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Category: Columns

Geoff has written for publications as diverse as PC User and The Northern Star His weekly columns have been a source of humour and inspiration for tens of thousands of readers and his mailbox is always full.
Here you can find his more recent contributions.

  • John James Newsletter No. <65>

    The John James Newsletter 65

    20 June 2015 – Provence

    Nations, like metal, shine only on the surface

    Antoine de Riverol

    Full text of Pope Francis on Climate Change

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2015/06/18/read-pope-franciss-full-document-on-climate-change/ 

     US Catholics ready to follow Pope’s ‘marching orders’ on climate change

    http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/18/pope-encyclical-climate-change-catholics-us-response?CMP=ema_565 

    We are in the business of creating a miracle on earth

    An Inspiring talk that describes a new approach to money and capitalism

    http://sacred-economics.com/ 

    Iceland Jailed Bankers and Rejected Austerity—and It’s Been a Success

    Instead of imposing devastating austerity measures and bailing out its banks, Iceland let its banks go bust and focused on social welfare policies. It has now repaid 85% of UK claims. When the global economic crisis hit in 2008, Iceland suffered terribly—perhaps more than any other country. The savings of 50,000 people were wiped out, plunging Icelanders into debt and placing 25% of homeowners in mortgage default. Now, less than a decade later, it will become the first European country that faced collapse to beat its pre-crisis peak of economic output. The IMF declared that Iceland had achieved economic recovery ‘without compromising its welfare model’ of universal healthcare and education.

    http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/world-news/imf-data-shows-icelands-economy-recovered-after-it-imprisoned-bankers-and-let-banks-go-bust-instead-of-bailing-them-out-31292885.html 

    A Psychologist Explains Why People Don’t Give a Shit About Climate Change

    The more people start believing we can create a better society with lower emissions, the sooner they can start taking action.

    http://www.vice.com/read/a-psychologist-explains-why-people-dont-really-give-a-shit-about-climate-change-608?utm_source=vicefbus  

    To get a feel for what is going on

    https://www.google.fr/search?q=youth+climate+change+activists&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&gws_rd=cr&ei=7l96VdKjHOSt7gaZpIKoCA

    How to  turn young people into climate change activists

    http://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2013/jul/02/climate-change-campaigns-youth-engagement 

    France Removes Roundup from Store Shelves

    Monsanto product will no longer be sold in aisles of nurseries frequented by amateur gardeners

    http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/06/15/offensive-against-monsanto-france-removes-roundup-store-shelves 

    German companies have halted sales of Monsanto’s glyphosate herbicide.

    http://www.countercurrents.org/zuesse120615.htm 

    Arctic Sea Ice Area Drops 320,000 Square Kilometers in Just One Day

    https://robertscribbler.wordpress.com/ 

    http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2012/20121226_GreenlandIceSheetUpdate.pdf

    WikiLeaks: Big-Pharma Measures in TPP Will Raise Drug Prices

    the TPP would steer member states towards pro-business, anti-consumer healthcare policies.It would crush the public health system of  New Zealand and Australia. It would restrain governments’ abilities to provide healthcare and medicine to citizens.

    http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/WikiLeaks-TPP-to-End-Cheap-Medicine-in-New-Zealand-20150610-0092.html

    German Banker: Obama Is Destroying Europe

    Because of sanctions against Russia, German exports declined by 18% in 2014, and by 34% in the first two months of 2015. The damage gets worse over time. For example, losing contract for the railway line from Moscow to Beijing.

    http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/06/german-banker-obama-is-destroying-europe.html

    South China Sea dispute updates

    Planes downed, ships blocked, naval battles, and more, a list of eight incidents that have rattled the South China Sea region.

    http://www.smh.com.au/world/south-china-sea-dispute-updates-20150522-gh5kd4 

    Beefing up for war?

    WikiLeaks cables reveal secret Nato plans to “defend” Baltics from Russia:

    http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/dec/06/wikileaks-cables-nato-russia-baltics 

    China tests supersonic nuclear delivery vehicle

    http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/news/international/china-confirms-test-of-supersonic-nuclear-delivery-vehicle/article7313032.ece 

    China confirms test of new hypersonic strike vehicle ‘Wu-14’

    http://rt.com/news/267115-china-tests-hypersonic-missile/

    Putin: 40+ ICBMs targeted for 2015 nuclear force boost

    http://rt.com/news/267514-putin-ballistic-missiles-army/ 

    Pentagon ‘poised to send heavy weapons, troops to Eastern Europe’

    http://www.dw.de/pentagon-poised-to-send-heavy-weapons-troops-to-eastern-europe/a-18516115 

    Russia readies hybrid amphibious drone for test flight

    http://rt.com/news/225591-chirok-uav-amphibious-drone/ 

    Senior Iranian commander says Tehran ready for war with US

    http://rt.com/news/256773-iran-war-us-nuclear/ 

    Russia will take part in multinational navy drills in disputed South China Sea

    http://rt.com/news/263533-rusia-multinational-navy-drills/ 

    Skills become drudgery 

    We know that our conditions of life are deteriorating. Interesting jobs are sliced up, through digital Taylorism, into portions of meaningless drudgery.

    http://www.monbiot.com/2015/06/09/work-force/ 

    Writing’s On The Wall: Texas Pulls $1 Billion In Gold From NY Fed, Makes It “Non-Confiscatable”

    The lack of faith in central bank trustworthiness is spreading. First Germany, then Holland, and Austria, and now Texas.

    http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-06-13/writings-wall-texas-pulls-1-billion-gold-ny-fed-makes-it-non-confiscatable 

    As currency dies, Zimbabweans will get $5 for 175 quadrillion local dollars

    Zimbabwean dollar was ruined by hyperinflation, when people had to carry bags of notes to buy bread and milk. Prices were rising at least twice a day.

    http://www.cnbc.com/id/102752428 

    What Musical Taste Tells Us About Social Class

    Class informs the way we listen to music. Poorer, less-educated people tended to like country, disco, easy listening, golden oldies, heavy metal and rap. The wealthier and better-educated preferred classical, blues, jazz, opera, choral, pop, reggae, rock, world and musical theatre.

    http://phys.org/news/2015-06-musical-social-class.html 

    Thinking Like an Elephant

    I believe the disappearance of our megafauna impoverishes human life as well as wildlife. We evolved in a wonderful, terrible world, of horns and tusks and fangs and claws, and we carry with us the vestigial psychological equipment – a ghost psyche – required to navigate it.

    http://www.monbiot.com/2015/06/15/thinking-like-an-elephant 

  • The John James Newsletter 155

    The John James Newsletter 155

    To subscribe or unsubscribe email John
    What the US government is doing in Syria is tantamount to a war of aggression, which, according to the Nuremberg Tribunal, is the worst possible crime a State can commit against another State
    Father Miguel D’Escoto
    People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster
    James Baldwin

    South Florida’s Rising Seas – Sea Level Rise Documentary 

    we all need to plan for this future. Florida keys is only a few feet above SLT, just like Barmagui another parts of Australia.

    Earth Under Water – Worldwide Flooding | Sea Level Rise 

    Everywhere exposed cities and agricultural land will be flooded. Meltwater Rie pulse 1A 5m+ or 16 feet in a century. By 2100 coastal cities will nkow they are doomed.

    Antarctic contribution to meltwater pulse 1A from reduced Southern Ocean overturning

    Giant iceberg poised to break off from Antarctic shelf 

    Predicted to be one of the largest break-offs ever recorded, separation of iceberg could trigger breakup of most northern major ice shelf, Larsen C. A thread of just 20km of ice is now preventing the 5,000 sq km mass from floating away, following the sudden expansion last month of a rift that has been steadily growing for more than a decade. “It just makes the whole shelf less stable. If it were to collapse there would be nothing holding the glaciers up and they would start to flow quite quickly indeed.”
     
     

    Is that a Black Hole or a hole in the data?

    How to quickly spot dodgy science.
    To spot false information
    The US government is creating a new $160 million bureaucracy to shut down information that doesn’t conform to U.S. propaganda narratives, building on the strategy that sold the bloody Syrian “regime change”

    Most Important Videos Uploaded In December 2016

    *  Peter Wadhams interview Farewell to Arctic Ice
    *  Mark Jacobson presentation How the Future of Energy Impacts the Future of Our Cities
    *  Paul Beckwith video Abrupt Climate Disrupting Arctic Changes
    *  Peter Wadhams also in video interview for ExtinctionRadio
    *   Guy McPherson presentation 22 December.

    Earths past was much hotter

    Today global land temperature stands at 14.8C where the most common has been 7C hotter – far too hot for us

    Morality vs Ethics: the problem with trolleys 

    Many people – even many philosophers – think that morality and ethics are the same thing. But they are not. Morality is primarily about making correct choices, while ethics is about proper reasoning. Should you kill the fat man?
    and

    Fresh doubt over global warming ‘pause’

    When the researchers corrected the data to take the “cold bias” into account, they concluded that the oceans had warmed 0.12C per decade since 2000, nearly twice as fast as previous estimates of 0.07 degrees. The warming experienced in the first 15 years of the 21st Century was “virtually indistinguishable” from the rate of warming between 1950-99, a time generally acknowledged to have seen significant rates of warming from human emissions of CO2. The study did not go down well with climate sceptics and US House of Representatives subpoenaed the author’s emails which Noaa refused to hand over.

    Population growth masking weak economy, making households worse off

    One of the economic arguments that has been used to support current immigration rates has been that it helps offset an ageing population. However, the Commonwealth Bank report noted that this is only “kicking the can down the road”, with the current working age migrants themselves ageing and leaving the workforce 20, 30 or 40 years from now.

    When hoping for population decline

    It is worth remembering what happened to the numbers of the St Matthew Island reindeer herd in the late 1960s.

    Record-breaking extreme weather in Australia in 2016 devastates ecosystems

    Bureau of Meteorology’s annual climate statement cites unprecedented bushfires in regions that don’t usually burn and worst coral bleaching on record, and has been attributed as the cause of damage to vast tracts of crucial kelp forests, oyster farms and salmon stocks across southern Australia.

    A well-kept open secret: Washington is behind India’s brutal experiment of abolishing most cash

    In early November, without warning, the Indian government declared the two largest denomination bills invalid, abolishing over 80 percent of circulating cash by value. Amidst all the commotion and outrage this caused, nobody seems to have taken note of the decisive role that Washington played in this. That is surprising, as Washington’s role has been disguised only very superficially.

    Changing the Global Food Narrative

    The dominant story about the future of the world food supply is logical, well known and wrong. Changing Diets, Not Population Growth, is the Dominant Driver of Food Demand

    Climate change is going to be very bad for the global economy

    But by analyzing temperatures alone we have more precise estimates of how climate change could affect the economy. It turns out that temperature has a surprisingly consistent effect on different economic inputs: labor supply, labor productivity, and crop yields all drop off dramatically between 20°C and 30°C.

    Nearing exit, Obama seeks to tie Trump’s hands

    Obama has also permanently banned oil and gas drilling across large swaths of the Atlantic and Arctic oceans, closed off 1.6 million acres of Western land to development and scrapped the last vestiges of a registration system used largely on Muslim immigrants.

    ‘The Greatest Single Step’ to help Elephants

    In ‘game-changing’ development, China announces it will ban all domestic ivory trade by end of 2017.

    History suggests Australia could be left behind by the next industrial revolution 

    There’s a new industrial revolution just around the corner, driven by artificial intelligence and robotics. Deterioration within the key institutions of suffrage, education, and land policy indicate that Australia may be left behind this time.

    NATO’s Playbook Of Proxy Wars In The Middle East

    Since the times of the Soviet-Afghan jihad, during the eighties, it has been the fail-safe game plan of the master strategists at NATO to raise money from the oil-rich emirates of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE and Kuwait; then buy billions of dollars’ worth of weapons from the arms’ markets of the Eastern Europe; and then provide those weapons and guerilla warfare training to the disaffected population of the victim country by using the intelligence agencies of the latter’s regional adversaries. Whether it’s Afghanistan, Chechnya, Bosnia, Libya or Syria, the same playbook has been executed to the letter.

    What Kerry Did

    What set off the firestorm was that Kerry dared to publicly and forcefully criticize Israeli policy. And that was what the overreaction intended to snuff out. The standard Israeli approach used in situations of this sort is to launch a campaign of intimidation designed to pummel the offender into submission and to discourage others from taking similar course.

    2016 was a great year for wind and solar, even if nobody noticed.

    Renewable energy’s gains this year were incremental and unglamorous. In the US, the amount of residential solar installed rose, with no limits in sight. Utilities built solar projects in record-breaking numbers.

    The future of nuclear power runs on the waste of our nuclear past

    The conventional nuclear power method involves inserting radioactive rods into a reactor core where their fissionable material is converted into energy. Problem is, it’s not particularly efficient. Over the four years or so that a rod will remain in use, only about three percent of its available nuclear material is expended, leaving 97% as “waste.” And since nobody seems particularly willing to just fling it into the Sun, this waste must be disposed of in a nuclear repository. Over the past forty years or so, the US has generated 67,500 metric tons of the stuff—enough to cover a football field with spent fuel rods to a depth of seven yards. But what if there were a way to recycle the waste and recapture the remaining energy?

    Preview YouTube video Earth Under Water – Worldwide Flooding | Sea Level Rise (SLR)

  • The John James Newsletter 154

    The John James Newsletter 154

    Speculation is perfectly all right, but if you stay there you’ve only founded a superstition. If you test it, you’ve started a science
    Hal Clement
     
    Twenty Photos: My Seven Months Living at Standing Rock 
    These images show some of the defining moments of the past seven months — some that made it to mainstream media coverage and others unseen until now. Among the ever-growing lessons this place has taught me is what it means to simultaneously build and tear down. The life we have built here has taught many how to live a large-scale sustainable, decolonized, anticapitalist lifestyle that until now academics, sociologists, theoreticians, and greenies alike have only been able to hypothesize.
    Climate Change 2016: The Year the Future Arrived 
    Global warming didn’t really get started in a big way until the 1950s. Today, the warming rate is seven times greater than it was in the 1950s and the carbon emission rate is four times greater than in the ’50s. That same sulfur pollution that caused all the acid rain in the ’60s and ’70s is a global cooling pollutant that hides warming. With grossly increasing smog in Asia since about the turn of the century, the results have been that 30 percent of warming that should have occurred has been masked or covered up by global cooling sulfate smog.
    2016’s most memorable moments
    As the year comes to a close, there’s a few memories that really stand out. “I’ll remember the winning moments of the campaign to stop the privatisation of ASIC, and succeeding in saving funding for renewables. I’ll remember being among the crowds of people rallying for justice for refugees and people seeking safety.”
    US Aims to Break Russia With Arms Race
    During the Reagan presidency, the US embarked on a surge in military spending which inevitably induced the Soviet Union to respond likewise. Both countries incurred massive financial problems owing to the accelerated arms race. In the case of the Soviet Union, the unsustainable arms expenditures led to the collapse of its economy, and consequently its political system dissolved in 1991. At all costs, Russia must avoid an arms race that would shatter its economy and eventually its national sovereignty. That is exactly what American adversaries want.
    Why Putin Is Winning in Syria
    Recent press headlines about Syrian peace talks and a possible ceasefire reflect naivete and false hopes that come from thinking the world is the way we wish it to be and not the way it really is.  Russian President Vladimir Putin’s geopolitical gambit in Syria is poorly understood and generally underestimated
    Former UK Ambassador to Syria Debunks Aleppo Propaganda
    Assad is not going to be removed by force of arms or at the negotiating table. What Britain should do now is three things: we should stop supporting a failed and divided opposition; we should start to try to help the people of Syria by lifting sanctions; and we should be working with the Russians on an overdue political settlement.
    Israel Threatens 
    Israel has been angered by the vote and has retaliated by announcing that it would cut funding to several UN institutions and countries who voted in favor of the resolution which proposes that Israel cease its settlement building in occupied Palestinian lands, stating that the settlements have “no legal validity and constitute a flagrant violation under international law.”
    UN vote exposes the true face of Israel’s settlement policy
    The UN Security Council’s passage of Resolution 2334, which condemns the settlements and calls for an immediate halt to their expansion, is merely the latest — and possibly most reverberant — incident to unmask the fiction of Israel’s commitment to a viable two-state solution.
    Kerry: ‘Israel Can Either Be Jewish or Democratic — It Cannot Be Both’
    Today, there are a similar number of Jews and Palestinians living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. They have a choice. They can choose to live together in one state or they can separate into two states. But here is a fundamental reality. If the choice is one state, Israel can either be Jewish or democratic. It cannot be both. And it won’t ever really be at peace.
    The Demise of Greece’s Agricultural Commons
    The strategy of the West of dumping its hazardous agricultural technologies and seeds on Greece and every other country that did not industrialize its countryside is threatening millennia of agrarian wisdom and practice,
    As the Sun Sets On The Nuclear Wasteland
    The ruinous consequences of seventy years of nuclearisation are now patently manifest. The Hanford facility in the US, Sellafield in the UK and the Mayak Industrial Complex in the former USSR have all served as “sacrifice zones” where plutonium pits were manufactured for deployment in nuclear warheads during the Cold War era. They are now vast nuclear wastelands with unthinkable quantities of radioactive wastes stored in ageing containers and leaking landfill sites. Less visibly, countless abandoned uranium mines throughout the world continue to release radioactivity into the air, soil, local waterways and groundwater.
    Nine Nations Have Nukes 
    Nine nations — the United States, Russia, United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea — possess approximately 16,300 nuclear weapons.
    Turkey Blasts the US for Supporting Terrorists in Syria
    There is now “confirmed evidence, with pictures, photos and videos” of US complicity in and support of terrorist groups in Syria, including the Islamic State group
    NATO Weaponry and Personnel in East Aleppo
    Huge stockpiles of weaponry and ammunition, many with NATO markings, were discovered in East Aleppo when the Al-Nusra militants, a local branch of Al Qaida, were pushed out of the city by Syrian forces.
    Corporate America Is Drowning in Debt
    If you remove the top 25 cash holders, you’ll find that for most of Corporate America, cash on hand is declining even as these companies rack up more and more debt at historic rates. The bottom 99% of corporate borrowers have just $900 billion in cash on hand to back up $6 trillion in debt. “This resulted in a cash-to-debt ratio of 12%—the lowest recorded over the past decade
    Australian fur seal weighing 200kg wanders down Tasmanian street, squashes car
    “It did this spectacular manoeuvre where it slid down the back of the first car and jumped onto bonnet of the second car and scrambled over the top of that.”
  • Islamic scholars reject Saudi extremism

    Islamic scholars reject Saudi extremism

    Saudi execution
    A public execution in “chop chop” square

    The final week of 2016 is an apt time to reflect on the role of religion. Fundamentalists fan the flames of religious hate from Aleppo to Ipswich. Borders snap shut, refugees languish in ghettos and First Nations people from West Papua and Western Australia to just West of the Mississippi at Standing Rock are tortured to death by police upholding Christian values.

    In Chop Chop Square each and every Friday the Saudi family execute and flog dissenters to uphold the untenable claim that their Jewish forebears are direct descendants of Mohammed. Yet we pray in Parliament and swear on the bible in court. We give tax free dollars to criminal institutions so they might rape our children and force battered women to reconcile with their perpetrators in those self-same Christian values.

    Our elected representatives banish reason in the name of faith, deny science and belittle grace. Nature red in tooth and claw, the market rules the human race, a race of lemmings herded by armies bearing icons and brands. Religion joined by commerce both harnessed by a State that no longer even pretends to represent us but simply take.

    Religion justifies that right to take, to exploit, to dominate. We wipe out life to live. We reduce the biosphere to microscopic animals and machines, industrial harming of the few living things we eat, the planet a machine to feed the megacity a few remnants of nature a Disneyland for the mega rich.

    But it need not be so.

    All life takes, consumes, organizes, builds. Else there would be entropy. That is the law of thermodynamics. Each ant nest a treasury of stolen organic matter dragged home by neutered workers. Bee hives the same except they fly by with their baskets of pollen, sucked nectar. How ants must wail and nash their nippers as the bees buzz past.

    The gift of consciousness is wasted on post hoc rationalization, justifying our greed, our fear and anger. We must harness it to create wondrous beauty, we must apprehend the Universe with awe, the Earth with respect, each other with kindness. We must stop racing to the cliff and learn to look after each other, one by one and then in communities and then we can begin again.

    Merry Christmas, from the Cross, in the Cage on the Zeds. My name is Geoff Ebbs.

  • The Summer that will not end in our life times

    The Summer that will not end in our life times

    Endless Summer
    The Summer that will not end in our lifetimes

    You are in the Cage unscripted. Australia is on holiday. The Summer that Will Not End in our lifetimes has begun. It is hot. It is very hot. And the Endless Summer has just begun.

    As we huddle in the air conditioning, or wallow in the kid’s wading pool draping wet towels over ourselves to survive the heat we also come to terms with the passing of the social democratic state. The social safety net built with the blood of the unionists, the suffragettes and environmentalists is being dismantled before our eyes.

    While we will report and comment on its demise, The focus of The Cage is not to lament its passing but to find ways to build a new people power movement a movement built on community, a movement that operates independently to undermine the controls placed on us in the Cage, a movement that loosens those restrictions and builds a robust, hopeful, loving society that will outlast the death throes of capitalism.

    We are here to agitate, educate and organize. We are here to build the post-apocalyptic society into which we bring the new-borns, the to-be-borns and each other. Not a cheery vision perhaps, but at real one, one of courage, one of robust abundance, one based on love, solidarity and the power within. We uncompromisingly refuse to enslave ourselves for the masters of the Cage, even as we use the infrastructure of the Cage to survive.

    This project is not secret. There are few secrets in this era of total surveillance. Every phone call you make, every text message you send, every social media post you make is collected, collated and analysed. Our task is not to overthrow the emerging network of networks in which we are simply nodes, it is to engage, evolve and redesign it for a better future.

  • Cashless India program attacks world’s poorest

    Cashless India program attacks world’s poorest

    Prime Minister Morodi's justification for a Cashless India
    Prime Minister Morodi’s justification for a Cashless India

    India’s rapid move to a cashless society was part of Prime Minister Morodi’s campaign against corruption and tax avoidance but the consequences of the sudden cancellation of all 500 and 1,000 rupee bills has led to an economic crisis and widespread accusations that it is an attack on the poor. With uneven access to digital and financial services the enforced move to a digital economy is leaving hundreds of millions of people behind. 17% of Indians own a smart phone and only 11% have a credit or debit card. Hundreds of thousands of people have marched in the streets, locking down banks and government offices.

    Chakravorti, who co-authored a report titled “The Cost of Cash in India,” found that, “most Indians lack the means to use cashless alternatives irrespective of their desire to do so.”

    “The digital infrastructure in India is so horrendously poor,” Chakravorti says. “The majority of people don’t have access to smartphones. Large numbers of them cannot read or write. Mobile connections are extremely poor. Even the people in the city, for them connections are terrible.”

    A New Delhi shop keeper has lost 80% of his business due to the crisis
    A New Delhi shop keeper has lost 80% of his business due to the crisis

    Chakrovorti says policy-makers pushing a cashless society are “essentially putting the cart before the horse. The country needs to invest in its digital infrastructure before it pushes people to digital payments.”

    http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/12/21/506330351/india-wants-to-go-cashless-but-its-easier-said-than-done

    The point of this new act being that no longer will it be necessary to offer payment to employees in cash. It will be possible to pay via cheque, or electronic transfer into a bank account. The aim is, of course, all rather tied in with the demonetisation campaign and the move toward a cashless society. If wages are being paid in a manner easy to check then the tax system can be expected to benefit. And given that vast swathes of India’s economy are entirely informal it’s obviously in the government’s interest for this to happen.

    In a further push to cashless economy, the Central cabinet has approved the ordinance for paying wages via electronic means — which means that the government has given its nod for cashless salary. Accordingly, the government approved to amend Section 6 of the Payment Of Wages Act.

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/12/21/india-repeals-the-truck-acts-in-move-to-cashless-society/#722161f36413

    It was a move that could have brought India’s economy to a shuddering halt. Indeed, the seemingly endless queues outside banks, and the difficulty of spending cash at shops and stalls may have seemed like it did. But the decision to demonetise the 500 and 1,000 rupee notes was just one in a series of moves that will push India towards a digital economy.

    http://theconversation.com/india-taking-a-step-on-the-road-to-cashless-economy-70309