Activist Post

The United States by every measure is hanging on by a thread to its First World status.  Saddled by debt, engaged in wars on multiple fronts with a rising police state at home, declining economic productivity, and wild currency fluctuations all threaten America’s future.

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How often do you mention the word ‘Fed’ online? There is about to be a new breed of Big Brother “watchers” and electronic surveillance on billions of online conversations before eavesdropping on the emotion behind how the ‘Fed’ was used. The monitoring will include identifying and reaching out to “key bloggers” and “influencers.”

ZeroHedge reported the Federal Reserve Bank will soon monitor billions of conversations on social networking sites to know who mentions “Fed” as well as the sentiment in which it was used. The Federal Reserve is looking for a “Communication Group” to monitor social media platforms. The Fed expects the Watchers to be “timely and proactively aware of the reactions and opinions expressed by the general public as it relates to the Federal Reserve and its actions on a variety of subjects.”

Orwell warned us long ago these things were coming. Now they are here.

(Source: thephrygiancap, via endprohibition)

plantedcity:

From The Province:

Humankind will slip next week into ecological debt, having gobbled up in less then nine months more natural resources than the planet can replenish in a year, researchers said Tuesday.

The most dominant species in Earth’s history, in other words, is living beyond the planet’s threshold of sustainability, trashing the house it lives in.

At its current pace of consumption humankind will need, by 2030, a second globe to satisfy its voracious appetites and absorb all its waste, the report calculated.

Earth’s seven billion denizens — nine billion by mid-century — are using more water, cutting down more forests and eating more fish than Nature can replace, it said.

At the same time, we are disgorging more CO2, pollutants and chemical fertilizers than the atmosphere, soil and oceans can soak up without severely disrupting the ecosystems that have made our planet such a comfortable place for homo sapiens to live.

Counting down from January 1, the date when human activity exceeds its budget — dubbed “Earth Overshoot Day” — had receded by about three days each year since 2001.

The tipping point into non-sustainability happened sometime in the 1970s, said the Oakland, California-based Global Footprint Network, which issued the report.

This year, researchers estimate that the equivalent of Earth’s resource quota will be depleted on September 27.

…

“Overshoot” is driven by three factors: how much we consume, the global population, and how much Nature can produce.

…

The United States is the biggest ecological deficit spender, according to an earlier calculation by the same group.

If all people adopted the American lifestyle — big house, two cars, huge per-capita energy consumption — the world’s population would need about five “Earths” to meet its needs.

By contrast, if everyone on Earth matched the average footprint of someone in India today, humanity would be using less than half the planet’s biocapacity.

Check out the rest of the article here. You can learn more about our growing ecological debt here.

(‘Earthrise’ photo credit: NASA)