Pre-Announcement Media Coverage

[John Smith]

We are seeing so many remarkable pre-announcement pieces showing up, this is a place to post and discuss them. This one for example, is making discoveries sound 'ho hum' which a few months/years ago were heralded as amazing breakthroughs. Today for example: 

"Nearly Every Star Hosts at Least One Alien Planet"

http://news.yahoo.com/nearly-every-star-hosts-least-one-alien-plane...

When a month or so ago they were making a BIG deal about finding one planet in the sweet zone which could possibly support life, son they they say 25% of them could support life! Including mention of red dwarfs, etc. The Zeta predicted evidence continues to build up!

Here is another blog that relates, describing a wobble:

NASA Scientists "Discover" a Wobbly Planet!?

https://poleshift.ning.com/forum/topics/nasa-scientists-discover-a-...

[Shaun Kazuck]

Seems they "accidentally" triggered the Emergency Broadcast System in a few states today.  The message claimed to be from the White House itself.  Give that fact, it feels like another test to see how the public would react.

http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/false-emergency-tv-warning-se... 

[Corey Young]

Quite an interesting article that helps to shine a light on previous catastrophes (without actually saying it) and what might have happened to prehistoric humans....hint....that site was not always at its present day level!!!!

Ice age Andes settlement found at record high altitude

12,400-year-old site in Peru shows ice age humans more adaptable than thought

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/ice-age-andes-settlement-found-at...

 

 

The 12,400-year-old settlement was found in a cave called the Cuncaicha rock shelter, located nearly 4,500 metres above sea level. That makes it the highest ice age human settlement ever found

The site is more than 2,000 metres higher than the famous Inca archeological site Machu Picchu — where travellers already risk becoming ill from altitude sickness — and just 880 metres lower than the Mount Everest base camp in the Himalayas.

 

 

This article definitely gets people thinking and 'talking'...more pre-announcement prep!

 

 

[sourabh kale]

Earth 'opening up': Seismologists confirm a global surge of great earthquakes from 2004-2014
http://m.phys.org/news/2014-10-global-surge-great-earthquakes-.html
The last ten years have been a remarkable time for great earthquakes. Since December 2004 there have been no less than 18 quakes of Mw8.0 or greater – a rate of more than twice that seen from 1900 to mid-2004. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost and massive damage has resulted from these great earthquakes. But as devastating as such events can be, these recent great quakes have come with a silver lining: They coincide with unprecedented advances in technological and scientific capacity for learning from them.
"We previously had very limited information about how ruptures grow into great earthquakes and interact with regions around them," said seismologist Thorne Lay of the University of California at Santa Cruz. "So we are using the recorded data for these recent events to guide our understanding of future earthquakes. We've gained a new level of appreciation for how one earthquake can influence events in other zones."
High on the list of areas ripe for a great quake is Cascadia, the Pacific Northwest, where the risk for great quakes had long been under appreciated. Evidence began surfacing about 20 years ago that there had been a great quake in the region in the year 1700. Since then the view of the great quake risk in Cascadia has shifted dramatically.

"We don't know many details about what happened in 1700," said Lay. There were no instruments back then to observe and record it. And so the best way to try and understand the danger and what could happen in Cascadia is to study the recent events elsewhere.

Over the last decade Lay and his colleagues have been able to gather fine details about these giant earthquakes using data from an expanded global networks of seismometers, GPS stations, tsunami gauges, and new satellite imaging capabilities such as GRACE, InSAR, and LandSAT interferometry. Among the broader conclusions they have come to is that great quakes are very complicated and idiosyncratic. Lay will be presenting some of those idiosyncrasies at the meeting of the Geological Society of America in Vancouver on Oct. 21.

"What we've seen is that we can have multiple faults activated," said Lay. "We've seen it off Sumatra and off Japan. Once earthquakes get going they can activate faulting in areas that were thought not physically feasible."

The great Sumatra-Andaman earthquake of Dec. 26, 2004, for instance, unzipped a 1,300 kilometer long segment of the subduction zone and unleashed one of history's most destructive, deadly tsunamis. Much of the rupture was along a region with very limited plate convergence. In Japan, the Kuril Islands, and the Solomon Islands, great mega-thrust ruptures have ruptured portions of the subduction zones that were thought too warm or weak to experience earthquakes.

"These earthquakes ruptured right through areas that had been considered to have low risk," said Lay. "We thought that would not happen. But it did, so we have to adjust our understanding."

Perhaps the best recent analogy to Cascadia is off the coast of Iquique, Chile, said Lay. There had been a great quake in 1877, and a conspicuous gap in quakes ever since. Like the 1700 Cascadia earthquake, there is little data for the 1877 event, which killed more than 2,500 people. In both subduction zones, the converging plates are thought to be accumulating strain which could be released in a very large and violent rupture. On April 1 of this year, some of that strain was released offshore of Iquique. There was a Mw8.1 rupture in the northern portion of the seismic gap. But it involved slip over less than 20 percent of the region that seismologists believe to have accumulated strain since 1877.

"We have no idea why only a portion of the 1877 zone ruptured," said Lay. "But clearly, 80 percent of that zone is still unruptured. We don't have a good basis for assessment of how the rest will fail. It's the same for Cascadia. We don't know if it always goes all at once or sometimes in sequences of smaller events, with alternatin

[casey a]

Senior Chinese Official meets John Kerry ahead of APEC summit.

"The purpose of my visit to Boston and then to Washington is really to pave the ground for President Obama's visit to China in November and also for participation of the President in the APEC informal leadership meeting to be hosted by China," said the Chinese official.

The APEC summit will be taking place in Beijing on 10 & 11 November (5 days before the G20 summit in Australia).

-Consisting of 21 Pacific Rim members, it represents 40 % of world population & 50 % of world GDP.

This includes the U.S., China & Russia.

-Xi and Obama will meet on the sidelines of the APEC Economic Leaders' Meeting.

[Both China & Australia have ramped up security in anticipation of the summits]

[casey a]

On the heels of U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, meeting with the defense ministers of the western Hemisphere and

President Obama meeting with the defense chiefs of 20 countries RE: ISIS,

Prime Minister David Cameron met with leaders of 53 countries in the Asia-Europe Meeting. The leaders represent more than half the GDP of the world & 60 % of the global population.

(The premise of this meeting however has been slated to addressing the Russia/Ukraine situation.)

The 2014 U.N. Climate Change Conference is scheduled to take place from December 1-12, 2014.

[Mark]

US, European and Asian markets see a huge sell off in shares:

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Steep Sell-Off Spreads Fear to Wall Street

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/10/15/stocks-tumble-on-global-grow...

Waves of nervous selling buffeted the stock market in the United States on Wednesday, after a steep sell-off in Europe. At one point, the Dow Jones industrial average had plunged 460 points, or 2.8 percent, though it later swung higher to close down 1.1 percent, or 173.45 points. The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index fell 0.8 percent, or 15.21 points. Since their peak a month ago, American stocks have lost over $2 trillion in value, losses that may ripple through the wider economy.

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http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/10/17/markets-stocks-europe-idUK...

European stocks rose in early trading on Friday, halting the week's sharp drop after Wall Street pared losses as macro data soothed fears about the U.S. economic outlook.

At 0703 GMT, the FTSEurofirst 300 index of top Europeanshares was up 0.4 percent at 1,250.48 points, after losing 3.7 percent earlier in the week.

But gains looked fragile, and a warning from Rolls-Royce that it would not return to growth next year fuelled worries over corporate profits and sent shares of the Britishengineering group down 7 percent.

The month-long sell-off in European stocks has prompted U.S.-based investors to slash their exposure to Europe, according to data from Thomson Reuters Lipper.

A Lipper poll of 109 U.S.-domiciled funds invested in European stocks, which include exchange-traded funds' (ETFs) holdings, shows net outflows of $1.3 billion in the seven days to Oct 15, the biggest weekly redemptions since Lipper started to monitor the data in 1992.

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http://www.marketwatch.com/story/asian-shares-reverse-selloff-2014-...

A recent selloff in Asia due to global volatility was fading Friday with stocks in Australia edging higher, though shares on China’s mainland fell amid slowdown concerns.

The Shanghai Composite Index SHCOMP, -0.65%  was down 1.3%, ahead of next week’s Fourth Plenum, an annual meeting of China leaders which may offer clues about plans to address a slowing economy.

China also is expected to release third-quarter economic growth figures next Tuesday. Economists expect 7.2% growth from a year earlier, slowing from a 7.5% on year increase in the second quarter.

[casey a]

Michelle Obama dances with turnip and harvests crop

The first lady held a White House harvest this week. She was joined by schoolchildren in the White House Kitchen Garden to harvest lettuce, bell peppers, sweet potatoes and tomatoes.

[Starr DiGiacomo]

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/pentagon-climate-crisis-imm...

The Pentagon, the headquarters of the United States Department of Defense, Arlington County, Virginia. 

STAFF

Pentagon: climate crisis an immediate security threat

For all of the many scary aspects of the climate crisis, it’s important not to forget the national security implications.

The Pentagon on Monday released a report asserting decisively that climate change poses an immediate threat to national security, with increased risks from terrorism, infectious disease, global poverty and food shortages. It also predicted rising demand for military disaster responses as extreme weather creates more global humanitarian crises.

 

The report lays out a road map to show how the military will adapt to rising sea levels, more violent storms and widespread droughts. The Defense Department will begin by integrating plans for climate change risks across all of its operations, from war games and strategic military planning situations to a rethinking of the movement of supplies.

“The loss of glaciers will strain water supplies in several areas of our hemisphere,” Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told a group of contemporaries in Peru yesterday. “Destruction and devastation from hurricanes can sow the seeds for instability. Droughts and crop failures can leave millions of people without any lifeline, and trigger waves of mass migration.”

 

The Pentagon’s findings come on the heels of a related report from a leading government-funded military research organization, which found the “accelerating rate of climate change poses a severe risk to national security and acts as a catalyst for global political conflict.”

 

Among the areas of concern are conflicts over natural resources, food scarcity, the effects of rising sea levels, and the potential for refugee crises.

 

Yesterday’s report was, however, a little different. As the New York Times’ report noted, “Before, the Pentagon’s response to climate change focused chiefly on preparing military installations to adapt to its effects, like protecting coastal naval bases from rising sea levels. The new report, however, calls on the military to incorporate climate change into broader strategic thinking about high-risk regions – for example, the ways in which drought and food shortages might set off political unrest in the Middle East and Africa.”

 

In a political context, it’s worth acknowledging that congressional Republicans not only oppose such “broader strategic thinking,” they’ve also taken deliberate steps to prevent the Pentagon from even considering such concerns.

 

Kate Sheppard reported in May that House Republicans “passed an amendment to the National Defense Authorization bill … that would bar the Department of Defense from using funds to assess climate change and its implications for national security.”

 

Rep. David McKinley (R-W.Va.), the sponsor of the measure, argued at the time, “The climate is obviously changing; it has always been changing. With all the unrest around the [world], why should Congress divert funds from the mission of our military and national security to support a political ideology?”

 

The answer, as we discussed at the time, is that climate change and national security, whether the right chooses to acknowledge this or not, are inextricably linked. Telling U.S. military leaders they must bury their heads in the sand because congressional Republicans say so won’t help.

 

Among those voting for the measure: Reps. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Bill Cassidy (R-La.), James Lankford (R-Okla.) and Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.)*. All five of these far-right representatives voted to prevent the Pentagon from considering the national security implications of global warming, and all five are poised for promotions to the U.S. Senate.

 

* Correction/Update: It looks like I missed one. As Eric Edlund reminds me, Rep. Steve Daines (R) of Montana also voted to block the Defense Department on this, and he’s also poised to get a promotion to the Senate.

10/14/14 11:11 AM—UPDATED 10/14/14 01:58 PM

[Mark]

CITING TERRORISM AS A REASON, CHINA ARMS ITS POLICE FORCE WITH LITTLE OR NO TRAINING

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/after-china-gives-...

LUOKAN VILLAGE, China — Invoking the threat of terrorism, Chinese police for the first time in years have started carrying guns and, with little training, using them.

The fatal effects have rippled across the country, reaching even this tiny mountain village.

China’s removal of a ban on police guns came in response to a gruesome attack on a train station several hundred miles from here, but it has given the police almost blanket authority to shoot whenever they see fit.

More than a decade into America’s war on terror, China is launching its own. And experts worry that the flood of newly armed police — combined with poor training and the government’s take-no-prisoners attitude — could become as fearful a problem as the terrorism it is intended to combat.

In the latest police-related violence, at least 40 people died Sunday in China’s restive Xinjiang region, according to state-run news media, which attributed the incident to terrorists and identified the deceased as “rioters” shot by police or killed in explosions.

By contrast, the sleepy village of Luokan is about as remote and unlikely a place for terrorism as can be found. Yet when police fatally shot a man recently in the middle of a busy market here, they declared him a terrorist as well and abruptly closed the case.

“But everyone knows this is a lie,” said one villager in a hushed midnight interview inside his home.

“There are no terrorists here,” said another beside him. “The only ones we’re afraid of are the police.”

While police shootings are often viewed with suspicion worldwide — most notably in the death last month of an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Mo. — there are few countries where local authorities have as much power as they do in China to suppress all evidence afterward.

No one knows how many people die here from gun violence each year, much less from police shootings, because of government secrecy.

Among the killings publicly reported in the past five months, since the policy change: A man with a history of mental illness shot by police in Sichuan province. An allegedly drunk officer in Luoping county who quarreled with one man and then killed another who was trying to intervene, according to reports quickly taken down by censors.

And at a gun-safety demonstration in front of kindergartners in Henan province, an officer fired a loaded gun, thinking it was empty, and sent a child and several parents to the hospital.

At a recent training session in Shandong province, one detective said, several officers — not aware of the recoil force that comes with shooting — gripped their guns improperly and broke their thumbs.

Some police officers have been issued licenses without visiting the firing range, because their departments are fudging paperwork, according to officers who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

“Most of us haven’t shot a gun in years,” said the detective. “A lot of cops are afraid to even hold one.”

[Mark]

Governor Sam Brownback declares October “Zombie preparedness month” as he unveils plans to protect the city from the living dead

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/11121755...

Sam Brownback, the state’s Republican governor, has decided that October is to be “zombie preparedness month”.

He will sign a formal declaration on Friday to encourage Kansans to prepare for all disasters including an invasion of the undead.

Kansans are told to ready themselves for the zombie invasion in much the same way as typhoons, floods and other natural disasters.

Requirements include three days food and a home emergency kit.

"You want to make sure you have all the food and water you need," Devan Tucking, the state's Deputy Emergency Operations manager told the Telegraph.

"You need to work on your zombie alerts. Of course if you look like a zombie you may be able to escape from them.

"Good cardio fitness is useful if you want to run away and have good running shows. Ladies should get rid of their high heels.

"If you hear a strange sound, don't go their on your own, use a buddie system. If you do run away, don't look back and get some good maps and make sure you know your area.

"You may want to avoid cemeteries.

“If you are prepared for a zombie apocalypse, you are prepared for anything.”

Preparing for a zombie invasion appears to be one of the few things uniting Democrats and Republicans with President Barack Obama’s administration drawing up its own strategy in a 31-page document to deal with the threat.

“It is our way of telling people that even if the severe weather season is over, the winter is coming up,” a spokesman for Governor Brownback said.

To drum up interest in the zombie threat, the state is even holding a “fun lurch” over the weekend with a “disaster on the go” pack being handed out to the first 300 people – alive or undead – who show up.