Tag Archives: Smart Cities

02/1/15

Agenda 21: Al Gore’s car-less society is well underway

By: Renee Nal
New Zeal

Image from the BBC's 'Tomorrow's Cities season'

Image from the BBC’s ‘Tomorrow’s Cities season’

“Now that more people live in cities across the planet than do not, it is imperative that this revolutionary change in attitude occurs rapidly.” – Author David Thorpe, from his article “There’s a $90 Trillion Plan to Rid the World’s Cities of Cars”

Former Vice President Al Gore and former Mexican President Felipe Calderon have been roundly mocked for their vision to separate citizens from their vehicles.

As reported at the Washington Times,

Starting over is a $90 trillion expense. Minimum. But to meet that cost they would have to cram us all together in those cities like livestock, at the cost of our freedoms.

The Daily Caller observes:

Calderon and Gore made their presentation at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland where, ironically (or maybe not, at this point), some 1,700 private jets — which use petroleum — were used to shuttle in conference participants and others to discuss global warming and other pressing global issues.

We may want to laugh at the plan, but Americans are financing it.

Smart Cities

While in India this week, President Obama pledged $4 billion dollars in “investments and loans” as reported at Reuters. What Reuters neglected to mention, along with the rest of the American mainstream media, was that $2 billion will be spent for the “development of smart cities,” as reported at the Times of India.

The left’s age-old tradition of population manipulation and social engineering experimentation continues openly today in the guise of “sustainability” (code for Agenda 21), which seeks to convince local city leaders around the world to remake cities in an effort to combat “anthropogenic [human-caused] climate change.” The “smart cities” movement is a part of this effort, as discussed at Broadside News.

Smart cities will have an infrastructure that will verify that the habits of citizens are monitored to ensure they are not indulging in harmful activities like using too much water, for example. Make no mistake, you will not be using more resources than deemed to be your fair share.

Like “Smart Meters,” in time, “the Smart Grid will enable consumers to react in near real-time to lessen their impacts.” Or, it can be remotely done for you.

No more cars

At a panel discussion during a conference (hashtag #TTDC15) sponsored in part by firm called “Embarq,” the discussion to remold cities was in full swing. Embarq seeks to capitalize on the “smart cities” movement and claims to engage in “[H]elping cities make sustainable transport a reality.”

During one of the discussions, India’s “Union Urban Development Secretary” Shankar Aggarwal stated that “smart cities” currently being developed in India will be “coordinated, compact and connected” and “meant for citizens and not for cars.”

Aggarwal laments “urban sprawl,” noting that people have to travel long distances to get to work. Stating that traveling long distances to get to work somehow lessons global competitiveness, he continues:

It is very necessary that we create cities which are compact, and the transportation needs to undergo a huge change. Instead of promoting individual cars, we have to go in for public transport and that means people should be able to walk to work, bicycling, walk to work [yes, he said it twice], and then they should make use of public transport…

Here are some of the creepy tweets:

The panel discussion can be viewed here (Shankar Aggarwal’s comments can be seen at around the 8:50 minute mark):

In evolving manifestations, the radical left shares a common theme: an overarching obsession with social engineering based on a lust for power and an irrational fear of over-population, which justifies their need to manipulate populations.

The elitist mindset is anything but “progressive” if one goes by the true meaning of the word, and can be traced back to left-wing heroes Thomas Malthus, Margaret Sanger, George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells, for example.

A bit of history

Al Gore’s car-less society is just another iteration of radical social engineering endorsed by the left. Their grand visions do not take the nature of man into account, which is why the founding fathers are the true progressives.

Consider some of the following quotes:

In 1798, Thomas Robert Malthus wrote An Essay on the Principle of Population which laments,

The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.

Progressive icon George Bernard Shaw wrote,

Just consider the situation we are up against – an overpopulation problem created by capitalism, and are trying to get rid of it by substituting emigration. Socialists say quite truly that Socialism can get rid of it, and clergymen tell us that self-control can relieve it. But it cannot wait for Socialism, and people will not practice self-control.

A eugenicist like many of his socialist peers, George Bernard Shaw was not a fan of morality. In “Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope, and Aims, The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. X, No. 1, July 1904,” he wrote:

What we must fight for is freedom to breed the race without being hampered by the mass of irrelevant conditions implied in the institution of marriage.

H.G. Wells submits,

As the standard of living and the multiplicity of interests increase, there is no sort of people anywhere who will not welcome the freedom and the relief from burdensome families that Birth Control affords.

More quotes on how the masses must be manipulated to fight “overpopulation” can be found at Liberty Unyielding.

The individual versus the collective

While the radical left brands their ideas as revolutionary and “progressive;” their visions of Utopian societies in various forms can be traced back to ancient philosophers. In fact, America’s founding fathers are the true progressives, as they put in place a Constitutional Republic that was sincerely revolutionary when compared to the vast majority of political systems throughout the entire world, throughout the entirety of recorded mankind: a focus on the individual rather than the collective, and the idea that morality was essential to freedom.

Consider this quote by John Adams (His writings compiled by his grandsons can be found online here):

If ‘Thou shalt not covet,’ and ‘Thou shalt not steal,’ were not commandments of Heaven, they must be made inviolable precepts in every society, before it can be civilized or made free. – The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States, Volume 6, 1856

It is likely that most people would rather live in a cave and be free than be in a “smart city” and be monitored and car-less.

This article has been cross-posted at Broadside News.

01/28/15

Agenda 21: Obama commits to helping India build ‘smart cities’ (Video)

By: Renee Nal
New Zeal

President Obama discusses the U.S. commitment to build ‘smart cities’ in India via YouTube [WhiteHouse.gov] Screenshot

President Obama discusses the U.S. commitment to build ‘smart cities’ in India via YouTube [WhiteHouse.gov] Screenshot

During his trip to India, President Obama declared America’s commitment to “help design smart cities” and “bullet trains” in the country.

The main selling point for “smart cities” is that they are “sustainable,” a vague but applauded term that often used in context of combating what this author strongly believes is a non-existent problem: man-made climate change.

During a speech at the Siri Fort Auditorium in India, Obama, who met with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the tour, declared:

We are ready to join you in building new infrastructure…roads and airports, the ports and bullet trains to propel India into the future. We are ready to help design smart cities…

President Obama declared that taxpayers will foot the bill for $4 billion dollars in “investments and loans” as reported at Reuters.

Obama’s visit was discussed on Twitter under the hashtag #ObamaInIndia.

Smart cities are a part of the United Nations Agenda 21 plan and are defined in “fuzzy” ways as acknowledged at Wikipedia, which highlights several vague definitions. Some of the biggest common threads is “smart governance,” “smart technology,” “smart mobility,” and of course, “sustainability.”

Although rarely discussed, it seems that the ongoing “open data” initiative is heavily intertwined with the concept of “smart cities” (see here, here, here, here and here).

“Open Data” is a benign-sounding initiative dedicated to “transparency” in data, but falls under the “Open Societies” concept of global governance as promoted by billionaire George Soros, who “proposes that the open societies of the world should form an alliance for the dual purpose of fostering the development of open society within individual countries, and to lay the groundwork for a global open society by strengthening international institutions and rules of behaviour,” according to an Amazon description for his book “Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism.”

Under President Obama, OpenData.gov was born.

The Economic Times in India laid out the involvement of the U.S. Taxpayers in India’s smart cities,

…the United States Trade and Development Agency (USTDA) signed Memorandums of Understandings (MoUs) with Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh for cooperation to support the development of three smart cities.

The cities are Allahabad, Ajmer and Visakhapatnam. Under the MoUs, the USTDA will contribute funds for feasibility studies and pilot projects, study tours, workshops or trainings and other projects that would be determined mutually.

The Times of India reported:

As per the agreements, USTDA will collaborate with other US government agencies like the Department of Commerce, the US Export Import Bank and other trade and economic agencies to promote greater US-India infrastructure development cooperation and to support development of smart cities.

USTDA will enable US industry bodies to mobilize private sector expertise and resources to address important aviation and energy related infrastructure connected to developing smart cities.

The USTDA twitter feed promoted the initiative and posted a press release on the effort:

In the above tweet with the embedded video, President Obama further discusses the American “investment” into India’s “smart cities.” It should be noted that through the USTDA, taxpayers fund similar initiatives around the world.

Part of the award to India will involve financing of small business loans.

Trevor Loudon, author of “Barack Obama and the Enemies Within,” and his latest jaw-dropping book, “The Enemies Within: Communists, Socialists and Progressives in the U.S. Congress” told the author that he believes the ultimate goal of Agenda 21 (smart cities) is to move the populations of the world into small urban areas.

A population confined to “concentrated areas,” Loudon explained, would make citizens much more manageable. In his view, it is a part of an age-old battle between the “collective versus the individual,” a concept that can be illustrated in ideologies as far back as Plato and Aristotle, who both advocated for what they believed was “the superior role of the collective and the relatively inferior position of the individual.”

In an article at Forbes magazine, author Sarwant Singh wrote glowingly of “smart cities” in light of “urbanization.” Singh’s organization Frost & Sullivan “identified eight key aspects that define a Smart City: smart governance, smart energy, smart building, smart mobility, smart infrastructure, smart technology, smart healthcare and smart citizen.”

It should be noted that while the term “Agenda 21” has been progressively scrubbed from America’s newsrooms as it became marginalized in America, the plan lives on throughout the country in “sustainable” city planning initiatives.

An interesting discussion of smart cities can be found here from an Alternative Media source, TRUTHstreammedia:

Are Americans happy about their tax dollars going toward such a venture? Does Congress even have a say anymore?

Listen around the 52:00 minute mark:

This article has been cross-posted at Broadside News.