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MP3 One Seg­ment

This pro­gram explores mate­r­i­al from past Archive Pro­grams (updat­ed with cur­rent infor­ma­tion) and prog­nos­ti­ca­tions about the future (echoed by con­tem­po­rary ana­lysts.)

Begin­ning with an excerpt from Mis­cel­la­neous Archive Show M‑11, the broad­cast sets forth the insid­i­ous role of the Munich Rein­sur­ance Com­pa­ny in pro­vid­ing intel­li­gence to Ger­man U‑boats dur­ing World War II. Because of the enor­mous cost of under­writ­ing inter­na­tion­al mar­itime com­merce, Amer­i­can insur­ance com­pa­nies rein­sured with the Zurich group.

The Zurich group, in turn, rein­sured with the Munich group.

This arrange­ment placed detailed infor­ma­tion about the sail­ing of U.S. mer­chant ships in the hands of the Ger­man navy, per­mit­ting U‑boats to tor­pe­do and sink Amer­i­can ves­sels with­in sight of shore. The loss of life among mer­chant sailors tra­vers­ing the North Atlantic dur­ing the war was rough­ly one in three.

After review­ing the mate­r­i­al from M‑11 (Record­ed on 5/23/80), the pro­gram high­lights a cur­rent legal dis­pute between the Cal­i­for­nia Insur­ance Com­mis­sion­er and the Munich Rein­sur­ance Com­pa­ny. This dis­pute cen­ters on the lia­bil­i­ty of the Munich firm for claims left over from the Holo­caust. Coun­sel for Munich Rein­sur­ance main­tains that the fact that the firm left the state of Cal­i­for­nia three years ago negates its lia­bil­i­ty.

Next the pro­gram touch­es on the role of a sub­sidiary of Munich Rein­sur­ance in the Bor­mann flight cap­i­tal pro­gram.

After review­ing the past, the pro­gram explores pos­si­bil­i­ties for the future. Excerpt­ing a lec­ture giv­en in Jan­u­ary of 1995 enti­tled “The Future: Tech­nol­o­gy, Theoc­ra­cy and the Thou­sand-Year Reich”, the pro­gram sets forth Mr. Emory’s fears about tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tions in the areas of com­put­ers, arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence and robot­ics. These devel­op­ments may very well lead to the cre­ation of intel­li­gent, self-aware tech­no­log­i­cal enti­ties that might make a con­scious deci­sion to elim­i­nate human beings. These fears have been echoed by Bill Joy of Sun Microsys­tems, writ­ing in a recent arti­cle in Wired mag­a­zine.

Pro­gram High­lights Include: the head of the for­mer Munich Rein­sur­ance com­pa­ny’s posi­tion as a Deputy Finance Min­is­ter of the Third Reich; the Nazi insur­ance-intel­li­gence con­nec­tion’s com­mu­ni­ca­tion of detailed plans for U.S. muni­tions plants to the Third Reich; Munich Rein­sur­ance’s tenure of busi­ness in Cal­i­for­nia for over 40 years (ren­der­ing absurd its coun­sel’s claims that it has no lia­bil­i­ty because it no longer does busi­ness in Cal­i­for­nia); the recent acqui­si­tions of Amer­i­can insur­ance com­pa­nies by Ger­man insur­ers; details about Bill Joy’s fears about immi­nent com­put­er pro­grams and the pos­si­bil­i­ty that these soft­ware pro­grams may delib­er­ate­ly “delete” the human race. (Record­ed on 4/9/2000.)