In the original Terminator movie, Reese - the heroic resistance character sent to our present from a horrific future in which machines tyrannize humanity - displays a bar code embedded on his arm to convince Sarah Conner he's not nuts and that his story is all-too-real. The bar code, of course, is used to scan people instead of groceries.

Creepy sci-fi in 1984, when the first Terminator movie came out.

An even creepier reality this 2012 - a time when men use machines to tyrannize man.

In Virginia - my home state, but by no means the only state looking into this - lawmakers are "studying" the idea of bar-coding license plates and possibly even embedding radio frequency identification (RFID) tags into them so that every car - and thus, every driver - can be more readily kept track of.

Ostensibly, for mere revenue collection.
The Virginia soviet - er, DMV - issued a report (see here) about a week ago bemoaning the loss of toll fees resulting from cars being able to slip through the revenue gantlet, particularly along the I-95 corridor near Richmond, where automated toll machines are supposed to snap pictures of toll both scofflaws and send them a piece of payin' paper in the mail. It is insufferable that anyone escape paying "their fair share" to use roads they've already paid more than their fair share to use via motor fuels taxes and all the countless other taxes each of us is already forced to pay.

But toll-skippers are small fry - just a convenient excuse to bar code and chip our cars. And thus, us. The DMV soviet's study estimates that, at most, $70,474.73 is lost each year to toll non-payers. Chump change - for an entity that disposes of $85 billion annually (see here). Seventy thousand? It's amazing they even noticed it. Probably, that amount of other people's money is spent on lawmakers' mini-bar incidentals in a month.

Remember the 20 children who died in Newtown, Connecticut.

Remember the 35 children who died in Gaza this month from Israeli bombardments.

Remember the 168 children who have been killed by US drone attacks in Pakistan since 2006.

Remember the 231 children killed in Afghanistan in the first 6 months of this year.

A fascinating new ruling unwittingly illustrates the separate system of 'justice' invented for Muslims in the US after 9/11

Valuable revelations are often found in unlikely places. Such is the case with a fascinating ruling released last week by the New York Court of Appeals, that state's highest court, in the criminal case of People v. Edgar Morales. The facts of the case are quite simple, but the implications of the ruling are profound.

The defendant, Morales, was a member of a Bronx street gang known as the "St. James Boys" (SJB). In August, 2002, Morales and fellow gang members went to a party, saw someone from a rival gang which they believed responsible for a friend's death, and told him to leave. When he refused, they planned to attack him after the party. When the party ended, Morales shot at the rival gang member and his cohorts, severely wounding one of them but also accidentally shooting and killing a 10-year-old girl who was a bystander.

Prosecutors were not content to charge Morales with murder and related crimes. Instead, they charged him with crimes of "terrorism" under an anti-terrorism law that was enacted in New York in the aftermath of the 9/11 attack. When enacting the law, the legislature stated that it is designed to ensure that terrorists "are prosecuted and punished in state courts with appropriate severity". Under the law, this newly created "terrorism" crime is committed whenever one acts with the "intent to intimidate or coerce a civilian population", but the law contains no definition of that term.

At trial, Morales vehemently argued that what he was accused of doing could not possibly be "terrorism", but the prosecutors insisted - and the trial court agreed - that his violence "furthered the [gang]'s objective to intimidate or coerce other Mexican-American gangs in the Bronx and, as a result of those activities, the [gang] intended to intimidate and coerce the entire Mexican-American community." The jury found him guilty on all counts, including the "terrorism" charges, and the Court of Appeals set out to determine whether the terrorism charges were validly applied to this violence.

The United States is often considered a world leader when it comes to deploying the latest biometric security and surveillance technologies. But it could have an unlikely new competitor: Ecuador.

According to Russian company the Speech Technology Center, the small Latin American country has successfully completed installation of "the world's first biometric identification platform, at a nation-wide level, that combines voice and face identification capabilities."

As I reported back in September, Speech Technology Center operates under the name SpeechPro in the United States. The company's controversial technology enables authorities to build a massive database containing several million "voiceprints" of known criminals, suspects, or persons of interest.

When authorities want to ID speakers on an intercepted call, the recording is entered into the database, which provides a match with what SpeechPro claims is about 97 percent accuracy. The system that the firm says it has provided to Ecuador also allows authorities to accumulate a large image database of suspects, with a facial recognition tool that supplements the so-called "VoiceGrid." While facial recognition technology in the past has lacked accuracy, SpeechPro says it has invented algorithms which "deliver reliable results even when facial characteristics have undergone physical changes."

Why is the church still such a force in our society when most of us disregard its clerics' teachings?

A few months ago, Suffolk police stopped me for driving over 30mph. My excuse that East Anglia was so flat it was impossible not to break the limit did not wash, and they sent me on a speed awareness course. Very good it was too. After surveying the human cost of bad driving, I resolved never to speed again. Unfortunately, the instructor was over-fond of his own voice and his lecture went on for hours. "I hope he winds up soon," I whispered to the woman next to me. "I am meant to be speaking to the National Secular Society."

She was a little astonished and a little amused. "A National Secular Society? Why does Britain need a National Secular Society? Surely the secularists have won?"

It can feel that way. The number of people who say they have no religion jumped from 15% in the 2001 census to 25% in 2011. If the remaining 75% were believers, this leap in free-thinking would be significant but not sensational. But those who say they are religious are not faithful to their creeds, or not in any sense that the believers of the past would have recognised. Church attendance is in constant decline. Every year that passes sees congregations become smaller and greyer. As striking as the fall in religious observance is the public's near total disregard for the teachings of the clerics and prelates, who could once claim to be society's moral guides.

Democrats and Republicans alike embrace torture and assassination policies that are an attack on 800 years of civil law.

Eric Bailey: The last four years have seen significant changes in American federal policy in regards to human rights. One of the few examples of cooperation between the Democratic and Republican parties over the last four years has been the passing of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2012. This bill has given the United States military the power to arrest American citizens, indefinitely, without charge, trial, or any other form of due process of law and the Obama administration has and continues to fight a legal battle in federal court to prevent that law from being declared unconstitutional. Obama authorized the assassination of three American citizens, including Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son, admittedly all members of Al Qaeda - all without judicial review.

Additionally, the Guantanamo Bay prison remains open, the Patriot Act has been extended and the TSA has expanded at breakneck speeds. What is your take on America's human rights record over the past four years and can you contrast Obama's policies with those of his predecessor, George W. Bush?

A Milan court fined a Moroccan woman at the center of Silvio Berlusconi's sex-for-hire scandal (EURO)500 ($650) on Monday for failing to appear as a witness twice at the former premier's trial. It ordered her to testify in January.

Karima el-Mahroug, also known as Ruby, is the last witness to be called in the sensational trial that accuses Berlusconi of having paid for sex with el-Mahroug when she was 17, and then trying to cover it up. Both deny having had sex.

The court ordered el-Mahroug, who is in Mexico on vacation, to testify on Jan. 14, confirming the necessity of her testimony.

Prosecutors have accused the defense, which called el-Mahroug as a witness, of engaging in a strategy to delay a verdict - which has included calling witnesses who have failed to show. Italian law does not carry particularly strict penalties against witnesses who fail to appear, and in some cases the court may decide their participation is not essential.

Prosecutors are scheduled to give their closing arguments on Jan. 28, followed by the defense on Feb. 4.

"The Farmers Assurance Provision" is the title of a rider, Section 733, inserted into the House of Representatives 2013 Agriculture Appropriations Bill. Somehow, as a farmer, I don't feel the least bit assured.

The only assurance it provides is that Monsanto and the rest of the agriculture biotech industry will have carte blanche to force the government to allow the planting of their biotech seeds.

In addition, the House Agriculture Committee's 2012 farm bill draft includes three riders - Sections 1011, 10013 and 10014. These amendments would essentially destroy any oversight of new Genetically Engineered (GE) crops by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).

When something unbelievably evil happens in one of our schools, like the recent murder of 27 children and teachers at the Newtown School in Connecticut, the media always tells us the same thing: blame the lone nut(s). But history suggests that many if not most schoolyard massacres, like other large-scale acts of domestic terrorism, have a much more sinister agenda.

Sheriff Pat Sullivan, who ran the Columbine investigation, was arrested last year and convicted of coercing sexual favors from a child in exchange for methamphetamine. His ridiculously short sentence, served in the jail that bears his name, amounted to a slap on the wrist. Rumor has it that Sullivan is part of a pedophile network along the lines of the Finders of Lost Children and the perpetrators of the Franklin Scandal child sex ring.

Some Columbine victims' family members suspect that Sheriff Sullivan was involved in a "butt rape" incident involving the alleged Columbine shooters. Were those shooters mind-controlled sex-abuse victims?

Rogue intelligence agents and their psychiatrist colleagues have been brainwashing "lone nuts" to commit murder at least since the CIA's MK-Ultra program achieved its objectives circa 1960.

Why would such "rogue networks" want to send brainwashed Manchurian Candidates into schools to massacre children?

Let's allow one of the terrorists themselves to answer that question.

In my "quickie" article published less than an hour after the news broke about the Connecticut school shooting, I tried to inject some historical context into the discussion - and do it as fast as possible. Since we know that many if not most "lone nut" massacres are actually false-flag operations, we might as well assume that this one is too. Getting that message out early, in order to shape public opinion while it is still malleable, should be a top priority of everyone who wants to put the real terrorists out of business.

Friday's radio guest Paul Rea responds: "To avoid any appearance of reflexively pour new wine into old cognitive categories, you might consider gathering information, to emerging narratives, and then providing critique of them." I agree that there is a place for this kind of critique - the "judicious study" by the "reality-based community" of the false realities created by "history's actors." But unfortunately, Karl Rove was right: No amount of "judicious study" of false-flag events is ever going to undo the powerful first impressions hammered into the deepest levels of the public mind by media propaganda.

So the first priority of all truth-seekers must be to "catapult the counter-narrative" as quickly as possible.