Granted, the source is prisonplanet.com, which is rather too conspiracy-oriented for my taste, but these people are either meeting or they aren’t. And if they are, regardless of the context, it’s worth talking about. It’s also worth asking why it’s not all over the news like other conferences with similar lists of attendees. [ Former Attendee List | wikipedia.org ]

Here’s a quote from the article, which I think makes a very strong point.

A mere book signing by an ex-politician would generate at least a few headlines, yet we have dozens of CEO’s, European and Federal Reserve banking and finance kingpins, Prime Ministers, European royalty, NSA officials, professors from top Universities, NATO and UN officials, oil company chairmen, and foreign policy luminaries meeting behind closed doors and yet not one single U.S. media report! Not one!

From Wikipedia’s entry:

The group’s secrecy and its connections to power elites has raised concerns for many who believe that the group is part of a conspiracy to create a New World Order. Radio host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones claims the group intends to dissolve the sovereignty of the United States and other countries into a supra-national structure similar to the European Union. Daniel Estulin, writing in Nexus magazine, claims the long-term purpose of Bilderberg is to “Build a One-World Empire.” He states the group “is not the end but the means to a future One World Government”.

So here’s my take: you have a massive list of people who are just “talking”, right? But there are many ties between the Bilderberg group and the Council on Foreign Relations. Not a big deal? Well, perhaps it’s a big deal when the CFR has come right out and said they’re for eliminating the sovereignty of nations.

Again, I’m not even saying One World Government is necessarily a bad thing. I’d have to do a whole lot more research on these various groups before I could say anything like that. But I do know that I don’t like the secrecy.

Quite simply, if they weren’t doing something that they didn’t want people talking about, then why is there a media blackout? And of all the people able to create a media blackout, don’t you think the people meeting in Bilderberg meeting might be able to pull it off?

Thoughts?

Edit: Ok, my buddy Ken just had the most excellent point. Above and beyond the question of whether or not the Bilderberg group is doing something wrong, let’s come at it from another angle. If the goal is to do something good for the world in general, and there are that many important people trying to help, why wouldn’t they have ASKED FOR AND DEMANDED coverage?

I was just taking a shower and had a frightening idea. With all this talk of the National ID program, and the inclusion of biometric identification into the system, I started thinking about other trends in technology that could impact it.

So the main danger, critics argue, of the National ID system is that as it becomes prolific it will get used for more and more purposes. I think this will include private industry before too long. We already send copies of drivers licenses to do credit checks, for example.

Well imagine what will happen when we understand genetics better — all the way to the point where one could have a test done and a computer could map out the person’s tendencies and weaknesses. We’ve all heard about the fat gene, a propensity for violence, being vulnerable to alcoholism, depression, etc.

Well what if that data were to be stored in people’s files? What if it were to be converted into an individual risk matrix (IRM). So on your card (and in the database) would be everything about you up until that point. Obvious things like age, race, height, weight, etc. But also things like country of origin, who your parents were. What affiliations they had (think semantic web), etc.

Now imagine this information being at the disposal of local law enforcement. They stop the Arab kid down the road and run a “query” on him. Hmm…missing school a lot. He’s been going to the local Mosque quite a bit. Oh, and he’s genetically prone to religious devotion by a margin of 2.6 deviations. And he’s walking out of a hardware store with a bunch of mechanical-looking stuff.

Or how about your insurance agency doing a “query” on you. Credit score, genetic risk factors for suicide, depression, heart disease, current health records, etc. And all this information gets run through an algorithm that decides whether you get a policy and how much you’ll be charged.

Or a local redneck at a bar late at night when the cops show up. Ok, he’s at a bar. His father died in a drunk driving accident, he’s divorced, and he has no ride home. Genetics indicate he’s likely to fight if we attempt to arrest him. Call for backup.

The scary thing is that all of these things could be used for good. Some other ideas that open up once the genetic material is easy to attain and replicate:

college admission, dating sites, ordering brides…

Thoughts?