Thursday, November 29, 2012

Global Government Now Seeks Total Control Over the Internet

Global Government Now Seeks Total Control Over the Internet



by J.D. Heyes
Natural News
November 28, 2012

What is arguably the very last bastion of totally free speech is once again under assault by the world’s tyrants, as the United Nations is now eying regulation of the Internet – as though it was in need of being regulated.
Why? It’s an age-old story.
Leaders of authoritarian regimes the world over hate the free flow of information that is disseminated via the Internet.
They hate the fact that they no longer have a monopoly on ideas and opinion within their own country. They see notions of freedom and liberty as a threat.
They despise any medium that undermines their grip on power. And their regimes are heavily represented in the U.N., of which the United States (once considered the bastion of liberty and freedom) is the largest contributor.
“Who runs the Internet? For now, the answer remains no one, or at least no government, which explains the Web’s success as a new technology. But as of next week, unless the U.S. gets serious, the answer could be the United Nations,” reports The Wall Street Journal.
Authoritarians seek ways to control free expression, free speech, and individual liberty
A sizable number of the world body’s 193 members simply oppose the open and very uncontrolled nature of the Internet, the paper said, noting the World Wide Web’s interconnected global networks that defy international boundaries and, as such, make it extremely difficult for governments to tax or censor.
For over a year, these authoritarian regimes have lobbied a UN agency known as the International Telecommunications Union to grab the reins of the Internet and take over its management.
The organization, which was originally created in 1865 as the International Telegraph Union, last wrote a treaty on communications in 1988, years before the commercial Internet developed into a popular communications and commerce medium, and back when telecommunications referred to voice telephone calls routed through national telephone monopolies.
In the coming days, the ITU plans to hold a “negotiating conference” in the emirate of Dubai, say reports. In the past months, rumors have surfaced that a new treaty could be in the offing – one that will no doubt prove disastrous to a free and open Internet.
Most U.S. resolutions, as well as free-market commentary in publications such as the Journal, “have focused on proposals by authoritarian governments to censor the Internet,” the paper reported. “Just as objectionable are proposals that ignore how the Internet works, threatening its smooth and open operations.”
What would be the effect of having the Internet “reviewed” and “regulated” by global bureaucrats, most of whom are sympathetic to, or beholden to, authoritarian regimes bent on stifling free speech, free expression and individual liberty.
The Internet consists of 40,000 networks, interconnected among 425,000 global routes that cheaply and inefficiently deliver messages and digital content to about two billion people around the world every day – with a half-million signing on each day.
Up to now, the Internet has been self-regulating, which has obviously been working just fine (hence the growth figures in the previous paragraph).
As it stands, no one has to ask for permission to put up their own blog or website. No government has the ability or right to tell network operators how they should do their jobs.
‘Technology moves faster than any treaty process’
What has transpired is an extremely rare, if virtual, place for innovation that requires no prior permission from a regulatory or government agency or bureaucrat or governing body.
Former Federal Communications Commission Chairman William Kennard pointed out that 90 percent of cooperative “peering” agreements among co-existing networks are “made on a handshake,” adjusting as needs change.
“The Internet is highly complex and highly technical, yet governments are the only ones making decisions at the ITU, putting the Internet at their mercy,” Sally Wentworth of the Internet Society told the Journal recently.
She went on to say that Web developers and engineers who make the Internet work have said it’s “mind boggling” that any government – even a so-called world government – would ever claim the universal right to regulate or manage the Internet.
“Technology moves faster than any treaty process ever can,” Internet Society warned.
Even if the Obama administration hasn’t yet publicly stated its position, liberty-minded officials and lawmakers in Europe (believe it or not) have stepped up to the plate.
The European Parliament has passed a resolution that protests plans by the ITU to seize control of the Internet.
“[The European Parliament] believes that the ITU, or any other single, centralized international institution, is not the appropriate body to assert regulatory authority over either Internet governance of Internet traffic flows,” says the resolution, which was passed by a majority of EP representatives, reports said.
Biggest backers of regulation include Russia, China
According to Britain’s The Guardian newspaper:
What’s worrying the EP, along with an unlikely coalition of Google, the U.S. Republican party, organized labor, and Greenpeace, is that the meeting might try and take over regulatory oversight for Internet communications in a closed-door coup. The U.S. government has said it will oppose serious moves to change the current regulatory order, but how effective that will be remains to be seen.
“The resolution of the Parliament is a big success for internet users. This sends a clear and positive signal to the European Commission and the Member States”, said Amelia Andersdotter, MEP for the Pirate Party and co-submitter of the resolution, The Register reported.
Some of the biggest backers of unmitigated Internet regulation include, not surprisingly, the authoritarian regimes of Russia and China.
As we’ve said, the Internet is truly the last bastion of genuinely free speech and expression, not to mention a tremendous creator of commerce and wealth. Regulating the Internet will have exactly the same effect as regulations on industry have had – it will stifle creativity, curb freedoms, kill jobs and destroy economic growth.
We’ll be keeping an eye on this very important issue.
Sources:
http://online.wsj.com
http://www.weeklystandard.com
http://www.forbes.com
http://www.theregister.co.uk

Antarctic Melting and Sea Level

Antarctic Melting and Sea Level

Due to its location at the South Pole, Antarctica receives relatively little solar radiation. This means that it is a very cold continent where water is mostly in the form of ice or snow. This accumulates and forms a giant ice sheet which covers the land. New data which more accurately measures the rate of ice-melt could help us better understand how Antarctica is changing in the light of global warming. The rate of global sea level change is reasonably well-established but understanding the different sources of this rise is more challenging. Using re-calibrated scales that are able to weigh ice sheets from space to a greater degree of accuracy than ever before, the international team led by Newcastle University has discovered that Antarctica overall is contributing much less to the substantial sea-level rise than originally thought.


Instead, the large amount of water flowing away from West Antarctica through ice-melt has been partly cancelled out by the volume of water falling onto the continent in the form of snow, suggesting some past studies have overestimated Antarctica’s contribution to fast-rising sea levels.

Using Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite data, the team calculated ice sheet mass loss by more accurately mapping and removing the mass changes caused by the flow of rock beneath Earth’s surface.

Publishing their findings in the academic journal Nature, project lead Professor Matt King said the data meant we were at last close to understanding how Antarctica is changing.

"We have tried to weigh the ice in the past but GRACE only measures the combined effect of the ice changes and the land mass changes occurring beneath the Earth’s surface," explains Professor King, Professor of Polar Geodesy at Newcastle University. "The step forward we have made is to provide a better calculation of the land mass changes so we can correct the satellite measurements to more accurately calculate the changes in ice mass alone."

"Our ice change calculations rely heavily on how well we can account for these important changes taking place beneath the Earth’s surface.  While the land beneath the ice is moving by no more than a few millimetres-per-year — the thickness of a fingernail —that seemingly small effect significantly alters the rate at which we estimate the ice is changing."

"By producing a new estimate of the land motion we’re effectively re-calibrating the scales — in this case the GRACE satellite —so we can more accurately weigh the ice.  And what we’ve found is that present sea level rise is happening with apparently very little contribution from Antarctica as a whole."

"We’re now confident it is shrinking," says Professor King.  "Our new estimate of land motion helps us narrow the range and shifts the best estimate to the lower end of the ice melt spectrum."

"Worryingly, though, the rate of shrinking has sped up in some important locations. The parts of Antarctica that are losing mass most rapidly are seeing accelerated mass loss and this acceleration could continue well into the future."

"The sea level change we’re seeing today is happening faster than it has for centuries with just a small contribution from the massive Antarctic ice sheet. What is sobering is that sea levels will rise even faster if Antarctica continues to lose increasingly more ice into the oceans."

Sea levels around the world are rising.  Between 1870 and 2004, global average sea levels rose 17 cm as reported in 2006 in  Geophysical Research Letters.  From 1950 to 2009, satellite data showed a rise of 3.3 ± 0.4 mm from 1993 to 2009.  In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projected that during the 21st century, sea level will rise another 18 to 59 cm (7.1 to 23 in).

Ice sitting on the Antarctic continent at the peak of the last ice age 20,000 years ago forced the rock beneath to deform and slowly flow away. After that time ice levels generally reduced and the rock within the Earth's mantle more than 100km below the surface has been slowly flowing back in. That change affects the GRACE satellites in exactly the same way as ice moving into and out of the continent and it has to be factored in to get an accurate measurement of the total ice.

For further information see Sea Levels.

Antarctica image via  Wikipedia.

ObamaCare- Medical Tyranny is Here in USA

Daniel Taylor
Infowars.com
November 29, 2012

Health care reform is a hot topic today, as it has been for much of America’s history. Benjamin Rush, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, warned in 1787 that medical freedom needed to be included in the American Constitution. Without this protection, Rush warned that the medical establishment would naturally progress – as many of mankind’s institutions do – into an oppressive dictatorship. His words, echoing from over 200 years ago, ring strikingly true today:
photoBenjamin Rush, Founding Father .
“The Constitution of this Republic should make special provision for medical freedom. To restrict the art of healing to one class will constitute the Bastille of medical science. All such laws are un-American and despotic. … Unless we put medical freedom into the constitution the time will come when medicine will organize into an undercover dictatorship and force people who wish doctors and treatment of their own choice to submit to only what the dictating outfit offers.”
The spirit of managerial scientific control that drives this beast is summarized in the words of Frederick Taylor, a pioneer in “scientific management.” As Taylor stated in 1907, ”Too great liberty results in a large number of people going wrong who would be right if they had been forced into good habits.” This spirit of quasi-altruistic scientific control begins to fade away towards the higher ranks of the system, however.
The potential for medical tyranny that Benjamin Rush perceived over 200 years ago crystallized when the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations transformed the American medical establishment in the early 20th Century. They strove to create a system of schooling to manufacture a predictable, rule following group of professionals to enforce the establishment regulations. Additionally, tax exempt foundations – through their grant making power – are able to mold the idea-sphere from which medical research emerges, or is suppressed.
The dictatorial health care model as expressed by “obamacare” is being implemented as part of a larger global program. The World Health Organization announced recently that it hopes to implement – via a U.N. resolution – “universal health coverage” across the globe in fulfillment of its Millennium Development Goals. The Rockefeller Foundation is working with WHO in the project. “There is a global movement towards UHC (Universal Health Care) and it is gathering momentum,” said Judith Rodin, President of the Rockefeller Foundation.
If you don’t want the kind of care that the allopathic establishment prescribes, be prepared to face the consequences.
A Minnesota mother was recently brought to court over refusing chemotherapy for her 8 year old daughter. A doctor apparently reported her to CPS. She was “…ordered into court and told if they did not work with them on a treatment plan, they would lose custody of Sarah.”
Another case involved a Pennsylvania mother who declined to vaccinate her child, resulting in a visit from CPS. 
A 2009 case in which a 13 year old boy’s parents refused chemo resulted in a judgement of “medical neglect,” denying the right of his parents to refuse treatment on religious grounds.
The bottom line is this: Even if the medical establishment had our best interests at heart, what happens when their science is wrong? What happens when it is skewed in favor of the corporations that are closely aligned with them? What kind of damage is done when it is universally enforced? Benjamin Rush foresaw this danger, and it is time to face it for the reality it has become.

2012 heading for top 10 warmest years globally, UN reports

DOHA, Qatar -- Despite cooling from La Nina early in the year, 2012 is on track to become one of the top 10 warmest years on record, with the U.S. experiencing extreme warmth and Arctic Sea ice shrinking to its lowest extent, the U.N. weather agency said Wednesday.
In a statement released at international climate talks in Qatar, the World Meteorological Organization said the "alarming rate" of the Arctic melt highlights the far-reaching changes caused by global warming.
"Climate change is taking place before our eyes and will continue to do so as a result of the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which have risen constantly and again reached new records," WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud said.
Delegates from nearly 200 countries are meeting in Doha, Qatar, to discuss ways of slowing climate change, including by cutting emissions of greenhouse gases that scientists say are warming the planet, melting ice caps, raising sea levels, and changing rainfall patterns with impacts on floods and drought. Discord between rich and poor countries on who should do what has kept the two-decade-old U.N. talks from delivering on that goal, and global emissions are still going up.
The WMO said global temperatures rose after initial cooling caused by the La Nina weather oscillation, with major heat waves in the U.S. and Europe. Average temperatures in January-October were the highest in the continental U.S., and the ninth highest worldwide, since records began in 1850.
Cyclone activity was normal globally, but above average in the Atlantic, where 10 storms reached hurricane strength, including Sandy, which wreaked havoc across the Caribbean and the U.S. East Coast.
Sandy wasn't the strongest cyclone, though. That was Typhoon Sanba, which struck the Philippines, Japan, and the Korean Peninsula, "dumping torrential rain and triggering floods and landslides that affected thousands of people and caused millions in U.S. dollars in damage," the WMO said.
Related: Permafrost melt needs to be factored into talks, experts say
Droughts impacted the U.S., Russia, parts of China and northern Brazil. Nigeria saw exceptional floods, while southern China saw its heaviest rainfall in three decades.
But of all the weather events in 2012, the most ominous to climate scientists was the loss of ice cover on the North Pole. In September, scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado said Arctic Sea ice measured 1.32 million square miles — which is 18 percent less than the previous record low, set in 2007. Records go back to 1979 based on satellite tracking.
The scientists said their computer models predict the Arctic could become essentially free of ice in the summer by 2050, but added that current trends show ice melting faster than the computers are predicting.
More world stories from NBC News:

2012 marked by extreme weather, Arctic thaw: UN

2012 marked by extreme weather, Arctic thaw: UN
GENEVA — Extreme temperatures, drought, floods and the unprecedented loss of Arctic ice marked global weather in 2012, boosting concern at the march of climate change, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said Wednesday.
"Climate change is taking place before our eyes and will continue to do so," WMO chief Michel Jarraud said, unveiling a weather report that coincided with fresh negotiations on a UN treaty to curb greenhouse gases.
January-October 2012 was the ninth warmest such period since records began in 1850, the WMO said.
The global land and ocean surface temperature over these 10 months was about 0.45 degrees Celsius (0.81 degrees Fahrenheit) above the 1961-1990 average of 14.2 C (57.56 F), it said.
"Notable extreme events were observed worldwide, but some parts of the northern hemisphere were affected by multiple extremes," it said, highlighting these episodes:
- HEATWAVES hit the United States, which registered 15,000 new daily temperature records in March alone, as well as southern Europe, much of Russia and northwestern Asia.
Drought gripped many countries, notably affecting some 9.6 million people in China's Yunnan and Sichuan provinces.
- FLOODING struck many parts of western Africa and the Sahel between July and September, affecting nearly three million people and killing at least 300.
In western Russia's Krasnodar region, July floods killed nearly 200 people and caused property damage worth $630 million (488 million euros).
Parts of southern China experienced their heaviest rainfall in the last 32 years in April and May.
- STORMS left a trail of damage in the Caribbean and US East Coast as the Atlantic basin experienced an above-average hurricane season for the third year in a row.
A total of 19 tropical storms have hit so far, 10 of them hurricanes, the WMO said.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo on Monday estimated superstorm Sandy's costs at more than $60 billion for New York and New Jersey alone.
The effects were "far more important than (similar hurricanes) 100 years ago," Jarraud said, pointing out that sea levels today are 20 centimetres (eight inches) higher, allowing water to penetrate deeper inland on a storm surge.
The WMO also raised the alarm over unprecedented melt of Arctic sea ice, confirming data published in September by the US National Snow and Ice Data Center.
Arctic sea ice cover shrank to just 3.4 million square kilometres (1.32 million square miles) at its annual low point on September 16 -- 18 percent less than the previous record low in 2007.
The new record was also 49 percent below the 1979-2000 average, corresponding to an additional ice loss of nearly 3.3 million square kilometres -- about the size of India, the WMO said.
"In August, the Arctic sea ice lost an average of nearly 92,000 square kilometres of ice per day -- the fastest observed loss for the month of August on record," the report said.
It pointed to Greenland, whose land-based icemelt is considered particularly serious since it can hike sea levels, saying it registered an all-time heat record for May, when the mercury soared to 24.8 C (76.6 F).
Both the Arctic and the Greenland icesheet appeared to be melting "somewhat faster" than predicted five years ago, Jarraud said, adding that "the trend is not only continuing but accelerating."
He cautioned that the higher temperatures came despite the cooling influence of the La Nina weather phenomenon in the tropical Pacific Ocean at the beginning of the year.
Addressing a familiar question, Jarraud acknowledged that it was hard to attribute any single extreme weather or temperature phenomenon to global warming.
But such events are "not incompatible with global warming" and are "likely to be a consequence of it," he said.
The WMO report, on preliminary weather data for 2012, coincided with the annual UN climate talks, taking place this year in Doha, Qatar.

How Climate Change Could Affect Entire Forest Ecosystems


Droplets caused by fog collect on the needles of this Bishop pine tree on Santa Cruz Island. (Credit: Mariah Carbone)
ScienceDaily (Nov. 28, 2012) — The fog comes in, and a drop of water forms on a pine needle, rolls down the needle, and falls to the forest floor. The process is repeated over and over, on each pine needle of every tree in a forest of Bishop pines on Santa Cruz Island, off the coast of Santa Barbara. That fog drip helps the entire forest ecosystem stay alive.
Thousands of years ago, in cooler and wetter times, Bishop pine trees are thought to have proliferated along the West Coast of the U.S. and Mexico. Now, stratus clouds -- the low-altitude clouds known locally as "June gloom" -- help keep the trees growing on Santa Cruz Island, Santa Rosa Island, and on one island off Baja California. Other than these locations, Bishop pine trees grow only farther north in California where it is cooler and wetter.
Mariah S. Carbone, first author of a new paper, titled "Cloud Shading and Fog Drip Influence the Metabolism of a Coastal Pine Ecosystem," and her co-authors, studied the influence of clouds on the largest Bishop pine forest of Santa Cruz Island. Carbone is a postdoctoral fellow with UC Santa Barbara's National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS). Their study was published in the journal Global Change Biology.
"When people think about climate change, they're often thinking about temperature and precipitation," said Carbone. "When you think about precipitation, it's rain and snow, depending on where you are. What this study showed is that you can have really important water inputs coming from clouds that influence the carbon cycle."
She explained that clouds are one of the largest uncertainties in global climate, and that the forest ecosystem interactions with clouds have a large impact -- one that has rarely been studied before, particularly in Southern California.
Changes in cloudiness or cloud height with global warming will alter the types of forest ecosystems that grow in coastal California, explained Carbone. While predictions about how rainfall will change in California over the next 50 years are uncertain, fog and low-stratus clouds might decline as sea-surface temperatures warm. Like the relict Bishop pines on Santa Cruz Island, and the majestic coastal Redwood forests in Northern California, forests remove and store carbon from the atmosphere, and thus are important for understanding greenhouse gas concentrations in the future. These coastal forests are also highly valued for their aesthetic and recreation qualities.
Fog is often present in coastal California during May through August. It occurs when the land warms in the spring and summer, and moist ocean air is pulled over cold, upwelling coastal waters. This moist air then condenses under a stable atmospheric inversion layer, creating low clouds or fog banks.
"The finding that summer fog strongly impacts carbon cycling highlights the need for improved understanding of whether we should expect coastal summer cloud behavior to change in a warmer world," said second author A. Park Williams, a former graduate student in UCSB's Geography Department, now at Los Alamos National Laboratory. "A change in summer fogginess could produce temperature, moisture, and carbon feedbacks in coastal ecosystems that easily swamp out the effects expected from increased greenhouse gases alone," said Williams.
The carbon cycle involves the movement of billions of tons of carbon between the oceans, lands, and atmosphere every year. Increased amounts of carbon dioxide, a potent greenhouse gas, ¬¬are injected into the atmosphere and contribute to climate change.
The scientists received help from NASA and NOAA in collecting information. "We used satellite data to map the spatial distribution of cloud cover across the western portion of Santa Cruz Island," said senior author Christopher J. Still, formerly an associate professor at UC Santa Barbara, now at Oregon State University. "We had some evidence of a cloud cover gradient from the coast to inland, based on our own observations and our weather station data, but the satellite data -- from NOAA and NASA satellites -- really allowed us to quantify this gradient across the western half of the island and in particular at our two study sites," said Still.
Still said that the authors believe this study is unique in linking clouds to soil microbial activity. "While most previous research on fog and ecosystems has focused on its role in plant-water relations -- such as the well-known linkages between fog and coast Redwoods -- we show that soil microbial activity and metabolism in these coastal ecosystems may be very dependent on the light but frequent fog drip that occurs during the rainless summer months," said Still. The study is also unique in linking fog and low clouds to the carbon cycle of a coastal ecosystem, including its impact on tree growth and soil respiration.
"What we found was that there are two major effects of the clouds," said Carbone. "One is shading, which keeps the temperatures cooler and the soil moisture higher. The other is fog drip, which is a water input into the soil."
The soil moisture content was not depleted as rapidly where the trees were under more cloud cover, and thus they were able to grow longer into the dry season. Water pulses from fog drip immediately stimulated microbes in the litter and soil below, but did not directly enhance pine tree activity. The microbial activity releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
"This study provides us with a greater understanding of how fog and the low coastal clouds which Californians commonly call 'the marine layer' affect plant growth and the activities of microorganisms in the soil," said John Randall, scientist with The Nature Conservancy, which owns and operates Santa Cruz Island in cooperation with the National Park Service and the University of California. "Their findings of the importance of fog and low clouds in influencing plant growth and survival and microbial metabolism in the soil will help us understand how changes in coastal fogs and low clouds that may accompany climate change will affect the forests and soils on Santa Cruz Island, other islands off the coast of California and Mexico, and all along the coast of the adjacent mainland."
The work on Santa Cruz Island, conducted in cooperation with The Nature Conservancy, was funded by grants from the Andrew Mellon Foundation and the Kearney Foundation of Soil Science. The NOAA Climate and Global Change Postdoctoral Fellowship and the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis have supported Carbone.

Sea Levels Rising Faster Than IPCC Projections


Sea-levels are rising 60 per cent faster than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) central projections, new research suggests. (Credit: © byheaven / Fotolia)
ScienceDaily (Nov. 27, 2012) — Sea levels are rising 60 per cent faster than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) central projections, new research suggests.
While temperature rises appear to be consistent with the projections made in the IPCC's fourth assessment report (AR4), satellite measurements show that sea levels are actually rising at a rate of 3.2 mm a year compared to the best estimate of 2 mm a year in the report.
The researchers, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Tempo Analytics and Laboratoire d'Etudes en Géophysique et Océanographie Spatiales, believe that findings such as these are important for keeping track of how well past projections match the accumulating observational data, especially as projections made by the IPCC are increasingly being used in decision making.
The study, which has been published November 28, in IOP Publishing's journal Environmental Research Letters, involved an analysis of global temperatures and sea-level data over the past two decades, comparing them both to projections made in the IPCC's third and fourth assessment reports.
Results were obtained by taking averages from the five available global land and ocean temperature series.
After removing the three known phenomena that cause short-term variability in global temperatures -- solar variations, volcanic aerosols and El Nino/Southern Oscillation -- the researchers found that the overall warming trend at the moment is 0.16°C per decade, which closely follows the IPCC's projections.
Satellite measurements of sea levels showed a different picture, however, with current rates of increase being 60 per cent faster than the IPCC's AR4 projections.
Satellites measure sea-level rise by bouncing radar waves back off the sea surface and are much more accurate than tide gauges as they have near-global coverage; tide gauges only sample along the coast. Tide gauges also include variability that has nothing to do with changes in global sea level, but rather with how the water moves around in the oceans, such as under the influence of wind.
The study also shows that it is very unlikely that the increased rate is down to internal variability in our climate system and also shows that non-climatic components of sea-level rise, such as water storage in reservoirs and groundwater extraction, do not have an effect on the comparisons made.
Lead author of the study, Stefan Rahmstorf, said: "This study shows once again that the IPCC is far from alarmist, but in fact has under-estimated the problem of climate change. That applies not just for sea-level rise, but also to extreme events and the Arctic sea-ice loss."
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The Cashless Society is Almost Here


card
Among the long list of items bundled by consensus reality merchants under the banner of ‘conspiracy theory’, is a world without cash – where technocrats rule over the populace, and everything and anything is exchanged via plastic and RFID chips.
In this sterile and controlled Orwellian hi-tech society, the idea of cash being passed from hand to hand would be as archaic as the thought of carrying around a rucksack of tally sticks today.
Still, despite the incredible penetration of credit and debit card transactions into economic aggregate, and the boom in internet shopping, few will comfortably admit that a cashless society is nearly upon us. In part, it’s a natural denial by many fueled by the idea of our society is indeed on a collision course with the sort of dystopic impersonal future like that depicted in the 1970′s sci-fi film classic, Logan’s Run’.
Cashless money is here, and growing rapidly.
Over the years, futurists and commentators alike seemed to agree that a cashless society will be a slow creep, and would automatically phase itself in simply by virtue of the sheer volume of electronic transactions that would gradually make cash less available and more costly to redeem, or exchange. This is still true for the most part. What few counted on, however, was how the final push would like place, and why. Some will be surprised by these new emerging mechanisms, and the political and sinister implications they will ultimately lead to.
Introduction of Parallel Currencies 
There has been a lot made about the ‘cashless society’ in media, but this cannot fully happen until there is a cashless currency.
Every revolution needs a good crisis in order to germinate its seed. The cashless revolution is no different. It should be abundantly clear by now that the global financial meltdown has been engineered at every juncture of its unfolding by the very private central banks who expand and contract the money supply. A dollar or euro collapse will trigger a global economic crisis, which is a prime opportunity to introduce the next phase.
In the summer of 2012, at the height of the European Central Bank (ECB) ritualistic raping of the Greek economy, financial expert Max Keiser, alongside Mexican billionaire Hugo Salinas Price, traveled to Athens to promote the idea of a silver Drachma as a parallel currency to the ever-failing euro. In theory and in practice, this parallel currency was ‘sound money’ for individual Greeks and would allow them to retain some say in their financial destiny, and also allow them to accumulate real wealth. It should have caught on.  But this great idea did not go down well with media moguls and technocratic elites loyal to their overlords in the ECB, Wall Street and the City of London. Still, too many people are remain unaware of how money is created, entered into circulation and how their private central banks control inflation, and Greece is no different.
Watch this clip from Greek television:
The US dollar is pure fiat, but it does have a theoretical backer. It is an oil-backed currency – and for better of for worse, is on its way to losing its long-lived status as the world’s reserve currency. China is moving towards a gold-backed currency and has already agreed to buy the majority of its oil supply from Russia off of the US dollar peg. This could mean two things: the US could be forced to fight a war to maintain dollar supremacy, or the dollar will begin to drop as the top dog. This shift will open up a window of opportunity for money masters to insert not only a brand new global currency, but also its universal cashless attributes as well.
Common sense and free market wisdom would expect to see a sound money option replace the current fiat disaster, but as we saw in Greece, a great solution was not taken up and straddled with the dysfunctional euro, that society will continue to pay the cost of that reality.
The euro crisis was a great opportunity to throw out the euro in favour of something that could create wealth, rather than debt. As the fiat currencies continue to slide downhill, globalist are preparing their solution behind closed doors.
Enter the Cashless Currency…
Right now we are now on the cusp of that US Dollar collapse, and perhaps a Euro implosion on the back end of it. Risks of hyper inflation are very real here, but if you control the money supply might already have a ready-made solution waiting in the wings, you will not be worrying about the rift, only waiting for the chaos to ensue so as to maximise your own booty from the crisis.
Many believed that the global currency would be the SDR unit, aka Special Drawing Rights, implemented in 2001 as a supplementary foreign exchange reserve asset maintained by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). SDRs were not considered a full-fledged currency, but rather a claim to currency held by IMF member countries for which they may be exchanged for dollars, euros, yen or other central bankers’ fiat notes.
With the SDR confined to the upper tier of the international money launderette, a new product is still needed to dovetail with designs of a  global cashless society.
Two new parallel currencies are currently being used exclusively within the electronic, or cashless  domain – Bitcoin and Ven. Among the many worries Ben Bernanke listed in his speech at the New York Economic Club last week  was the emergence of Bitcoin. But don’t believe for a second that these digital parallel currencies are not being watched over and even steered by the money masters. Couple this latest trend with done deals by most of the world’s largest mobile networks this month to allow people to pay via a mobile ‘wallet’, and you now have the initial enabler for a new global electronic currency.
These new parallel cashless currencies could very quickly end up in pole position for supremacy when the old fiat notes fade away as a result of the next planned economic dollar and euro crisis.
Both Bitcoin and Ven appear on their surface to be independent parallel digital money systems, but the reality is much different. In April 2011, Ven announced the first commodity trade priced in Ven for gold production between Europe and South America. Both of these so-called ‘digital alternatives’ are being backed and promoted through some of the world’s biggest and most long-standing corporate dynasties, including Rothschild owned Reuters as an example, which should be of interest to any activist who believes that a digitally controlled global currency is a dangerous road.
The Electronic Deutsche Mark
Much is made of Germany’s prominent financial position within the EU, with a popular talking point being that, “Germany is carrying the majority of the load in ‘bailing out’ countries such as Greece in the south”. If the Euro is ‘heading south’ as many a financial commentator are claiming, then how would a country like Germany – or even the US Federal Reserve for that matter, hedge their bets with an impending currency collapse looming just over the horizon?
Economics professor Miles Kimball from the University of Michigan thinks he knows the answer:
“In short, for a smooth transition, a reintroduced mark needs to be an electronic mark. I recently made the case for the electronic dollar in a previous Quartz column, “E-Money: How paper currency is holding the US recovery back.” The trouble with paper money is that the rate of interest people earn on holding paper money puts a floor on the interest rate they are willing to accept in doing any other lending. For the US, I proposed making the electronic dollar the “unit of account” or economic yardstick for prices and other economic values, and having the Federal Reserve control the exchange rate between electronic dollars and paper dollars to make paper dollars gradually fall in value relative to electronic dollars during periods of time when the Fed wants room to make the interest rate negative.
In the case of Germany, there would be no need to reintroduce a paper mark along with the electronic mark, since the euro itself could continue in its current role as a “medium of exchange” for making purchases in Germany, alongside the electronic mark. A “crawling peg” exchange rate could be used to let the electronic mark gradually go up in value relative to the euro, without causing a huge rush into the mark, since with no paper mark other than the euro itself, interest rates in Germany could be close to zero when measured in euros, which would make them strongly negative in terms of marks.”
A dollar or euro crash could be the perfect storm for the introduction of a major global digital currencies, and this will do nothing but fast-track our entry into the new cashless society.
Contactless Payments
This past year’s Summer Olympic was a beta testing exercise for a number of new programs. We witnessed troops deployed en mass for the first time to marshal the international sporting event and new facial recognition technology tested to monitor its attendees. One of the chief sponsors of London 2012 Olympic was VISA, used the event as a springboard to launch its new ‘contactless payment’ technology, acclimatising the international public to making routine payments via smartphones. VISA now predicts that this new method will carry 50 per cent of its transaction volume by the year 2020.
Mastercard has also rolled out its own version called Paypass, and Barclaycard has already implemented its own mobile phone payment chip in 2011. It conceivable here, that a bank like Barclays could one day takeover a major mobile service provider in order to streamline the endless profits it could accrue from monopolising cashless payment facilities for its customers. A recent edition of Marketing Week further explains how this is program is being rolled out:
“Barclays launched Pingit this year, a mobile payment service that allows customers to send and receive money with a mobile phone number, which has sparked The Payments Council to work on a similar project. And the three leading mobile operators in the UK – EE, Vodafone and O2 – are working on a joint project under the name Weve, one of the aims of which is to develop standardised technology for ‘digital wallets’ on mobile.
These industry innovations reflect the changing attitude and behaviour by consumers to cashless payments. Barry Clark, account director at Future Foundation, which identified the trend towards a cashless society in its recent report into the changing face of payments, explains that this move towards digital is a “banking nirvana” for brands, since replacing cash with electronic payments takes high costs out of the system.”
These mobile enablers will effectively cover the small services and contractor’s market for the cashless society. In addition, digital payment terminals like iZettle and Square (created by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey), have brought in most small traders, including taxi drivers, plumbers etc, and street side retailers – meaning that the barrier for entry into the new cashless society has been effectively dissolved.
The Socialist Oyster
The darker aspect of a cashless society, is one which few are debating or discussing, but is actually the most pivotal in terms of scial engineering and transforming communities and societies. In London, the electronic touch payment Oyster Card was introduced in 2003, initially for public transport, and since that time the card has been co-opted to be used for other functions, as the UK beta tests the idea of an all-in-one cashless lifestyle solution.
Ironically, it’s the United States, supposedly the birthplace of modern capitalism, who is beta testing its own socialist technocracy.  As the ranks of the poor and unemployed grow and dollar inflation rises in America, more and more people are dependent on traditional ‘Food Stamp’ entitlements in order to feed their families. The US has now introduced its own socialist ‘Oyster’ to replace the old Food Stamp program. It’s called the ‘EBT’, which stands for “Electronic Benefit Transfer“, as a means of transferring money from the central government to people living below the poverty line. Advocate Mike Adams for Natural News describes it another way:
“EBT benefits have more than doubled during the Obama administration’s last four years, creating tens of millions of new dependents who now vote based almost entirely on who gives them the most handouts.
The purchase of vitamins is specifically prohibited by the EBT program. This is done as a way to keep EBT recipients sick and diseased while suffering from nutritional deficiencies, which is precisely what the federal government wants.
EBT cards create high-profit handouts to corporations, too: Pharmaceutical companies and the sick-care industry; Big Government which gets re-elected based on entitlement handouts; global banks which earn a percentage off every swipe; and even the processed junk food industry which preys upon nutritional ignorance of the poor.
In fact, for every dollar’s worth of food handed out to EBT recipients under the program, at least 50 cents is driven right into the profit coffers of wealthy corporations.”
Adams has pointed out the endgame here. Where collectivist technocrats are concerned, a global digital currency is not only a means for a centrally controlled economy, but also a centrally controlled society. And as Adams also pointed out, they can even control what you eat.
Bottom line: the state can, and will cut-off your electronic financial lifeline should you fall foul of the system. No negotiations, no gray areas – and definitely no place for a free individual in this type of globalist system.
Social Networks Could Supplant Nations
In 2011 Facebook launched its own virtual currency, which was taken up immediately by the games developer industry. Facebook created it’s own internal digital market overnight. If customers didn’t like it, they had two choices – jump ship, or stay in the biggest market place. That’s a lot of power to wield, and you can wield it if you have the big numbers.
A severe lack of choice in the world of online communities has unwittingly(or not) positioned Facebook to play the roles of not only data collector, but also as banker, retailer, archivist and governor.
As 2012 comes to a close, many people have certainly become, in one way or another, sans border citizens of the Facebook Nation. In the future, one corporation or cartel’s success in capturing a near global monopoly of membership to a particular online platform might give it the ability to dictate a digital  economic mandate to both producers and consumer.
The digital data industry now claims in a recent study by fast.MAP, that consumer confidence in sharing personal information has risen. But the reality is that most people do not know which data is being used and to who it is being shared or sold to. Most users are unknowingly trading “access” to networks, as well convenient speed of registration – for data privacy. We do this on a daily basis now.
It’s a question of speculation at this point how deeply the new digital currencies will be integrated into social networking giants like Facebook, or Second Life - where users are already buying virtual property with virtual currency, but few can deny that the potential for consolidation in the early 21st century is already there.
History Will Repeat Itself
Whenever the status quo is seen as a failure, the architects of society will rarely allow the whole show to come to a grinding halt, for fear that new and non-centrally controlled organic systems of organisation will emerge. The ruling establishment will spare no opportunity to tell society this, over and over, making people truly believe that it is in their best interest to adopt whatever alternative is handed down to them. This is why, when faced with a crisis, society will almost always seek to implement a parallel alternatives, rather than rethink the whole system.
In 2008, the public had an opportunity to collapse the predatory banking system that has been trading insolvent and gambling on thin air. But the very same ruling establishment who engineered the crisis to  begin with, masterfully presented their own solution as the remedy by establishing the precedent of the state bailing out any gambling losses incurred by the banking community.
In the end society relented, and with help of pro-banking political leadership on both sides of the Atlantic, they adopted the pre-packaged belief that a cluster of bloated and corrupt financial institutions were simply too big to fail. Aside from being a massive redistribution of wealth upwards into the hands of the speculative elite classes, this was merely a test by the establishment to see how far they could go in robbing the public, pushing up inflation, hoovering up real assets, robbing pension funds and enslaving taxpayers to generations of debt the bankers created – all in one swoop.
It has long been the dream of collectivists and technocratic elites to eliminate the semi-unregulated cash economy and black markets in order to maximise taxation and to fully control markets. If the cashless society is ushered in, they will have near complete control over the lives of individual people.
The financial collapse which began in 2007-2008 was merely the opening gambit of the elite criminal class, a mere warm-up for things to come. With the next collapse we may see a centrally controlled global digital currency gaining its final foothold.
The cashless society is already here. The question now is how far will society allow it to penetrate and completely control each and every aspect of their day to day lives.

Leave the Carbon in the Ground, by Bill McKibben

Leave the Carbon in the Ground: An Open Letter to Governments and Their Negotiators

To really address climate change UNFCCC-COP18 should decide to leave under the soil more than 2/3 of the fossil reserves

2012 saw the shocking melt of the Arctic, leading our greatest climatologist to declare a 'planetary emergency,' and it saw weather patterns wreck harvests around the world, raising food prices by 40% and causing family emergencies in poor households throughout the world.
 
That's what happens with 0.8ºC of global warming. If we are going to stop this situation from getting worse, an array of institutions have explained this year precisely what we need to do: leave most of the carbon we know about in the ground and stop looking for more."Now is the time to act for the future of humanity and Nature." (image: 350.org)
 
If we want a 50-50 chance of staying below two degrees, we have to leave 2/3 of the known reserves of coal and oil and gas underground; if we want an 80% chance, we have to leave 80% of those reserves untouched. That's not "environmentalist math" or some radical interpretation--that's from the report of the International Energy Agency last month. 
 
It means that--without dramatic global action to change our path--the end of the climate story is already written. There is no room for doubt--absent remarkable action, these fossil fuels will burn, and the temperature will climb creating a chain reaction of climate related natural disasters.
 
Negotiators should cease their face-saving, their endless bracketing and last minute cooking of texts and concentrate entirely on figuring out how to live within the carbon budget scientists set. We can't emit more than 565 more gigatons of carbon before 2050, but at the current pace we'll blow past that level in 15 years. If we want to have a chance to stick to this budget by 2020 we can’t send to the atmosphere more than 200 gigatons.
 
Rich countries who have poured most of the carbon into the atmosphere (especially the planet's sole superpower) need to take the lead in emission reductions and the emerging economies have also to make commitments to reduce the exploitation of oil, coal and gas. The right to development should be understood as the obligation of the states to guarantee the basic needs of the population to enjoy a fulfilled and happy life, and not as a free ticket for a consumer and extractivist society that doesn’t take into account the limits of the planet and the wellbeing of all humans.
 
There's no longer time for diplomatic delays. Most of the negotiators in the Eighteenth Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) know that these are the facts. Now is the time to act for the future of humanity and Nature.
Bill McKibben
Bill McKibben is Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College and co-founder of 350.org. His most recent book is Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.

Burning All the Carbon Will Burn Us All -Our Climate Future and the 2012 Doha Summit

Burning All the Carbon Will Burn Us All

Our Climate Future and the Doha Summit

(Photo credit: NASA / with text added)The annual United Nations climate summit has convened, this year in Doha, the capital of the oil-rich emirate of Qatar, on the Arabian Peninsula. Dubbed “COP 18,” an army of bureaucrats, business people and environmentalists are gathered ostensibly to limit global greenhouse-gas emissions to a level that scientists say will contain the global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius (3.8 degrees Fahrenheit), and perhaps stave off global climate catastrophe. If past meetings are any indication, national self-interest on the part of the world’s largest polluters, paramount among them the United States, will trump global consensus.
“We want our children to live in an America ... that isn’t threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet,” President Barack Obama proclaimed in his victory speech on Nov. 6 this year, just over a week after Superstorm Sandy devastated New York City and much of New Jersey, killing more than 100 people. These are fine aspirations. The problem is, action is needed now to avert the very scenario that President Obama has said he wants to avoid. The United States, which remains the greatest polluter in world history, stands as one of the biggest impediments to a rational global program to stem global warming.
'There is no room for doubt—absent remarkable action, these fossil fuels will burn, and the temperature will climb, creating a chain reaction of climate related natural disasters.' —Nnimmo Bassey, Bill McKibben, Pablo Solon
Latest findings suggest that the goal of limiting global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius may now be beyond reach, and that we may now be locked into a 4- to 6-degree temperature increase. “The only way to avoid the pessimistic scenarios will be radical transformations in the way the global economy currently functions: rapid uptake of renewable energy, sharp falls in fossil fuel use or massive deployment of CCS [carbon capture and storage], removal of industrial emissions and halting deforestation.” These are not the words of some wild-eyed environmental activist, but from business advisers at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC) in their November 2012 Low Carbon Economy Index.
The PwC advisers concur in many regards with a consortium of environmentalists who issued an open letter as COP 18 convened. Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, Nigerian activist Nnimmo Bassey and Ambassador Pablo Solon, who formerly led climate negotiations for Bolivia, said in their letter to the COP 18 negotiators: “If we want a 50-50 chance of staying below two degrees, we have to leave 2/3 of the known reserves of coal and oil and gas underground. ... That’s not ‘environmentalist math’ or some radical interpretation—that’s from the report of the International Energy Agency last month. It means that—without dramatic global action to change our path—the end of the climate story is already written. There is no room for doubt—absent remarkable action, these fossil fuels will burn, and the temperature will climb, creating a chain reaction of climate related natural disasters.”
The World Meteorological Organization released preliminary findings for 2012, highlighting extremes of drought, heat waves, floods, and snow and extreme cold, as well as above-average hurricane activity in the Atlantic basin for the third consecutive year. Also speaking at the COP 18’s opening was Dr. R.K. Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, comprising more than 1,800 scientists from around the globe, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. In sober, scientific language, Dr. Pachauri, pointed out potential catastrophes unless action is taken, among them: “By 2020, between 75 and 250 million people [in Africa] are projected to be exposed to increased water stress due to climate change. ... As global average temperature increase exceeds 3.5 (degrees) C, model projections suggest significant extinctions ranging from 40 to 70 percent of species assessed around the globe."
President Obama loudly advocates for doing away with subsidies to the oil and gas corporations, but, as pointed out by Oil Change International, Greenpeace and other groups, he is “supporting skyrocketing export subsidies for dirty fossil fuels through the United States Export-Import Bank,” with at least $10.2 billion in public financing for fossil-fuel projects in 2012 alone, dwarfing the $2.3 billion the State Department claims it has disbursed to developing countries to combat climate change.
Outside the air-conditioned plenary halls and corridors of the UN climate summit in Doha, in the emirate of Qatar—which, ironically, is the nation with the highest per capita carbon emissions of any nation on the planet—there will be protests. The newly formed Arab Youth Climate Movement, hundreds of grassroots activists from across the region, including many involved in the Arab Spring, are marching, calling for their nations to take the lead in reducing emissions.
The Arab Spring activists toppled dictators, but can they move the fossil-fuel corporations? With a growing global movement intent on doing just that, prepare for a hot summer, in more ways than one.
Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
Amy Goodman
Amy Goodman is the host of "Democracy Now!," a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on 1,100 stations in North America. She was awarded the 2008 Right Livelihood Award, dubbed the “Alternative Nobel” prize, and received the award in the Swedish Parliament in December.

'Alarming' Year of Extremes as Climate 'Tipping Point' Looms

'Alarming' Year of Extremes as Climate 'Tipping Point' Looms

UN groups issue stark warnings at climate summit in Doha

- Common Dreams staff
Satellite data reveal how the new record low Arctic sea ice extent, from Sept. 16, 2012, compares to the average minimum extent over the past 30 years (in yellow). (Credit: NASA/Goddard Scientific Visualization Studio)
An "alarming" rate of Arctic Sea ice melt and "far-reaching changes" to the Earth from climate change follow a year of extremes, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said on Wednesday as the third day of climate negotiations take place in Doha, Qatar.
The WMO statement comes a day after the UN Environment Program (UNEP) warned that the looming release of methane in the Arctic could push the world past a "tipping point."
"The extent of Arctic sea ice reached a new record low. The alarming rate of its melt this year highlighted the far-reaching changes taking place on Earth's oceans and biosphere," Michel Jarraud, head of the WMO, an agency of the UN, stated on Wednesday.
"Climate change is taking place before our eyes and will continue to do so as a result of the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which have risen constantly and again reached new records," he added.
The Geneva-based group pointed out: "In August, the Arctic sea ice lost an average of nearly 92,000 square kilometers of ice per day -- the fastest observed loss for the month of August on record."
But the climate predictions, as dire as many are, fail to take into account the ticking time bomb of the carbon dioxide and methane emissions from the thawing permafrost.
"Permafrost is one of the keys to the planet's future because it contains large stores of frozen organic matter that, if thawed and released into the atmosphere, would amplify current global warming and propel us to a warmer world," UN Under-Secretary General and UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner stated on Tuesday.
"Its potential impact on the climate, ecosystems and infrastructure has been neglected for too long," he added.
As the planet warms and the active area of permafrost that thaws and refreezes each year extends, huge of amounts of carbon dioxide and methane will be released into the atmosphere.
"Once this process begins," UNEP explains, "it will operate in a feedback loop known as the permafrost carbon feedback, which has the effect of increasing surface temperatures and thus accelerating the further warming of permafrost - a process that would be irreversible on human timescales."
Another threat that has been understated, according to research published in Environmental Research Letters on Tuesday, is the level of sea rise.
Scientists assert in this new study that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) sea level projections have been "biased low," and the sea level is rising 60% faster than the IPCC predictions, heading towards a rise of one meter by the end of the century.
"I would say that a metre of sea level rise by the end of the century is probably close to what you would find if you polled the people who know best," study co-author Grant Foster told Agence France Presse.
"In low-lying areas where you have massive numbers of people living within a metre of sea level, like Bangladesh, it means that the land that sustains their lives disappears, and you have hundreds of millions of climate refugees, and that can lead to resource wars and all kinds of conflicts," he added.
"For major coastal cities like New York, probably the principal effect would be what we saw in Hurricane Sandy.