.

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Perplexity

“…upon the earth distress•Strongs 4928: sunoche, soon-okh-ay´; from 4912; restraint, i.e. (figuratively) anxiety: — anguish, distress. of nations, with perplexity•Strongs 640: aporia, ap-or-ee´-a; from the same as 639; a (state of) quandary:—perplexity.
•Strongs 639: aporeo, ap-or-eh´-o; from a compound of 1 (as a negative particle) and the base of 4198; to have no way out, i.e. be at a loss (mentally):— (stand in) doubt, be perplexed….”
—Luke 21:25

Divided Nation

“But he, knowing their thoughts, said unto them, Every kingdom•Strongs 932: basileia, bas-il-i´-ah; from 935; properly, royalty, i.e. (abstractly) rule, or (concretely) a realm (literally or figuratively): — kingdom, + reign. divided•Strongs 1266: diamerizo, dee-am-er-id´-zo; from 1223 and 3307; to partition thoroughly (literally in distribution, figuratively in dissension): — cloven, divide, part. against itself is brought to desolation•Strongs 2049: eremoo, er-ay-mo´-o; from 2048; to lay waste (literally or figuratively): — (bring to, make) desolate(-ion), come to nought.; and a house divided against a house falleth.”
—Luke11:17

A report by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York last week showed that consumers are having difficulty climbing out of the debt hole they dug for themselves before the credit bubble began to deflate in late 2007. The report gives support to the fears of those asset managers and economists who believe the U.S. is facing deflation.

Bill Gross, manager of the $239 billion Pimco bond fund, is one. His evidence is that the Consumer Price Index (CPI), annualized over the last two years, has fallen slightly.

Since deflation, in simple monetarist terms, means too little money chasing too many goods, with a consequent fall in prices, the remedy should be easy. Can’t the Federal Reserve create as much money as it wants with just a few key strokes? Well, there are some things money can’t buy. In political circumstances like today’s, one of them is public confidence.

In fact, the Fed has been fighting deflation for nearly two years. It began pumping new money into the economy after the September 2008 stock market crash to restore liquidity in the financial system. It has kept the pumps running by maintaining a near-zero interest rate target. Its net purchases—with newly created dollars—of government and government-agency bonds have totaled some $1.4 trillion, expanding its balance sheet to $2.3 trillion. As the Fed pumped out new money, member bank reserves ballooned and now exceed $1 trillion. That means a vast amount of money is on deposit in Fed accounts, ready to be flooded into the economy if loan demand increases.

So what’s the problem? Here it is best to depart from monetarist terminology, with its heavy emphasis on the magical powers of the central bank. Those magical powers are highly overrated, as almost anyone who has ever run a central bank will likely tell you. The Fed can flood the banks with liquidity in an effort to stimulate economic growth (if it is willing to run the very serious risk of inflation). But that will not necessarily stimulate a demand for this money.

What’s missing in these times is a strong desire among businesses and consumers to take on new debt, low rates notwithstanding. Corporations can’t even decide what to do with all the surpluses their businesses are generating; they are sitting on vast amounts of cash even though it is earning them minimal investment returns. Because business’s “animal spirits” are suppressed by caution, private-sector hiring is weak, which means the unemployment rate is likely to remain high. As the New York Fed report shows, householders on balance are struggling to pay off the debts piled up during the 2003-2007 credit binge and are building up savings. Consumer spending is relatively flat.

The key word here is “uncertainty.” The Obama administration and Congress have dumped a huge load of highly dubious new legislation on Americans, much of it unread even by the legislators who voted for it. ObamaCare is an attempted federal takeover of a vast and complex industry. No one really knows how much chaos the financial sector “reform” act will generate. Hyperactive zealots in federal bureaucracies such as the Environmental Protection Agency have been unleashed to do silly things like attempt to reduce the planet’s supply of carbon dioxide.

A massively expensive federal “stimulus” program failed to stimulate for the easily predictable reason that the money the government spends on its political projects robs the rest of the economy of resources. Opinion polls show that the soaring federal deficit is of major concern to voters, as it should be.

State and local governments are, on the whole, in terrible financial shape, which means that they will likely be shedding employees and adding to the ranks of the unemployed. The only remedy the Democrats have for cutting the deficit is higher taxes, which in a weak economy likely would be counterproductive.

As a rotating member of the Federal Open Market Committee, Dallas Fed President Richard W. Fisher helps guide national monetary policy. He addressed the uncertainty issue in a recent speech to the San Antonio Chamber of Commerce.

The prevailing sentiment among business leaders he surveys monthly, Mr. Fisher said, is that “the politicians and officials who craft and enforce the rules are doing so in a capricious manner that makes long-term planning difficult, if not impossible. They are increasingly distressed by the lack of consistent direction coming from Washington. . . . So they are calling time-outs and heading for the sidelines while they wait for the referees to settle the rules of the game.”

He added that no amount of further monetary accommodation can offset the retarding effect of heightened uncertainty. Indeed, it would make matters even worse if the private sector concludes that the Fed has become “politically pliable and is prone to substitute such accommodation for fiscal discipline.” Who would ever think that?

Getting back to Mr. Gross and his fears of deflation, it should be noted that he stacked the deck in referring to a two-year average, since that includes the brief period after the 2008 crash when the CPI fell. The index began climbing sharply at midyear 2009 and was showing nearly 3% inflation by the end of the year. A 0.3% rise in July still signals rising prices.

Since U.S. prices correlate inversely with the dollar’s international purchasing power, and since the massive U.S. budget deficit puts downward pressure on the dollar in international markets, inflation surely remains a more serious danger than deflation.

But deflation and inflation predictions could both be right in a sense, if you aren’t too fussy about strict definitions. In the late 1970s, the last time Americans suffered from manic interventionism from Washington, we had “stagflation,” a combination of minimal economic growth and double-digit inflation. It wasn’t pretty.

Stagflation was cured by a set of policies that reversed the Keynesian nostrums then in vogue and that are again the core basis for federal economic policy. In the early 1980s, the Fed tightened money, tax rates were cut, economic regulation was pared sharply and an effort was made to curb nondefense spending. It worked quite well, producing 25 years of economic growth. It will be much harder to repair today’s damage, but the need to make another try is becoming urgent.

Mr. Melloan, a former columnist and deputy editor of the Journal editorial page, is author of “The Great Money Binge: Spending Our Way to Socialism” (Simon & Schuster, 2009).

Experts who worked on the IPCC report say the error by social and biological scientists has unfairly maligned their work

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Days of Noah

“But as the days of Noe were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.”
—Matt 24:37

“These are the generations of Noah: Noah was a just•Strongs 6662: tsaddiyq, tsad-deek´; from 6663; just:—just, lawful, righteous (man). man and perfect•Strongs 8549: tamiym, taw-meem´; from 8552; entire (literally, figuratively or morally); also (as noun) integrity, truth:—without blemish, complete, full, perfect, sincerely (-ity), sound, without spot, undefiled, upright(-ly), whole. in his generations, and Noah walked with God. And Noah begat three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. The earth also was corrupt•Strongs 7843: shachath, shaw-khath´; a primitive root; to decay, i.e. (causatively) ruin (literally or figuratively):—batter, cast off, corrupt(-er, thing), destroy(-er, -uction), lose, mar, perish, spill, spoiler, x utterly, waste(-r). before God, and the earth was filled with violence•Strongs 2555: chamacç, khaw-mawce´; from 2554; violence; by implication, wrong; by meton. unjust gain:—cruel(-ty), damage, false, injustice, x oppressor, unrighteous, violence (against, done), violent (dealing), wrong
•Strongs 2554: chamacç, khaw-mas´; a primitive root; to be violent; by implication, to maltreat:—make bare, shake off, violate, do violence, take away violently, wrong, imagine wrongfully..”
— Genesis 6:9-11

Perilous Times — Lies — And Their Source

“Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it“.
—John 8:44

Climate scientists who worked on the UN panel on global warming have hit out at “sloppy” colleagues from other disciplines who introduced a mistake about melting glaciers into the landmark 2007 report.

The experts, who worked on the section of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report that considered the physical science of global warming, say the error by “social and biological scientists” has unfairly maligned their work. Some said that Rajendra Pachauri, the panel’s chair, should resign, though others supported him.

The IPCC report combined the output from three independent working groups, which separately considered the science, impacts and human response to climate change, and published their findings several months apart.

The report from working group two, on impacts, included a false claim that Himalayan glaciers would melt away by 2035, which was sourced to a report from campaign group WWF. The IPCC was forced to issue a statement of regret, though Pachauri and senior figures on the panel have refused to apologise for the mistake.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, several lead authors of the working group one (WG1) report, which produced the high-profile scientific conclusions that global warming was unequivocal and very likely down to human activity, told the Guardian they were dismayed by the actions of their colleagues.

“Naturally the public and policy makers link all three reports together,” one said. “And the blunder over the glaciers detracts from the very carefully peer-reviewed science used exclusively in the WG1 report.”

Another author said: “There is no doubt that the inclusion of the glacier statement was sloppy. I find it embarrassing that working group two (WG2) would have the Himalaya statement referred to in the way it was.”

Another said: “I am annoyed about this and I do think that WG1, the physical basis for climate change, should be distinguished from WG2 and WG3. The latter deal with impacts, mitigation and socioeconomics and it seems to me they might be better placed in another arm of the United Nations, or another organisation altogether.”

The scientists were particularly unhappy that the flawed glacier prediction contradicted statements already published in their own report. “WG1 made a proper assessment of the state of glaciers and this should have been the source cited by the impacts people in WG2,” one said. “In the final stages of finishing our own report, we as WG1 authors simply had no time to also start double-checking WG2 draft chapters.”

Another said the mistake was made “not by climate scientists, but rather the social and biological scientists in WG2 … Clearly that WWF report was an inappropriate source, [as] any glaciologist would have stumbled over that number.”

The discovery of the glaciers mistake has focused attention on the IPCC’s use of so-called grey literature: reports that do not appear in conventional scientific journals, and are instead drawn from sources such as campaign groups, companies and student theses. The IPCC’s rules allow such grey literature, but many people have been surprised at the scale of its inclusion.

The report from WG2 cited the erroneous WWF report again, though not the glacier claim, in a separate section on human health, and also referenced reports from Greenpeace, the World Resources Institute, wildlife trade group Traffic as well as insurance companies Swiss Re and Axa. Working group three draws extensively on grey literature, including a newspaper article from the Asia Times.

Most WG1 scientists contacted by the Guardian defended the use of grey literature. “In many cases these reports have to use grey literature and anecdotal evidence because there is nothing else available, for example reports of sea level rise on small island states.”

Another author said: “Part of the problem is that WG2 largely involves the social science community. They are more used to referring to a diversity of sources, in fact, expert opinion is also an important analysis tool in the social sciences.”

Several authors defended Pachauri and the IPCC process. “The IPCC is not a hierarchical, top-down organisation. The chapter authors have great freedom in writing their assessment without interference from the top, and so it should be.”

The IPCC correction combined with the release of private emails from global warming scientists at the University of East Anglia has raised suggestions of a crisis in climate science.

“This is a transient and manufactured crisis and will likely go away with time,” one IPCC author said. “What the science community needs is a few huge donors to throw millions of dollars behind PR campaigns to counter the propaganda out there. We are being attacked through baseless smear campaigns and we are not PR experts.”

They added: “The sad reality is this whole manufactured climate controversy is like arguing over the dinner menu on the Titanic as it sinks. The fact is, the climate is warming. Do we want to deal with this problem or not? Do we owe anything to future generations who are not here today to be part of the decision-making process. Science and the IPCC cannot answer these questions.”

Jewish Sanhedrin rabbis unite with Turk on common cause

The Coming Temple

“And there was given me a reed like unto a rod: and the angel stood, saying, Rise, and measure the temple of God, and the altar, and them that worship therein.”
Revelation 11:1

ith the Middle East still in chaos and rumors of war in the air, the idea of rebuilding the Jerusalem Temple on a foundation occupied and administered by Islamic militants might seem fanciful – even preposterous.

But the author of a new book, “The Islamic Antichrist: The Shocking Truth About the Real Nature of the Beast,” returned from Turkey recently with news that a prominent Islamic teacher and best-selling author and Jewish Sanhedrin rabbis are conspiring to do just that.

In a column penned in WND today, author Joel Richardson reveals the historically unprecedented development.

Adnan Oktar, who uses the pen name of Harun Yahya, is a controversial but highly influential Muslim intellectual and author with more than 65 million of his books in circulation worldwide. Oktar recently met with three representatives from the re-established Jewish Sanhedrin, a group of 71 Orthodox rabbis and scholars from Israel, to discuss how religious Muslims, Jews and Christians can work together on the project.

“The objectives of the alliance include waging a joint intellectual and spiritual battle against the worldwide growing tide of irreligiousness, unbelief and immorality,” explains Richardson, who met in Turkey with Oktar. “But even more unusual is their agreement with regard to the need to rebuild the Jewish Temple, a structure that Mr. Oktar refers to as the ‘Masjid (Mosque)’ or the ‘Palace of Solomon.’”

An official statement about the meeting has been published on the Sanhedrin’s website. Concluding the statement is the following call:
“Out of a sense of collective responsibility for world peace and for all humanity we have found it timely to call to the World and exclaim that there is a way out for all peoples. It is etched in a call to all humanity: We are all the sons of one father, the descendants of Adam, and all humanity is but a single family. Peace among Nations will be achieved through building the House of G-d, where all peoples will serve as foreseen by King Solomon in his prayers at the dedication of the First Holy Temple. Come let us love and respect one another, and love and honor and hold our heavenly Father in awe. Let us establish a house of prayer in His name in order to worship and serve Him together, for the sake of His great compassion. He surely does not want the blood of His creations spilled, but prefers love and peace among all mankind. We pray to the Almighty Creator, that you harken to our Call. Together – each according to his or her ability – we shall work towards the building of the House of Prayer for All Nations on the Temple Mount in peace and mutual understanding.”
Oktar explained his vision for the rebuilding of Solomon’s Temple to Richardson:
“The Palace of Solomon is a historically important palace and rebuilding it would be a very wonderful thing. It is something that any Jew, a Christian or a Muslim should welcome with enthusiasm. Every Muslim, every believer will want to return to those days, to experience those days again and, albeit partially, to bring the beauty of those days back to life.”

Oktar added that the Temple of Solomon “will be rebuilt and all believers will worship there in tranquility.” During his meeting with the Sanhedrin Rabbis, Oktar expressed his belief that the Temple could be rebuilt in one year:
“It could be done in a year at most. It could be built to the same perfection and beauty. The Torah says it was built in 13 years, if I remember correctly. It could be rebuilt in a year in its perfect form.”
Richardson later met with Rabbi Abrahamson and Rabbi Hollander, two of the Sanhedrin representatives who conferred with Oktar. Regarding the rebuilding of the Temple, Rabbi Hollander explained, “The building of the Temple is one of the stages in the Messianic process.” But another possibility that has been presented is that the Dome of the Rock that sits so prominently on the Temple Mount be used as “a place prayer for all nations.”

Do you prefer reading e-books? “The Islamic Antichrist” is also available in electronic form at reduced price through Scribd.

“This should be fairly simple,” explained Rabbi Hollander. “It is said that the structure of the Dome in Haram E-Sharrif (the Temple Mount) was originally meant by (Caliph) Omar to be a House of Prayer for Jews, and the Al-Aqsa for Muslims.”

However, he also explained that religious Jews would not be able to enter the Dome of the Rock unless it had first been ritually cleansed according to Jewish halakhic regulations.

This is not the only similar call to rebuild the Jewish Temple, points out Richardson. Yoav Frankel is an Orthodox Jew who has been deeply involved in interfaith dialogue with Muslims and also envisions a shared Temple Mount. The Interfaith Encounter Association is working on a project called “God’s Holy Mountain.” It sees the day when the rebuilt Jewish Temple will exist side by side with the Dome of the Rock.

Richardson sees such plans tying in to Barack Obama’s calls for internationalizing the city of Jerusalem.

A recent poll showed nearly two-thirds of Israelis back the idea of rebuilding the Temple.

“Meanwhile, the work of the Temple Institute, a group that has openly dedicated itself for years to rebuilding the Jewish Temple goes on,” writes Richardson.

It has already created many of the most significant priestly utensils and pieces of furniture necessary for the Temple once it is ready.

“The suggestion of rebuilding the Jewish Temple is deeply significant to Christians, particularly those who are students of Bible prophecy,” explains Richardson. “According to the Bible, an impostor messiah known as the Antichrist will someday invade the land of Israel and ‘set himself up’ in the ‘God’s Temple.’”

Richardson’s book focuses on the striking parallels between the Bible’s prophecies about the coming messiah and Islam’s traditions regarding the one called “the Mahdi” – Islam’s primary messiah figure, who will one day invade the land of Israel and establish his seat of authority on the Temple Mount.

Richardson’s book stands in stark contrast to most other popular prophecy books of the last 40 years.

The student of Islam and the Middle East says that after decades of reading popular prophecy books and even best-selling fiction like the “Left Behind” series, millions of evangelical Christians around the world are expecting the Antichrist to emerge from a revived Roman Empire, which many have assumed is associated with the Roman Catholic Church and the European Union.

Not so, argues Richardson. His book makes the case that the biblical Antichrist is one and the same as the Quran’s Muslim Mahdi.

“The Islamic Antichrist” is almost certain to be greeted in the Muslim world with the same enthusiasm as Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses.” The author, Joel Richardson, is prepared. He has written the book under a pseudonym to protect himself and his family.

“The Bible abounds with proofs that the Antichrist’s empire will consist only of nations that are, today, Islamic,” says Richardson. “Despite the numerous prevailing arguments for the emergence of a revived European Roman empire as the Antichrist’s power base, the specific nations the Bible identifies as comprising his empire are today all Muslim.”

Richardson believes the key error of many previous prophecy scholars involves the misinterpretation of a prediction by Daniel to Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar. Daniel describes the rise and fall of empires of the future, leading to the endtimes. Western Christians have viewed one of those empires as Rome, when, claims Richardson, Rome never actually conquered Babylon and was thus disqualified as a possibility.

It had to be another empire that rose and fell and rose again that would lead to the rule by this “man of sin,” described in the Bible. That empire, he says, is the Islamic Empire, which did conquer Babylon and, in fact, rules over it even today.

Many evangelical Christians believe the Bible predicts a charismatic ruler, the Antichrist, will arise in the last days, before the return of Jesus. The Quran also predicts that a man, called the Mahdi, will rise up to lead the nations, pledging to usher in an era of peace. Richardson makes the case these two men are, in fact, one in the same.

His book was an instant best-seller on the Amazon charts when it debuted Tuesday. It remains No. 1 in two religion categories.

‘Comprehensive Planetary Regime could control development, distribution of all natural resources’

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“And also for the innocent•Strongs 5355: naqiy, naw-kee´; or naqiyi (Joel 4 : 19; Jonah 1 : 14), naw-kee´; from 5352; innocent:—blameless, clean, clear, exempted, free, guiltless, innocent, quit.
•Strongs 5352: naqah, naw-kaw´; a primitive root; to be (or make) clean (literally or figuratively); by implication (in an adverse sense) to be bare, i.e. extirpated:—acquit x at all, x altogether, be blameless, cleanse, (be) clear(-ing), cut off, be desolate, be free, be (hold) guiltless, be (hold) innocent, x by no means, be quit, be (leave) unpunished, x utterly, x wholly. blood that he shed; which the LORD would not pardon•Strongs 5545: saw-lakh´; a primitive root; to forgive:—forgive, pardon, spare..”
—2Ki 24:4

The man President Obama has chosen to be his science czar once advocated a shocking approach to the “population crisis” feared by scientists at the time: namely, compulsory abortions in the U.S. and a “Planetary Regime” with the power to enforce human reproduction restrictions.

“There exists ample authority under which population growth could be regulated,” wrote Obama appointee John Holdren, as reported by FrontPage Magazine. “It has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society.”

Holdren’s comments, made in 1977, mirror the astonishing admission this week of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who said she was under the impression that legalizing abortion with the 1973 Roe. v. Wade case would eliminate undesirable members of the populace, or as she put it “populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”

In 1977, when many scientists were alarmed by predictions of harmful environmental effects of human population growth, Holdren teamed with Paul R. Ehrlich, author of “The Population Bomb,” and his wife, Anne, to pen “Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment.”

Holdren’s book proposed multiple strategies to curb population growth, and, according to the quotes excerpted by FrontPage Magazine, advocated an international police force to ensure the strategies were carried out.

“Such a comprehensive Planetary Regime could control the development, administration, conservation, and distribution of all natural resources, renewable or nonrenewable,” Holdren and the Ehrlichs reportedly wrote. “The Planetary Regime might be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world and for each region and for arbitrating various countries’ shares within their regional limits. … The Regime would have some power to enforce the agreed limits.”

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The website Zombietime has posted photos of text excerpts from “Ecoscience,” referencing even further strategies from Holdren and the Ehrlichs, including compulsory adoption of children born to teenage mothers, forced sterilization and other government-mandated population control measures.

A former Teresa and John Heinz professor of environmental policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, Holdren was appointed as the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and confirmed on March 20 to assume the position informally known as Obama’s “science czar.”

Holdren’s track record shows a trend of alarmist viewpoints on scientific issues, including a statement made in 1973 that the U.S. population of 210 million at the time was “too many, and 280 million in 2040 is likely to be much too many.” In response, Holdren recommended “a continued decline in fertility to well below replacement should be encouraged, with the aim of achieving [zero population growth] before the year 2000.”

The current U.S. population is approximately 304 million.

After the perceived “crisis” of population growth faded, however, Holdren began sounding the alarm over global climate change. In the 1980s Holdren warned of human-caused ecological disasters resulting in the deaths of a billion people before 2020, and as recently as 2006, Holdren warned that sea levels could rise as much as 13 feet by the year 2010.

WND reported Holdren’s participation in a panel predicting a dire future caused by global warming and calling for a global tax on greenhouse gas emissions in a report to the U.N.

Holdren’s activism for greater government involvement drew a negative reaction from other scientists in the form of an open letter to Congress, WND reported.

“This is the same science adviser who has given us predictions of ‘almost certain’ thermonuclear war or eco-catastrophe by the year 2000, and many other forecasts of doom that somehow never seem to arrive on time.

“The sky is not falling; the Earth has been cooling for 10 years, without help. The present cooling was NOT predicted by the alarmists’ computer models, and has come as an embarrassment to them.

“The finest meteorologists in the world cannot predict the weather two weeks in advance, let alone the climate for the rest of the century. Can Al Gore? Can John Holdren? We are flooded with claims that the evidence is clear, that the debate is closed, that we must act immediately, etc, but in fact THERE IS NO SUCH EVIDENCE; IT DOESN’T EXIST.”

During his confirmation, at a hearing before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, Holdren was grilled about his history of predicting calamity and advocating radical measures in response.

Sen. David Vitter, R-La., expressed concern at the hearing that Holdren’s alarmist positions violated a statement made by President Obama when he nominated the Harvard professor:

“The truth is that promoting science isn’t just about providing resources – it’s about protecting free and open inquiry,” Obama said. “It’s about ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology.”

In response, Holdren sought to differentiate between alarmist “predictions” and simply “descriptions” of where America could wind up if it continues on its current path:

“The motivation for looking at the downside possibilities, the possibilities that can go wrong if things continue in a bad direction, is to motivate people to change direction. That was my intention at the time.” Holdren explained. “I think it is responsible to call attention to the dangers that society faces so we will make the investments and make the changes needed to reduce those dangers.”

Regarding his more recent forecasts of environmental doom, Holdren affirmed, “We continue to be on a perilous path with respect to climate change, and I think we need to do more work to get that reversed.”

Nonetheless, Vitter persisted in questioning Holdren’s potential political ideology behind advocating government-mandated population control:

“I’m scared to death that you think this is a proper function of government,” Vitter said. “Do you think that determining optimal population is a proper role of government?”

“No, Senator, I do not,” Holdren answered.

Holdren then explained that current policies, including those that promote health care and opportunities for women, as well as education, naturally create families more likely to have fewer children, thus solving the potential problems of population growth.