first photo of Kim Jong Il’s son emerges

Drudge Report h/t:

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) – North Korea published a photo in state media Thursday of leader Kim Jong Il’s youngest son and heir apparent Kim Jong Un in the first official image of him released.

A photo of a group of senior Workers’ Party officials was published in Thursday’s edition of the authoritarian regime’s main Rodong Sinmun newspaper.

An article accompanying the front-page photo listed the names of those in the picture. The 20-something Kim Jong Un was one of the officials named and appeared to be sitting near his father with a military officer between them.

The release of the photo comes after the younger Kim earlier this week was handed top military and party posts at a Workers’ Party conference….

…(read more)…

Dennis Prager Interviews Steven Greenhut who authored the book~Plunder: How Public Employee Unions are Raiding Treasuries, Controlling Our Lives and Bankrupting the Nation

There is some crazy information on California and how much we owe for our state workers benefits package. We are beyond bankrupt! (I removed phone calls from the interview and shortened it a bit.)

And It Starts

UPDATE: I just wanted to preface this post by saying I do not think this IS The Mark, rather, it is merely the beginning of building a database that will allow for the categorizing of these numbers. It is an archetype of sorts… a step beyond even our SSN here in the States.

This article mentions fraud… but the only way you couldn’t have fraud is if at some point this number were attached somehow via biotechnology:

(Wall Street Journal) India’s vaunted tech savvy is being put to the test this week as the country embarks on a daunting mission: assigning a unique 12-digit number to each of its 1.2 billion people.

The project, which seeks to collect fingerprint and iris scans from all residents and store them in a massive central database of unique IDs, is considered by many specialists the most technologically and logistically complex national identification effort ever attempted. To pull it off, India has recruited tech gurus of Indian origin from around the world, including the co-founder of online photo service Snapfish and employees from Google Inc., Yahoo Inc. and Intel Corp.

The country’s leaders are pinning their hopes on the program to solve development problems that have persisted despite fast economic growth. They say unique ID numbers will help ensure that government welfare spending reaches the right people, and will allow hundreds of millions of poor Indians to access services like banking for the first time.

…(read more)…

I have always said that people will voluntarily get the number per some benefit (say, 30% off you grocery bill). But as you can see government perceives the benefit for them already as not being able to defraud the government.