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

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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What the World Thinks of God – Poll Results

Britain is one of the most secular nations in the world, a new poll in 10 countries finds

Levels of religious belief and activity in the UK are far lower than in almost all other countries surveyed across the globe in a special poll undertaken for the BBC.

The ICM poll of 10,000 people in the USA, UK, Israel, India, South Korea, Indonesia, Nigeria, Russia, Mexico and Lebanon was carried out for What the World Thinks of God – BBC TWO, Thursday 26 February, 9.00pm.

It reveals that only 46% of respondents in the UK said they have always believed in God – 27% less than the average.

Only Russia (42%) and South Korea (28%) were lower.

Furthermore just 52% of UK respondents believed God (or a Higher Power) created the universe, compared to 85% in the USA, 83% in Mexico, 99% in Indonesia and 96% in Lebanon.

The highest levels of belief are found in the poorer nations of Nigeria (98%), India (92%) and Indonesia (97%).

However, the USA – the richest nation polled – has a very high level of belief.

Only 13% of those polled in America said they found it hard to believe in God (a Higher power) when there was so much suffering in the world.

Yet this compares to more than half (52%) of those polled in the UK – the highest of all the countries – and more than twice the average. The figures for Lebanon were 2% and Nigeria 12%.

The survey found that only 19% of those in the UK said they would die for their God/beliefs.

This compares to 37% in Israel, 90% of those polled in Indonesia and Nigeria, and 71% in the USA and Lebanon.

A staggering 78% of those polled in the USA claimed to have studied religious texts, by far the largest figure, followed by 51% in Nigeria and 42% in the UK. This compares to an average of 33%.

The poll also looked at the place of religion in the world.

Almost a third (29%) of people in the UK believe that the world would be a more peaceful place without beliefs in God but very few people in other countries agreed.

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Russia Aims To Host Mideast Peace Meeting

The Russian president said in Cairo on Tuesday that Moscow aimed to hold a Middle East peace conference before the end of 2009, a move backed by Egypt and which Russia said also had Israel’s approval.

Russia, which has proposed such a conference in the past, is a member of the Quartet of Middle East negotiators, along with the European Union, the United States and the United Nations.

“We paid special attention to Middle East issues. We highly appreciate efforts by the Egyptian president to create an atmosphere of trust and cooperation in the region,” Dmitry Medvedev said after talks with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

“(The) Moscow Middle East conference, which we plan to hold before the end of the year, will also contribute to achieving this goal,” he said at a joint news conference in Cairo.

Mubarak, speaking after the two sides signed cooperation agreements, said Egypt backed the conference in Moscow.

Israeli spokesman Yigal Palmor said Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman recently told Russia that Israel “would, in principle, agree to attend, provided, of course, that anti-peace elements such as Hamas and Hezbollah are not invited”.

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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.