Steve Bull's Blog, page 1190
February 16, 2018
Are Modern Cities Sustainable?
Photo by Grant252 | CC BY 2.0
Around 4 billion people, or more than 50 % of the world’s population, now live in cities. By 2050 that percentage is expected to rise to 75%, as the world population soars to 9.7 billion. Fifty of those cities will be mega cities, i.e. concentrations of people in excess of 10 million.There are already 10 hypercities, each housing more than 20 million people, which was the size of the population of the entire world at the time of the French Revolution. How many of these mass conurbations there will be by that time is anyone’s guess, because the rate at which cities have grown over the last thirty years is simply unprecedented. This accelerated urbanisation of the world is a direct result of globalisation, both its intended and unintended consequences. And what the newly arrived urbanite can expect from that development will largely depend upon whether or not he has been invited to the party.
To get some idea of the remarkable speed of this urbanisation it is instructive to compare the growth rates of some of these new cities with that of the city of London in Victorian England. As Mike Davis points out in ‘Planet of Slums’, (reprinted in 2007, and so already woefully behind on current figures) from 1800 to 1910 the population of an increasingly industrialised London multiplied 7 fold. But compare that with Dhaka, Kinshasa and Lagos, which over a far shorter period, (1950 to 2000) have experienced population increases by a factor of 40. What is even more remarkable is that this influx of people occurred not against the backdrop of developing industries and expanding labour markets, but just the opposite. It happened at a time of “falling real wages, soaring prices and skyrocketing urban unemployment.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
February 15, 2018
7 Questions to Help You Figure Out Where to Store All That Food
About twelve years ago, my family decided to start storing food in case one of those dreaded “what ifs” happened in our lives.
You know those “what ifs.”
“What if we lose a source of income?” “What if someone is injured and can no longer work?” “What if we are sued and don’t have enough money to cover the lawsuit?” “What if prices go up so much that we can’t afford to feed our family as well as we do now?”
Yeah. Even if your “what ifs” aren’t the same as mine, I’d be willing to bet you have your own.
So those “what ifs” drove us to start amassing food. But one of the first things that went through my mind was, “We don’t have a basement! Where are we going to store food?”
Has that thought ever crossed your mind? If you’re in a bit of a panic because you don’t know where you’re going to store your stash, I’m going to provide you with seven questions that will help you uncover not-before-thought-of-spots.
I want you to take a walk through your house one room at a time. Looking at each room with new eyes, ask yourself these seven questions.
#1) Do I have anything that I can get rid of to create more room for food storage?
Well, the first and most obvious place to store food is in your kitchen. Go through your cabinets. Do you have approximately a gazillion plastic lids, but they don’t match any of your containers? Get rid of the lids and reclaim that area for food storage. Has your one gadget drawer procreated so now you have three billowing gadget drawers? Purge the items you’ve never used and are never likely to use in an emergency. Then use that space for food storage.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
How the SHTF in Bosnia: Selco Asks Americans, “Does this sound familiar?”
Selco interviewed by Daisy Luther
I was recently emailing back and forth with Selco and we were discussing the situation in the US right now, with the political polarization, the rage, and the general cognitive dissonance. I asked him if he saw any similarities between our situation and the one in Bosnia when the SHTF there during the war. When he replied I knew I had to share this information with you.
While we might like to think it could never happen here, the current events here are eerily similar to what happened there in the 1990s.
When you read this. think about recent events. The anger about immigration. The destruction of Civil War monuments. The unease between the races. The deep rage about the recent presidential election. The scorn and derision for neighbors who think differently. The way the media fans the flames of dissent between our fellow Americans.
You’ll realize that it definitely CAN happen to us…and there’s not one darn thing we can do except to be prepared.
What parallels do you see with events in the US and Bosnia before the SHTF?
US and Yugoslavia (in 1990) on first look do not have anything in common because people are going to say, “The USA cannot have anything similar to any socialistic system.”
This is true but only on first look.
Yugoslavia had somewhere around 20-22 million citizens, six republics (similar to states in the US), 3-4 main religions, and many national groups (ethnicity).
The official state policy was to build Yugoslavian “nationality” (from the end of WW1) and through different ways that effort was successful until the 90s.
We were “something big, united through differences with a strong connection to make something big.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
U.S. Public Debt Surges By $175 Billion In One Day
After the U.S. Government passed the new budget and debt increase, with the President’s signature and blessing, happy days are here again. Or are they? As long as the U.S. Government can add debt, then the Global Financial and Economic Ponzi Scheme can continue a bit longer. However, the days of adding one Dollar of debt to increase the GDP by two-three Dollars are gone forever. Now, we are adding three-four Dollars of debt to create an additional Dollar in GDP. This monetary hocus-pocus isn’t sustainable.
Well, it didn’t take long for the U.S. Government to increase the total debt once the debt ceiling limit was lifted. As we can see in the table below from the treasurydirect.gov site, the U.S. public debt increased by a whopping $175 billion in just one day:
I gather it’s true that Americans like to do everything… BIG. In the highlighted yellow part of the table, it shows that the total U.S. public debt outstanding increased from $20.49 trillion on Feb 8th to $20.69 trillion on Feb 9th. Again, that was a cool $175 billion increase in one day. Not bad. If the U.S. Government took that $175 billion and purchased the average median home price of roughly $250,000, they could have purchased nearly three-quarter of a million homes. Yes, in just one day. The actual figure would be 700,000 homes.
Regardless, we are now off to the races when it comes to adding GOBS of DEBT to continue a Ponzi Scheme that would make Bernie Madoff jealous.
There is so much that I want to write about and put into videos, but there is only so much time in the day.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Life and Death of Memes: Vegan Vs. Macrobiotic
This 2009 book by Lierre Keith is a fascinating reflection on how ideology permeates people’s eating habits. Ideology, then, is based on memes and that’s a new and developing field of science.
John Michael Greer (the Archdruid) tells the whole story of the great cycle of the macrobiotic and vegan diets. The macrobiotic movement started in the 1970 and peaked sometimes in the 1980-1990s. Greer himself tried to follow the rules of the macrobiotic diet and he reports an experience similar to that told by Lierre Keith in her book “The Vegetarian Myth” with a Vegan diet. Both Greer and Keith suffered serious health problems with these diets until they finally decided to abandon them – and then felt much better!
The question of diets can be utilized to illustrate how memes propagate in the global mindsphere. Data from “Google Ngrams” provide the number of times that a word is used in books. It can be used to quantify Greer’s claim that Veganism somehow supplanted Macrobioticism in a memetic cycle that covered a few decades. It is true: here are the data:
You can see how the “macrobiotic” meme went through a classic memetic trajectory, virally infecting the consciousness space of a fraction of humankind. Then, it lost potency and started fading. These data are up to 2008, if you use Google Trends to measure how many times the term “macrobiotic” was searched for in the Web, you see that it is in terminal decline from 2004.
If “macrobiotic” is a dying meme, that’s not true for “vegan” which is still showing growth in both Google Ngrams and Google Trends, the latter showing the number of times that a term is searched for in the Web. Here are the Google Trends data:
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
New Data: Yellowstone Supervolcano STRAINED, Magma Chamber Under Immense Pressure
According to a group of seismologists who are monitoring the potentially catastrophic supervolcano, Yellowstone is “under strain.” This new report has reignited fears that the caldera could erupt at any moment.
Experts were alerted to the volcano’s strain after noticing deformation. This process, where subsurface rocks subtly change shapes, is occurring beneath the surface of Yellowstone right now. Researchers state deformation occurs when there is a change in the amount of pressure in the magma chamber and experts are keeping an eye on the development.
Seismologists from UNAVCO, a non-profit university-governed consortium, are using “Global Positioning System (GPS), borehole tiltmeters, and borehole strainmeters” to measure minute changes in deformation at Yellowstone. In an article for the Billings Gazette, David Mencin and Glen Mattioli, geodesists with UNAVCO, say “the strain signal is larger than would be expected if the crust under Yellowstone were completely solid.”
“What that means, at least in their eyes, is that there’s lava flowing that’s allowing pressure to build in the chamber,” says Joe Joseph of The Daily Sheeple. “I don’t know if this is good or bad!”
These independent observations agree with other instruments at Yellowstone, like seismometers, that indicate a zone of semi-molten rock starting about 3 miles beneath the surface. The term “semi-molten” is used because the entire zone contains only between 5 and 15 percent liquid rock that occupies small pockets of space between the solid rock.
But the scientists want to assure the public that these observations are no cause for alarm. “Of course, they’re always gonna say that,” says Joseph. “It’s about 700,000 years ago they say when it erupted and it’s long overdue. So here we are, Yellowstone, yet again, thrust into the news because of some of this new data coming out…,” Joseph said.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Muck’s Minute #48 Future of Mankind Part III
Authors’ note: The response to the first few parts of this series show that the vast majority of readers are myopic in their view point. This series is about l-o-n-g t-e-r-m consequences of currently occurring happenings. It is not intended to be thought of as a One Turning forecast or even multiple 4TH Turnings. A turning is between 80-100 years and I’m talking about a thousand years and specie survival. I’ll try and rein in my long term view after this series and get back to talking about next month.
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Start Part III
The higher productivity of agriculture is the reason why population density and growth has fallen off the table as a popular subject to debate. Additionally, religion that espouses moral opposition to birth control in any fashion (including abortion) is spreading throughout undeveloped areas of the world ( as well as the USA’s swing to evangelical prominence) so we can be sure that more and more of the extra food production technology makes possible will be swallow up faster and faster. Worse luck, that, and our greatgrandchildren will live to regret it. True, this must be balanced against the fact that the more education women get, the fewer children they tend to have. You can also have a problem like they have in China with their “one child” policy that had led them to a demographical time bomb about to go off. On balance, population will still increase with time.
What is far more likely the result of continuing population expansion is war. Wars are fought over possession and control of land. There are, of course, other excuses for fighting a war, such as wars based on religious or cultural differences, but throughout the history of human conflict, fighting over the control of land and the resources thereon is the basis for war.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Dutch Lies Over Putin’s ‘Aggression’ Expose NATO War Agenda
Dutch Lies Over Putin’s ‘Aggression’ Expose NATO War Agenda
Netherlands Prime Minister Mark Rutte was this week forced to bear a parliamentary vote of no confidence after his foreign minister finally came clean over a dangerous lie he has been telling for two years concerning Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Halbe Zijlstra quit in shame on Monday as the country’s foreign minister after admitting that a story he had peddled about personally hearing Putin plotting to create a “greater Russia” was false. That then forced premier Rutte to endure a “no confidence” motion from parliamentarians. In the end, Rutte survived the vote. If a majority had voted against his leadership, his coalition government may have collapsed.
But the deep damage done to the Dutch authorities will not be so easily repaired by Rutte’s survival as premier. What has been exposed this week is a senior member of government recklessly telling bare-faced lies in an attempt to slander Russia, poison international relations, and ratchet up already dangerous geopolitical tensions.
Zijlstra had claimed two years ago, in 2016, that he had personally witnessed Russian leader Vladimir Putin boasting about creating a “greater Russia” which, it is claimed, would incorporate Ukraine, the Baltic states, Belarus and Kazakhstan.
The newly resigned Dutch top diplomat claimed he heard Putin making the remarks while present with others at the Russian leader’s dacha (summer house) back in 2006.
This week, Zijlstra finally came clean and admitted before parliament that he hadn’t in fact been present at the alleged gathering. He still maintains, however, that a confidant who was among the guests at Putin’s dacha informed him of the alleged “greater Russia” plan. But how can we now trust the word of a self-confessed liar?
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Global Energy Forecast to 2100
A global energy demand forecast is presented to 2100 based on historic growth of per capita energy consumption, 1965-2015 and on UN low and medium population growth forecasts. The low forecast sees energy demand growing from 13.15 billion tonnes oil equivalent (toe) per annum in 2015 to 19.16 billion toe in 2100. The medium population forecast sees 29.5 billion toe in 2100, that is a rise of 124% over 2015. This is an interactive post where commenters are invited to suggest where all this additional energy may come from.
[I have been and am still incredibly busy. For the last three weeks I have been working on a significant consulting job. No comments please on this subject. This short post is based on some simple modelling work I did last May – and no I have not been offered a job as a male model. Those offers dried up about 20 years ago 
Regime Change Fails: Is A Military Coup or Invasion of Venezuela Next?
The U.S. has employed all of its regime change tools in Venezuela and although so far they have failed, there is still a chance that a military attack is in store, warn Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers.
Several signals point to a possible military strike on Venezuela, with high-ranking officials and influential politicians making clear that it is a distinct possibility.
Speaking at his alma mater, the University of Texas, on February 1, Secretary of State Tillerson suggested a potential military coup in in the country. Tillerson then visited allied Latin American countries urging regime change and more economic sanctions on Venezuela. Tillerson is also reportedly considering banning the processing or sale of Venezuelan oil in the United States and is discouraging other countries from buying Venezuelan oil.
In a series of tweets, Senator Marco Rubio, the Republican from Florida, where many Venezuelan oligarchs live, openly called for a military coup in Venezuela. “The world would support the Armed Forces in #Venezuela if they decide to protect the people & restore democracy by removing a dictator,” the former presidential candidate tweeted.
How absurd — remove an elected president with a military coup to restore democracy? Does that pass the straight face test? This refrain of Rubio and Tillerson seems to be the nonsensical public position of U.S. policy.
The U.S. has been seeking regime change in Venezuela since Hugo Chavez was elected in 1998. Trump joined Presidents Obama and Bush before him in continuing efforts to change the government and put in place a U.S.-friendly oligarch government.
They came closest in 2002 when a military coup removed Chavez. The Commander-in-Chief of the Venezuelan military announced Chavez had resigned and Pedro Carmona, of the Venezuelan Chamber of Commerce, became interim president.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
