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importantIs Income Equality the Killer App?
From Shareable.net
Why More Equality? Our thirty years research shows that: 1) In rich countries, a smaller gap between rich and poor means a happier, healthier, and more successful population. Just look at the US, the UK, Portugal, and New Zealand in the top right of this graph, doing much worse than Japan, Sweden or Norway in the bottom left. 2) Meanwhile, more economic growth will NOT lead to a happier, healthier, or more successful population. In fact, there is no relation between income per head and social well-being in rich countries. 3) If the UK were more equal, we'd be better off as a population. For example, the evidence suggests that if we halved inequality here: - Murder rates would halve - Mental illness would reduce by two thirds - Obesity would halve - Imprisonment would reduce by 80% - Teen births would reduce by 80% - Levels of trust would increase by 85% 4) It's not just poor people who do better. The evidence suggests people all the way up would benefit, although it's true that the poorest would gain the most. 5) These findings hold true, whether you look across developed nations, or across the 50 states of the USA.noreply@blogger.com (Mira Luna) Ahmadinejad: the United States are guilty of the "greatest robbery in History"
Speaking before the representatives of the D8 (a group of 8 developing countries made up of Bangladesh, Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia, Pakistan and Turkey), the Iranian president denounced the world financial system. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sustained that over the past 30 years the United States printed 29 000 billion dollars worth of Treasury bonds and fiat money without any real backing. With this fictitious currency, they took possession of the world's most important resources, pulling off \"the greatest robbery in the History of humanity\".(author unknown)1657272441176682183614936088195576994816
A passage to world power | Randeep RameshThe reality of India I saw was often grim. Yet the country still confounds those who write it off In my six years there, it was hard not to be infected by the hubris of India – a nation that feels part of history, an essential actor on the global stage. Yet even as I admired a country that had thrived as a democracy despite unbounded poverty, mass illiteracy and entrenched social divides, experiencing India as a reporter was a string of enervating and dispiriting episodes. Whether I was visiting a rural police station where half-naked men were hung from the ceiling during an interrogation, or talking to the parents of a baby bulldozed to death in a slum clearance, the romance of India's idealism was undone by its awful daily reality. The venality, mediocrity and indiscipline of its ruling class would be comical but for the fact that politicians appeared incapable of doing anything for the 836 million people who live on 25p a day. The selling of public office for private gain was so bad that the only way to make poverty history in India would be to make every person a politician. Last year the wealth of local representatives in the northern state of Haryana rose at an astonishing rate of £10,000 a month. Their constituents were lucky if their income increased by a few pounds. The burden of democracy in India, to borrow from Yeats, the Irish poet influenced by mystical Hindu thought, was that "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity". Yet the country continues to confound those who write it off. I saw India redeemed repeatedly by three quirks of history: a written liberal constitution, religions rendered ethical, and a talent for sabotage. Take the last first. India won independence not through war or revolution but through non-co-operation, protest and the quiet subversion of the economy. Civil society in India has acquired an unrivalled mastery of such skills, and campaigners have been quicker than politicians to realise that democracy will not prevail unless its proponents show success at governing. Consequently, it was activists who shamed the government last year into enacting a law to make children's education compulsory. India's constitution, the longest in the world, has become a moral compass for justice in a society where violence had been the best measure of one's power and standing. When homosexual sex was legalised by Delhi's high court last summer, the judges said the old law criminalising the gay community was in violation of the constitution. By appealing to the highest sense of being Indian, the bench ended years of homophobia. To claim faith has enabled Indians to come together might seem far-fetched. British India was rent asunder by religion, and one of my first reporting tasks was to visit Muslim victims of state-sponsored pogroms. Yet such violence appeared more political than theological. Indeed, during my time in India it was Europe that appeared unable to embrace religious diversity. While I awoke each day to the sound of the muezzin, the Swiss voted to outlaw the construction of minarets. France's president Nicolas Sarkozy wants to ban the burka; Britain's Jack Straw asks women to remove veils in meetings and the Turks wait, still, to join the EU. Europe's liberalism looked like a straitjacket of unspoken Christian values. India's philosophy emphasised not what you believed but how you behaved. Lead a compassionate, religious life and the state would leave you alone. This thinking meant Indian streets are shared by people who look, dress and pray differently – making them a celebration of the nation's diversity. Diverse, yes: but it's an open question whether the society being created by these forces is a fair one. India is perhaps the most unequal country on the planet, with a tiny elite engorged on the best education, biggest landholdings and largest incomes. Those born on the bottom rungs of the social hierarchy suffer a legacy of caste bigotry, rural servitude and class discrimination. Politics in India is increasingly becoming a debate about the haves and have-nots, and this is given violent expression by a rise in bloody Maoist guerrilla terror. Delhi's stance in global talks is being reduced to the impact on poverty. Whether the matter is climate change, trade talks or nuclear weapons, India has forced wealthier nations to acknowledge that international relations are about power and morals. It negotiates with a hand yet to be dealt: in a few decades it will be the world's third largest economy. Coming back to London has meant returning to a country that lives in the shadow of its former colony. Britain may see itself as a major power, sending troops to pacify Islamist insurgents and spreading good governance globally. These delusions will leave us morbidly disappointed. Unlike Indians, we are not on the cusp of a stirring transformation. Overspent and overstretched, we perch instead on the crest of a falling wave. Randeep Rameshguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Randeep Ramesh Is this the meaning of life? | John StewartJohn Stewart argues that despite the perception that science has stripped the meaning from life, recent developments in evolutionary theory suggest that humans have a central role to play in the future of the universe It is often assumed that the science-based worldview implies that life on this planet is a meaningless accident in a universe that is indifferent to our existence. Humans struggle to find purpose within this purely naturalistic understanding of reality, and so they supplement it with beliefs in supernatural processes and entities. However, recent advances in our understanding of evolution are revealing a bigger picture that can, by itself, give meaning to life. This new worldview locates humanity within a much larger evolutionary process that appears to offer us a meaningful role to play. This new understanding of evolution is founded on the recognition that evolution is headed somewhere – it has a trajectory. In particular, evolution on Earth has repeatedly gathered small-scale entities into cooperative organisations on a progressively larger and larger scale. Self-replicating molecular processes were organised into the first simple cells. Communities of these simple, prokaryotic cells formed the more complex eukaryotic cell. Collections of these formed multicellular organisms, and organisms were organised into cooperative societies. A similar sequence appears to have unfolded in human evolution: from family groups, to bands, to tribes, to agricultural communities and city states, to nations, and so on. This trajectory has applied regardless of whether evolution proceeds by gene-based natural selection or cultural processes. It is driven by the potential at all levels of organisation for cooperative teams united by common goals to be more successful than isolated individuals. Cooperation trumps selfishnessMainstream biology has been slow to accept that evolution moves towards increasing cooperation. The view has been that selfishness, rather than cooperation, is favoured by evolution. But this objection has been overcome in the past two decades by a large body of research on the evolution of cooperation. In short, this research shows that complex cooperation will emerge among self-interested individuals if they are organised so that they benefit from their cooperative acts – and if free riders and other non-cooperators are restrained or punished. Crucially, this removes any conflict between self-interest and cooperation. (Readers interested in a more detailed discussion of why biologists have been so slow to accept that there is a direction to evolution should read my pre-press article for the journal Foundations of Science.) Where will evolution go from here? Extrapolating the trajectory into the future is reasonably straightforward, at least initially. The next major transition on Earth would be the emergence of a sustainable and cooperative global society. As with cooperatives at all other levels, the global society would curb internal conflict and destructive competition, including war and pollution. Past transitions demonstrate how this might be organised. Universal trajectoryExtrapolating the trajectory further would see the continued expansion of the scale of cooperative organisation out into the solar system and beyond. Wherever possible, this expansion would be likely to occur through cooperative linkage with other living processes, rather than by "empire building". The possibility of life arising elsewhere seems high, and while the details of evolution on other planets are likely to differ, the general form of the evolutionary trajectory would be universal. If the trajectory continued in this way, the scale of cooperative organisation would expand throughout the universe, comprised of living processes and intelligence from multiple origins. As it increased in intelligence and scale, its command over matter, energy and other resources would also expand, as would its power to achieve whatever objectives it chose. What might organised life and intelligence do with this increasing power? One possible answer was developed as an attempt to solve the "fine-tuning problem" – the enigma of why the fundamental laws and parameters of the universe seem to be fine-tuned to support the emergence of life, with even slight changes leading to a universe in which life is unlikely to emerge. Supposing the trajectory of evolution eventually produces life and intelligence with sufficient power and knowledge to reproduce the universe itself? This intelligent universe would fine-tune "offspring" universes so that they are even more conducive to the emergence and development of life and intelligence. And so on. According to this scenario, our universe itself is embedded in larger evolutionary processes that shape universes. And life (including humanity) has a function and purpose within these larger processes in the same sense that our eyes have a purpose within the evolutionary processes that have shaped humanity. Intentional evolutionNot all organisms that evolve to humanity's current stage will go on to participate in these large-scale evolutionary processes. Up to our stage, evolution has been driven along its trajectory by competition and selection. But these pressures weaken as a global society begins to emerge, because this society will not be in direct competition with other global societies. From this point on, evolution will continue to advance only if the emerging global society decides to advance the evolutionary process intentionally. The society must awaken to the possibility that it is living in the midst of a directional evolutionary process, realise that the continued success of the process depends on its intentional actions, and then commit to actively move the process forward. Organisms that complete this transition to intentional evolution will drive the further development of life and intelligence in the universe. Those that do not will be failed evolutionary experiments. They will be eggs that never hatched. Humanity is fast approaching the threshold of this critical evolutionary transition. John Stewart is a core member of the Evolution, Complexity and Cognition Research Group of the Free University of Brussels, and the author of Evolution's Arrow and The Evolutionary Manifesto. This is a condensed version of his paper "The meaning of life in a developing universe" which is in press for a special issue of the journal Foundations of Science Further reading guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds(author unknown)04512761470315387364 AN ENTREPRENEUR'S APPROACH TO RESILIENT COMMUNITIESHere's an interesting "in system" method for building resilient communities in the US (I think of this as a "soft" launch). It leverages two forms of investment capital: IRA/401K and student debt. Here's a little bit more on "resilient communities" if you are unfamiliar with the concept. In essence, its a community that is able to generate everything it needs locally, can trade with the global economy, and support modern lifestyle quality. __________________ In order to build out resilient communities there needs to be a business mechanism that can financially power the initial roll-out. Here are some markets that may be serviced by resilient community formation:
Triangulating these markets yields the following business opportunity:
I suspect there is a good way to construct a legal business framework that allows this to happen. What would make this even more interesting would be to combine this with a "Freedom" network/darknet that allows ideas to flow freely via an open source approach between active resilient communities on the network. The network would also allow goods and services to flow between sites (via an internal trading mechanism) and also allow these goods and intellectual property (protected by phalanxes of lawyers) to be sold to the outside world (via an Ali Baba approach). At some point, if it is designed correctly, this network could become self-sustaining and able to generate the income necessary to continue a global roll-out by itself. AN ENTREPRENEUR'S APPROACH TO RESILIENT COMMUNITIESHere's an interesting "in system" method for building resilient communities in the US (I think of this as a "soft" launch). It leverages two forms of investment capital: IRA/401K and student debt. Here's a little bit more on "resilient communities" if you are unfamiliar with the concept. In essence, its a community that is able to generate everything it needs locally, can trade with the global economy, and support modern lifestyle quality. __________________ In order to build out resilient communities there needs to be a business mechanism that can financially power the initial roll-out. Here are some markets that may be serviced by resilient community formation:
Triangulating these markets yields the following business opportunity:
I suspect there is a good way to construct a legal business framework that allows this to happen. What would make this even more interesting would be to combine this with a "Freedom" network/darknet that allows ideas to flow freely via an open source approach between active resilient communities on the network. The network would also allow goods and services to flow between sites (via an internal trading mechanism) and also allow these goods and intellectual property (protected by phalanxes of lawyers) to be sold to the outside world (via an Ali Baba approach). At some point, if it is designed correctly, this network could become self-sustaining and able to generate the income necessary to continue a global roll-out by itself. Cuba plans city farms to ease economyProject launched to ring urban areas with thousands of small farms in bid to reverse agricultural decline Cuba has launched an ambitious project to ring urban areas with thousands of small farms in a bid to reverse the country's agricultural decline and ease its chronic economic woes. The five-year plan calls for growing fruits and vegetables and raising livestock in four mile-wide rings around 150 of Cuba's cities and towns, with the exception of the capital Havana. The island's authorities hope suburban farming will make food cheaper and more abundant, cut transportation costs and encourage urban dwellers to leave bureaucratic jobs for more productive labour. But the government will continue to hold a monopoly on most aspects of food production and distribution, including its control of most of the land in the communist-run nation. The pilot programme for the project is being conducted in the central city of Camaguey, which the Cuban agriculture ministry has said eventually will have 1,400 small farms covering 52,000 hectares (128,490 acres), just minutes outside the town. The farms, mostly in private hands but also including some cooperatives and state-owned enterprises, must grow everything organically, and the ministry expects they will produce 75% of the food for the city of 320,000 people, with big state-owned farms providing the rest. On a recent day, dozens of people were hard at work plowing fields, hoeing earth, posting protective covering for crops and putting up fencing as the sun came up. "This land they gave to us, the private farmers. I have four hectares (10 acres) and now they have leased me eight (20 acres) more," one of the farmers, Camilo Mendoza, told Reuters. "Look, on this side and the other side are other plots, and over there another. Here they have given quite a bit of land and support to private farmers," he said. The project is modelled after the hundreds of urban gardens developed by then-defence minister Raul Castro during the deep economic depression of the 1990s that followed the collapse of communism in eastern Europe. He proclaimed at the time that beans were more important than cannons, marking a strategic shift towards a more domestic focused agenda by Cuban leaders after decades of active support for liberation movements and leftist guerrillas overseas.The suburban project dovetails with other steps introduced by President Raul Castro since he took over the day-to-day leadership in 2008. These have included the leasing of fallow state lands to 100,000 mostly private farmers, raising prices for farm products and allowing farmers to sell part of their crops directly to the people instead of to the state. On the other side of Camaguey and a few miles up Cuba's central highway, Armando, the head of a cattle cooperative, said his group was persuaded to join the plan by the offer of land to raise garden and root vegetables and the chance for direct sales to the public. Stands have been set up every mile or so along the city's ring road for the sales, but Armando said they are taking their products to the customers. "They assigned us a district where we can sell our produce. We are using a mobile system, a bicycle cart, and sell out every day," he said. "In December we produced around five tonnes. The root vegetables we had to sell to the state, but we were free to sell the garden vegetables directly," he said. The changes are tweaks to Cuba's centralised socialism, not a significant step away from it, keeping with Raul Castro's vow to protect the system put in place after his brother took power in the 1959 Cuban revolution. He has balked at more sweeping, market-oriented changes that many expected when he took power and without which many economists say Cuba will not significantly increase agricultural output. Cubans have seen many past government efforts to transform the country's agriculture fail, so the farmers at Camaguey said they were taking a wait-and-see attitude on this latest one. "For sure there will be more food around here if you come back in a few years," Camilio Mendoza said about his expectations. "More than that, I can't say." guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds (author unknown)10873299502629559260 Secret Banking Cabal Emerges From AIG Shadows: David Reilly - Bloomberg.com
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This 'cabal' idea has been sidelined for years. Now it's in Bloomberg! Bookmark this on Delicious - Saved by matslats to illuminati - More about this bookmark This 'cabal' idea has been sidelined for years. Now it's in Bloomberg! Identification and Tracking in the Brave New World–RFID Chips and YouAs I’ve often said, the global system of money, banking, and finance is designed to centralize power and concentrate wealth. It is quite obvious that this trend has been accelerating over the past several decades. Projecting the trend, we conclude that the ultimate objective is to achieve tight control over the masses by a tiny elite segment of the population. For more than 30 years I’ve been monitoring developments in the technologies for identification and tracking. Each innovation has been more awesome than the last one in its capabilities. This article from the Michael Journal describes the present state of technology. Complete control requires a system for positive personal identification (PPI). That is now not only possible, it is being implemented. — t.h.g. An introduction to New Technologies (Part I) by Patrick Redmond Patrick Redmond graduated with a Doctorate in History from the University of London, England in 1972. He taught at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad, then at Adhadu Bello University in Kano, Nigeria before joining IBM. He worked in IBM for 31 years before retiring. During his career at IBM he held a variety of jobs. These included; from 1992 until 2007 working at the IBM Toronto lab in technical, then in sales support. He has written two books and numerous articles. Here is a presentation he gave in Toronto on April 13, 2008. * * * I want to thank Yvon for inviting me here to talk about new technologies. What I’m going to do is give you an introduction to three technologies that are becoming more and more important. The first is RFID chips, the second genetic engineering, and the third synthetic biology. This will give you an understanding of what is happening and where science is going. We will start with RFID chips: So what are they? They are Radio Frequency Identification Devices. An RFID is a microchip with an attached antenna. The microchip contains stored information which can be transmitted to a reader and then to a computer. RFID’s can be passive, semi-passive or active. Active RFID’s have an internal power source such as a battery. This allows the tag to send signals back to the reader, so if I have a RFID on me and it has a battery, I can just send a signal to a reader wherever it is. They can receive and store data, and be read at a further distance than the passive RFID’s. The batteries can only last a short while. But the current batteries in the RFID’s can last for over a hundred years, because of their self-generating power. Ultrawideband (UWB) allows the small battery operated RFID tag to be sensed over fairly wide areas. For instance, GE Aircraft Engines in Ohio has installed five readers in the factory and it covers over 30,000 square feet so they can track everything within that area with only the five readers. That gives you an idea of the distance that can be covered by an RFID tag that might be on you or on equipment. An RFID held by a pair of tweezers The readers can transmit over telephone or by internet to computers and they use satellites as well. For example, Digital Angel has signed contracts with satellite providers to transmit their data for military personnel location beacons (PLBs). These beacons use the COSPAS-SARSAT satellite system. This system has some 400,000 digital beacons around the world and it’s rising to some 900,000. By the year 2009 they plan to have a GL stationary satellite system that will enable them to find the location and details of any beacon. You may sometimes see these at night; the GO stationary systemscan track any beacon. Skiers sometimes use them so that they can be identified, and sailors as well, if they become lost at sea they will be able to be tracked. Anything that has an RFID tag can be tracked by a reader or a computer. An example of such transmission is a chip sold by Zarlink. This chip is implanted in a person; it tracks problems and if one is detected, it alerts the doctor who uses a two way RF link to interrogate and adjust the implanted device. Semi-passive RFIDs have an internal power source that let them monitor environmental conditions, such as temperature and shock, but they still require RF energy from the reader to respond. Passive RFID’s do not have a power source but use a signal sent by the scanner to power the microchip circuit to transmit back their stored information. Passive RFID’s are getting very small. Hitachi a few years ago produced a chip (called the mu chip) that was the size of a pencil point; if you take a pencil and put it on a piece of paper you get a little dot. That’s how small they’re getting. In 2007 Hitachi came out with a chip that was even smaller, they call it RFID powder. They are just like the talcum powder you would put on a baby. Somark Innovations in Jan 10, 2007 announced an invisible RFID ink. This can be applied to cattle, prime cuts of meat, military personnel and it can be read through hair. I brought along a couple of the larger size chips, and this particular chip I got from Gillette fusion blades. I bought one of the blades and you can see that on one side what looks like a bar code and if you open it up you can see parts of a RFID chip on the back. This one here is from the Gap. One of my daughters went to the Gap; they put the tag directly on the clothing and the instructions just say to remove before washing and wearing. If you put it up to the light you will see the RFID chip inside it. These chips are quite small and can be put on the back of labels. They would not be noticeable in badges or ID cards; they could even be put in the eye of a person, they are that small. In order for chips to be useful, they have to have a unique product number and because of this, MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) started developing some standards. It’s called the AutoID Center. They then passed it on to the AutoID Group within the Uniform Clothes Council. It will assign codes and publish specifications, so if you have a company, government agency, or church you can contact these people and they will give you a set of numbers. So let’s say there are three or five people in this room wearing the same white hat and each one of them has a chip on it with a different number. We could differentiate everything even if you’re all wearing the same clothes, it doesn’t really matter because everything has a unique number. MIT has the architecture of participation called EPC Global so if you go on Google and type in EPC Global and you will come up with the website they will give you instructions on how to apply and get chips. So if you want to chip yourself, your family, relatives, company or anything like that; you can do it. It works with people who want to use this technology. One of many companies who sell the chip is called, Technic Imitations. If you have a company and you go to one of their presentations, they will give you books like this that tell you what the chips look like, how they work, the types that are sold, and what the readers look like. They will help you install chips in your company. It’s a very big business and it’s spreading very quickly. When you use active or passive chips, active chips have advantages when you want to track items or people over longer distances. Soldiers can have active chips so they can be tracked via satellite wherever they might be in the battlefield. You can get one for your car, so you can be tracked if you are on the 407 or something. Passive ones suffice if you are only interested in tracking over shorter distances. For example, in a sea container coming in from China, every box and every item within the box can have a chip on it. A reader can track all the items as a box passes through it. In a warehouse it is used to ensure the right shipments go to the right places. A man carrying a skid on a forklift can have the goods inside the box verified without even opening it. They are using the chips to track inventory in order to be able to monitor what items are going where, if the right items are in the truck, etc. The passive chips are being put on devices to ensure they are valid. There’s a lot of counterfeit drugs being produced and sold over the internet. Viagra is one of the most commonly counterfeited ones although there are many others. To ensure that people get the correct drugs they sometimes put chips on the containers so when you’re buying them you know that you are buying the correct drug. Chipping farm animals is now required by the government RFID’s are a great economic help to a company because they reduce theft and loss. They also streamline inventory, reduce turnaround time and handling. They’ve allowed companies to adjust production in response to inventory levels and to respond on demand. That’s why companies are interested, because of these big economic benefits and efficiency. When you go to Wal-Mart, Best Buy, the U.S. Military and many other agencies around the world, you will see that they are all implementing RFID chips on items and increasingly on people. The recent growth of the RFID industry has been staggering: From 1955 to 2005, cumulative sales of radio tags totaled 2.4 billion; in 2007 alone, 2.24 billion tags were sold worldwide and analysts project that by 2017 cumulative sales will top 1 trillion–generating more than $25 billion in annual revenues for the industry. We’re starting to see chips being implemented in credit cards, debit cards and passports, driver’s licenses, health cards, and many other things. Increasingly they are being used to monitor people as well as items. RFID tags embedded into clothes and personal belongings allow people to be tracked and monitored in shopping malls, libraries, museums, sports arenas, elevators, and restrooms. American Express has them on their blue cards. They are announcing plans to place people-tracking readers in stores to track customers movements and observe their behavior. If you bought something with your credit or debit card, they will know what items you bought and if the items were chipped, they will know what you were buying. In this way they will be able to track you. In 2006, IBM received a patent approval for an invention called, “Identification and tracking of persons using RFID-tagged items.” One stated purpose was to collect information about people that could be “used to monitor the movement of the person through the store or other areas.” When somebody enters a store a reader “scans all identifiable RFID tags carried on the person,” and correlates the tag information with sales records to determine the individual’s “exact identity.” A device known as a “person tracking unit” which then assigns a tracking number to the shopper “to monitor the movement of the person through the store.” If I had three readers in this room, I could scan everybody in one second and I would know right away who’s here; so it would scan that quickly. The computers are getting quite sophisticated and capable of doing large numbers of scans at any given time. One company recently announced a computer that reads data transactions at 200 million/second, an incredible number. Here’s an example of how they are being used in companies; a few oil companies have given their employees smart cards so that they know where they are at any time of the day. This ensures that people do not go where they are not authorized to go. They will see how many times an individual might go to the washroom or outside to have a cigarette; things like that. It allows continuous tracking of people, and so more and more companies are thinking it’s a novel idea. In early 2007, the American government complained to the Canadian government that they were tracking American contractors who were visiting Canada by placing loonies ($2.00 Canadian coins) with tiny RFID transmitters in their pockets. And a CIS officer when confronted with this said: “Ah, give us a break! You might want to know where the individual was going, what meetings he’s attending, who he’s talking with and everything like that.” So if they wanted they could track people with chipped loonies. The University of Washington students, faculty and staff are being tracked as they move around the site so the details of where they’ve been, what they’re doing and with whom, will be stored in their database. One of the professors at the University was asked, “Will you check on this student?” so he checked on him and said, “Oh, he’s on the fourth floor just standing outside room 452 and now he’s moving into the classroom.” In London you can buy a monthly pass to the transit cars that have an RFID on it and if you link the bus pass to a person’s name you can track where this person is on the bus and subway system throughout London, England. Last year the police were getting four requests a month and now they are getting close to 100. Just last week the London police announced that they were putting RFID chips on all of the 31,000 police in London. Now this may be on their ID card, they did not say if they were going to put them directly on their body, but they were getting chipped; it was published in the Daily Mail. Some of the police were complaining that they “are going to know where we are at any time, we won’t be able to go into a coffee shop and get a donut.” All 31,000 police in London now have RFID’s so if they ever need to stop or control people they can direct 1,000 troops immediately to the scene. In Southern China they’re implementing RFID readers in the city of Shenzhen to track the movement of citizens; all citizens have an ID card with a chip so they can identify who is in what part of the city at any point in time. RFID readers in a library The chips and National ID cards that they are trying to bring in now contain not only a number, but also a person’s work history, education, religion, ethnicity, police record and reproductive history. The United States has been trying to implement the National ID card for a few years now and there are strikes going on in different states as they try to resist this National ID that will identify everyone in the country. Canada is adding a Real ID to the license plates and we don’t hear anything about it, its being done a lot more secretly than it is in the States where there is a lot of public debate. The increase of the use of RFID chips is going to require a increased rate of the UBF spectrum, as a result in the United States they’re going to stop using the UBF spectrum of the VHF frequency in 2009 and everything is going to go digital. You may have seen that on television in the United States. Canada is going to do the same thing, they’ll say it still works, and instead of the antenna on your roof you’ll use a black box. The reason they’re doing this is that the UBF and VHF analog frequency are being used for the chips, so they don’t want to overload the chips with television signals, because the chips signals will now be receiving those frequencies. A friend of mine from Quebec says his cows have a chip embedded under the skin. All farm animals have to be chipped and he says he’s no longer allowed to kill as many cows as he wants. He was given a limit of two cows that he could kill and use only for the farm. All the others had to be sold to particular companies who could control those cows and get food from them. So he could only kill two and the others he had to sell to a supermarket chain. People are being chipped now. There’s a trend that they’re promoting in the media in terms of chipping people; they’re saying why not chip children for safety, so we can protect them, especially if they’re in the hospital then nobody could steal the newborn babies. Why don’t we chip the sick, then if someone has a heart attack and falls on the floor, we can read the signal in the chip and send someone to help them. We should chip the military so we would be able to know where the soldiers are and if they’re alive. After we could chip people on welfare so we could make sure they’re not cheating the government. Then we can chip all the criminals so that we could control them, and we’ll chip workers because a lot of them goof off at work. Then we’ll chip all the pensioners because they’re just taking money from us; and after that we’ll chip everyone else. Some 800 hospitals in the United States are now chipping their patients. You can turn it down, but it’s available. Four hospitals in Puerto Rico have put them in the arms of the Alzheimer’s patients, and it only costs about $200 per person. The Baja Beach Club in Barcelona gets patrons chipped. A BBC reporter went the club and got himself chipped. He said it was like getting a needle in your arm; they just rubbed it with some antiseptic and put a chip in. Because it was fairly small, he said it didn’t hurt too much and he had it inside him so whenever he ordered he would just move his arm and pay for it. The reader on the bar would read the signal and since he had his bank account information on the chip on his arm it would deduct the money from his bank account. Nigel Gilbert of the Royal Academy of Engineering said that by 2011 you should be able to go on Google and find out where someone is at any time from chips on clothing, in cars, cell phones, and inside many people themselves. Chips are becoming more and more sophisticated. Nature Magazine reported recently that a drug containing microchips has been developed that will release drugs at the right time and amount. They can put a chip in you and release drugs so you don’t have to take a pill every day. This particular one that they’re selling lasts for over 140 days, you just have to get chipped three times a year with this drug and it releases it every day automatically. We will probably start hearing more about things like this in the near future. In 2006, LifeScience.com said that European researchers have developed neuro-chips, they’ve coupled together living brain cells in silicone circuits and done a lot of experimentation on rats and snails. An electrical signal from a neuron is recorded in the chips transistors, while the chip’s capitulators stimulate the neurons. They can create neuro-stimulators and use them to alleviate pain and lessen the debilitating effects of Parkinson’s disease. The mu chip is only .05 ml in length There are gastric stimulators that can treat obesity, they would make you feel hungry so you wouldn’t want to eat anymore, it would just be necessary to put a chip in your brain that would connect and send signals. In another study, neuro-chip implants were developed and are being used on violent prisoners. They were implanted with the microchip (but they didn’t know they were implanted), and when the implant was set at 160 megahertz’s all the subjects became lethargic and slept about 22 hours a day. The implants ended all aggression in violent prisoners. Another interesting application is a silicone chip implant that mimics the hippocampus, the area of the brain known for creating memories. If successful, the artificial brain prosthesis could replace its biological counterpart, enabling people who suffer from memory disorders to regain the ability to store new memories. It’s being developed by Professor Berger at the Center for Neural Engineering at the University of Southern California. They’re working on rats and monkeys, so if applied to humans what this could do is restore your short-term memory which people lose as they get older, or it could replace your existing short-term memory with artificial short-term memory. Applied Digital Solutions has a Verichip that is compatible with human tissue and can be used on implantable pacemakers or put defibrillators in artificial joints. It can be injected using a syringe and used as a sort of bar code in security applications. That’s seen as one of the easy ways to implement chips in people through injections. They could very easily inject it via a flu shot or a vaccine. Verichip is working on a glucose microchip that would determine glucose levels. You wouldn’t have to draw blood to monitor glucose level. All you need is to have the doctor read your chip and your information and tell what your blood levels have been for the past month or two. IBM has demonstrated a tiny device that measures heart rate and is able to sense when a person wearing it is in distress, after which it will call a cell phone for immediate help. The distress signal is sent wirelessly via Bluetooth. Zarlink has developed the first swallowable camera capsule which uses Zarlink’s RF transmitter to relay real-time images from the gastrointestinal tract. Our MICS (Medical Implant Communication Services) platform is designed with in-body communication systems that will improve patient care, lower healthcare costs, and support new monitoring, diagnostic and therapeutic applications. Currently the chip uses 100 hair-thin electrodes that sense the electro-magnetic signature of neurons firing in specific areas of the brain in, for example, the area that controls arm movement. The activity is translated into electrically charged signals and are then sent and decoded using a program, which can move either a robotic arm or a computer cursor. According to the Cyberkinetics’ website, three patients have been implanted with the BrainGate system. The company has confirmed that one patient (Matt Nagle) has a spinal cord injury, while another has advanced ALS. This shows that human thoughts can be converted into radio waves and used by paralyzed people to create movement. Matt Nagle sends the thoughts to a computer to decipher. He can turn his TV on or off, change channels, and alter the volume. (BBC 2005) He can also move his arms and pick up things. In addition to real-time analysis of neuron patterns to relay movement, the Braingate array is also capable of recording electrical data for later analysis. A potential use of this feature would be for a neurologist to study seizure patterns in a patient with epilepsy. Braingate is currently recruiting patients with a range of neuromuscular and neurodegenerative diseases, so if you want a computer chip in your brain you can just go on the website and volunteer. What are the problems about these new technologies? Let me just give you a brief explanation. Chips are going to end privacy. There’s a website called Spychips.com operated by Katherine Albrecht; they research the use of RFID’s by different companies. They have been warning people about them because chips that have economic or health data could get that data stolen. The New York Times in October of 2006 said that any card that doesn’t require swiping (in other words that doesn’t have a chip in it), is vulnerable to un-authorized charges and put people at risk for identity theft. You can buy scanners in electronics stores for $60 or more that can read the information on the chip. They are finding that once implanted in people, chips can be damaging to our health. For example, the body of a rodent who was tested started rejecting some chips and started a development of cancer. Also there is a danger of viruses; you are all familiar with software viruses on your computers, imagine if you got a virus in your chip that deletes your information in your chip. If chips can disseminate medicine then they can disseminate other things too; anything put inside a microchip can be activated by a signal. And finally, with this technology, subliminal mind control becomes possible. I went on to Google and did a search on mind control; you might find it interesting to check that yourself. I read one on patents; there are patents that exist for mind control. This is what one states: non-aural carriers, in the very low or very high audio frequency range or in the adjacent ultrasonic frequency spectrum, are amplitude or frequency modulated with the desired intelligence and propagated acoustically or vibrationally, for inducement into the brain. This is patent number 5,159,703 1992. Another explains a device that can be placed in the auditory cortex of the brain. This device allows the following process: someone speaks into a microphone, the microphone then has the sounds coded into microwaves which are sent to the receiver in the brain and the receiver device will transform the microwaves back so that the person’s mind hears the original sounds. In other words, a person with this device in their head will hear whatever the programmers send via microwave signals. (Phillip L. Stoklin took out patent number 4,858,612 on this.) What do things like this mean to people of faith? You know from the Apocalypse, which is the last book of the Bible, that microchips are unacceptable to God. Chapter 13, Verses 16-17: “And he (the beast) shall make all, both little and great, rich and poor, freeman and bondmen, to have a character in their right hand, or on their foreheads. And that no man might buy or sell, but he that hath the character, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.” Chapter 16, Verse 2: “The first angel poured out his vial upon the earth, and there fell a sore and grievous wound upon men who had the character of the beast; and upon them that adored the image thereof.” Chapter 20, Verse 4: “And I saw seats; and they sat upon them; and judgment was given unto them; and the souls of them that were beheaded for the testimony of Jesus, and for the word of God, and who had not adored the beast nor his image, nor received his character on their foreheads, or in their hands; and they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years.” If people have chips they will be tracked wherever they are. And there is a reasonable expectation that their bodies will be controlled and manipulated, as this technology is increasingly refined. Their minds will also be manipulated, they can certainly be made or induced to follow whatever people want them to follow. It’s quite conceivable that they could be made to denounce God also. Patrick Redmond Ron Paul's State of the Republic Address | Ron Paul 2012 | Campaign for Liberty at the Daily Paul
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Supreme Court OKs unlimited corporate spending on elections - latimes.com
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2010: Giant Gathering Storm Clouds
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THE MOST INPIRING AND HOPE-GIVING FILM I HAVE EVER SEEN
Jan. 11, 2010 -- "Permalture -- Farms for the Future" --
http://www.viddler.com/explore/PermaScience/videos/4/ It's not just because my friends Colin Capmbell and Richard Heinberg are in it but that helps! This film also totally fits with all of my life's research and the science I used in "Confronting Collapse". At 48 minutes it would be the perfect double feature with "collapse" the movie. We must distinguish real hopes from false ones. We must discard or put aside less important threats and issues to address the only one that matters. Be prepared to learn about Permaculture and be prepared to smile. This is our hope. MCR ****************************************************************************** From Jenna Orkin Headlines CNBC's Kilduff: $100 Oil in Next Six Months Constitutional Crisis in Argentina, President Threatens to Take Over Central Bank; Potential Latin America "Cascade Effect" When the UK Needs Energy, Wind Farms Fail to Produce Power cuts upset life, candle demand up (Pakistan) Pakistan Army May Go To North Waziristan - Lieberman (from Rice Farmer, JO) Pakistan terror death toll worst ever in 2009 – a 48% rise U.S. household names hit by Venezuela devaluation Chavez warns businesses after currency devaluation China the new king of the road China car sales top U.S. As China Rises, Fears Grow on Whether Boom Can Endure Chavez Threatens to Seize Businesses, Devalues Currency by 50%; Chavez vs. Obama, Parallels Greater Than You Think! Massachusetts Miracle: Republicans May Win Senate Special Election For Kennedy's Seat Guns and goons: Private armies in the Philippines (from Rice Farmer) Economy Ponzi Scheme: The Federal Reserve Bought Approximately 80 Percent Of U.S. Treasury Securities Issued In 2009 (from Rice Farmer) Federal Reserve Earned $45 Billion in 2009 Fed seeks to protect US bailout secrets America slides deeper into depression as Wall Street revels Wall Street turns flat as advance fades Fed unlikely to be swayed by jobs data: Bullard China surprises with bank reserve hike, markets hit China will likely spend full amount of stimulus China’s “Terminal Phase” of Credit Bubble Excess Economy still bleeding jobs Household Survey Charts Reveal This Is No Garden Variety Economic Downturn (from Rice Farmer) Will the U.S. Social Security System Survive? (from Rice Farmer) 401(k): Here comes the screw job (from Rice Farmer) Personal Bankruptcy Filings Rising Fast Schwarzenegger budget ax would fall heavily on poor Dubai's First Foreclosure Opens Floodgates in World's Worst Housing Market 'The Slums of the 21st Century Are Being Built in Dubai' Interview with architect - catch the name - Albert Speer Jr. Rahm Emanuel may quit as Barack Obama's Chief-of-Staff War Clinton to talk bases, security on tour Elite Iran force’s rise may limit U.S. options Suicide rate of young veterans up 26 percent Yemen officials admit to losing battle against al-Qaeda 2010: Giant Gathering Storm Clouds (from Rice Farmer) We Might Just Nuke Those Cyber Attackers - General Yemen's top al-Qaida scout is American-born Military deluged with intelligence from drones NYT: Remote-controlled planes produced 24 years’ worth of video in '09 Energy/Environment Oil at Heart of Dispute Over Iran Fourth UK gas warning Freezing conditions lead to new alert as North Sea field is shut. California Ties Cash to Energy Cold records are shattered across Florida And... "The World Bank Unveiled: Inside the Revolutionary Struggle for Transparency" by David Ian Shaman, Parkhurst Brothers Inc. Publishers, 2009. Airport Droids Attack Human Gene Pool (from Rice Farmer) Green Sea Slug Is Part Animal, Part Plant noreply@blogger.com (Jenna Orkin) WHY A RESILIENT COMMUNITY NETWORK?For those of you that have been reading this weblog for years. You already know that I've been advocating that people start building resilient communities (RCs).* Why? Resilient communities will:
Unfortunately, nobody is going to help us build them. The nation-state can't and won't. It is losing power across the board as the global system strengthens. Organizationally, the nation-state has lost control of its finances, borders, media, economics, use of force, etc. Worse, moral and ideological moorings that served the nation-state well for hundreds of years have rotted away. The nation-state is now adrift, unable to orient its decision making cycles. As a result, the nation-state has been largely co-opted by increasingly powerful non-state entities -- from parasitical banks that sit astride core functions of the global system (they profit from the ability to distort core financial and economic functions to manufacture virtual "wealth") to transnational gangs that puncture borders with drugs and other smuggled goods -- and that corruption is spreading. Nothing can get done at the nation-state level anymore and what does get done (as the recent health and finance legislation in the US proves), is only being done to drive forward profitability in parasitical firms or sap our resources (making us more vulnerable to predation by local threats). Worse, nation-state bureaucracies are becoming more insulated and focused on self-preservation by the day from the institutional level down the individual government employee contractor. So, what can we do? Attempts to bootstrap resilient communities are definitely possible. However, isolated and small, I fear these efforts will either result in a reduction in the quality of life for its participants or quickly fall prey to parasites/predators (as in, you won't get far if bankruptcy, privatization, and gangs-disorder guts your community). The dominant solution to all of these pitfalls, dangers, and threats is to team up. Create a virtual tribe that helps communities become resilient -- by financing, protecting, and accelerating them. While its possible to build a virtual tribe via a completely ad hoc process, the best way to build platforms in software that make the growth of tribal networks fast and easy. If we can build these software platforms, we can turn the transition to resilient communities from a process prone to high rates of failure, into a process that spreads virally* and generates immediate improvements for its participants. A vibrant future awaits, all we need to do is build it. NOTE: As soon as I get some cash flow, I'm going to self-finance the building blocks of these platforms. I'll do what I can, but if there is someone with deep pockets interested in changing the world (for the better) reading this, here's a chance to do it. Also, given the number of people that have sent me e-mails expressing their intent to join in, we won't be short of high quality talent to work on this. *Virally, as in the growth of self-reinforcing networks and not the diminutive sense of viral content/site traffic. WHY A RESILIENT COMMUNITY NETWORK?For those of you that have been reading this weblog for years. You already know that I've been advocating that people start building resilient communities (RCs).* Why? Resilient communities will:
Unfortunately, nobody is going to help us build them. The nation-state can't and won't. It is losing power across the board as the global system strengthens. Organizationally, the nation-state has lost control of its finances, borders, media, economics, use of force, etc. Worse, moral and ideological moorings that served the nation-state well for hundreds of years have rotted away. The nation-state is now adrift, unable to orient its decision making cycles. As a result, the nation-state has been largely co-opted by increasingly powerful non-state entities -- from parasitical banks that sit astride core functions of the global system (they profit from the ability to distort core financial and economic functions to manufacture virtual "wealth") to transnational gangs that puncture borders with drugs and other smuggled goods -- and that corruption is spreading. Nothing can get done at the nation-state level anymore and what does get done (as the recent health and finance legislation in the US proves), is only being done to drive forward profitability in parasitical firms or sap our resources (making us more vulnerable to predation by local threats). Worse, nation-state bureaucracies are becoming more insulated and focused on self-preservation by the day from the institutional level down the individual government employee contractor. So, what can we do? Attempts to bootstrap resilient communities are definitely possible. However, isolated and small, I fear these efforts will either result in a reduction in the quality of life for its participants or quickly fall prey to parasites/predators (as in, you won't get far if bankruptcy, privatization, and gangs-disorder guts your community). The dominant solution to all of these pitfalls, dangers, and threats is to team up. Create a virtual tribe that helps communities become resilient -- by financing, protecting, and accelerating them. While its possible to build a virtual tribe via a completely ad hoc process, the best way to build platforms in software that make the growth of tribal networks fast and easy. If we can build these software platforms, we can turn the transition to resilient communities from a process prone to high rates of failure, into a process that spreads virally* and generates immediate improvements for its participants. A vibrant future awaits, all we need to do is build it. NOTE: As soon as I get some cash flow, I'm going to self-finance the building blocks of these platforms. I'll do what I can, but if there is someone with deep pockets interested in changing the world (for the better) reading this, here's a chance to do it. Also, given the number of people that have sent me e-mails expressing their intent to join in, we won't be short of high quality talent to work on this. *Virally, as in the growth of self-reinforcing networks and not the diminutive sense of viral content/site traffic. How do I know China wrecked the Copenhagen deal? I was in the room | Mark LynasAs recriminations fly post-Copenhagen, one writer offers a fly-on-the-wall account of how talks failed Copenhagen was a disaster. That much is agreed. But the truth about what actually happened is in danger of being lost amid the spin and inevitable mutual recriminations. The truth is this: China wrecked the talks, intentionally humiliated Barack Obama, and insisted on an awful "deal" so western leaders would walk away carrying the blame. How do I know this? Because I was in the room and saw it happen. China's strategy was simple: block the open negotiations for two weeks, and then ensure that the closed-door deal made it look as if the west had failed the world's poor once again. And sure enough, the aid agencies, civil society movements and environmental groups all took the bait. The failure was "the inevitable result of rich countries refusing adequately and fairly to shoulder their overwhelming responsibility", said Christian Aid. "Rich countries have bullied developing nations," fumed Friends of the Earth International. All very predictable, but the complete opposite of the truth. Even George Monbiot, writing in yesterday's Guardian, made the mistake of singly blaming Obama. But I saw Obama fighting desperately to salvage a deal, and the Chinese delegate saying "no", over and over again. Monbiot even approvingly quoted the Sudanese delegate Lumumba Di-Aping, who denounced the Copenhagen accord as "a suicide pact, an incineration pact, in order to maintain the economic dominance of a few countries". Sudan behaves at the talks as a puppet of China; one of a number of countries that relieves the Chinese delegation of having to fight its battles in open sessions. It was a perfect stitch-up. China gutted the deal behind the scenes, and then left its proxies to savage it in public. Here's what actually went on late last Friday night, as heads of state from two dozen countries met behind closed doors. Obama was at the table for several hours, sitting between Gordon Brown and the Ethiopian prime minister, Meles Zenawi. The Danish prime minister chaired, and on his right sat Ban Ki-moon, secretary-general of the UN. Probably only about 50 or 60 people, including the heads of state, were in the room. I was attached to one of the delegations, whose head of state was also present for most of the time. What I saw was profoundly shocking. The Chinese premier, Wen Jinbao, did not deign to attend the meetings personally, instead sending a second-tier official in the country's foreign ministry to sit opposite Obama himself. The diplomatic snub was obvious and brutal, as was the practical implication: several times during the session, the world's most powerful heads of state were forced to wait around as the Chinese delegate went off to make telephone calls to his "superiors". Shifting the blame To those who would blame Obama and rich countries in general, know this: it was China's representative who insisted that industrialised country targets, previously agreed as an 80% cut by 2050, be taken out of the deal. "Why can't we even mention our own targets?" demanded a furious Angela Merkel. Australia's prime minister, Kevin Rudd, was annoyed enough to bang his microphone. Brazil's representative too pointed out the illogicality of China's position. Why should rich countries not announce even this unilateral cut? The Chinese delegate said no, and I watched, aghast, as Merkel threw up her hands in despair and conceded the point. Now we know why – because China bet, correctly, that Obama would get the blame for the Copenhagen accord's lack of ambition. China, backed at times by India, then proceeded to take out all the numbers that mattered. A 2020 peaking year in global emissions, essential to restrain temperatures to 2C, was removed and replaced by woolly language suggesting that emissions should peak "as soon as possible". The long-term target, of global 50% cuts by 2050, was also excised. No one else, perhaps with the exceptions of India and Saudi Arabia, wanted this to happen. I am certain that had the Chinese not been in the room, we would have left Copenhagen with a deal that had environmentalists popping champagne corks popping in every corner of the world. Strong position So how did China manage to pull off this coup? First, it was in an extremely strong negotiating position. China didn't need a deal. As one developing country foreign minister said to me: "The Athenians had nothing to offer to the Spartans." On the other hand, western leaders in particular – but also presidents Lula of Brazil, Zuma of South Africa, Calderón of Mexico and many others – were desperate for a positive outcome. Obama needed a strong deal perhaps more than anyone. The US had confirmed the offer of $100bn to developing countries for adaptation, put serious cuts on the table for the first time (17% below 2005 levels by 2020), and was obviously prepared to up its offer. Above all, Obama needed to be able to demonstrate to the Senate that he could deliver China in any global climate regulation framework, so conservative senators could not argue that US carbon cuts would further advantage Chinese industry. With midterm elections looming, Obama and his staff also knew that Copenhagen would be probably their only opportunity to go to climate change talks with a strong mandate. This further strengthened China's negotiating hand, as did the complete lack of civil society political pressure on either China or India. Campaign groups never blame developing countries for failure; this is an iron rule that is never broken. The Indians, in particular, have become past masters at co-opting the language of equity ("equal rights to the atmosphere") in the service of planetary suicide – and leftish campaigners and commentators are hoist with their own petard. With the deal gutted, the heads of state session concluded with a final battle as the Chinese delegate insisted on removing the 1.5C target so beloved of the small island states and low-lying nations who have most to lose from rising seas. President Nasheed of the Maldives, supported by Brown, fought valiantly to save this crucial number. "How can you ask my country to go extinct?" demanded Nasheed. The Chinese delegate feigned great offence – and the number stayed, but surrounded by language which makes it all but meaningless. The deed was done. China's game All this raises the question: what is China's game? Why did China, in the words of a UK-based analyst who also spent hours in heads of state meetings, "not only reject targets for itself, but also refuse to allow any other country to take on binding targets?" The analyst, who has attended climate conferences for more than 15 years, concludes that China wants to weaken the climate regulation regime now "in order to avoid the risk that it might be called on to be more ambitious in a few years' time". This does not mean China is not serious about global warming. It is strong in both the wind and solar industries. But China's growth, and growing global political and economic dominance, is based largely on cheap coal. China knows it is becoming an uncontested superpower; indeed its newfound muscular confidence was on striking display in Copenhagen. Its coal-based economy doubles every decade, and its power increases commensurately. Its leadership will not alter this magic formula unless they absolutely have to. Copenhagen was much worse than just another bad deal, because it illustrated a profound shift in global geopolitics. This is fast becoming China's century, yet its leadership has displayed that multilateral environmental governance is not only not a priority, but is viewed as a hindrance to the new superpower's freedom of action. I left Copenhagen more despondent than I have felt in a long time. After all the hope and all the hype, the mobilisation of thousands, a wave of optimism crashed against the rock of global power politics, fell back, and drained away. Mark Lynasguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsMark Lynas16397249267601274781 Copenhagen summit: 'First step' to a new order – or a 'betrayal of our grandchildren'India With India involved in the last minute negotiations that produced the compromise accord, its environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, called it "a good deal and satisfactory solution". But another parliamentary delegate, Sitaram Yechury, complained that the final draft was "well short of expectations". The Hindu newspaper called it an "important beginning" but noted that it contained few specific figures, commitments or timelines. The Hindustan Times felt that "without a legally binding document, the summit turned into a damp squib". The Mail Today concluded that "something is better than nothing", even if trying to get so many countries to agree on anything would strike many as "an exercise in futility". But environmental groups were critical of the Indian government's performance. "This has been a shirking of global responsibility by India and a weak outcome has so far emerged from the UN climate talks," Greenpeace India complained. One unexpected positive was that relations with China – strained by border and visa disputes – appear to have warmed slightly. Russia Russia's president, Dmitry Medvedev, said the summit had achieved "quite modest" results. His aides, however, blasted the two-week UN conference as "one of the most poorly organised top-level events ever". Greenpeace Russia dismissed it as "ignominious" and "futile". Medvedev said: "Ultimately we managed to compile a statement that reflects various countries' perceptions of how to continue improving the work on making the environmental situation on the planet better and preventing unfavourable influences on climate." Despite Russian scepticism about climate change, he had arrived promising $200m to a multibillion fund to help poor countries reduce their carbon output. He also said Russia, the world's third largest emitter, was ready to cut emissions by 25% from 1990 levels by 2020 – if the US, China and others followed suit. The collapse of the Soviet Union saw emissions fall by about 30%. Germany Angela Merkel's commitment to the environment once earned her the media moniker of "climate chancellor". But her return from Copenhagen has met with accusations that she betrayed her principles. "She made minimal offers which turned out to be a flop. She did not put Germany on the frontline," said Claudia Roth, head of the Green party, labelling the talks a "tragedy". Merkel, while owning up to "mixed feelings", told Bild am Sonntag that Copenhagen had been "a first step towards a new world climate order. No more, but also no less," she said. However, her measured optimism was drowned out. "The world was watching Copenhagen. The world has been sorely disappointed," said Hubert Weiger, head of Germany's association for environment and nature protection, Bund. Sigmar Gabriel, former environment minister and chairman of the opposition SPD party, described the summit as a "catastrophe. The way state and government heads have put at risk the future of their own children and grandchildren is a disgrace." One other leader singled out for particular criticism was Barack Obama. "It may have been Hollywood, but what we saw was a bad film," remarked Roth. "It was not enough just to come, put nothing on the table and then go away again and criticise the conference." France Before he jetted into Copenhagen last week, Nicolas Sarkozy publicly warned that "failure would be catastrophic". But the French president emerged from the talks chastened. "It is not perfect," he told journalists, "[but] it is the best possible agreement". His ecology minister, Jean-Louis Borloo, insisted "absolute disaster" had been averted. That, though, was not the consensus among France's green activists or opposition leaders. Nicolas Hulot, the popular ecologist, told the Journal du Dimanche newspaper: "We have sold off our children's future and compromised that of millions of citizens." Blame for the "fiasco" focused chiefly on Beijing and the US. "But Europe also sinned in its disunity and absence of leadership," said Djamila Sonzogni, for the French Green party. The result, she added, was "as desperate as the stakes were high". The media verdict media was unanimous. An editorial in Le Monde was entitled simply: "A disappointment." "China is at the heart of Copenhagen's failure," it said. South Africa South Africa may have been one of the five countries to broker the Copenhagen accord, but there was little enthusiasm for the deal back home. "The Hopelesshagen Flop" was the front-page headline in the Sunday Independent, and opposition politicians and environmental activists were critical. President Jacob Zuma had talked on Friday about how climate change was already "wreaking havoc on the lives of our people [in coastal provinces of South Africa]". He called for ambitious cuts in rich country emissions, and said poorer countries emissions should be permitted to increase – a position shared by the G77 developing countries. But the Sunday Independent said Zuma subsequently aligned himself with "Obama's deal", which it described as "no deal at all for those who are going to be worst affected by the devastating effects of climate change". Reporting: Gethin Chamberlain, Luke Harding, Lizzie Davies, Xan Rice
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsGethin Chamberlain, Luke Harding, Lizzy Davies, Xan Rice US left behind in technological race to fight climate change | George MonbiotA speech by the US energy secretary, Steven Chu, shows how America's unquestioning belief in the free market has held back technological innovation I have just been watching the tragic sight of a fallen giant flailing around on its back like a beetle, desperately trying to turn itself over. The occasion was a speech by the US secretary of energy, Steven Chu. He is, of course, a Nobel physicist, brilliant, modest, likeable, a delightful contrast to the thugs employed by the previous administration. But his speech was, in the true sense of the word, pathetic: it moved me to pity. Yesterday afternoon in Copenhagen – where the UN climate talks are entering their second week – Professor Chu unveiled what would have been a series of inspiring innovations, had he made this speech 15 years ago. Barely suppressing his excitement, he told us the US has discovered there is great potential for making fridges more efficient, and that the same principle could even be extended to lighting, heating and whole buildings. The Department of Energy is so thrilled by this discovery that it has launched a programme to retrofit homes in the US, on which it will spend $400m a year. To put this in perspective, four years ago the German government announced it would spend the equivalent of $1.6bn a year on the same job: as a result every house in Germany should be airtight and well insulated by 2025. The US has about 110m households; Germany has roughly 37m, and German homes were more energy-efficient in the first place. This $400m is a drop in the ocean. Professor Chu went on to explain two amazing new discoveries: a camera which can see how much heat is leaking from your home and a meter which allows you to audit your own energy use. Perhaps thermal imaging cameras and energy monitors seem new and exciting in the US, but on this side of the Atlantic, though their full potential is still a long way from being realised, they've been familiar for more than a decade. He thrilled us with another US innovation, a technology called pumped storage: water can be pumped up a hill when electricity is cheap and released when it's expensive. The UK started building its first pumped storage plant, Dinorwig, in 1974. Then he told us about a radical system for heating buildings by extracting heat from water: this must have been the one that the Royal Festival Hall used in 1951. I'm sure these technologies have in fact been deployed for years in parts of the US. My point is that Chu appeared to believe that they represent the cutting edge of both technology and public policy. The energy secretary explained that the US is now making "a very big investment" in developing and testing new components for wind turbines. The "very big investment" is $70m, which is what the US spends on subsidies and forgoes in tax breaks for fossil fuels every two days. As if to hammer home the point that the Department of Energy seems to be stuck in a time-warp, and as if to highlight the sad decline of technological innovation in the US, Chu finished his talk with a disquisition on the beauty of the earth as seen by the Apollo astronauts. What has happened to the great pioneering nation, the economic superpower which once drove innovation everywhere? How did it end up so far behind much smaller economies in boring old Europe? How come, when the rest of the developed world has moved on, it suddenly looks like a relic of the Soviet Union, with filthy, inefficient industries, vast opencast coal mines and cars and appliances which belong in the 1950s? It can't all be blamed on George Bush: this technological backwardness pre-dates him. The real problem is the terror of all modern US governments of being seen to interfere in the free market. It's ironic that the lack of effective regulation in the US has not ensured – as the free market fundamentalists prophesied – that the US came out in front, but that it has been left far behind. Just ask the car manufacturers. The truth, too uncomfortable to be discussed by US officials, is that government regulations are among the main drivers of technological innovation.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsGeorge Monbiot1618799518968991371115962397149638530255 |
