From futurist Stephan A. Schwartz - Trends That Will Affect Your Future …

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A Mega City Runs Dry


Sao Paulo is the 4th largest city in the world,
with a population of 20 million people.
Credit: cbc.ca

A reader who used to live in Brazil sent this to me. As you read this please bear in mind that the writer is an upper middle class person in the 4th largest city in the world. What he is describing is not what happens to a poor person, but to a family firmly in the middle class when climate change, corruption, and poor social policies combine to produce a water disaster. This could be Los Angeles, or Birmingham or Miami 10 years from now.


Adbusters

I am writing by candle light. The aching in my hand and the irregular handwriting reminds me that it’s been a long time since I wrote on paper and not a keyboard. The power cut has already lasted more than eight hours and I fear that the combination of events and outcome of what we are going through might be a foreshadowing of what’s soon to come around the world ... More here

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Judge rules against Japan nuke restart, cleanup of melted reactors non-existent


The damaged Takahama nuclear power plant.
Credit: Beyond Nuclear

It is four years and the truth is no one knows how to deal with the catastrophe of Fukushima. Everything is an experiment, a best guess. As I write this Fukushima is still spilling radioactivity into the ocean. The site is still only partially controlled and no one has any certainty whether it ever will be. A whole section of Japan, some of its most important and historic rice land, may never be habitable again.

This judge’s decision is, as discussed in this report, I think, the first really good news to come out of this sorry mess in months and months.

Unless some technology for dealing with radioactivity is discovered, it will require maintenance for centuries or even thousands of years. Absurd amounts of time. And decommissioning a nuclear reactor is wildly expensive. The British government estimates that it would cost more than $100 billion to decommission existing plants, and could end up costly many billions more. Nuclear power was the unnatural child of the Cold War and the geopolitics of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), and should be phased out as quickly as possible. I believe Judge Hideaki Higuchi should be seen as an international hero, a force for wellness.

Beyond Nuclear

"Fukui Prefecture court in Japan has ruled that the only real protection from a catastrophic nuclear accident is to keep the nation’s atomic reactors shut down. Hideaki Higuchi, a local judge for Fukui, ordered that the Takahama nuclear power plant remain closed as there is not adequate proof that another disaster caused by an earthquake can be reliably averted if the atomic reactors are operating. Judge Higuchi had previously ordered that the Ohi nuclear plant in Fukui also remain closed for the same reason. Judge Higuchi’s Takahama order overruled Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority’s decision to restart under revised regulatory standards. In spite of the Abe government’s push to restart atomic power, Japan remains “Zero Nuclear” by popular demand and legal authority" ... Read more

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Islamic Extremists Have Seized Control Of U.S. Cities, Says NRA Seminar



This is how crazy the Theocratic Right has become. These people very genuinely feel under siege. They really believe that Islamic extremists are taking over the U.S. and trying to impose Sharia law here. They’re not faking it. The problem is, of course, that it has no basis in fact, it is an alternative reality, it is a form of mental illness. They literally cannot think rationally, and this is what is tearing America apart. About 30 per cent of us have overactive right amygdalas, and are easily manipulated through fear. This is the foundation of the Great Schism Trend.

Kira Lerner - Think Progress

NASHVILLE, TN — Islamic extremists have seized control of cities across the United States and have enacted sharia law, according to a speaker at the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting who spoke about current and emerging threats to American gun owners.

Author Steve Tarani said during a presentation in Nashville on Sunday that he has witnessed the alleged “no-go zones” — areas where police cannot enter — while shadowing a friend who serves on the Detroit Metro SWAT Police on a drive in Dearborn, MI. He described pulling up to one of the alleged Muslim-controlled areas ... Read more

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that other Gulf oil spill ...

Oil Spill Has Been Leaking Into Gulf of Mexico for a Decade



This is an amazing story, a whole separate saga of greed, stupidity, and corruption resulting in the degradation of the Gulf. I had never heard of it before, and I doubt you had either. This is a classic example of a regulatory agency corrupted to the point of irrelevance, and this is what journalism is supposed to do. Although one has to wonder why it has taken so long.

Zoë Schlanger - Newsweek

When Hurricane Ivan struck the Gulf of Mexico off of Louisiana in 2004, the force of the waves prompted a mudslide that toppled an offshore well platform owned by Taylor Energy. Since then, more than 10 years ago, oil from the undersea wells has been leaking into the Gulf unabated.

And the leak is far larger than reported.

According to an Associated Press investigation, recent U.S. Coast Guard figures show that the volume of the continual spillage is 20 times higher than figures originally put forth by Taylor Energy ... Read more

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Top Nuclear Watchdog Forced Out by Industry


Gregory Jaczko, former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Credit: AP

Nuclear power, bastard child of the Cold War is just fine until it’s not, and when its not the problem can quickly escalate beyond the human ability to deal with it — Fukushima tells that tale very convincingly. And then there is the issue of the nuclear waste which no one knows what to do with and which, in theory, must be maintained in a stable state for, well no one is really sure, but potentially 200,000 years. Since human recorded history only dates back to the Fourth Millennium BCE, roughly 6,000 years, you can see the problem.

Lewis Beale - Reader Supported News

Gregory Jaczko was chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission when Japan’s Fukushima power plant suffered a major meltdown in 2013. An advocate of tightening safety controls at America’s aging nuclear facilities after the Fukushima disaster, Jaczko soon discovered that despite his concerns, the influence of profit-hungry corporations over the NRC was affecting its ability to adequately police the industry—and putting the public in danger ...

Read more

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Mind training as effective as anti-depressants


A form of mental training which helps people recognise the onset of depression, and control it,
works as well as anti-depressants in preventing relapse, researchers said Monday.
Credit: Agencé France-Presse

Yet more research on meditation/mindfulness. In this report the research shows you would do as well developing the daily discipline of meditation/mindfulness as you would taking anti-depressant medication. And you wouldn’t suffer from the many side-affects associated with these drugs, most of which are no better than placebos anyway. If depression is an issue for you, or someone you care about, I recommend you consider this option.

Richard Ingram - Agence France-Presse (France)

A form of mental training which helps people recognise the onset of depression, and control it, works as well as anti-depressants in preventing relapse, researchers said Monday.

Dubbed Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), the method may offer a welcome alternative for people wishing to avoid long-term use of anti-depressants, which can have unpleasant side effects like insomnia, constipation and sexual problems, said a study in The Lancet medical journal.

In a two-year trial with 424 depression sufferers in England, researchers found that MBCT users faced a "similar" risk of relapse to those on anti-depressants ... Read more

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Chinese scientists genetically modify human embryos



Note this date in your diary. The taboo has been crossed. Do you think the new global aristocracy won’t want to use this technology? Will the military resist? Will governments? Why yes, I’d like to order up 100,000 genetically modified “Unsullied”. Thank you for asking. Homo Superior will be on the scene within a generation.

David Cyranoski and Sara Reardon - Nature

In a world first, Chinese scientists have reported editing the genomes of human embryos. The results are published1 in the online journal Protein & Cell and confirm widespread rumours that such experiments had been conducted—rumours that sparked a high-profile debate last month2, 3 about the ethical implications of such work.

In the paper, researchers led by Junjiu Huang, a gene-function researcher at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, tried to head off such concerns by using 'non-viable' embryos, which cannot result in a live birth, that were obtained from local fertility clinics. The team attempted to modify the gene responsible for β-thalassaemia, a potentially fatal blood disorder, using a gene-editing technique known as CRISPR/Cas9. The researchers say that their results reveal serious obstacles to using the method in medical applications ... Read more

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How Radioactive Is the Pacific, Really ?



Here is the latest on the spread of radiation in the world ocean arising from the Fukushima disaster. Not good, but not as bad as many feared. Of course the worse part is that thousands of tons of radioactive water continues to pour into the ocean.

James Joiner - The Daily Beast

American shores. The truth is, it’s only in trace amounts. The real problem is that it’s nobody’s job to check ever again.

Radioactive elements from Japan’s Fukushima disaster were found in the ocean on the U.S. Pacific coast last week. Alarmist fringe sites were quick to herald everything up to an alleged collapse of the Pacific fishery as the result of this four-year, trans-ocean trek ... Read more

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94 percent of Americans don’t know the budget deficit is getting smaller



I was at a small social event this evening and in conversation with someone was surprised to learn that they thought the deficit was going up. It left me wondering how many people believe this to be the case. Here is the answer. People think as they do because of an active disinformation campaign put on by the Right. It is a classic example of Joesph Goebbel’s Big Lie tactic.

Steve Benen - Daily Kos

It's an indisputable fact: The budget deficit is getting smaller ... Read more

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9 States That Are Running Out Of Water


Cracks in the dry bed of the Stevens Creek Reservoir in Cupertino, Calif.
Credit: Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP

I live in the Pacific Northwest and recently had conversations with two real estate agents we know. Both were aware that not only are people from dry states moving into our area, so are the Chinese — just as they did in Vancouver when Hong Kong was turned over to China by the British.

This is all part of the Migration Trend I have both predicted and described in SR over the last 15 years when I first saw data suggesting it.

Thomas C. Frohlich and Mark Lieberman - The Huffington Post

For many states, the rainy season is over, and most of the Western United States is now locked into a fourth consecutive year of drought. The imminent dry summer is particularly foreboding for California, where more than 44% of land area is engulfed in an exceptional level of drought. This was the highest such share nationwide and the kind of water shortage seen only once a century ... Read here

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Energy Storage Would Play Major Role in a Green Future


A storage reservoir for a pumped-water hydroelectricity plant on Zar Mountain
in southern Poland. Credit: Ongrys via Wikimedia Commons)


Energy storage is the leverage point in the transition into the non-carbon era. Great fortunes are going to be made solving this problem. Proving it is entirely possible to make wealth in the service of wellness.

Paul Brown - Truthdig/Climate News Network

LONDON—Inventors are in a race to find the best way of storing electricity to make the most of renewables and cut the use of fossil fuels.

Currently, when more power than needed by consumers is produced by sources such as wind turbines or solar panels, some of the electricity is wasted. But that is changing.

Governments have realised that one of their biggest challenges in cutting the use of fossil fuels is to store surplus electricity for use at peak times ... Read more

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Pentagon Can’t Account for $1 Billion in Afghanistan
Emergency Reconstruction Aid


A gun from the Panzer Howitzer platoon, Kamp Holland, Tarin Kowt,
June 14, 2007.
Credit: David Axe

$1.3 billion just disappeared. And then there were the pallets of $100 bills shipped to Iraq, several billions worth, all nicely shrink wrapped, straight from the New York Federal Reserve. They just disappeared. A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon it’s real money. How many hungry American kids could have been fed with that money? How many wounded vets could have been treated? How many elderly could have been given decent housing? A nation is what it spends its money on.

James Rosen - truthout

Washington - A total of $1.3 billion that the Pentagon shipped to its force commanders in Afghanistan between 2004 and 2014 for the most critical reconstruction projects can't be accounted for by the Defense Department, 60 percent of all such spending under an emergency program, an internal report released Thursday shows.

About 70 percent of the $100 billion the United States has spent to rebuild Afghanistan during 13 1/2 years of war has gone through the Pentagon, with the rest distributed by the US Agency for International Development and other civilian departments. A small portion of the Pentagon's money went directly to American military officers there in a bid to bypass bureaucracy and rush the aid to urgently needed roads, bridges, schools, hospitals, water-treatment plants and other essential infrastructure ... Read more

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Super El Nino Likely as Huge Warm Water Wave Hits West Coast,
Extreme Marine Die Off Developing



This is what climate change looks like, and it is going to affect our lives in myriad ways great and small. The steady relative constancy of Earth’s meta-systems is being severely disrupted, and the world will never be the same again. In this case it should offer California a reprieve, although a compromised one, as the report describes, which is at least one bit of good news.

Daily Kos

In early March, the strongest wave of tropical convection ever measured (known as the Madden Julian Oscillation) by modern meteorology moved into the western Pacific from Indonesian waters bringing an outbreak of 3 tropical cyclones, including deadly category 5 Pam which ravaged the south Pacific islands of Vanuatu. This extreme outburst of tropical storms and organized thunderstorms pulled strong westerly winds across the equator, unleashing a huge surge of warm water below the ocean surface. Normally, trade winds blow warm water across the Pacific from the Americas to Australia and Indonesia, pushing up sea level in the west Pacific. When the trade winds suddenly reversed to strong westerlies, it was as if a dam burst, but on the scale of the earth's largest ocean, the Pacific. The front edge of that massive equatorial wave, called a Kelvin wave, is now coming ashore on the Americas ... More here

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Tesla unveils batteries to power homes


Elon Musk


Energy storage, as I have noted repeatedly, is the leverage point that will materially affect the transition out of the carbon era, in the process changing the energy model from a centralized monopoly mass grid, to a dispersed decentralized model.

I think Elon Musk is one of the most impressive business leaders in the world. He sees how to create wealth by making wellness a priority, and he incorporates this into his business model. And it is going to make him a world historical figure.

Independent of Musk, this battery story is very good news, and should be seen as a significant step in the beginning of a major trend.

BBC News (U.K.)

US electric carmaker Tesla Motors has unveiled batteries that can power homes and businesses as it attempts to expand beyond its vehicle business.

Chief executive Elon Musk announced the firm would build batteries that store solar energy and serve as a back-up system for consumers during blackouts.

The device would allow consumers to get off a power grid or bring energy to remote areas that are not on a grid.

Tesla plans to start shipping the units to installers in the US by this summer ... More here

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Co-Op Nation



The localism trend is another positive development that is taking hold in communities across the country.
Here is a good assessment of what is going on.

Neal Gorenflo - shareable

In this interview, Shareable publisher and editor Neal Gorenflo and P2P Foundation's Michel Bauwens chat with Gar Alperovitz, the Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland and co-founder of the Democracy Collaborative. Among his most recent books are America Beyond Capitalism and (with Lew Daly) Unjust Deserts: How the Rich Are Taking Our Common Inheritance and Why We Should Take It Back ... Read more

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Immigrants to U.S. From China Top Those From Mexico



When you picture immigrants to the U.S. do you picture Hispanics coming over the Rio Grande? Well if you are like Republican 1st District Texas Representative Louie Gohmert, you probably do. All those wiry Mexicans with “calves like cantalopes” seem to haunt his dreams. But, as with most things Rep. Gohmert is wrong, as this report describes. You may be surprised.

Neil Shah - The Wall Street Journal

SAN DIEGO—Move over, Mexico. When it comes to sending immigrants to the U.S., China and India have taken the lead.

"China was the country of origin for 147,000 recent U.S. immigrants in 2013, while Mexico sent just 125,000, according to a Census Bureau study by researcher Eric Jensen and others. India, with 129,000 immigrants, also topped Mexico, though the two countries’ results weren’t statistically different from each other" ... More here

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Millions of trees are dying due to California drought



One aspect of climate change that people are simply not fully comprehending is the massive changes in the natural environment that are going to come with it. This report about California is just one example of what I mean. The massive restructuring of natural systems is going to be very challenging to our civilization.

Veronica Rocha - L.A. Times

Rangers in the San Bernardino National Forest call them “red trees.”

Instead of the typical deep green color, large swaths of pine trees now don hues of death, their dehydrated needles turning brown and burnt-red because of the state’s worsening drought.

“Unlike back East, where you have fall colors, here it’s because the trees are dying,” said John Miller, a spokesman for the San Bernardino National Forest.

Years of extremely dry conditions are taking a heavy toll on forest lands across California and heightening the fire risk as summer approaches.

“The situation is incendiary,” William Patzert, a climatologist for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told The Times recently. “The national forest is stressed out.” ... Read more

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Denmark hopes to boost its economy by eliminating cash



The Scandanavian countries seem capable of social changes that are inconceivable in the U.S., and going cashless is perhaps the most radical move to date. The upside to going cashless is described in this report. If one is given to paranoia though it is not hard to see how a cashless society would be easy to control. Just turn off an individual’s access to money, by rejecting their card everywhere. But this is coming. My 2050 remote viewers almost universally made this point, when I asked them to remote viewing how they paid for things and services in 2050.

Shelly Banjo - Quartz

The Danish government said today that it wants to allow gas stations, clothing stores, and restaurants the option to stop taking cash payments, a move that could accelerate a huge shift toward credit, debit, and alternative payment systems.

The measure is part of a larger set of 50 proposals (in Danish) from Denmark’s ministry of finance that aim to make it easier to do business in the country and boost economic growth ... Read here

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Scientists Find Alarming Deterioration In DNA Of The Urban Poor



Some days, when I do SR by the time I am through I just feel that with the level of stupidity and greed that pervades our culture we don’t deserve to survive, and probably won’t. This is one of those stories.

Nico Pitney - The Huffington Post

The urban poor in the United States are experiencing accelerated aging at the cellular level, and chronic stress linked both to income level and racial-ethnic identity is driving this physiological deterioration.

These are among the findings published this week by a group of prominent biologists and social researchers, including a Nobel laureate. Dr. Arline Geronimus, a visiting scholar at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study and the lead author of the study, described it as the most rigorous research of its kind examining how "structurally rooted social processes work through biological mechanisms to impact health" ... Read more

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Officer in Freddie Gray case demanded man’s arrest
as part of personal dispute



This is what I have been waiting for. It was clear to me from the beginning that at least one of the officers involved with Freddie Gray’s death had to be a bully and a thug, and it was just a matter of time until evidence of that came out. And now it has… in a British newspaper. Why is that, do you think? Why is this coming out in non-U.S. media? Where is the corporate American media? Just asking.

As you read this story ask yourself: How is it possible that a man with the background of Brian Rice could be a front line serving senior officer of police? And what else do you think will come out as this investigation continues?

Jon Swaine and Oliver Laughland - The Guardian (U.K.)

The most senior Baltimore police officer charged over the death of Freddie Gray used his position to order the arrest of a man as part of a personal dispute just two weeks before the fatal incident, prompting an internal inquiry by Baltimore police department.

During an erratic late-night episode in March, Brian Rice boasted he was a Baltimore police lieutenant and warned “heads will roll” if officers in a nearby city did not “go arrest” his ex-girlfriend’s husband, according to a police report obtained by the Guardian.

The incident is the latest in a series revealed by the Guardian that policing experts said raised questions over Rice’s ability to perform his duties as a supervising officer and the Baltimore department’s decision to keep him on front line patrols ... Read more