Do you close the curtains at night? Do you have deep and fascinating intimate conversations? Do you make jokes sometimes that you most certainly wouldn’t make if you knew strangers were listening? Do you pick and choose your friends carefully? Do you use caution when you write emails, knowing the connection isn’t secure? Do you whisper sweet nothings to your dearest love?

I say: whether you are an Upstanding Citizen (i.e. “nothing to hide”) or a Dissent-is-Patriotic type, the following video should give you some good food for thought.

Kind of makes me want to quit facebook and google entirely, honestly.

This StormCloudsGathering video details the biometric data collection mandates contained within the recent immigration bill, “Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act”. The video suggests that such biometric tools (meant for use in immigration) are and will continue to be used to create massive databases, not only of immigrants and visitors, but of all Americans — and that it — the database — is currently quite far along in its development.

While some fear ID tags and mandatory microchips, perhaps more scary is the notion that we are passively being corralled into a situation in which all of our biometric data is shared and stored opaquely by the government and various agencies within it. What could the data be used for? Most terrifying is as a condition of employment for American citizens. But there are surely worse scenarios that I cannot yet imagine. For instance (off the top of my head), what if mistakes in your Tax return flagged you as suspicious and automatically barred you from entry into certain government institutions or warned potential employers of your ‘untrustworthiness’? There are too many dreadful scenarios, too much unaccountability.

What technologies are being used currently? What may be being collected about you as we speak?

• Gait Recognition, based on the bounce in your step — decipherable from far away
• Facial Recognition, aided by your sharing of images of yourself from various angles on social media sites like Facebook
• Iris Scanning, recently thrust upon Occupy protesters lest they pay higher bail for release from prison
• Voice Recognition, how many microphones are there, right?
• Fingerprints, of course
• Whatever is next: DNA-collection, maybe?

soy la cascada.
soy la gota de agua cayendo.
soy todo: el principio, sí
y la conclusión también.

soy la muerte y la vida.
no tengo fin; continúo.
siempre he estado aquí.
y aunque no me veas,
todavía estoy.

soy la cascada,
dando saltos mortales hasta el desenlace
del universo.

New levels of intelligence to stay the tide of human negligence and stupidity.

We live in a complex and complicated world. Such safeguards against chaos and entropy are key to maintaining our forward momentum, of course, but the Taoist in me asks: For what such momentum? For what such speed? For what such complexity?

Obviously it is good to prevent needless tragedy and destruction, but are we really building to the stars — or have we stagnated as a species?

Post your thoughts in the comments.

12 nations have and are agreeing to cede their national sovereignty completely to the new Global Corporate Order through the docily-named Trans-Pacific Partnership. They are:

1. Canada
2. The United States
3. Mexico
4. Peru
5. Chile
6. New Zealand
7. Australia
8. Singapore
9. Malaysia
10. Brunei
11. Vietnam
12. Japan

These governments have more-or-less agreed to step out of the way of Corporate & Business entities and any and all decisions they would make in their Profit-Seeking, Earth-Raping, Human-Dignity-Destroying endeavors. Thailand and the Philippines have also expressed interest in becoming slaves to (and enforcers of) the new and grander Corporate Crony-Capitalist Aristocratic Kingdom.

Source: truth-out.org/opinion/item/16295-why-the-transpacific-partnership-is-a-scary-big-trade-deal

From RT:

This from PhysOrg:

Reliable information on the depth and floor structure of the Southern Ocean has so far been available for only few coastal regions of the Antarctic. An international team of scientists under the leadership of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, has for the first time succeeded in creating a digital map of the entire Antarctic seafloor. The International Bathymetric Chart of the Southern Ocean (IBCSO) for the first time shows the detailed topography of the seafloor for the entire area south of 60°S. An article presented to the scientific world by IBCSO has now appeared online in the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters.

The IBCSO data grid and the corresponding Antarctic chart will soon be freely available in the internet and are intended to help scientists amongst others to better understand and predict sea currents, geological processes or the behaviour of marine life.

The new bathymetric chart of the Southern Ocean is an excellent example of what scientists can achieve if researchers from around the world work across borders. “For our IBCSO data grid, scientists from 15 countries and over 30 research institutions brought together their bathymetric data from nautical expeditions. We were ultimately able to work with a data set comprising some 4.2 billion individual values”, explains IBCSO editor Jan Erik Arndt, bathymetric expert at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-04-entire-topography-antarctic-seafloor.html

Click to view full-size version.