A professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, John Yoo served in the Bush administration Justice Department. In the first half, he discussed why he believes the United States must respond to challenges to its national security and to world stability by embracing new military technologies such as drones, autonomous robots, and cyber weapons. These weapons, he believes, can provide less destructive means to coerce opponents to stop WMD proliferation, clamp down on terrorism, or end humanitarian disasters. The kind of drones we've seen in Afghanistan and Iraq are just the beginning of a great transformation that is happening in the military, he remarked.
Cyber weapons like the Stuxnet virus can attack machines and computers (Stuxnet was successfully used to delay Iran's nuclear program), he noted, and these type of digital weapons can be used more precisely than standard or kinetic warfare "to shut down the stock exchange of an enemy country or paralyze an electrical grid," for instance. Aerial technology like drones and UAVs is being developed for smaller vehicles that can operate in swarms, Yoo reported, and robotics and automation will also be incorporated into land and sea military operations, both for offense and defense. New forms of missile defense, for example, could take great advantage of this technology, he added.
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Linda Stasi is a media personality, and a columnist for the New York Daily News. She spoke about her newest novel, a religious thriller called the Book of Judas, which is fueled by the startling information found in the Gospel of Judas that features conversations between Jesus and Judas. Thought to be written in the 2nd century AD by Gnostic Christians, the only known copy has been carbon dated to be between 1,700 and 1,800 years old, and first surfaced in the 1970s, she cited. In the Gospel, Jesus tells Judas that human life originated from the Sirius star system, and Stasi suspects that Jesus himself may have been an ET from there.
Another interesting revelation from the Judas Gospel is that Judas did not betray Jesus but was actually his closest friend and advisor. I believe "we've been sold a bill a goods," that perhaps stemmed from the other apostles being jealous of Judas, and thus created the story of betrayal. Further, she continued, the thirty pieces of silver said to be his payment for the betrayal was a small amount, and Judas was serving as the treasurer of Jesus' group and wouldn't have been swayed by such a paltry sum. Stasi also talked about the intrigue over the missing pages from the Judas Gospel, which some suspect may reveal the secret of the resurrection, and how this knowledge might be converted into a powerful weapon if it fell into the wrong hands.
News segment guests: Scott Stevens, Howard Bloom