2012 Forecast: Food Riots, Ghost Malls, Mob Rule, Terror

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A trends forecaster says the current economic “rebound” from last winter’s Wall Street collapse of banks, insurance companies and automobile manufacturers is an artificial blip created by ‘phantom money printed out of thin air backed by nothing.”

And Gerald Celente of TrendsResearch.com, says people right now should be bracing for “the greatest recession” which will hit worldwide and will mark the “decline of empire America.” Crop failures could be among the minor concerns.

“Here we are in 2012. Food riots, tax protests, farmer rebellions, student revolts, squatter diggins, homeless uprisings, tent cities, ghost malls, general strikes, bossnappings, kidnappings, industrial saboteurs, gang warfare, mob rule, terror,” he writes for a quarterly publication that is available through subscription on his website.

The recent surge in Wall Street indexes back to near the 10,000 level, still far below the 14,000 prior to the crash, should be no reassurance for anyone, he said.

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E-Mail Surveillance Renews Concerns in Congress

The National Security Agency is facing renewed scrutiny over the extent of its domestic surveillance program, with critics in Congress saying its recent intercepts of the private telephone calls and e-mail messages of Americans are broader than previously acknowledged, current and former officials said.

The agency’s monitoring of domestic e-mail messages, in particular, has posed longstanding legal and logistical difficulties, the officials said.

Since April, when it was disclosed that the intercepts of some private communications of Americans went beyond legal limits in late 2008 and early 2009, several Congressional committees have been investigating. Those inquiries have led to concerns in Congress about the agency’s ability to collect and read domestic e-mail messages of Americans on a widespread basis, officials said. Supporting that conclusion is the account of a former N.S.A. analyst who, in a series of interviews, described being trained in 2005 for a program in which the agency routinely examined large volumes of Americans’ e-mail messages without court warrants. Two intelligence officials confirmed that the program was still in operation.

via E-Mail Surveillance Renews Concerns in Congress – NYTimes.com.

Countries Form Bloc To Challenge US Dominance

With public hugs and backslaps among its leaders, a new political bloc was formed yesterday to challenge the global dominance of the United States.

The first summit of heads of state of the BRIC countries — Brazil, Russia, India and China — ended with a declaration calling for a “multipolar world order”, diplomatic code for a rejection of America’s position as the sole global superpower.

President Medvedev of Russia went further in a statement with his fellow leaders after the summit, saying that the BRIC countries wanted to “create the conditions for a fairer world order”. He described the meeting with President Lula da Silva of Brazil, the Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, and the Chinese President, Hu Jintao, as “an historic event”.

The BRIC bloc brings together four of the world’s largest emerging economies, representing 40 per cent of the world’s population and 15 per cent of global GDP. The leaders set out plans to co-operate on policies for tackling the global economic crisis at the next G20 summit in the US in September.

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Netanyahu Calls for Conditional Palestinian State

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu endorsed an independent Palestinian state beside Israel for the first time on Sunday, dramatically reversing himself in the face of U.S. pressure but attaching conditions the Palestinians swiftly rejected.

A week after President Barack Obama’s address to the Muslim world, Netanyahu said the Palestinian state would have to be unarmed and recognize Israel as the Jewish state — a condition amounting to Palestinian refugees giving up the goal of returning to Israel.

Netanyahu, in an address seen as his reponse to Obama, refused to heed the U.S. call for an immediate freeze of construction on lands Palestinians claim for their future state. He also said the holy city of Jerusalem must remain under Israeli sovereignty.

Senior Palestinian officials Saeb Erekat said the plan “closed the door” to negotiations.

Still, it was a dramatic transformation for a man raised on a fiercely nationalistic ideology and who has spent a two-decade political career criticizing peace efforts.

“I call on you, our Palestinian neighbors, and to the leadership of the Palestinian Authority: Let us begin peace negotiations immediately, without preconditions,” he said, calling on the wider Arab world to work with him.

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Apocalypse Sun Creates Stir Among Scientists

It’s the sort of news that makes one’s eyes glaze over and if our prediction is correct, Solar Cycle 24 will have a peak sunspot number of 90, the lowest of any cycle since 1928 when Solar Cycle 16 peaked at 78,” said Doug Biesecker of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center.

Yes, space has weather, in the form of solar radiation that varies with solar activity in the form of sunspots and solar flares. Biesecker heads an NOAA panel that keeps an eye on such things and released this latest report.

But this dry statistic has more significance for the earth and its climate than all of Al Gore’s gloom and doom about tailpipe emissions and rising sea levels. Whether the warm-mongers like it or not, the sun rules earth’s climate — always has and always will.

First noticed in the 1800s, solar activity runs in roughly 11-year cycles. Some are as short as nine years or as long as 14. The valleys are usually brief, a couple of years, but sometimes, for reasons not fully understood, they stretch out for decades.

In the 17th century, a 70-year period of little or no sunspot activity known as the Maunder Minimum spawned what has become known as the Little Ice Age, which extended from roughly the 16th century to the 19th.

Washington’s famous winter at Valley Forge was part of that natural phenomenon. So was Napoleon’s bitter retreat from Moscow. During the winter of 1779-1780, the Hudson River was solid ice for five weeks. Early settlers going West crossed a frozen Mississippi near present-day St. Louis in 1799.

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Federal Reserve Puzzled By Yield Curve Steepening

The Federal Reserve is studying significant moves in the U.S. government bond market last week that could have big implications for the central bank’s strategy to combat the country’s recession.

But the Fed is not really sure what is driving the sharp rise in long-dated bond yields, and especially a widening gap between short and long term yields.

Do rising U.S. Treasury yields and a steepening yield curve suggest an economic recovery is more certain, meaning less need for safe haven government bonds and a healthy demand for credit? If so, there might be less need for the Fed to expand the money supply by buying more U.S. Treasuries.

Or does the steepening yield curve mean investors are worried about the deterioration in the U.S. fiscal outlook, or the potential for a collapse in the U.S. dollar as the Fed floods the world with newly minted currency as part of its quantitative easing program. This might be an argument to augment to step up asset purchases.

Another possibility is that China, the largest foreign holder of U.S. Treasury debt, has decided to refocus its portfolio by leaning more heavily on shorter-term maturities.

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Atheists Roll Out New Advertising Campaign

Campaign Slogan – In The Beginning Man Created God

This provocative twist on the Bible’s opening line was plastered on the side of 25 Chicago buses this week as part of an advertising crusade by the Indiana Atheist Bus Campaign.

The ads have been cruising between downtown and the city’s North and South sides, including the No. 56 Milwaukee route, since the beginning of the week and will run through June.

“The intent of the campaign is to stimulate discussion of religion and its place in our society,” said Charlie Sitzes, a spokesman for the Indiana group who with help from the American Humanist Association has collected more than $10,000 in private donations to buy the ad space in Indiana and Illinois.

The group brought its message to Chicago after a similar campaign in Indiana – to post the slogan “You can be good without God” – was rejected by transit authorities in Bloomington and stalled by officials in South Bend, who didn’t want the ads posted in time for President Barack Obama’s speech at Notre Dame.

Indiana’s chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union has sued the Bloomington Public Transportation Corporation on the atheist group’s behalf. Bloomington Mayor Mark Kruzan has denounced his own transit system, saying he does not condone government censorship.

“It would appear that where there is more opposition to the message that maybe that would be the place where we needed dialogue more,” Sitzes said, maintaining that the slogan is a simple fact.

“All non-believers believe God is a creation of man,” he said. “We used to have thousands of gods. Now we’re down to one. We’re getting closer to the true number.”

Among the guidelines for determining if an advertisement can run on the CTA is a requirement that the ad be truthful and is “not directed at inciting imminent lawless action.”

via Atheists roll out ad campaign | The Seeker.

LGBT Teaching Material Chosen For California Schools

We’d all love to see the plans,” the Beatles once sang about revolution. Some Alamedans have borrowed that sentiment about the Alameda Unified School District’s proposed LGBT curriculum, saying instead, “We’d all love to see the books.”

The school district’s Web site mentions the titles of the books it intends to use for the program tentatively scheduled to start in the fall, but delivers little else in the way of information. Here’s a look at some of the books and material.

* For kindergarten, The New Girl and Me: According to one reviewer the book is a “gentle story about Shakeeta, a new girl at school, and Mia, the classmate who befriends her… A stellar choice for any ‘new kid in the classroom’ situation, as well as for children who may be hesitant in making new friends. The author is a former elementary school teacher, which is obvious by her style of writing.”

* For first grade, Who’s in A Family: “This equal opportunity, open-minded picture book has no preconceptions about what makes a family a family,” says Random House, the publisher. “There’s even equal time given to some of children’s favorite animal families. With warm and inviting jewel-tone illustrations, this is a great book for that long talk with a little person on your lap.”

* For second grade, And Tango Makes Three: The book is based on the true story of Roy and Silo, two male Chinstrap Penguins in New York’s Central Park Zoo who for six years formed a couple. The book follows part of this time in the penguins’ lives. The pair was observed trying to hatch a rock that resembled an egg. When zookeepers realized that Roy and Silo were both male, it occurred to them to give them the second egg of a mixed-sex penguin couple, a couple which had previously been unable to successfully hatch two eggs at once. Roy and Silo hatched and raised the healthy young chick, a female named “Tango” by keepers, together as a family.

* For third grade, a video called “That’s a Family”: This is how the filmmakers describe their work: “With blunt and sometimes hilarious candor, children from over 50 diverse families open the door to their homes, and explain things like divorce, mixed race, gay and lesbian, birth mom, single parent, guardian and stepdad — and get right to the point of what they wish other people would understand about their families.”

* For fourth grade, an essay written by an 11-year-old named Robert called “My School Is Accepting — But Things Could Be Better.” Among Robert’s thoughts: “When kids learn that I have two moms, they are normally OK with it. Sometimes I’ll come across someone who says it is weird but that doesn’t bother me because I’m fine with my family. I tend to not be very good friends with the kids who say it is weird to have LGBT parents.” The essay can be read in its entirety on the AUSD Web site.

* For fifth grade, a handout that list famous LGBT personalities: The list includes author James Baldwin, singer Elton John and poet Walt Whitman. Like the fourth-grade essay, the list can be read in its entirety on the AUSD Web site.

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Campus Evangelists In Clash With Police

A campus evangelism group is stunned today, as a ministry event at a community college in Ohio resulted in four members being arrested, one on a felony assault charge that the ministry’s leader claims is fabricated.

“I’ve done ministries like this at more than 200 universities,” said Jason Storms, director of Faithful Soldier School of Evangelism, a ministry of Mercy Seat Christian Church in Milwaukee, Wis. “We train people to do evangelism, and I have never seen an incident like this.”

Storms and a team of students earlier this week traveled to Sinclair Community College in Dayton, Ohio, with signs, literature and a message of faith.

When they arrived, however, a student complaint led campus police to confront the evangelism team and demand that their signs and literature be put away in accordance with college policy. When two of the evangelists refused the order, however, insisting their materials were protected by the freedom of speech guaranteed in the First Amendment, the officers arrested them on charges of disorderly conduct.

via Campus evangelists in clash with police.

Joel Rosenberg – Obama To Say It’s Time To Divide Jerusalem

I’m horrified by reports this morning that in his June 4th speech in Cairo, President Obama will say it is time to divide Jerusalem and make the holy city the capital of a Palestinian state.

No, Mr. President, it is not.

Jerusalem is and should be the eternal, undivided capital of the Jewish people and the Jewish state. Dividing Jerusalem will not make peace. Rather, it would send a message to every Radical Islamic jihadist around the world that Israel is weak, that the Jews won’t even defend the sovereignty of their own capital, that there is “blood in the water,” and that it is time to strike Israel and wipe her off the map. Dividing Jerusalem would trigger an apocalyptic war in the Middle East the likes of which the region has never seen. Already, the Radicals believe Israel is doomed to destruction. Hearing that the American President is now ready to apply intense pressure against the Israelis to divide their capital will only embolden the Radicals and convince them further that Allah is on their side, the wind is at their back, and they will soon triumph over the Jews and Christians.

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Americans Shopping For A Different Religion

William Lobdell has followed four different religions. Now he’s an atheist.

Raised Episcopalian, the 48-year-old Orange County, Calif. man switched to a non-denominational parish and then a Presbyterian one. After going through a year of Catholic conversion classes he eventually realized that he is “a reluctant atheist.”

“I wish I believed,” said the former Los Angeles Times reporter and author of the memoir “Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America – And Found Unexpected Peace.” “I’d like to believe that someone is watching over me and protecting me, but I just don’t believe that.”

He may be an extreme example, but approximately half of Americans change religions at least once in their lives, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. The forum recently released a report, “The U.S. Religious Landscape: Exploring Religion in America,” based on surveys of 35,000 people.

Pew found that Catholicism has seen the sharpest decrease in membership among all religions in the U.S. About 10 percent of all Americans are former Catholics, according to the survey. The Archdiocese of Chicago declined to interview for this article.

via Americans ’shopping for religion’.

Earthquake Fault Much Larger,Dangerous Than Thought

An earthquake fault previously believed to be limited to an area south of Washington state’s Whidbey Island actually stretches 250 to 300 miles, from Victoria, B.C., to Yakima, Wash., crossing the Cascade Mountains and capable of producing a major earthquake, new research shows.

Many of the other faults in western Washington could be connected to the South Whidbey Island Fault in a network similar to the San Andreas Fault system in California, Craig Weaver, the regional earthquake coordinator for the U.S. Geological Survey based in Seattle, said in an interview Wednesday.

Suzette Kimball, the USGS acting director, told Congress on Thursday that there was “strong evidence” other faults in western Washington were connected to the South Whidbey fault.

“It appears there is a very large (fault) system in the Cascade arc,” she told the House interior appropriations subcommittee.

Weaver said scientists are trying to determine whether the South Whidbey Island Fault extends as far east as the Hanford nuclear reservation and if it could also be connected to the highly unstable Cascadia subduction zone off the coast.

“This is big stuff,” said Weaver, adding the South Whidbey fault was “most dangerous. A lot of people are looking over our shoulder.”

The fault could be capable of producing a maximum earthquake registering 7.5 on the Richter scale, which is used to measure the strength of earthquakes, he said. An earthquake that size is capable of causing serious damage over large areas.

via Earthquake fault much larger, more dangerous than thought | McClatchy.

Student Who Auctioned Virginity May Have to Pay Taxes

The teenage student who sold her virginity for $13,827 could have to hand over half of her earnings to the taxman.

German inland revenue investigators are studying reports that Alina Percea, 18, was paid in cash for a weekend of sex with a middle-aged Italian businessman after auctioning her virginity online.

Prostitution is legal in Germany — where Alina studies — but hookers are taxed at 50 percent of their earnings.

The Romanian-born computer studies student is allowed to work in Germany for 90 days as long as she arrived on a student visa, even as a prostitute.

But because Alina earned so much in such a short time she may also be liable for a hefty VAT bill.

A German inland revenue spokesman said: “If we have hard figures then we can make an accurate assessment.”

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Space Solar Storm Alert: 90 Seconds From Catastrophe

It is midnight on 22 September 2012 and the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. Few New Yorkers have seen the aurora this far south but their fascination is short-lived. Within a few seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker, then become unusually bright for a fleeting moment. Then all the lights in the state go out. Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the US is without power.

A year later and millions of Americans are dead and the nation’s infrastructure lies in tatters. The World Bank declares America a developing nation. Europe, Scandinavia, China and Japan are also struggling to recover from the same fateful event – a violent storm, 150 million kilometres away on the surface of the sun.

It sounds ridiculous. Surely the sun couldn’t create so profound a disaster on Earth. Yet an extraordinary report funded by NASA and issued by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in January this year claims it could do just that.

Over the last few decades, western civilisations have busily sown the seeds of their own destruction. Our modern way of life, with its reliance on technology, has unwittingly exposed us to an extraordinary danger: plasma balls spewed from the surface of the sun could wipe out our power grids, with catastrophic consequences.

The projections of just how catastrophic make chilling reading. “We’re moving closer and closer to the edge of a possible disaster,” says Daniel Baker, a space weather expert based at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and chair of the NAS committee responsible for the report.

It is hard to conceive of the sun wiping out a large amount of our hard-earned progress. Nevertheless, it is possible. The surface of the sun is a roiling mass of plasma – charged high-energy particles – some of which escape the surface and travel through space as the solar wind. From time to time, that wind carries a billion-tonne glob of plasma, a fireball known as a coronal mass ejection (see “When hell comes to Earth”). If one should hit the Earth’s magnetic shield, the result could be truly devastating.

The incursion of the plasma into our atmosphere causes rapid changes in the configuration of Earth’s magnetic field which, in turn, induce currents in the long wires of the power grids. The grids were not built to handle this sort of direct current electricity. The greatest danger is at the step-up and step-down transformers used to convert power from its transport voltage to domestically useful voltage. The increased DC current creates strong magnetic fields that saturate a transformer’s magnetic core. The result is runaway current in the transformer’s copper wiring, which rapidly heats up and melts. This is exactly what happened in the Canadian province of Quebec in March 1989, and six million people spent 9 hours without electricity. But things could get much, much worse than that.

Worse than Katrina

The most serious space weather event in history happened in 1859. It is known as the Carrington event, after the British amateur astronomer Richard Carrington, who was the first to note its cause: “two patches of intensely bright and white light” emanating from a large group of sunspots. The Carrington event comprised eight days of severe space weather.

via Space storm alert: 90 seconds from catastrophe – space – 23 March 2009 – New Scientist.