“Mom and Dad” as well as “husband and wife” have been banned from California schools under a bill signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who with his signature also ordered public schools to allow boys to use girls restrooms and locker rooms, and vice versa, if they choose.

“We are shocked and appalled that the governor has blatantly attacked traditional family values in California,” said Karen England, executive director of Capitol Resource Institute.

“With this decision, Gov. Schwarzenegger has told parents that their values are irrelevant. Many parents will have no choice but to pull their children out of the public schools that have now become sexualized indoctrination centers.”

“Arnold Schwarzenegger has delivered young children into the hands of those who will introduce them to alternative sexual lifestyles,” said Randy Thomasson, president of Campaign for Children and Families, which worked to defeat the plans. “This means children as young as five years old will be mentally molested in school classrooms.

“Shame on Schwarzenegger and the Democrat politicians for ensuring that every California school becomes a homosexual-bisexual-transsexual indoctrination center,” he said.

(Story continues below)

Analysts have warned that schools across the nation will be impacted by the decision, since textbook publishers must cater to their largest purchaser, which often is California, and they will be unlikely to go to the expense of having a separate edition for other states.

The bills signed by Schwarzenegger include SB777, which bans anything in public schools that could be interpreted as negative toward homosexuality, bisexuality and other alternative lifestyle choices.

There are no similar protections for students with traditional or conservative lifestyles and beliefs, however.

“SB 777 will result in reverse discrimination against students with religious and traditional family values,” said Meredith Turney, legislative liaison for Capitol Resource Institute. “These students have lost their voice as the direct result of Gov. Schwarzenegger’s unbelievable decision. The terms ‘mom and dad’ or ‘husband and wife’ could promote discrimination against homosexuals if a same-sex couple is not also featured.

“Parents want the assurance that when their children go to school they will learn the fundamentals of reading, writing and arithmetic – not social indoctrination regarding alternative sexual lifestyles. Now that SB777 is law, schools will in fact become indoctrination centers for sexual experimentation,” she said.

Also signed was AB394, which targets parents and teachers for such indoctrination through “anti-harassment” training, CCF said.

Schwarzenegger had vetoed almost identical provisions a year ago, saying existing state law already provided for penalties for discrimination.

“We had hoped that the governor would once again veto this outrageous legislation but he obviously decided to side with the out-of-touch extremists that control the legislature. This law does not reflect the true values of the average Californian,” said England. “True leadership means standing up for what is true and right.”

Thomasson said SB777 prohibits any “instruction” or school-sponsored “activity” that “promotes a discriminatory bias” against “gender” – the bill’s definition includes cross-dressing and sex changes – as well as “sexual orientation.”

“Because no textbook or instruction in California public schools currently disparages transsexuality, bisexuality, or homosexuality, the practical effect of SB777 will be to require positive portrayals of these sexual lifestyles at every government-operated school,” CCF noted.

Offenders will face the wrath of the state Department of Education, up to and including lawsuits.

CCF noted that now on a banned list will be any text, reference or teaching aid that portrays marriage as only between a man and woman, materials that say people are born male or female (and not in between), sources that fail to include a variety of transsexual, bisexual and homosexual historical figures, and sex education materials that fail to offer the option of sex changes.

Further, homecoming kings now can be either male or female – as can homecoming queens, and students, whether male or female, must be allowed to use the restroom and locker room corresponding to the sex with which they choose to identify.

AB394 promotes the same issues through state-funded publications, postings, curricula and handouts to students, parents and teachers.

It also creates the circumstances where a parent who says marriage is only for a man and a woman in the presence of a lesbian teacher could be convicted of “harassment,” and a student who believes people are born either male or female could be reported as a “harasser” by a male teacher who wears women’s clothes, CCF said.

Thomasson said Schwarzenegger also signed AB14, which prohibits state funding for any program that does not support a range of alternative sexual practices, including state-funded social services run by churches.

Affected will be day cares, preschool or after-school programs, food and housing programs, senior services, anti-gang efforts, jobs programs and others.

Thomasson said it also forces every hospital in California – even private, religious hospitals – to adopt policies in support of transsexuality, bisexuality, and homosexuality and opens up nonprofit organizations to lawsuits if they exclude members that engage in homosexual, bisexual, or transsexual conduct.

“It’s the height of intolerance to punish individuals, organizations, businesses, and churches that have moral standards on sexual conduct and sexual lifestyles,” said Thomasson, in response to the signing of AB14. “This is another insensitive law that violates people’s moral boundaries.”

The vitriol over the issue rose to new levels in its latest campaign.

As WND reported, a board member for the homosexual advocacy group Equality California verbally attacked and threatened CRI for its opposition to the bill earlier.

The board member sent an e-mail and video to CRI threatening the group would be buried if it continued efforts opposing the homosexual advocacy.

“The shocking hate mail we received shows that those behind this legislation do not promote true tolerance,” said England. “Only politically correct speech will be tolerated. Those with religious or traditional moral beliefs will not be allowed to express their opinions in public schools.”

She also cited an informational document published by the Gay-Straight Alliance Network and the Transgender Law Center that already is lobbying for special treatment in the school system.

“If you want to use a restroom that matches your gender identity … you should be allowed to do so,” it advises. “Whenever students are divided up into boys and girls, you should be allowed to join the group or participate in the program that matches your gender identity as much as possible.”

Further, the groups advise, “If you change your name to one that better matches your gender identity, a school needs to use that name to refer to you.” The advocacy group also warns schools against bringing parents into any such discussion with students.

WND has documented a number of earlier cases in which educators, including leaders in California, have taken it upon themselves to promote a homosexual lifestyle to children under their charge.

WND reported California Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell, under whose supervision hundreds of thousands of children are being educated, has used his state position and taxpayer-funded stationery to praise a “gay” pride event used in the past to expose children to sexually explicit activities.

That drew vehement objections from several educators, including Priscilla Schreiber, the president of the Grossmont Unified High School District governing board.

“I am outraged that a person in this high-ranking elected position would advocate an event where diversity is not just being celebrated but where pornography and indecent exposure is being perpetrated on the young and innocent children of our communities,” she said.

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=58130

In 2004 when the FDA approved implanting microchips in humans, the manufacturer said it would save lives, letting doctors scan the tiny transponders to access patients’ medical records almost instantly. The FDA found “reasonable assurance” the device was safe, and a sub-agency even called it one of 2005’s top “innovative technologies.”

But neither the company nor the regulators publicly mentioned this: A series of veterinary and toxicology studies, dating back to the mid-1990s, strongly suggested that chip implants had “induced” malignant tumors in some laboratory mice and rats.

“Potential investors should be told how a hacker can simply walk by a chipped person and clone his or her VeriChip signal, a threat demonstrated by security researcher Jonathan Westhues months ago,” says McIntyre, who is a former federal bank examiner.

Political strategist Mike Baker believes the national ID cards will eventually lead to the micro chipped society, since the ID cards can be lost, forged or stolen. The National ID cards are being touted as a security measure against terrorism and organized crime. It will eventually become necessary to have the implant if one wishes to open a bank account, enter a federal building, buy an airline ticket or travel on Amtrack, just to name a few. Will Christians who refuse to take their RFID microchip be the new terrorist in this Brave New World?

http://www.newswithviews.com/NWVexclusive/exclusive120.htm

http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewPrint.asp?Page=/Commentary/archive/200708/COM20070829c.html

(Editor’s note: This commentary contains passages from children’s books that may offend some people.)

Illinois School District 126, covering Alsip, Hazelgreen and Oak Lawn, has defended its choice to assign summer reading to 12- and 13-year-olds that is replete with harsh profanity and references to teen sex (even teen sex with adults).

Prairie Junior High School’s required reading list for rising 8th graders gave children six books to choose from over the summer. Parents have complained that three of the six books contain adult content which is highly age-inappropriate.

Those complaints, however, have fallen on deaf ears. At a recent school board meeting, school board members said they intend to continue assigning the books. The following are excerpts from just a handful of the many salacious passages found in one of the books, Fat Kid Rules the World, by K. L. Going:

(Warning: adult content not suitable for children):

– God, I want to touch her. Her legs are full. … If I could just reach under that skirt. … (p. 6)
– No one beats me or f-s me without my permission. (p. 11)
– F-k off, morons. (p. 47)
– I swear I’ll tear your g-d*mn, f-ing b*lls off…(p. 57)
–”She’d f-k you if you stay in the band,” he says (p. 141)
– …and now he has promised me that a forty-something woman will sleep with me if I’m the drummer (p. 142)

(Classy stuff, Prairie Junior High. Is that how you talk in front of your kids, Principal Gwaltney?)

To add insult to injury, the school didn’t even have the courtesy to warn these kids — or their parents — about the adult content within the assigned reading. And parents are understandably furious. If one of my daughters came to me at twelve having been assigned this smut, I’d be ticked-off too.

Whatever happened to classics like Ivanhoe or Up From Slavery? Sure, some of them may even contain limited profanity and adult content, but there’s a big difference. The profane content in Fat Kid isn’t sporadic. It’s pervasive and gratuitous. The book has 110 pages containing the f-word and other profanities, and there are multiple crude sexual references.

With all the objectionable material children are subjected to on the internet, on television and in theatres, it’s outrageous that educators, who are charged with helping to mold the minds of these 12- and 13-year-olds, would willingly — if not eagerly — contribute to their moral degradation by pushing this kind of vulgarity on them. It amounts to educational malpractice, and School District 126 should have its mouth washed out with soap.

I telephoned Robert Berger, superintendent of schools for District 126, fully expecting him to assure me that this foolishness would be remedied. But instead, his response was defiant, defensive and arrogant.

Berger refused to answer me when I asked him several times if District 126 believed that such mature content was appropriate for children. (I wonder; if it’s so appropriate, then why wouldn’t he defend it?)

I asked Berger if one could infer that the district found the material appropriate since it was assigned to children. He quipped, “Infer whatever you want to.”

No one’s calling for a book burning here, but c’mon, these are just kids. Does District 126 have any standards of decency at all?

Unfortunately the actions of District 126 are symptomatic of a metastasizing moral malady within our larger system of public education. Kids in public schools across the country are constantly inundated with material which promotes profanity, homosexuality, promiscuity and abortion.

The Agenda is pushed and the curriculum set by leftist groups like the National Education Association (NEA), the ACLU and the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN). Even the American Library Association (ALA) gave Fat Kids its “Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature.” The book also received a rave review from America’s largest homosexual activist literary organization, Lambda Literary Foundation.

By constantly lowering the bar on decency, educators are intentionally playing a game of ideological limbo with our children’s moral well-being as they seek to create little moral relativists in their own iconoclastic self-image. And they’re robbing kids of great reading like Oliver Twist, Treasure Island and many others in the process.

How low will they go?

By the looks of things in Alsip, Illinois, they’re not going to bottom out anytime soon.

(Matt Barber, an attorney concentrating in constitutional law, is policy director for cultural issues at Concerned Women for America.)

http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewPrint.asp?Page=/Commentary/archive/200708/COM20070829c.html
 

The former secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services in President Bush’s first term sees it as a potentially life-saving move because the chip will have details of his medical history should he ever be in an accident.

Thompson will be among the first humans to get the chip. Pets have been routinely chipped at pounds and veterinarians’ offices in recent years.
Thompson, who recently joined the board of directors of VeriChip, said he believed the technology was an important and secure means of accessing medical records and other information.

Thompson sees the chip as extremely useful for doctors requiring personal information that will help medical professionals and others provide emergency treatment.

The chips contain a 16-digit identification code that can be scanned at hospitals and then linked to a database that contains users’ medical data.

Thompson said he will receive the implant when more hospitals have the scanning technology, which could be “as soon as six months to a year.”

FDA approved the chips in October 2004. About 7,000 chips have been sold and about 2,000 have been implanted worldwide, according to Scott Silverman, chairman of Applied Digital, which owns VeriChip.

Two hospitals – Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston – currently are equipped to scan the chips, Silverman said.

Thompson predicted that people eventually will overcome their skepticism about having a chip implanted. The chip “will prevent babies from being picked up by the wrong people in a maternity ward and make sure people in nursing homes don’t walk away,” he said.

“yet another horror story from a Planned Parenthood abortion mill” – Said to be “just the tip of the iceberg”

OMAHA, September 4, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) – As pro-lifers protested on Saturday at the Omaha home of Planned Parenthood abortionist Meryl Severson, news broke that Severson is being sued by a 40-year old woman whose abortion he botched.

The woman, who filed the suit Friday under the pseudonym “Jane Roe,” alleges that Severson so severely botched her abortion that she lost 80% of her total blood volume and required an emergency hysterectomy to save her life.

According to the complaint, the woman reported to the Lincoln Planned Parenthood office on August 17, 2007, for an abortion in the 8th week of pregnancy. During the suction abortion, she felt a sharp, excruciating pain and asked abortionist Severson to stop. Three employees then held the woman down while he completed the suction process in spite of her pleas.

In the recovery area, a friend who accompanied her to the abortion clinic attempted to help her to the bathroom, but the woman, who was in intense pain and bleeding, passed out and suffered the first of three seizures.

The woman was transported by ambulance to the local hospital where doctors treated her for “catastrophic perforation” of the uterus, which would have resulted in her death if treatment had been delayed any longer.

“This is yet another horror story from a Planned Parenthood abortion mill,” said Operation Rescue President Troy Newman. “How many women has this happened to that have not filed lawsuits? When we see stories like this, we know it is just the tip of the iceberg.”

Severson lives in Omaha, but splits his time between three abortion mills in Lincoln, Nebraska; Council Bluffs and Sioux City, Iowa.

Larry Donlan of Rescue the Heartland led the protest at Severson’s home that included one of Operation Rescue’s Truth Trucks, which circled through the neighborhood showing the consequences of abortion.

“People need to be aware that when they walk into a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic, they may not walk out,” said Newman.

Source URL: http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2007/sep/07090405.html
 
LifeSiteNews.com

Zhang Zhengrong, a doctor who oversees the city’s first-aid hotline for pregnant teens, said 46 percent of the more than 20,000 teenage girls who called the hotline over the past two years said they had had sex with boys they met on the Internet.

“Most of the fathers disappeared after learning about the pregnancy, and some of the mothers did not even know the fathers’ names,” the China Daily said.

Zhang blamed the situation on adult Web sites, videos and books and appealed to parents, teachers and society at large to pay more attention to sex education.

A survey by Zhang’s hospital found that only 7.9 percent of the parents queried talked to their children about sex, and 79 percent of high school and university students said they got their ideas about sex from the Internet.

Chinese attitudes towards sex have relaxed in recent decades, triggering a boom in extramarital relationships which the ruling Communist Party blames on bourgeois mores imported from the West.

The procedure for offing people from a live video stream goes something like this.  The first step is to align successive video frames, using fast computational techniques that detect and reorient patterns of pixels in successive frames.  The computer stitches together the sequence of aligned frames into a mosaic that is constantly rebuilt as the computer receives new frames.  In the case of skater Katarina Witt, the mosaics store information about what is behind her as she moves.  While this is going on, fast frame-to-frame comparisons based on a Sarnoff-grown computational technique called “pyramid processing” enable the system to isolate and track objects moving in the foreground.

The key to pyramid processing is the succession of lower resolution versions of each frame it produces.  Rather than having to compare full sets of pixels to detect frame-to-frame differences, such as Witt moving a few inches on the ice, the computer can rely on the reduced pixel sets.  That greatly simplifies calculations, such as ones that track patterns of pixels that travel together through sequences of frames.

To erase Witt, the system summons the piece of the mosaicked background and inserts those pixels wherever the foreground pixel patterns change.  By detecting which sets of pixels move with respect to one another and which sets remain relatively fixed, pyramid processing computers can track moving objects against stationary backgrounds.  Since these calculations are doable in less than the thirtieth of a second between frames, there’s time to replace moving foreground pixels with background pixels.  Do that and you can make a skater—or anything else—vanish.

HOW TO ERASE A SKATER

1. Take the video. Camera at rink produces a sequence of video frames.  A computer stitches the frames together in a mosaic showing the entire sequence and background.

2. Find the subject.  Software isolates and tracks the skater in the foreground, keeping track of the background being occluded at every instant.

3. Poof!  She’s gone.  Pixels from the background mosaic are substituted for the parts of the image in which the skater appears.

In the clip, Witt gracefully plies the ice for about 20 seconds.  Then came what is perhaps one of the most unusual sports replays ever seen.  The background was the same, the camera movements were the same.  In fact, the image was identical to the original in all ways except for a rather important one: Witt had disappeared, along with all signs of her, such as shadows or plumes of ice flying from her skates.  In their place was exactly what you would expect if Witt had never been there to begin with—the ice, the walls of the rink and the crowd.

So what’s the big deal, you ask. After all, Stalin’s staff routinely airbrushed persona non grata out of photos more than a half-century ago. And Woody Allen ushered a variation on reality morphing into the movies 17 years ago with Zelig, in which he inserted himself next to Adolf Hitler and Babe Ruth. In films such as Forrest Gump and Wag the Dog, reality twisting has become commonplace. 

What sets the Witt demo apart—way apart—is that the technology used to “virtually delete” the skater can now be applied in real time, live, even as a camera records a scene and instantly broadcasts it to viewers.  In the fraction of a second between video frames, any person or object moving in the foreground can be edited out, and objects that aren’t there can be edited in and made to look real.  “Pixel plasticity,” Livingston calls it. The implication for those at the satellite imagery conference was sobering: Pictures from orbit may not necessarily be what the satellite’s electronic camera actually recorded.

But the ramifications of this new technology reach beyond satellite imagery.  As live electronic manipulation becomes practical, the credibility of all video will become just as suspect as Soviet Cold War photos.  The problem stems from the nature of modern video.  Live or not, it is made of pixels, and as Livingston says, pixels can be changed.

The best-known examples of real-time video manipulation so far are “virtual insertions” in professional sports broadcasts.  Last January 30, for instance, nearly one-sixth of humankind in more than 180 countries repeatedly saw an orange first-down line stretched across the gridiron as they watched the Super Bowl.  Princeton Video Imaging (PVI) in Lawrenceville, N.J., created that line, stored it in a computer, and inserted it into the live feed of the broadcast.  To help determine where to insert the orange pixels, several game cameras were fitted with sensors that tracked the cameras spatial positions and zoom levels.  Adding to the illusion of reality was the ability of the PVI system to make sure that players and referees occlude the virtual line when their bodies traverse it.

Last spring and summer, as PVI and rivals such as New Yorkbased Sportvision were airing virtual insertion products, including simulated billboards on walls behind major league batters, a team of engineers from Sarnoff Corp. in Princeton, N.J., flew to the Coalition Allied Operations Center of NATO’s Operation Allied Force in Vicenza, Italy.  Their mission: transform their experimental video processing technology into an operational tool for rapidly locating and targeting Serbian military vehicles in Kosovo.  The project was dubbed TIGER, for “targeting by image georegistration.”  “Our goal was to be able to fire precisionguided munitions at Serbian military vehicles—just dial in the coordinates and the thing goes,” explains Michael Hansen, a young, caffeinated Sarnoff gadgeteer who can hardly believe he was helping fight a war last year.

Compared to PVI’s job, the military’s technical task was more difficult—and the stakes were much higher.  Instead of altering a football broadcast, the TIGER team manipulated a live video feed from a Predator, an unmanned reconnaissance craft flying some 450 meters above Kosovo battlefields.  Rather than superimposing virtual lines or ads into sports settings, the task was to overlay, in real time, “georegistered” images of Kosovo onto the corresponding scenes streaming in live from the Predator’s video camera.  The terrain images had been previously captured with aerial photography and digitally stored.  The TIGER system, which automatically detected moving objects against the background, could almost instantly feed to the targeting officers the coordinates for any piece of Serbian hardware in the Predator’s view.  This was quite a technical feat, since the Predator was moving and its angle of view was constantly changing, yet those views had to be electronically aligned and registered with the stored imagery in less than one-thirtieth of a second (to match the frame rate of video recording).

In principle, the targeting step could have been hotwired to precision guided weapons.  “We weren’t actually doing that in Allied Force,” Hansen notes.  “We were just telling targeting officers exactly where Serbian targets were and then they would vector in planes to go strike the targets.”  That way the human decision makers could pre-empt flawed machine-made decisions. According to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, TIGER technology was used extensively in the final three weeks of the Kosovo operation, during which “80 to 90 percent of the mobile targets were hit.”

So far, real-time video manipulation has been within the grasp only of technologically sophisticated organizations such as TV networks and the military.  But developers of the technology say it’s becoming simple and cheap enough to spread everywhere.  And that has some observers wondering whether real-time video manipulation will erode public confidence in live television images, even when aired by news outlets.  “Seeing may no longer be believing,” says Norman Winarsky, corporate vice president for information technology at Sarnoff. “You may not know what to trust.”

THE SUBLIME TO THE RIDICULOUS

A crude form of video manipulation already is happening in the satellite imagery community.  The weekly publication Space News reported earlier this year that the Indian government releases imagery from its remote-sensing satellites only after defense facilities have been “processed out.”  In this case, it’s not real-time manipulation and it’s up front, like a censor’s black marker.  But pixels are plastic.  It is perfectly possible now to insert sets of pixels into satellite imagery data that interpreters would view as battalions of tanks, or war planes, or burial sites, or lines of refugees, or dead cows that activists claim are victims of a biotech accident.

A demo tape supplied by PVI bolsters the point in the prosaic setting of a suburban parking lot.  The scene appears ordinary except for a disturbing feature: Amidst the SUVs and minivans are several parked tanks and one armored behemoth rolling incongruously along.  Imagine a tape of virtual Pakistani tanks rolling over the border into India pitched to news outlets as authentic, and you get a feel for the kind of trouble that deceptive imagery could stir up.

Commercial suppliers of virtual insertion services are too focused on new marketing opportunities to worry much about geopolitics.  They have their eyes on far more lucrative markets.  Suddenly those large stretches of programming between commercials—the actual show, that is—become available for billions of dollars worth of primetime advertising.  PVI’s demo tape, for instance, includes a scene in which a Microsoft Windows box appears—virtually, of course—on the shelf of Frasier Crane’s studio.  This kind of product placement could become more and more important as new video recording technologies such as TiVo and RePlayTV give viewers more power to edit out commercials.

Dennis Wilkinson, a Porsche-driving, sports-loving marketing expert who became CEO of 10-year-old PVI about a year ago, couldn’t be happier about that.  Wilkinson’s eyes gleam when he describes a (near) future in which virtual insertion technology pushes advertisements to the personalized extreme.  Combined with data-mining services by which browsers’ individual likes, dislikes and purchasing patterns can be relentlessly tracked and analyzed, virtual insertion opens up the ability to shunt personally targeted advertisements over phone lines or cables to Web users and TV viewers.  Say you like Pepsi but your neighbor next door likes Coke and your neighbor across the street likes Seven- Up—the kind of data harvestable from supermarket checkout records.  It will become possible to tailor the soft-drink image in the broadcast signal to reach each of you with your preferred brand.

Just 15 minutes up the road from PVI, Sarnoff’s Winarsky is also glowing—not so much about capturing market share as about the transforming power of the technology.  Sarnoff has a distinguished history in that regard; the company is the descendant of RCA Laboratories, which started innovating in television technology in the early 1940s and has given birth to a plethora of media technologies.  The color TV picture tube, liquid crystal displays and high-definition TV all came, at least in part, from RCA qua Sarnoff, which has five technical Emmys in its lobby.

The ability to manipulate video data in real time, he says, has just as much potential as some of these forerunners.  “Now that you can alter video in real time, you have changed the world,” he says.  That may sound inflated, but after looking at the Katarina Witt demo, Winarsky’s talk of “changing the world” loses some of its air of hyperbole.

Deleting people or objects from live video, or inserting prerecorded people or objects into live scenes, is only the beginning of the deceptions becoming possible.  Pretty much any piece of video that has ever been recorded is becoming clip art that producers can digitally sculpt into the story they want to tell, according to Eric Haseltine, senior vice president for R&D at Walt Disney Imagineering in Glendale, Calif.  With additional video manipulation technologies, previously recorded actors can be made to say and do things they have never actually done or said.  “You can have dead actors star again in entirely new movies,” says Haseltine.

Contemporary shots featuring footage of dead performers have been around for several years.  But the Hollywood illusioncraft that, for example, inserted John Wayne into a TV commercial required painstaking, frame-by-frame post-production work by skilled technicians.  There’s a big difference now, says Haseltine: “What used to take an hour [per video frame], now can be done in a sixtieth of a second.”  This dramatic speed-up means that manipulation can be done in real time, on the fly, as a camera records or broadcasts.  Not only can John Wayne, Fred Astaire or Saddam Hussein be virtually inserted into preproduced ads, they could be inserted into, say, a live broadcast of The Drew Carey Show.

The combination of real-time, virtual insertion with existing and emerging post-production techniques opens up a world of manipulative opportunity.  Consider Video Rewrite technology, which its developers at the Interval Corp. and the University of California, Berkeley first demonstrated publicly three years ago.  With just a few minutes of video of someone talking, their system captures and stores a set of video snapshots of the way that a person’s mouth-area looks and moves when saying different sets of sounds.  Drawing from the resulting library of “visemes” makes it possible to depict the person seeming to say anything the producers dream up—including utterances that the subject wouldn’t be caught dead saying.

In one test application, computer scientist Tim Bregler, now of Stanford University, and colleagues digitized two minutes of public-domain footage of President John F. Kennedy speaking during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.  Using the resulting viseme library, the researchers created “animations” of Kennedy’s mouth saying things he never said, among them, “I never met Forrest Gump.”  With technology like this, nearfuture political activists conceivably will be able to orchestrate webcasts of their opponents saying things that might make Howard Stern sound like a mensch.

Haseltine believes video manipulation techniques will quickly be carried to their logical extreme: “I can predict with absolute certainty,” he says,“that one person sitting at a computer will be able to write a script, design characters, do the lighting and wardrobe, do all of the acting and dialog, and post production, distribute it on a broadband network, do all of this on a laptop—and viewers won’t know the difference.”

THE END OF AUTHENTICITY

So far, the widely witnessed applications of real-time video manipulation have been in benign arenas like sports and entertainment.  Already last year, however, the technology began diffusing beyond these venues into applications that raised eyebrows.  Last fall, for instance, CBS hired PVI to virtually insert the network’s familiar logo all over New York City—on buildings, billboards, fountains and other places—during broadcasts of the network’s The Early Show.  The New York Times ran a front-page story in January raising questions about the journalistic ethics of altering the appearance of what is really there.

The combination of real-time virtual insertion, cyber-puppeteering, video rewriting and other video manipulation technologies with a mass-media infrastructure that instantly delivers news video worldwide has some analysts worried.  “Imagine you are the government of a hypothetical country that wants more international financial assistance,” says George Washington University’s Livingston.  “You might send video of a remote area with people starving to death and it may never have happened,” he says.  Haseltine agrees.  “I’m amazed that we have not seen phony video,” he says, before backpedaling a bit:“Maybe we have. Who would know?”

It’s just the sort of scenario played out in the 1998 movie Wag the Dog, in which top presidential aides conspire with a Hollywood producer to televise a virtually crafted war between the United States and Albania to deflect attention from a budding Presidential scandal.  Haseltine and others wonder when reality will imitate art imitating reality.

The importance of the issue will only intensify as the technology becomes more accessible.  What now typically requires an $80,000 box of electronics the size of a small refrigerator should soon be doable with a palm-sized card (and ultimately a single chip) that fits inside a commercial video recorder, according to Winarsky.  “This will be available to people in Circuit City,” he says.  Consumer gear for virtual video insertion is likely to require a camcorder with a specialized image-processing card or chip.  This hardware will take signals from the camera’s electronic image sensors and convert them into a form that can be analyzed and manipulated in a computer using appropriate software—much as photo editors at newspapers use Adobe Photoshop and other programs to “clean up” digital image files.  A home user might, for instance, insert absent family members into the latest reunion tape or remove strangers they would prefer not to be in the scene—bringing Soviet-style historical revisions right into the family den.

Combine the potential erosion of faith in video authenticity with the so-called “CNN effect” and the stage is set for deception to move the world in new ways.  Livingston describes the CNN effect as the ability of mass media to go beyond merely reporting what is happening to actually influencing decision-makers as they consider military, international assistance and other national and international issues.  “The CNN effect is real,” says James Currie, professor of political science at the National Defense University at Fort McNair in Washington.  “Every office you go into at the Pentagon has CNN on.  ”And that means, he says, that a government, terrorist or advocacy group could set geopolitical events in motion on the strength of a few hours worth of credibility achieved by distributing a snippet of well-doctored video.

With experience as an army reservist, as a staffer with a topsecret clearance on the Senate’s Intelligence Committee, and as a legislative liaison for the Secretary of the Army, Currie has seen governmental decision-making and politicking up close.  He is convinced that real-time video manipulation will be, or already is, in the hands of the military and intelligence communities.  And while he has no evidence yet that any government or nongovernment organization has deployed video manipulation techniques, real-time or not, for political or military purposes, he has no problem conjuring up disinformation scenarios.  For example, he says, consider the impact of a fabricated video that seemed to show Saddam Hussein “pouring himself a Scotch and taking a big drink of it.  You could run it on Middle Eastern television and it would totally undermine his credibility with Islamic audiences.”

For all the heavy breathing, however, some experts remain unconvinced that real-time video manipulation poses a real threat, no matter how good the technology gets.  John Pike, an analyst of the intelligence community for the Federation of American Scientists in Washington,D.C., says the credibility risks are simply too great for governments or serious organizations to get caught attempting to spoof the public.  And for the organizations that would be willing to risk it, says Pike, the news folks—knowing just what the technology can do—will become increasingly vigilant.

“If some human rights organization popped up at CNN with some video, particularly an organization they were not familiar with, I would think that [CNN] would consider that radioactive,” says Pike.  Same goes for nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).  “No responsible director of an established organization would authorize such a thing.  And they would fire on the spot anyone caught doing it.  The stock-in-trade of NGO policy organizations is that ‘we tell the truth.’”

Even cool heads like Pike, however, concede that the media’s fortress of skepticism has an Achilles heel: the Internet.  “The issue is not so much your ability to get fake video on CNN, but to get it online,” he says.  That’s because so much Internet content is unfiltered.  “This could play into the phenomenon in the news production process where you would not replicate the original report, but you might report that it was reported,” says Pike.  And that could cascade into a CNN effect.  “These are undoubtedly experiments that will be done,” Pike says.

The trouble is, says Livingston, it may only take a few such experiments to forever make people question the authenticity of video.  That could have enormous repercussions for military, intelligence and news operations.  An ironic sociological consequence might emerge: a return to heavier reliance on unmediated face-to-face communication.  In the meantime, though, there will undoubtedly be some interesting twists and turns as pixels become ever more plastic.

FROM TECHNOLOGY REVIEW

REBUTTAL: The New Testament was sealed with the apostles’ blood.  They put their money where their mouths were.  The Greek word for “witness” –– as in the idea of witnessing to the truth about Jesus –– is “martyro,” from whence we get the word martyr.  Why?  Because so many witnesses to Jesus, e.g., the apostles, were killed for testifying about what they themselves saw.  Brown glibly ignores this history and, instead, exalts the questionable writings of second-, third-, and fourth-century Gnostic Christians, who were sexual libertines for the most part.  (Other Gnostics were strict legalists.)

ERROR: The doctrine that Jesus was divine was created by a pagan emperor in the fourth century, Constantine, for the purposes of manipulation: “It was all about power.”

REBUTTAL: After the Resurrection, Christians worshiped Jesus because He was divine.  They called Him “Kurios,” the Greek word for “Lord.”  In the Septuagint –– the Greek translation of the Old Testament that Jesus and the apostles had (translated roughly 150 B.C.) –– the word used for Yahweh is Kurios.  For a Jew to say that a human was Kurios was absolutely forbidden.
 
ERROR: No one believed, prior to the Council of Nicea in A.D. 325 that Jesus was divine.

REBUTTAL: Again, in the Gospels, written in the first century, we see that Jesus was divine.  This is why He was delivered up to be crucified.  The Jews accused Him of blasphemy, which is why they arrested Jesus and had a “trial” among themselves: Dan Brown’s view that the early Christians believed Jesus was only a mortal rests on historical quicksand.  From the very beginning, Christians worshiped Jesus as the Son of God.  “Cracking Da Vinci’s Code” authors Jim Garlow and Peter Jones have compiled a list of several Church Fathers –– all of whom wrote before the Council of Nicea in A.D. 325 –– affirming this most basic Christian doctrine that Jesus was divine.  Those Fathers include: Ignatius (writing in A.D. 105), Clement (150), Justin Martyr (160), Irenaeus (180), Tertullian (200), Origen (225), Novatian (235), Cyprian (250), Methodius (290), Lactantius (304), and Arnobius (305).  Furthermore, one of the earliest Christian creeds was “Jesus is the Lord” (Kurios) (1 Corinthians 12:3).

ERROR: Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, and the Gnostic gospels teach that.

REBUTTAL: There is the flimsiest of evidence for that.  There is one passage in the pseudo Gospel of Philip, written about A.D. 250, long after Philip the apostle had died, that claims Jesus often kissed Mary Magdalene on her________ (where he kissed her is obscure in the manuscript).  The word could have been mouth, cheek, forehead, or whatever.  Even liberal scholar Karen King of Harvard University observes that this is referring to a holy kiss that is asexual in nature.  Just like it says in the Bible, greet one another with “a holy kiss” (Romans 16:16).  Let’s also remember that this was written more than 200 years after Christ.  So even Dan Brown’s sources from antiquity don’t make his case for him.

ERROR: In “The Last Supper,” Leonardo da Vinci allegedly painted Mary Magdalene seated next to Jesus.
 
REBUTTAL: One of Dan Brown’s proofs is that John looks so feminine, but John is often portrayed in such a way in art because he was young.  Go to any cathedral and look at the stained-glass images of John.  Just as you can identify Peter because he is holding keys, and you can tell Andrew because he is holding a Cross like an X (the kind on which He was crucified), so you can tell John by his feminine looks.  But suppose it were the case that Leonardo intentionally painted Mary Magdalene next to Jesus instead of John, because Jesus and Mary were allegedly married, and Leonardo was in on the secret, then where is the “beloved disciple” John?  He is not in the picture.  Where is he?  Under the table?
 
ERROR: The Gnostic gospels uniformly teach the “sacred feminine” –– the pagan idea that sex with a woman is the route to a relationship with God.

REBUTTAL: Unlike the four Gospels, the Gnostic gospels can be actually degrading to women.  The Gospel of Thomas declares that a woman cannot be saved unless God first changes her into a man (the very last verse of Thomas, 114).

ERROR: The Priory of Sion, which looms large in the novel, was created in 1099 by the Knights Templar.

REBUTTAL: The Priory of Sion was created out of whole cloth in 1956 by a French anti-Semite con man, Pierre Plantard.  In 1975, documents were found in the Biblioteque Nationale in Paris that allegedly proved the Priory is as old as 1099, and that Leonardo da Vinci and Isaac Newton and other luminaries secretly presided over it.  These documents were proved to be fakes.

ERROR: Christianity was based on pagan religions –– such as the mystery religions.  Specifically, Dan Brown states: “Nothing in Christianity is original.  The pre-Christian God Mithras –– called the Son of God and the Light of the World –– was born on Dec. 25, died, was buried in a rock tomb, and then resurrected in three days.”

REBUTTAL: Dan Brown has it exactly the opposite.  The mystery religions more often borrowed from Christian themes –– including the ones that Brown mentions.  In ancient cultures, there was always the myth of the dying and resurrecting god –– essentially “winter” and “spring.”  However, these are never alleged to have been real history.  In contrast, on such and such a day (some scholars, including Dr. Alan Whanger, retired professor of Duke Medical Center –– believe April 7, A.D. 30) Jesus Christ was crucified and laid in a tomb in Jerusalem.  He came out alive with a resurrected body in three days (as Jews count it –– two days as we would count it).  Going further on the mystery religions, note what authors Carl Olson and Sandra Miesel write in their book, “The Da Vinci Hoax”:

“Unfortunately for Brown and the authors of “Holy Blood, Holy Grail,” there is little or no evidence that most pagan mystery religions, such as the Egyptian cult of Isis and Osiris or the cult of Mithras, existed in the forms described in their books prior to the mid-first century.  This is a significant point, for much of the existing evidence indicates that the third- and fourth-century beliefs and practices of certain pagan mystery religions are read back into the first-century beliefs of Christians –– without support for such a presumptive act …”

WAS THERE ANY FACT-CHECKING?

There are so many errors among the alleged “accurate depictions” of “The Da Vinci Code” that historian and first-rate scholar Paul Maier just has to shake his head. He notes, “Detailing all the errors, misinterpretations, deceptions, distortions, and outright falsehoods in “The Da Vinci Code” makes one wonder whether Brown’s manuscript ever underwent editorial scrutiny or fact-checking.”  Amazingly, we live in the Information Age, yet we live in an age of massive disinformation.  The Bible says Satan is the “the prince of the power of the air” (Ephesians 2:2).  The Bible also says that in the end times, “men will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears” (2 Timothy 4:3). Is that not happening in our own day?

COMMENT FROM GEORGE BARNA

Many followers of Christ fear that the movie, which will be even more accessible to the public at-large than the book, will distort people’s theological perceptions.  This fear is well-founded.  Americans already possess an unorthodox profile of religious beliefs, indiscriminately blending biblical and cultural views.  Among adults who are aligned with a Christian church, 59% do not believe that Satan exists, 42% contend that Jesus Christ committed sins during His earthly tenure, and just 11% believe that the Bible is the source of absolute moral truth.  In fact, millions of Americans are confused about the Bible.  On the one hand, six out of ten (61%) believe that “every word in the Bible is true and can be trusted.”  On the other hand, only half as many affirm that the Bible is “totally accurate in all of the principles it teaches.”  Americans admit that they are more likely to seek theological clarity from friends, family, experiences and even media input than from diving into biblical texts.