Accelerating Truth

Posted on June 1, 2013 by Thundering Heard

Most people have been trained to internalize only those ideas that come from honchos, that is, political and religious big shots, “experts,” very rich people, celebrities, etc. The powermongers capitalize on this when faced with criticism of the system by often resorting to what the logicians call ad hominem attacks, that is, they deflect attention from the criticism by attacking the person delivering it, attempting to undermine that person’s credibility. They characterize the malcontents as crazy, unpatriotic, uninformed, uneducated, or as crackpots, charlatans, imbeciles, demons, and so forth, while never addressing the issue at hand.

So for a more general public understanding of the nature of our system, it helps when people considered to be honchos start publicly discussing what is in fact going on. Other honchos are less likely to try to pull the ad hominem attack on one of their own. In other words, truth about the nature of our system needs to emerge from the blogosphere and into the mainstream. This process is accelerating.

Below is a link to an amazing video showing Columbia Professor Jeffrey Sachs speaking to a conference organized by the US Federal Reserve:

Columbia Economist Dr. Jeffrey Sachs speaks candidly on monetary reform

He begins by reporting that he was just at a meeting with foreign ambassadors at the UN who were asking:

“Why are we taking advice from the people who have managed the financial system so badly?”

He goes on to say that while people expect economists to talk about statistics and monetary issues, that the real problem with the system is as follows:

We have a mountain of criminal and fraudulent behavior…The amount of utter criminality and financial fraud is absolutely enormous…This is what’s called the American financial system at the moment. It’s an unregulated essentially lawless environment…

This is a profound failure of government…

I regard the moral environment as pathological…

We have a corrupt politics to the core. Both parties are up to their necks in this. It really doesn’t have anything to do with right wing or left wing. The corruption, as far as I can see, is everywhere.

Sachs follows that by saying that he meets with the top Wall St CEOs on a regular basis and the common feature he observes is that these people believe they can do anything they want, legal or not, with impunity. And that given their takeover of the politicians and regulators, they are correct!

Now this isn’t coming from MIT’s Prof. Noam Chomsky–who, let’s face it, was decades ahead of all of us in pointing out the criminality of the corporate/political system–it’s coming from a highly respected Columbia professor.

For a few years now, the money printing central banks such as the US Federal Reserve (the central banks have directly printed at least $16 trillion and counting) have been told by bloggers that this money is not supporting jobs and the economy, but rather that it is going to the rich who are bidding for financial assets and causing bubbles in multiple asset markets including stocks, bonds, and real estate. People like Ben Bernanke, his henchman, and academic and Wall St economists have denied this.

But now we find out, from a Freedom of Information Request by Bloomberg and from a leaked Fed document, that the banking insiders who advise the Fed are finally saying the same thing that the continuously-discredited bloggers have been saying all along: that the money printing is creating bubbles in farmland prices and student loans, and:

There is also concern about “an unsustainable bubble in equity and fixed-income markets given current prices.”

And for years, bloggers have said that the central banks cannot possibly stop printing more and more money or the whole edifice will crumble, another charge that is roundly derided. The Fed has claimed repeatedly that it has the tools to undo all the money printing so that it will never cause a problem. But now their own banker advisory panel says that if the Fed stops printing, it “may be painful for consumers and businesses…” and that “the Fed may now be perceived as integral to the housing finance system.” In other words, if the Fed stops printing, the “housing finance system” will collapse. Which it would. In a heartbeat.

People like Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone have been stalwart in documenting the ongoing manipulations in the interest rate, municipal bond, derivatives, and oil markets. And others have offered very strong evidence of manipulation of the stock market and precious metals markets. Taibbi recently wrote that “everything is rigged.” The US Bond market, the largest in the world, is certainly rigged: the Federal Reserve itself buys 75% of the bonds issued by the US Treasury. And the Fed announces, at the start of each month, which days it will be buying bonds through the Wall St firms in the coming month. The stock market always rises on those days. Always. Why? Because the Wall St firms take that money, leverage it up by further borrowing, and buy stocks. The Fed wants exactly that: they believe that a rising stock market makes people feel a “wealth effect” and therefore they will go out and spend more money in the real economy.

So finally, along comes one the largest banks in the world, Deutsche Bank, saying:

We would stress that we fully understand why the authorities wouldn’t want free markets to operate today as the risk of a huge global default and unemployment cycle would still be very high.

And a recent member of the Federal Reserve Board, Kevin Warsh, said that their money printing is not working and they are losing credibility:

…over the last several years, [the Fed] has over-promised and under-delivered, and the bank’s most important asset – credibility – is under attack.

One would think that, if their strategy isn’t working, that they have other tools they can bring to bear. That’s what they tell us. But Warsh says, “There is no Plan B.”

Bloggers have been warning that European banks are insolvent and getting worse all the time. Now the European Central Bank itself admits that the “euro zone’s slumping economy and a surge in problem loans were raising the risk of a renewed banking crisis.”

Here is an interview with the President of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, that place where they trade paper and electronic instruments that have an increasingly tenuous connection with physical things like gold, silver, copper, oil, etc. From the interview:

What’s interesting about gold, when we had that big break two weeks ago we saw all the gold stocks trade down significantly, we saw all the gold products (ed: futures) trade down significantly, but one thing that did not trade down, was gold coins, tangible real gold. That’s going to show you, people don’t want certificates, they don’t want anything else. They want the real product.

Then there is the supposed eternal juggernaut of the Chinese economy that will keep all the other floundering countries afloat. Much of that juggernaut has been propelled by debts taken on by local governments to promote the economy in their areas. But now the Financial Times reports this:

A senior Chinese auditor has warned that local government debt is “out of control” and could spark a bigger financial crisis than the US housing market crash.

Zhang Ke said his accounting firm, ShineWing, had all but stopped signing off on bond sales by local governments as a result of his concerns.

Last but not least, an insider is finally speaking up about nuclear power plants in the NY Times:

All 104 nuclear power reactors now in operation in the United States have a safety problem that cannot be fixed and they should be replaced with newer technology, the former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said on Monday…

The position of the former chairman, Gregory B. Jaczko, is not unusual in that various anti-nuclear groups take the same stance. But it is highly unusual for a former head of the nuclear commission to so bluntly criticize an industry whose safety he was previously in charge of ensuring.

This system is coming apart at the seams. Insiders and whistlebowers are finally describing the details. The US Government realizes this and is desperately trying to keep whistleblowers from telling the truth by filing charges against them and trying to ruin their lives. Ultimately, it won’t work. I just hope that everyone reading here takes those actions they need to take. By the time the collapse is on the television Nightly News and Page 1 of the newspapers, with the system honchos all claiming “No one could have seen this coming,” it will be too late.

Transition Update: Extreme Stress in the Animal Kingdom

Posted on May 10, 2013 by Thundering Heard

Forests precede civilizations…deserts follow them.
–Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand, 1768-1848

What is the effect of acceleration in the animal kingdom? What is the Transition? Part 3 showed a chart of the acceleration, the parabolic rise, of species extinction. And while that level of abstraction is important to grasp, seeing the details is another matter. The following articles, collected from the web over just the last four weeks, help to bring home the reality of the current stresses on the animal kingdom. Mass deaths are happening across the world, across many species. These incidents show that we’ve gone way beyond the proverbial “canary in the coal mine.” This is not business as usual.

Animals are suffering from direct poisoning by pesticides and fungicides, direct exploitation by people, habitat destruction, severe storms, weather pattern changes, pollution, cell phone tower disruption of the magnetic spectrum used by animals for navigation, ocean acidification, etc etc. But many cases remain inexplicable, even after investigations.

Worst-ever right whale die-off continues to puzzle

Scientists still don’t know why hundreds of baby southern right whales are turning up dead around Patagonia…

32 swans found dead at New Lake, Dunganaghy, Ireland

A spokesperson for the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine told Donegal Now that … it was still too early to say what had caused the multiple deaths.

One-Third of U.S. Honeybee colonies died last winter, threatening food supply

Nearly one in three commercial honeybee colonies in the United States died or disappeared last winter, an unsustainable decline that threatens the nation’s food supply.

Multiple factors – pesticides, fungicides, parasites, viruses and malnutrition – are believed to cause the losses, which were officially announced today by a consortium of academic researchers, beekeepers and Department of Agriculture scientists.

German lake full of dead carp baffles officials

Volunteers have pulled 25 tonnes of dead carp out of a lake in eastern Germany – there are so many, locals are running out of boats. Regional officials have admitted they are baffled – only carp seem to be dying in the lake.

3 more dolphins die in Indian River Lagoon

Biologists removed three more dead bottlenose dolphins in the Indian River Lagoon Monday, bringing this year’s total lagoon bottlenose body count to at least 30.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration already has declared the 100 or so manatee deaths in the lagoon since mid-2012 an Marine Mammal Unusual Mortality Event. The declaration triggers NOAA’s own formal investigation. The federal agency is examining whether the dolphin and manatee deaths might be connected.

Hundreds of dead fish wash up on Beaver Lake

It’s estimated that more than 7,000 pounds of dead fish – mostly catfish, sunfish and bass – have been taken out of Beaver Lake. But what caused this unusually large fish kill is still a mystery.

Thousands of dead fish reported in Indian River Lagoon in southern St. Lucie County, Florida

Tony DiChristofaro of Stuart, said he saw “thousands and thousands of dead fish coming ashore” about 2 p.m. Thursday as he was walking along the lagoon beach.

DiChristofaro said the dead fish extended along the shoreline for about a mile.

More than 1000 birds now dead as result of coastal chemical spill in UK

The substance has been identified as polyisobutene (PIB) by researchers at Plymouth University. It is the second time in just three months that PIB has killed hundreds of seabirds in the South West.

Video: Thousands of dead jelly fish at Umargam Beach

Seen in April 2013 there were thousands of dead jelly fish seen on sea beach of Umargam.

Big freeze – UK livestock death toll hits 100,000

English, Scottish and Welsh sheep losses in April were 50% higher than April 2012 costing 35,000 extra lives

Welsh cattle losses in April were more than double 2012’s equivalent to almost 2,700 head

Cattle losses in England and Scotland in April were about a quarter more than 2012 (23% and 25% to 13,800 and 9,700 head respectively)

Cattle losses for England, Scotland and Wales were up 34% and more than 7,000.

Central Africa elephant population down 62% in 10 years

Poaching on an “industrial” scale has slashed the elephant population in the countries of central Africa by nearly two-thirds…

Weather changes impact migrating birds

Experts say there has been an increase in the number of migratory birds falling from the sky in the region.

Health defects found in fish exposed to Deepwater Horizon oil spill, three years later

With researchers from Louisiana and South Carolina, the scientists found that Gulf killifish embryos exposed to sediments from oiled locations in 2010 and 2011 show developmental abnormalities, including heart defects, delayed hatching and reduced hatching success. The killifish is an environmental indicator species, or a “canary in the coal mine,” used to predict broader exposures and health risks.

Dead dolphins and shrimp with no eyes found after BP clean-up

Hundreds of beached dolphin carcasses, shrimp with no eyes, contaminated fish, ancient corals caked in oil and some seriously unwell people are among the legacies that scientists are still uncovering in the wake of BP’s Deepwater Horizon spill.

Cocktail of multiple pressures combine to threaten the world’s pollinating insects

Mysterious dead fish at Eagles Mere Lake, Pennsylvania

Dead birds “falling from the sky” in Port Arthur, Texas neighborhood

Hundreds of birds die of starvation after spring snowstorm in Colorado

Manatee deaths at Indian River Lagoon, Florida: Questions abound in mysterious deaths of manatees, pelicans

Minnesota man watches as waxwings began ‘dropping out of the sky’

Hawaii: Kaua’i coral disease worsening, says doctor

100 dolphins wash up on Italian coast after being hit by killer strain of measles

Storm kills 10 thousand birds in Jhenidah, Bangladesh

Wales: Worry over marsh horses ‘dropping dead like flies’

Update: More than 12,000 birds crashed in Utah’s Dugway proving grounds

Australia: Oyster crop hit by unknown disease

Enduring winter tough on migratory birds in Great Plains

China’s Animal Apocalypse Spreads To Dogs

238 pigs and 89 dogs “suddenly dead” in Chinese village

Sea lion strandings climb, scientists still stumped

Australia: Another fish kill stinks out Wonnerup

Snow storm: Sheep death toll reaches 20,000 in Northern Ireland

Bird jams: Long winter sends migratory flocks into tailspin in Germany

Over 100 dead birds found in Danville & Pittsylvania County

Different species of birds found dead in Trinidad shortly after mysterious mass vulture deaths

Peru: 10 Dolphins found dead in northern beaches

150 Black vultures mysteriously die in Chaguaramas, Trinidad

Rare birds killed off after migration north sees them face freezing temperatures back in UK

Over 8,000 dead sheep removed from Northern Ireland farms following record Spring snowfall

Mass death of multiple sea creatures along east coast of UK

‘Tonnes’ of dead fish found on Swedish lake

Video of grieving pink dolphin mother underscores plight of disappearing species

“There were about four or five dolphins in the water and it seemed at first as if they were trying to get hold of something and support it,” said Ho Tak-ching, 34, a guide with Hong Kong Dolphinwatch. “It really wasn’t normal behaviour.”

The dolphins were trying to help a mother support the body of her dead calf and stop it slipping below the water’s surface.

Grieving and unable to accept their calves’ deaths, the mother dolphins will spend up to two weeks trying to keep them on the surface of the water, exhausting themselves and going without food as other dolphins rally to help them.

The events above were from just one month. It seems more than likely that there are many, many more incidents that are unseen and unreported. And of course it’s true that our physical bodies are subject to many of the same stresses plaguing the animals. But hey, as long as lots of people are shopping, things must be fine.

What is the Transition? Conclusion

Posted on April 8, 2013 by Thundering Heard

Now you can’t say that no one ever told you.
–David Daniels

In Part 7, I promised predictions for this installment. And there will be predictions. The important question is: predictions based on what? The web and the media present piles of predictions, most of which turn out to be wrong.

So based on what? Evidence; and a model of how things work. Most predictions go awry because they aren’t based on either. Or if they are said to be based on models, the models are flawed.

Evidence is what Part 1 through Part 7 were all about. And all of us, consciously or not, operate from models of what the world is like. If we walk into a dark room and flip a light switch, we are operating from a model of the world where electricity is flowing into a building with wires connected to lights controlled by switches, and flicking a switch–that often sits precisely where we expect it to be even if we’ve never entered that room–lights one or more light bulbs. We have all sorts of such models in our heads having to do with gravity, internal combustion engines, computers, shoelaces, banks, the properties of water, etc. When correct, these models have predictive abilities that make our interactions with the world relatively easy and efficient compared to operating without such models.

So these models lead to predictions about the future, and when correct, they yield excellent results. When we turn the key in a vehicle ignition, we expect the engine to start, and typically we aren’t disappointed. Thus we made a prediction about the future, one that has generally turned out to be true. Perhaps not every time. Once in awhile, the car might not start. But the results are good enough, the model reliable enough, that we rarely “give it a second thought.”

In my view, this scales up to the major aspects of our lives. Though it does seem that, the larger the scale, the greater the disagreements people have on the topic. Yet I contend that getting large-scale models right is important and possible. When we get the large scale models wrong, life can be unnecessarily confusing and difficult; when we get them right, the results can be profound.

Bias, the bringer of difficulty

We all like to think we aren’t biased, but on this planet at this time, that is a rare achievement. It runs deeper than we like to admit. Were that not true, the mystics would not have to advise us to pierce the veil. Without bias, we would likely see that there is no veil.

Let’s look at a good example of why people have a tough time getting large scale models right. This is one where, were it a multiple-choice question on a standardized test, most highschoolers would get it right. But on this one, the “masters of Wall St” got it wrong. Big time.

Several decades ago, one researcher pointed out that the economy of the USA operates on a roughly 25 year recession/depression cycle, that is, roughly every 25 years, there is either a recession or depression. Yes, there could be recessions at other times, but you could rely on the idea that one would happen roughly every 25 years. This cycle has been active since early in the 1800s and predicted that there would be a recession or depression starting ideally in December, 2007. I told a number of people about this ahead of time, and few thought the idea had merit despite the historical track record, part of which looked like this at the time:

9/1857: very serious recession 6/1857-12/1858 (18 months contraction)
2/1882: depression 3/1882-5/1885 (38 months contraction)
7/1906: serious recession 5/1907-6/1908 (13 months contraction)
10/1932: serious depression 8/1929-3/1933 (43 months contraction)
7/1958: recession 8/1957-4/1958 (8 months contraction)
12/1981: very serious recession 7/1981-11/1982 (16 months contraction)
12/2007:

Every August, George Soros has a meeting at his Long Island estate for the biggest movers and shakers on Wall St. By August 2007, the sub-prime mortgage market was already falling to pieces. Soros asked his 21 guests, people who have the money to buy the purportedly best research on the planet, whether the current situation would lead to a recession in the US. Twenty of twenty-one said no recession. But right on schedule for the 25 year cycle, a recession started in December 2007. Some say we are still in the depression that started then, and there is good evidence for that.

So how come people would ignore such a prescient cycle with a long and excellent track record? First, because while most people are well aware of being surrounded by cycles such as heartbeats, breathing, night and day, moon phases, ocean tides, the seasons, years, birth and death, to name just a few cycles to which we are subject, they believe that such cycles couldn’t possibly apply to an economy, that such thinking is equivalent to voodoo. Second, the researcher who was the first to publish about this cycle was Edgar Cayce, and to most hard-nosed Wall St people who think they are operating by logic and science, how could Edgar Cayce possibly be right about anything. What they think of as hard-nosed is actually thick-skulled because Cayce was right about plenty of things. But he doesn’t fit their constrained view of “logic and science,” so out goes Cayce and anyone like him. While it would be fun to say “too bad for them,” when their firms failed in 2008, it was the rest of us who got stuck with the bill for bailing them out so they could keep their bonuses, stock options, and corporate jets.

So as we all know, in 2008 we got a humdinger (serious academic term) of a recession despite the bad models being used by the Wall St mavens and people like Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke that said we would not get a recession. So why did the masters of Wall St and most others dismiss such information? Probably because, if they heard the source of the prediction, most would discount something from Edgar Cayce because it was information channeled from the other side. And “everyone knows” that stuff is only for new age goofballs. So the real answer is: bias. People would rather hang onto their bias than admit that correct information is useful if they despise the source.

Oddly, another researcher, Manfred Zimmel of www.amanita.at, later figured out the basis for Cayce’s information. OK, check your biases. For some of you, this is about to get worse. Here’s that same recession/depression series from above exactly as I first saw it, presented by Manfred, in 2006:

Ø conjunction 9/1857: very serious recession 6/1857-12/1858 (18 months contraction)
Ø conjunction 2/1882: depression 3/1882-5/1885 (38 months contraction)
Ø conjunction 7/1906: serious recession 5/1907-6/1908 (13 months contraction)
Ø conjunction 10/1932: serious depression 8/1929-3/1933 (43 months contraction)
Ø conjunction 7/1958: recession 8/1957-4/1958 (8 months contraction)
Ø conjunction 12/1981: very serious recession 7/1981-11/1982 (16 months contraction) – last deep recession
Ø conjunction 12/2007:

Yep, you guessed it (heh), the cycle is actually the Jupiter-Pluto conjunction cycle. So an astrological model has reared it head! Yikes, so if the Wall Streeters had heeded either the channeled or the astrological model for this cycle, they could have saved their firms tens of billions in losses and turned 2008 into a year of tens of billions in profits by aligning their trading with the idea that a recession was very likely. This is not a stretch since there were hedge funds that did make billions from the financial collapse in 2008.

If a model is clearly working in significant ways, it is useful to ask whether allegiance to one’s biases is more important than being on the right side of major trends on this planet. One of the worst things a person can do in this rapidly-evolving environment is get in front of a major negative trend and stay put thinking that trend is not important. Millions have gone bankrupt in recent years doing just that. In the markets, they call it picking up pennies in front of a bulldozer. Sometimes having a good or bad model is a matter of life or death, for example, a bad model about the nature of the Nazi party brought horrific suffering and the deaths of many millions. (Side note: Thundering-Heard.com exists because I think understanding and heeding good models versus bad ones could very well be a matter of life or death over the next few years, or perhaps even months.)

Handling predictions

One more brief topic, and then on to predictions about the Transition: What is a person supposed to do when they hear a prediction about the world? Assuming that they want to do anything at all, here is an approach from some people whose livelihood depends on their expert handling of predictions. When you hear a prediction:

1. Put aside the natural human propensity for wanting to know immediately whether the prediction is correct. This is emotion coming to the fore. All of the remaining steps are about eliminating emotion from this process so that rationality, research, and observation can take their rightful place.

2. Consider the prediction a script about how the future will unfold.

3. After giving it some thought, assign a rating, say from 1 to 100, on whether you think the predicted event can possibly emerge from current conditions. If it has any chance of emerging, write down the script and place it in your script pile wherein scripts about the future are sorted by your numeric ranking. If there is no chance that the event can arise from current conditions, then throw it out.

4. If the outcome of a script would be important to you, do research on the topic and, if it is appropriate based on your research, adjust your numeric ranking for the prediction in the future script pile. If there is a way to investigate the track record of the person making the prediction, and on the internet there often is, this can help a lot in rating a prediction. People with a bad track record are typically operating from a narrow or faulty model and usually continue doing so. Few people, especially people who have achieved some fame using one model, will admit their errors and find a better model.

5. Watch as evidence about all of your scripts unfolds and adjust your script pile accordingly, tossing out scripts where emerging events show a script to be faulty, and upwardly adjusting the numeric rankings of those scripts where the evidence is pointing to the idea that they might be right.

Through this process, predictions that are false are discarded and those that are true rise to the top of the pile. Emotions are kept at bay, biases fall as evidence accumulates, observation and logic guide the process. And you learn a lot about how the world works.

The Evidence

So what have we observed?

1. Acceleration, evident in a wide variety of ways, including:

2. Weather extremes and wildness, including floods, windstorms, typhoons/hurricanes, tornadoes, heat waves, droughts, superstorms, etc. The insurance industry reports a greater than tripling of “loss-related weather events” since 1980. (Part 1)

3. Earthquakes of magnitude 6.0 or greater up more than 50% since 1990. (Part 1)

4. Tsunamis up fivefold in this century versus the last. (Part 1)

5. Volcanic eruptions clearly on the rise. (Part 1)

6. Magnetic poles on an accelerating shift accompanied by hemispheric temperature changes . (Part 2)

7. Sea level rise. (Part 3)

8. Species extinction rising exponentially along with rising human population. (Part 3)

9. Sinkholes increasing rapidly enough to go from obscurity to the mainstream media. (Part 4)

10. Asteroid encounters appear to be on the rise. (Part 4)

11. Nuclear plants compromised by the increasing earth and weather changes causing problems for people. (Part 4)

12. People’s perception of time as speeding up. (Part 5)

13. An exponential rise in the price/performance of technology. (Part 5)

14. Exponential growth in money, debt, and unemployment. (Part 5)

15. Exponential growth in the amassing of physical gold by those, such as China and the oil sheikdoms, who supply real goods for all this printed money. (Part 5)

16. Relentless growth in the prices of real goods such as food and fossil fuels in response to the massive influx of printed money.

17. Despite an exponential increase in money printing, borrowing, and spending by governments to simulate economies, these same economies remain moribund and these tactics clearly show diminishing returns. (Part 5)

18. The “age of truth” brings increasing revelations of lies and truth. (Part 6)

And with people, acceleration is bringing increases in (Part 7):

19. Communication/connectedness.

20. Inner work.

21. Insistence on knowledge over belief.

22. Group consciousness.

23. A changing attitude toward the physical sciences.

And increasing exploration of (Part 7):

24. Healing methods.

25. The energetic nature of everything.

26. That energy is different at different locations on the planet.

27. The multi-plane nature of life.

28. Interaction with nature intelligences.

29. People changing from “what can I get” to “what can I do to help.”

And accelerating (Part 7):

30. General insanity.

31. Use of legal and illegal drugs and of alcohol to cope with acceleration.

Predictions

OK, so where will this lead us? Does anyone have a model that accounts for accelerating change in most if not all aspects of life on this planet? A model which we might then be able to look to for guidance about the future, from which we could actually expect some reliability?

Surprisingly, yes. In early 2007, I was fortunate enough to run into such a model described in a book published in 2003. It went into my script pile at the time. Given that the book had been published four years earlier, I was able to evaluate whether a portion of its predictions were coming true or not, and they definitely were. I was already convinced prior to reading the book that we were likely to experience an all-out collapse of the financial system within 5 to 7 years. The book entirely agreed with that perspective, but it took things way beyond the financial world and covered the topic of the Transition from historical, geologic, meteorological, political, educational, occult, and cosmological perspectives, to name a few. And this wasn’t a book of vague wishy-washy predictions that could be interpreted several ways. It was exceedingly specific. Here is what it said—and this was in 2003, before the explosive growth of sub-prime mortgages being sold to anyone who could fog a mirror, with those mortgages being packaged up and sold to institutions across the world as blue-ribbon, good-as-gold, AAA-rated securities—about the real estate bubble. And this was when almost all people considered real estate a perfect investment, something whose price could never go down, something that was definitely not a bubble at all:

Many who pulled their money out of the stock market…rushed to invest these funds in real estate, but again this mad rush created yet another bubble of inflated real estate. Finance companies, mortgage brokers, and banks readily accorded mortgage loans to these buyers. Once they obtained the signature of the borrower on the loans papers, they sold the mortgages to non-bank secondary mortgage companies. In order to purchase these mortgages, these secondary mortgage companies borrowed money by issuing bonds and derivatives on these bonds.

In essence, though this convoluted maze of borrowing, these non-bank financial institutions…own indirectly most properties purchased with a mortgage…

As the world economy deflates, more and more people will lose their jobs, they will default on their house mortgage payments, and be thrown out into the streets. The sinister secondary mortgage companies will take possession of the property.

When mortgage defaults reach a critical mass, the secondary mortgage companies will collapse leaving a wasteland of properties. This will spell the end of the financial grip the Dark Forces hold on the world, and the towers of finance they have spent centuries to build will fall one by one like dominoes.

So what we have here is an exceedingly accurate description of the work-in-progress that is the real estate bubble and its associated derivatives taking down the financial system. Lots of “dominoes” have already fallen. In 2007, Wall St had five big investment banks. The sub-prime mortgage collapse took three of them to insolvency—Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns, and Lehman Bros—which were either broken up or absorbed into other companies, and it would have taken down the last two, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, but the government temporarily stabilized them by saying the they were now backed by FDIC deposit insurance even though they had never before paid a penny into the FDIC insurance program. In fact, they had shunned the FDIC program because they wanted less regulation.

As tracked by the Mortgage Lender Implod-o-Meter, 388 US and 13 non-US mortgage lenders have gone belly up so far. This includes giants such as “secondary mortgage companies” Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and lenders such Countrywide, Washington Mutual, and Wachovia Mortgage. (The full list is here.) And now with sinister companies like Blackrock rushing in to buy foreclosed houses, the game is not completely over, but it won’t be long before the dominoes have all fallen.

Anyway, back to this book I’ve been speaking of. Of the 31 trends identified above, this book covered 26 of them, and for all I know, I may have forgotten references to the other five.

The book is The Sanctus Germanus Prophecies, Volume 1 by Michael Mau. It was followed by Volume 2 in 2006, and Volume 3 in 2009. The books can be purchased here or here.

There are a lot of books out there these days that are really highly-padded versions of what could be a five or ten page article. Mau’s books are not in that category, as demonstrated by the quote above, that is, the real estate crisis was discussed in detail on one page and that was it, the author moved on to other topics. So an attempt to summarize the vast array of information in these books will do them serious injustice, but I will make the attempt anyway as a conclusion to this series of posts. The best advice, of course, is to read the books:

We are living in a period of transition during which much that impedes humanity’s evolution—warmongering, the manipulation/exploitation for power and profit of the many by a very few, the intentional distraction of people from their higher self, and so forth–will be cleared away. Energetic acceleration and earth changes will assure that this clearing/cleansing process takes place. The transition is a normal period of relative rest in the vast multi-billion year evolutionary cycle of our solar system called the manvantara in which people evolve through hundreds and even thousands of incarnations. Many people, called lightbearers in these books, incarnated now with the intention of helping people through this turbulent process and preserving, through the period of the transition, that which is conducive to people’s true evolution. The overall goal of the transition is to place humanity in a new golden age in which people can pursue soul liberation with excellent support and without interference. Getting to that golden age requires the dissolution of those organizations that serve the interests of those who seek to control everyone else for their own power and for material acquisition far beyond what any person would need during a lifetime. Since these organizations are not going quietly, we are dealing with increasing turbulence during which all people will have to decide where they stand with respect to war and the array of slaveries that permeate civilization. The degree of turbulence that can be expected is strongly related to whether or not people wake up and stand on the side of freedom and conscious evolution.

Volume 2 lists twelve regions on the planet that are called spiritual regions, higher elevation areas away from the coasts that, while not immune to the earth changes, are relatively safe with respect them, and which are conducive to lightbearers retrieving those abilities they cultivated in prior incarnations.

Here are some highlights from the timetable at the back of Volume 2:

2005-2012:

Severe worldwide economic and financial crisis
World economy hits bottom and stays there, all conventional efforts to revive it fail
Water-related catastrophes: tsunamis, hurricanes, rise in sea level, floods of lowlands and coastal areas
Spiritual Regions on higher ground begin to develop: initial preparations

2013-2020:

Water-related catastrophes multiply making more and more low-lying areas uninhabitable
Massive population displacements to higher ground
Spiritual Regions take hold as lightbearers find their way there
Period of Reconstruction: Transitional societies begin to consolidate in the Spiritual Regions

2021-2080

Indications of major continental shifts, rifts, and movements begin to perturb the earth’s surface

There is a lot more to these books that what I’ve summarized here. They place the Transition in a perspective that ranges from the innermost to the cosmic. They say that, far from being over, that we are early in many of the accelerating trends identified above. These books have risen to the top of my “script pile.” They have become a stable platform from which to view the changes and turbulence in the world, and have given me confidence that life on this planet can and will be changed, and vastly for the better, and that this goal is way beyond worth working for. These days, when I hear a prediction–and I do seek out a lot of them–if it clearly conflicts with the information in these books, I relegate it to the category of “very unlikely,” and that repeatedly works very well.

One of the main reasons that so many predictions go awry is because they are drawn from experience of a small slice of life. We hear predictions all the time about finance, politics, weather, health, the use of energy, the environment, social trends, and now even meteors and comets. I contend that so many of those predictions go awry because they work from a narrow band and fail to take into account the larger context. Most would relate to maybe one or a few of the 31 trends identified above. Mau’s books place almost all of these individual trends in the context of a much larger one.

And seeing all of these trends in their larger context is precisely what we need right now as change permeates, well, just about everything! A narrowly focused model has no chance of accounting for across-the-board acceleration in, for example, finance, earth changes, mass shootings, and the emergence of truth.

So what’s a person to do about all this?

It is truly up to each person.

What would I do? I will provide a detailed post about that soon where I will contend that a wait-and-see attitude about these changes is no longer appropriate. Life is, as usual, being very kind by giving us a preview of exactly how this will all unfold by not bringing change all at once, but by ramping up all of these trends. But it’s up to us to read the signs and take action.

In the mean time, if you haven’t done so already, you may want to do your own research on these topics. If you come to some understandings, an action plan may naturally emerge from what you learn.

One piece of advice I would give is to never underestimate the power of an accelerating trend. As trends become obviously exponential, they can be quite breathtaking in their speed, power, and scope. As a friend from Cyprus told me: “On Friday night, when we went to sleep, everything was normal. On Saturday, we were told that the banks were closed and that we would have very restricted access to our bank accounts and that we might lose a lot of our the money.” When things change these days, they can change radically and quickly.

There are suggestions for dealing with the collapse of the financial system in the post What then can we do?.

And I leave you with outstanding comments on this topic from Gandhi: View the Forces of Nature bringing Earth Changes as Opportunity to Change the World.

Thanks very much for reading this long series and this long post.

What is the Transition? Part 7

Posted on March 26, 2013 by Thundering Heard

In the context of the Transition, what are the detectable trends with people?

COMMUNICATION / CONNECTEDNESS: Enabled by the internet and by the radical expansion of telecommunication and video technologies, there is explosive growth in communication. Some communicate almost constantly, staying connected during nearly all waking hours. This is bringing an exponentially growing exchange of information that is making it increasingly difficult for people and organizations to hide information. Beyond the use of technology, some report finding an increasing ability to connect and communicate telepathically.

INNER WORK: People’s interest in inner work is flooding across the planet. Sure, some are searching for an inner secret to magically obtain a Maserati, and yes the world sometimes seems to be nearly-drowning in materialistic striving, but a large and growing number of people are realizing the importance of their inner life and the need to cultivate their insight in this realm.

This can be seen by the remarkable growth of people practicing meditation. Clear examples are organizations such as the Self Realization Fellowship founded by Yogananda, which has 500 centers in 54 countries. Even the Economist magazine stated that Sai Baba–whose organization is said to have centers in 166 countries–could have as many as 100 million followers. And there are thousands of other groups, large and small, teaching meditation, chanting, breathing, and other techniques for the cultivation of inner insight and being. Millions of people have been to therapy. Millions do Qi gong, yoga, or similar disciplines daily. There is explosive growth in this trend.

INSISTENCE ON KNOWLEDGE OVER BELIEF: For many, belief is no longer sufficient, they insist on going by knowledge gained from their own experience. This has resulted in a steady exodus from some of the traditional, belief-oriented religions into the inner work traditions, where experience is typically emphasized over belief. As a side-effect, this is making life more difficult for political parties, the mainstream media, and self-appointed or committee-sanctioned “experts” as people become less likely to simply believe the proclamations of an authority figure in favor of something that corresponds with their own experience.

GROUP CONSCIOUSNESS: Over the last 150 years, we’ve seen the strong emergence of people’s awareness that they belong to groups, communities that have nothing to do with the nation-states delivered to us by local geography and our history of war. Women’s movements and civil rights movements were created to secure equal rights. Labor movements began with the idea that commerce is a field where all participants can win, not just a few on the backs of the many. The environmental movement was begun by those who saw all humans as a group with the right to clean air, clean water, unpolluted land. The peace movement began with the idea that all people are in a group with the right to not be killed or maimed for the political and financial gain of small powerful cliques. Most humans see that groups can accomplish things an individual never could, spelling doom for the idea of “every man for himself.” Some spiritual traditions see all of us as one without separation, that what happens to one happens to all. All of these developments indicate an expansion of consciousness beyond the formerly limiting sense of group defined by family or nationality.

A CHANGING ATTITUDE TOWARD THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES: Most people are rightly respectful of the accomplishments of the physical sciences. But many are increasingly unsatisfied because these same sciences leave so much of life poorly explained. Even within their own fields of study, for example, biologists can’t explain photosynthesis; physicists don’t know the nature of the “dark matter” that they admit comprises at least 85% of the mass of the universe; mapping the human genome has raised at least as many questions as it answered; Western medical sciences are at a loss in the face of many diseases; and so forth. Many are transitioning themselves into intellectual and experiential research into realms which adherents of strictly physical science say do not exist because those realms cannot reliably be detected or measured using physical plane equipment. But Thomas Kuhn eloquently showed in his landmark 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that the science of any period operates within a paradigm that excludes “non-standard” thinking despite the fact that new discoveries typically arise from what the keepers of the paradigm consider non-standard thinking. But some of these defenders of the paradigm can become almost religiously dogmatic about their worldview so that non-standard thinkers are often derided and almost invariably deprived of funds by lack of employment and grant money. This exerts a major drag on scientific progress. Thus many people seek direct experience of realms, planes of existence, that lie outside the boundaries to which the physical sciences claim life is limited.

HEALING: Unsatisfied with restricting themselves to the limitations and dangers of Western medical practices, many people are transitioning to receiving and giving energy-based healing techniques delivered physically or telepathically, and thereby enjoying the benefits of healing methods based on the presence of meridians and chakras, of direct treatment of the etheric, astral, and lower mental bodies, and so forth. For some, this path is opened by the inability of Western medicine to cure their problem, for example, rosacea, a difficulty for which conventional medicine has no solution, but which is often completely cured by acupuncture.

Strict defenders of the medical status quo go out of their way, ostensibly in the name of the alleviation of suffering, to put certain alternative practitioners out of business, even in jail, despite testimony from hundreds or even thousands that their suffering has been relieved by such an alternative. What they often say is that there have been no double-blind studies to verify the technique and therefore all reported healing can be written off to the “placebo effect.” But what does it mean that there is a placebo effect, that we even need double-blind studies? It means that people have, within themselves, the ability heal themselves with their own minds. This is not an endorsement by me that people completely forsake Western medicine and rely only on their ability to heal themselves, but simply to point out the obvious fact that the entire apparatus of double-blind studies is a testament to people’s ability to heal themselves, an absolute proof of mind over matter. So in the name of relieving suffering, some people cause more of it, a lot more of it, by hounding, persecuting, and prosecuting methods where there is ample testimony and evidence of the relief of suffering.

ALL IS ENERGY: More people are transitioning themselves to a deeper understanding of what we are told in school—everything is energy—but which many ignore, clinging to a mechanical world view where a bunch of dead billiard balls bouncing off one another somehow create an expanding multitude of galaxies inhabited by multitudes of intelligent beings. Some take this farther, seeing all life as alive, from the tiniest particle to the Sun and beyond.

SENSING ENERGIES AT DIFFERENT LOCATIONS: More people are transitioning themselves to sensing differences in energy at different locations on the planet and concluding that some places are, because of these differences, more conducive to inner work, and to the retrieval of all of their capabilities, than others.

EXPERIENCE OF MULTIPLE PLANES: Some people are transitioning themselves to experience the multiple planes of life that humans can touch, exploring both the perils and vast riches of planes other than the physical.

INTERACTION WITH NATURE INTELLIGENCES: Inspired by work at places like Findhorn and Perelandra, many report startling horticultural results when they elicit direct help from those intelligences that are the true designers and builders in nature, enabling a true working with nature rather than against it.

WHAT CAN I DO TO HELP: Some people are transitioning themselves from a “what can I get” approach to life to an approach that asks “what am I capable of, what can I bring to the table, what can I do to help?” Almost invariably these people seem to get a lot more help than people who are focused solely on “what can I get.”

* * *

There probably is no need to spend much time documenting the fact that acceleration is driving a lot of people insane. Proof can easily be obtained by watching the news or doing a “channel surf” on television. Clearly, events such as mass shootings are accelerating, as can be seen from this and this. And there have been additional shootings since those lists were published.

It’s clear that a lot of people are attempting to deal with acceleration by sedation via legal and illegal drugs and alcohol. Here are some quotes from just one US state agency web site:

“Unintentional poisonings in North Carolina have more than tripled in the last decade, and 7 out of 10 of those poisonings are from narcotics.”

“Prescription drug abuse is the leading cause of accidental death in North Carolina.”

“National research now shows teens using marijuana more than 20 times a month (heavily) has increased 80 percent in the last three years.”

Acceleration as usual.

And in a deeply tragic insanity of our time, for exhibiting non-standard behavior, a lot of schoolchildren are being given drugs like Ritalin and drugs said to be anti-psychotic. Children are having a difficult time coping, so what do we do? We numb their minds and bodies. This sounds like tactics of a severely repressive dictatorial regime, and yet it is being brought to us by the medical industrial complex and educational system in allegedly free societies. If there is any greater evidence that the powers that be want us all to keep our heads down and just keep munching another clump of grass, I don’t know what it is. Stalin would be very intrigued.

If one takes the time to investigate almost any field of endeavor on the planet at this time—food, politics, finance, medicine, business, legal, education, media, military, fossil fuels, transportation, and so forth—it doesn’t take long before one encounters insanity. There is an upcoming post on this topic that will be called “Runaway Trains.”

In Part 8, we will explore what these current conditions and trends can be expected to yield going forward, in terms of both turbulence and benefits. In other words, we can get to predictions.

What is the Transition? Part 3

Posted on February 19, 2013 by Thundering Heard

Sea Level Rise

Have you ever seen a film of a three mile by one mile chunk of glacier falling into the sea? If not, and if you have four minutes to spare, now you can, by clicking on this link for an excerpt from the film Chasing Ice, which concludes, by the way, with a classic example of acceleration.

It helps to see films like that since the noise in the media on sea level rise is nearly deafening. A $120 million war chest can be used to make a lot of noise:

Secret funding helped build vast network of climate denial thinktanks

Folks like these, joined by the industry spawned by the fossil fuel companies and oil exporting countries, stridently deny lots of things about climate change. In fact, some of them claim that we are right on the verge of a new ice age. They often seem to feel the need to yell rather loudly to drown out stories like this:

Satellites reveal sudden Greenland ice melt

Melt ponds cause the Arctic sea ice to melt more rapidly

And charts like this that show the longer term trend for Arctic sea ice (source):

and of course the chart of sea level rise itself:

Claims and counter-claims aside, there are, undeniably, people losing their homes to rising sea levels:

Papua New Guinea: Carteret Islands: ‘The sea is killing our island paradise’

The people of the Carterets, for 300 years ignored by all but a few passers-by, can lay claim to a dubious distinction: within the next six months, some 240 of them – 40 families – will leave for good, driven from their homes by sea-level rise. In five years, half of the population, estimated at 2,500 people, is expected to have been evacuated to bigger, less vulnerable islands, some of the first refugees displaced as a result of man-made global warming. Some believe the islands will be uninhabitable by 2015.

The view from beneath the waves: climate change in the Solomon Islands

The smaller outer islands in the Solomon Islands are already seeing devastating impacts of the rising sea level. The impact of climate change is already affecting the rural population of Solomon Islands, an archipelago of eight bigger islands and hundreds of small, mostly uninhabited islands…Taro, the staple root crop in Ontong Java atoll, is dying due to salinity of the swamp and sandy soil. And graves at the Tuo village cemetery, an island in the eastern Solomons have been exposed by eroding waves.

During the 1980s the burial place was about 50m away from the beach. Today the beach is about 1m with only one cross remaining as the rising sea had washed most away.

Vanishing point

Unless Tuvaluans adopt the lifestyle of the Marsh Arabs and build their houses on stilts over water, and that’s where they live 24 hours a day, eventually most, if not all, of the island will become uninhabitable.

Micronesia: A Third Kind of Nation, Written Off?

“Even the dead are no longer safe in my country,” Micronesia’s Ambassador to the UN told ABC News at his mission’s offices on a rainy day in New York.

He gave us recent digital photos of his home islands.

In one, a man stands shin-deep out in a calm and sunny sea … where a cemetery used to be.

In others, colorful traditional burial grounds spill out of a wave-eroded bank onto the tiny remaining beach, and water surges inland past tumbled houses.

Sea change: the Bay of Bengal’s vanishing islands

Paradise lost?

The tiny Pacific island nation of Palau is a paradise on earth. This band of several hundred islands is home to some of the world’s most stunning marine life, and to the twenty thousand people who live there.

But like many low-lying nations across the world, Palau is threatened by the effects of climate change and sea-level rise.

Palau’s coasts are being eroded, its local farmlands tainted by seawater, and its valuable reefs threatened. Johnson Toribiong, President of Palau, calls the damage he’s witnessing “a slow-moving tsunami.”

Kiribati, the Maldives, Torres Strait Islands, Cook Islands, many small islands of the Philippines, and the inhabited areas Barbados–all are getting inundated.

And it isn’t just the small islands that are having trouble. Large cities like Jakarta are facing dual difficulties: sinking land from the draining of freshwater aquifers combined with rising sea levels (source):

Experts in Indonesia are preparing to build a huge wall to stop the ocean from swamping parts of Jakarta.

Some suburbs in the capital already go underwater when there is a big tide but the problem is expected to get even worse.

Jakarta is sinking by up to 10 centimetres a year and Indonesia’s national disaster centre says with oceans rising, large parts of the city, including the airport, will be inundated by 2030.

Flooding and high tides are already causing problems for some residents in the city of 10 million people.

New York is still suffering the effects of the elevated storm surge from Superstorm Sandy.

London completed the Thames Barrier in the early 1980s to deal with rising tides boosted by increasingly powerful storms. They raise the barrier in the Thames when rising ocean waters threaten to flood London and the Thames Valley. In the 1980s, they raised the barrier 4 times; in the 1990s, 35 times; and from 2000 through 2010, 80 times.

And according to Scientific American, Shanghai, which means “above the sea” is finding itself on its way to being below the sea. The city has spent billions of dollars fending off the encroachment of the sea:

But the city’s biggest concern remains the slow, steadily mounting threat that comes from sea level rise. Higher tides are washing away the precious delta soil upon which the city’s foundations are built, and water supplies are becoming more tainted as seawater intrudes more deeply into the fresh water of the Yangtze.

Species Extinction

It seems that major changes in conditions on the planet give rise to the extinction of a large number of species. This has happened five times in the last several hundred million years. The most recent such event saw the demise of the dinosaurs. Some observers—such as the US Geological Survey for the chart below—offer data that points to the idea that we are in the middle of the sixth such mass species extinction event:

This indicates that the changes we are experiencing are way beyond trivial.

Here is Part 4.

What is the Transition? Part 2

Posted on February 12, 2013 by Thundering Heard

An Important Weather SHIFT

This is not a contribution to the raging global warming debate in which some people who pretend to be civilized threaten those who disagree with them with torture and death.

And it’s about a weather trend, not what happened last week in one place.

This is about a global weather shift. And if this shift is correctly described below, then it has major consequences. But almost no one is talking about it.

In their local areas, this shift has been apparent to North American gardeners for years, as they have been increasingly able to grow plants farther north than previously possible. The first map below is the USDA (US Dept. of Agriculture) Plant Hardiness Zone map published in 1990. It told gardeners what plants would survive in their geographical zone, but gardeners learned to “cheat” the zones in recent years, growing plants rated for one zone south of their garden. The second map below was a revised zone map published by the Arbor Day Foundation in 2006 because they knew the USDA 1990 map was seriously out of date (the maps are from Mother Jones):

Notice how Zones 3 and 4, for example, shifted north, in some places by hundreds of miles, indicating warmer temperatures farther north.

In 2012, the USDA published their own new zone map and admitted that the “new map is generally one 5-degree Fahrenheit half-zone warmer than the previous map throughout much of the United States.” So they admitted that the lowest temperature to be expected in many areas was five degrees F greater in 2012 than it was in 1990!

That same warming trend was bringing heat and drought farther north each year. For a decade, Northern Mexico has been struggling with heat and drought. In 2010 and 2011, this condition moved into Texas with a vengeance, bringing scorching heat and a lot of wildfires. In 2011, the wildfires spread to New Mexico and Arizona, with Colorado often experiencing smoke from these fires. In 2012, winter temperatures averaged six to seven degrees F above normal in Colorado, and by Spring, the fires arrived en masse in Colorado and Utah, and by Summer, even into Wyoming and Montana:

Colorado farmers are facing disaster

During the Summer, more than 60% of the counties of the lower 48 states of the US were declared drought disaster areas. And this Winter has been far milder than normal in most of the US:

U.S. Agriculture Secretary: 2013 already a drought disaster

America’s first official disaster areas of 2013 were designated because 597 counties have experienced severe drought conditions for eight consecutive weeks, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.

Last year, 2,245 counties in 39 states were declared disasters by the USDA. With continued drought projected for much of the United States, farmers may have another hard year ahead of them.

2 Great Lakes hit lowest water level on record

…the lakes…declined 17 inches since January 2012.

Chicago expected to tie record for lack of snow

Chicago’s mild winter reaches another milestone on Tuesday: 319 days without an inch of snow falling.

That ties the record set in 1940. Wednesday will break the record and, with temperatures forecast to surge into the 50s Friday and Saturday, the record streak will continue.

Low water may halt Mississippi River transport next week

And a good summary:

2012 was hottest year on record for Lower 48 states

The average temperature was 3.3 degrees higher than in the 20th century…

Last year was the hottest year on record for the contiguous 48 states, marked by near-record numbers of extreme weather events such as drought, wildfire, tornadoes and storms, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

And surface temperatures in the Arctic have been rising for years. Here is the longer-term chart:

While the US heats up, Canada’s winters become more mild, and the surface temperature rises in the Arctic, there have been increasingly fierce and deadly winters over the last few years on the other side of the North Pole, especially in eastern Europe. From 2012:

Europe death toll rises in big freeze

Blizzards hit eastern Europe hard

And from 2013:

Pyrenees ski resorts top world snow charts with over 7 meters (23 feet) of snowfall in one month

Heaviest snowfall in many years hits Polish-Slovakian border

Snowiest winter in 100 years paralyzes Moscow

New satellite image shows the unusually frigid and snowy conditions that blanketed much of Great Britain

Heavy snowfall closes dozens of roads in Turkey

Record snowfall closes lifts and roads in the Pyrenees

Snowpocalypse Russia: ‘Snow tsunami’ swallows streets, cars, buildings

Europe hit by blizzards, air traffic havoc, deaths

Croatia snowfall shatters record set in 1861

Snow blankets parts of Middle East, Jerusalem

‘Lowest temperaure in Bangladesh’s history’ brings at least 80 deaths

Unprecedented cold spell breaks 50-year records in Pakistan

Heavy snow, torrential rain, gale-force winds batter Greece

Russian Trans-Caucasian highway closed due to heavy snowfall

China’s extreme cold snaps records

More than 100 dead as cold snap hits India

Record cold snap grips Korean Peninsula

Coldest winter in decades for Russia with snow as much as 5 meters (16½ ft) deep – Plows cannot reach roads to clear them

And I can go back to 2012 headlines and find a lot more of the same, though, as usual (as always???), the trend accelerated in 2013.

Admittedly, claiming trend changes for weather is a dicey business. Weather has a knack for frustrating those who declare trends. But there is strong evidence for a rather persistent procession of heat marching north toward the geographic North Pole in the Western Hemisphere and cold moving south from the Pole in the Eastern Hemisphere.

So, if that’s right, what could be the cause?

Well, there’s another well-known phenomenon making a similar directional march. Here are some graphics from ModernSurvivalBlog.com that track the movement of the magnetic North Pole, with the data supplied by conventional scientific organizations such as NOAA. Here is an animated gif of the movement over the last 400 years:

And here’s the last 150 years:

And over the last 50 years:

From the creator of these graphics:

Since 1860, the magnetic pole shift has more than doubled every 50 years…During the past 10 years, the magnetic north pole has shifted nearly half of the total distance of the past 50 years!

Here’s another way to look at the accelerated movement:

Where is the pole heading? In the direction of Siberia. All this is not woo-woo information, airports that paint magnetic compass readings on their runways are having to repaint those number every several years.

What’s happening is that, depending on where you are, a compass reading can change by one degree every five years.

The magnetic South Pole is doing the same type of movement away from the geographic South Pole, having moved off the land mass of Antarctica years ago.

Most simplified graphics of the Earth’s magnetic field look something like this:

So the question is: Is weather moving with the movement of the magnetic poles? Another way to frame the question: At the magnetic poles, the Earth’s magnetic field captures charged particles flowing from the Sun on the solar wind and directs them toward the surface, an effect visible in the extreme northern and southern latitudes as the Aurora Borealis and Aurora Australis. Is the same energetic pattern also delivering the coldness of space to the planet’s surface? Or is it the relative thinness of the magnetosphere at the magnetic poles?

Well, if it’s correct that this coldness is moving with the magnetic poles, why should anyone care? Because if substantial coldness is moving away from the traditional locations of the geographic poles in Arctic and the Antarctic, then it would seem that the ice at the geographic poles would melt far more quickly than most would expect before equivalent new formations of ice could develop, particularly in the South Pacific where there is no landmass nearby. Perhaps I am uninformed, but I have not heard that such an effect is being accounted for in anyone’s climate change model. And as shown at the beginning of this post, the movement of heat north through North America from the south is proceeding rapidly. If this continues, or more likely accelerates, there might be a whole lot more melting of polar ice caps than previously expected, raising sea levels faster than almost anyone anticipates.

And perhaps my effort above was feeble, but there is a lot of evidence out there for this weather shift. So why are so few talking about it? Clearly, because it doesn’t fit people’s models of how things work. Magnetic pole movement is straight out of conventional science, while the idea that it would impact the weather is not. The solution for most? Ignore the evidence.

What is the Transition? Part 3 is here.

What is the Transition? Part 1

Posted on February 9, 2013 by Thundering Heard

I have made reference to “the Transition.” Before trying to describe its essence, it will be useful to first review aspects of the Transition, in other words, some of its identifiable characteristics. One aspect that runs through all of the others is acceleration, as you will see.

EARTH CHANGES

EARTHQUAKES

Below is a chart of how much shaking the planet has experienced from strong earthquakes for the last 30 years. This chart sums up the Richter values for all earthquakes of magnitude 6.0 or greater for each year. The earthquakes are summed rather than simply counted so that larger earthquakes have slightly greater weight on the chart. To show the trend, the column for each year shows the 10-year average of all that shaking. The trend is unmistakable—things started to really scale up in the early 1990’s:

The data for this chart was assembled from a straightforward query of the USGS (US Geological Survey) database at their Global Earthquake Search page.

After the massive Japan earthquake and aftershocks of 2011 (it is worth watching this video graphical display of the world’s 2011 earthquakes, especially if you live in the Ring of Fire), there were fewer earthquakes in 2012. However, 2013 is off to a very fast start, as shown in part in this link from Feb 2:

Earth reeling from eight major earthquakes striking in 5 days

And since that post on Feb 2, there have been an 8.0, a 7.0, a 6.4, and a 6.3 in the Solomon Islands, a 6.9 in Japan, and a 6.9 in Columbia.

TSUNAMIS

Earth doesn’t typically see a lot of large tsunamis, but their occurrence has ramped up fivefold in recent years. According to data at the NOAA Global Historical Tsunami Database, which has records going back to 2000 BC, there have been 34 tsunamis with a wave height greater than twenty feet over the last 400 years. Six of those, or 18%, have occurred since the year 2000:

Year	Location	Water Height	Deaths
2000	GREENLAND	50.0
2004	INDONESIA	50.9	226,898
2006	INDONESIA	20.9	802
2009	SAMOA	22.4	192
2010	CHILE	29.0	156
2011	JAPAN	38.9	15,854

In the Twentieth Century, there was a tsunami with a twenty foot wave height about once every ten years. In this century, it has happened once every two years, resulting in the deaths of a quarter million people despite the fact that none of these tsunamis struck a major city. The NOAA’s database shows that even a tsunami less than five feet in height can kill thousands. With 23% of the world’s people living in what is called the “near coastal zone,” tsunamis are likely the single most life-threatening Earth-change phenomenon on the planet.

VOLCANISM

Due to the great behavioral variations of active volcanoes, the tracking of volcanism is not as mathematically rigorous as that for earthquakes and tsunamis. There is a site jointly sponsored by the Smithsonian and the USGS that reports on volcanic activity in the latest week. Here is their list for the week of 30 January–5 February 2013:

New Activity/Unrest:

Colima, México
Etna, Sicily (Italy)
Paluweh, Lesser Sunda Islands (Indonesia)
Rabaul, New Britain
Reventador, Ecuador
White Island, New Zealand

Ongoing Activity:

Batu Tara, Komba Island (Indonesia)
Chirpoi, Kuril Islands (Russia)
Copahue, Central Chile-Argentina border
Karymsky, Eastern Kamchatka (Russia)
Kilauea, Hawaii (USA)
Kizimen, Eastern Kamchatka (Russia)
Lokon-Empung, Sulawesi
Sakura-jima, Kyushu
Santa María, Guatemala
Shiveluch, Central Kamchatka (Russia)
Tolbachik, Central Kamchatka (Russia)

So, their list is all from the Pacific Rim and Italy. According to some who track this carefully, after a total of 77 volcanic eruptive events for all of the year 2012, there were 44 volcanic eruptive events recorded just in the month of January 2013.

Here are some volcano-related headlines shown on the SOTT.NET Earth Changes page in just the last couple of weeks:

The Great Awakening? Ten volcanoes awaken in one week

Indonesia’s Mount Lokon volcano shaken by double eruptions

Puyehue-Cordon Caulle volcano erupts in Chile

Tavurvur volcano erupts in Papua New Guinea, ash cloud diverts flights

Hawaii’s Mount Kilauea lava lake hits new record high

Manam volcano (Papua New Guinea): Large explosive eruption sending ash plume to 45,000 ft altitude

Campi Flegrei supervolcano raising anxiety among Italian residents

WEATHER EXTREMES (Storms, Floods, Heat Waves, etc.)

Does anyone on the planet need to be told that storms are ramping up in size, intensity, and frequency, resulting in unprecedented flooding? And that heat waves have taken on new intensities and duration? Is there anyone still claiming, “It’s just the internet, nothing has changed, we just have better reporting.”? Anyone making such claims would be well-advised to review the recent history of the global insurance industry. The venerable Lloyd’s of London almost went bankrupt in the mid-1990’s after 350 years of annual profits. They said they had to completely revamp their weather catastrophe calculations because the actuarial data on which they had relied for 300 years (!) was no longer applicable.

Below are some quotes from September 2010 on the web site of Munich Reinsurance, the largest re-insurance company in the world. Reinsurers sell insurance to other insurance companies to cover catastrophic losses:

Munich Re’s natural catastrophe database, the most comprehensive of its kind in the world, shows a marked increase in the number of weather-related events. For instance, globally there has been a more than threefold increase in loss-related floods since 1980 and more than double the number of windstorm natural catastrophes…

Prof. Peter Höppe, Head of Munich Re’s Geo Risks Research/Corporate Climate Centre: “It’s as if the weather machine had changed up a gear.”

Heavy rain and flash floods are affecting not only people living close to rivers but also those who live well away from traditionally flood-prone areas.

And then things accelerated further. By October 2012, Munich Re reported that the numbers were even larger. They reported that weather-related loss events in North America had grown fivefold over the past three decades, and that there was “an increase factor of 4 in Asia, 2.5 in Africa, 2 in Europe, and 1.5 in South America.”

There are literally thousands of headlines available to demonstrate this idea further, here are just a few:

Cyclone frequency in Indonesia increases 28-fold since 2002

Global warming – or something much worse? Australia adds new colour to temperature maps

The temperature forecast for next Monday by Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology is so unprecedented – over 52C – that it has had to add a new colour to the top of its scale, a suitably incandescent purple.

Tornado slams into Italian steel plant – video

To give you an idea how rare tornadoes are in Italy, four tornadoes in total were recorded in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, three were recorded in the 20th century and four were recorded since 2008 alone, with two of those coming in 2012.

And the damage is not limited to single instances, it is cumulative in many areas, for example, the US East Coast:

Former USGS scientist: Coastal cities are ‘sitting ducks’ for next big storm

“We have left our coasts sitting ducks, and Sandy destroyed these natural protections,” she said.

In the space of a few hours, Sandy blew through the sand dunes that had served as natural protections for communities up and down the Atlantic coast.

“Basically these dunes build up over geologic time, and yet the superstorm wore them down over a couple of days, and it is going to take geologic time again to build them back up,” McNutt said.

For those who are more video oriented, this youtube poster does a good job of grabbing news video of weather extremes and earth changes from around the world each month. These can be useful to watch since they can remind just how quickly, under the tremendous distraction of daily life, we forget what’s been happening:

Extreme Weather Events and Earth Changes DECEMBER 2012

The November installment includes Superstorm Sandy. Since the news media typically won’t cover a weather story unless there is a body count to report, few are aware that Lower Manhattan in New York City is still seriously impaired, with skyscrapers running from emergency generators on the street because their basements are still flooded.

RISING TIDES – WITH PERPLEXITY THE SEA AND WAVES ROARING NOVEMBER 2012

FIRE AND ICE – EXTREME WEATHER EVENTS AND EARTH CHANGES JANUARY 2013

(While I applaud SOTT.NET and the maker of the youtubes above, fidockave213, for their excellent work at collecting earth change information, I am not aligned with their editorial views.)

Part 2 describes a huge weather shift taking place on the planet that almost no one is talking about!