Prepping for an economic melt down

Why the surging US debt should have you prepping for a fiscal crisis

CNBC

The U.S. national debt is on pace to rise to record levels vs. the U.S. economy, its only precedent being the debt levels reached in World War II, according to a new report from the Congressional Budget Office. However, the government paid off much of that debt in the middle of the last century and the U.S. saw its most economically prosperous years in the ensuing decades, whereas the current debt has been neglected, morphing into a festering wound.

While interest rates are unlikely to rise significantly in the near future, they could see a dramatic spike in the long term. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the rise in national debt will stagnate economic growth within 10 years.

A stagnant economy could retroactively drain government revenue and back the government into a corner of perpetual borrowing. Tapered spending or increased taxes could help us dodge a catastrophic economic meltdown. The CBO's report adopted common conservative arguments, warning that financial aid to the poor leaves them with no incentive to join the workforce while entitlement spending as a whole continues to depress the economy.

Although we should see slight improvement over the next couple of years as we climb out of the crater-sized hole George W. Bush left in his wake, things look much worse over the long haul. The CBO blames the bleak long-term economic outlook on large deficits that occurred under Obama's stimulus, as well as the many Americans leaving the labor force and taking refuge under the government's umbrella instead of making their own. The retirement of the baby boomers and the lack of motivation in the workforce will also hike up the debt burden by causing future deficits. The CBO believes that we'll see deficits as high as $1 trillion by 2025.

The CBO can make projections, but not even it knows for certain how high the debt can get before an economic meltdown ensues. However, there will come a time when investors lose trust in the United States' ability to pay back it's loans and will be forced to raise the interest rates they charge on them.



Interest rates are projected stay at very low levels for the foreseeable future. But when they increase, it will greatly effect federal spending. U.S. interest payments are expected to more than double in the coming decade, jumping from 1.3% of GDP to 3% of GDP. These seemingly small deviations in percentage points appear harmless, but they could have a dramatic effect on federal debt many years down the road. It's time for our government, and, more importantly, its people, to stop ignoring these numbers and display prudence in financial behavior.

With a Congress that refuses to tighten the lid on spending despite an unprecedentedly high national debt, it shouldn't come as a great shock if the debt continues to mount. It may require a fiscal catastrophe--per usual--to bring Washington down from cloud nine. It is imperative that you sleep with one eye open on your spending and saving habits, because taxes could see a spike parallel to that of our nation's debt.

Gene Drive Technology

'Gene drive': Scientists sound alarm over supercharged GM organisms which could spread in the wild and cause environmental disasters
Steve Connor Sunday 02 August 2015

The development of so-called 'gene drive' technology promises to revolutionize medicine and agriculture 

A powerful new technique for generating “supercharged” genetically modified organisms that can spread rapidly in the wild has caused alarm among scientists who fear that it may be misused, accidentally or deliberately, and cause a health emergency or environmental disaster.

The development of so-called “gene drive” technology promises to revolutionize medicine and agriculture because it can in theory stop the spread of mosquito-borne illnesses, such as malaria and yellow fever, as well as eliminate crop pests and invasive species such as rats and cane toads.

However, scientists at the forefront of the development believe that in the wrong hands gene-drive technology poses a serious threat to the environment and human health if accidentally or deliberately released from a laboratory without adequate safeguards. Some believe it could even be used as a terrorist bio-weapon directed against people or livestock because gene drives – which enable GM genes to spread rapidly like a viral infection within a population – will eventually be easy and cheap to generate.

There is no compelling evidence to suggest that genetically modified crops are any more harmful than conventionally grown food (Getty) “Just as gene drives can make mosquitoes unfit for hosting and spreading the malaria parasite, they could conceivably be designed with gene drives carrying cargo for delivering lethal bacterial toxins to humans,” said David Gurwitz, a geneticist at Tel Aviv University in Israel.  A group of senior geneticists have called for international safeguards to apply to researchers who want to develop gene drives, with strict security measures placed on laboratories to prevent the accidental escape of “supercharged” GM organisms that are able to spread rapidly in the wild.

Palm Oil-The newest cost to western convenience-Part 2

Did slaves harvest the palm oil that went into your cookie?
By Nathanael Johnson on 28 Jul 2015

 

Every major palm oil buyer has recently committed to end deforestation and human exploitation in the industry. Now that commitment is being put to the test. Cargill, Nestlé, and Procter & Gamble are all buying palm oil from a plantation in Malaysia that has trapped workers in slave-like conditions, The Wall Street Journal reports in a big investigative piece. Cargill says it will investigate, and we’ll be watching to see how it follows up.

The story follows 22-year-old Mohammad Rubel, who left his home in Bangladesh seeking a better life. Smugglers brought boatloads of people like him to Malaysia, where contractors send workers to plantations, while claiming generous portions of their wages:

“They buy and sell us like cattle,” said one 25-year-old Bangladeshi, who said he had been shunted among three contractors for six months without receiving any pay.

Living in huts in the forest far from stores, the workers often must buy supplies from contractors, who they say set artificially high prices that put workers in debt. One man said his contractor deducted 30% from his weekly pay when he took an hour off to attend Friday Muslim prayers.

Being in Malaysia illegally, workers such as Mr. Rubel see little they can do to change matters, especially since workers said their employers took away their passports. “There is no escape,” said Muhi, a migrant who identified himself with just one name. “They bring policemen and threaten to send us to jail.”

Efforts to reach labor contractors were unsuccessful. The migrant workers declined to identify their contractors, saying they feared deportation or physical harm. In the past, contractors have told rights groups they play an important role in meeting labor demand and sometimes hold workers’ passports for safekeeping. Most of this is illegal, though The Wall Street Journal does note that some of the workers interviewed for the story said that they don’t feel trapped and they are happy to be making more money than migrants working in other industries, like construction.
The plantation is run by “Felda Global Ventures, a semiautonomous company set up by Malaysia’s government,” and, though it’s the labor contractors who seem guilty of the most vile slaver behavior, the plantation is responsible for protecting the rights of its workers under Malaysian law, and Felda seems to be cutting corners of its own:

The minimum wage is 900 ringgit, or about $240, a month. Several workers interviewed, including some with legal documents, said their pay was often below the minimum. A number of recent pay slips seen by The Wall Street Journal, bearing Felda’s name, showed monthly payments of 700 to 800 ringgit.

The company said people have to work at least 26 days a month to qualify for the minimum wage. Workers said supervisors sometimes didn’t give them enough work to meet that threshold, although under Malaysian law, plantations must provide enough for full-time workers to make minimum wage. The fact that big multinationals have pledged to clean up their act when it comes to palm oil is a huge step forward — but anyone who thinks that will solve the problems is kidding themselves. It will take activist industry leaders, watchdog NGOs, and journalism like this to end the practices that allow predatory operators to exploit workers and make fortunes.  



Developing Sustainable Economies......or else......

Scientific model supported by UK Government Taskforce flags risk of civilization's collapse by 2040

 

by Nafeez Ahmed

 

New scientific models supported by the British government’s Foreign Office show that if we don’t change course, in less than three decades industrial civilization will essentially collapse due to catastrophic food shortages, triggered by a combination of climate change, water scarcity, energy crisis, and political instability.

 

Before you panic, the good news is that the scientists behind the model don’t believe it’s predictive. The model does not account for the reality that people will react to escalating crises by changing behavior and policies.

 

But even so, it’s a sobering wake-up call, which shows that business-as-usual guarantees the end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it: our current way of life is not sustainable.

 

The new models are being developed at Anglia Ruskin University’s Global Sustainability Institute (GSI), through a project called the ‘Global Resource Observatory’ (GRO).

 

The GRO is chiefly funded by the Dawe Charitable Trust, but its partners include the British government’s Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO); British specialist insurance market, Lloyds of London; the Aldersgate Group, the environment coalition of leaders from business, politics and civil society; the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries; Africa Development Bank, Asian Development Bank, and the University of Wisconsin.

Palm Oil-The newest cost to western convenience-Part 1

Palm Oil Is In Everything -- And It's Destroying Southeast Asia's Forests

 

Cultivating the product, found in most processed foods and cosmetics, kills animals and displaces people.

 

Dominique Mosbergen

07/24/2015 03:57 PM EDT

 

 

 

 

A worker holds a handful of palm oil seeds in Serba Jadi, East Aceh, Indonesia, on December 11, 2010. | AFP/Getty Images

A hundred years ago, an estimated 230,000 orangutans roamed the earth. Today, fewer than 50,000 are left in the wild, living exclusively on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra -- islands that happen to be ground zero of one of the world’s most controversial and rapidly growing industries: palm oil.

Over the past 20 years, tens of thousands of wild orangutans have been killed, maimed or orphaned as a direct result of the palm oil industry.

Since 2006, the year Kesi was rescued, an estimated 1,500 orangutans have been clubbed to death after wandering onto palm oil plantations. Thousands more have died due to the widespread deforestation caused by the cultivation of palm oil.

The habitat destruction and conversion of forest associated with palm oil is “currently the greatest threat” to the future of wild orangutans, whose survival is entirely dependent on the health of rainforests, said Robert Shumaker, the Indianapolis Zoo’s vice president of conservation and life sciences.

“[Extinction] will be the sad reality if forest continues to be destroyed to promote the development of palm oil,” he said.

Experts estimate that orangutans could be extinct in the wild in 25 years or less if this rate of loss continues.

Mutant Flowers From Japan's Fukushima Nuclear Disaster

Four years after the disaster at Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant, strange things still are happening to the plants and animals living there.

Recent years have brought reports of deformed fruit and mutant butterflies, but the latest is a remarkable photo of deformed daisies posted on Twitter by @san_kaido, who took the photo below in Nasushiobara City, which lies about 70 miles from Fukushima.

Translated from Japanese, @san_kaiod's tweet describes how the daisies growing there have apparently been impacted by exposure to radiation since the March 2011 incident, which resulted in the meltdown of three of Fukushima's six reactors following a devastating tsunami:

"The right one grew up, split into 2 stems to have 2 flowers connected each other, having 4 stems of flower tied beltlike," according to Fukushima Diary. "The left one has 4 stems grew up to be tied to each other and it had the ring-shaped flower. The atmospheric dose is 0.5 μSv/h at 1m above the ground."

The last sentence from the tweet -- about the radiation dose now being "0.5 μSv/h at 1m above the ground" -- describes the radiation dose per hour that's now present at the site where the photo above was taken. It's classified as safe for "medium to long term habitation" according to this explanation of radiation levels.

That no doubt played a part in the Japanese government's recent decision to allow more than 7,000 residents of a town near the Fukushima plant to return home, four years after being evacuated. As the London Telegraph learned, however, it's unclear how many residents actually will go back to live there permanently.

"There are no shops. There are no doctors. I don't know what to do," one former resident told local Japanese media.

Creating matter out of light-The Nature of God's Creation

Matter will be created from light within a year, claim scientists

 

 

 

 

In a neat demonstration of E=mc 2, physicists believe they can create electrons and positrons from colliding photons

Researchers have worked out how to make matter from pure light and are drawing up plans to demonstrate the feat within the next 12 months.

The theory underpinning the idea was first described 80 years ago by two physicists who later worked on the first atomic bomb. At the time they considered the conversion of light into matter impossible in a laboratory.

But in a report published on Sunday, physicists at Imperial College London claim to have cracked the problem using high-powered lasers and other equipment now available to scientists.

"We have shown in principle how you can make matter from light," said Steven Rose at Imperial. "If you do this experiment, you will be taking light and turning it into matter."

The scientists are not on the verge of a machine that can create everyday objects from a sudden blast of laser energy. The kind of matter they aim to make comes in the form of subatomic particles invisible to the naked eye.

The original idea was written down by two US physicists, Gregory Breit and John Wheeler, in 1934. They worked out that – very rarely – two particles of light, or photons, could combine to produce an electron and its antimatter equivalent, a positron. Electrons are particles of matter that form the outer shells of atoms in the everyday objects around us.

But Breit and Wheeler had no expectations that their theory would be proved any time soon. In their study, the physicists noted that the process was so rare and hard to produce that it would be "hopeless to try to observe the pair formation in laboratory experiments".

Oliver Pike, the lead researcher on the study, said the process was one of the most elegant demonstrations of Einstein's famous relationship that shows matter and energy are interchangeable currencies. "The Breit-Wheeler process is the simplest way matter can be made from light and one of the purest demonstrations of E=mc2," he said.

Writing in the journal Nature Photonics, the scientists describe how they could turn light into matter through a number of separate steps. The first step fires electrons at a slab of gold to produce a beam of high-energy photons. Next, they fire a high-energy laser into a tiny gold capsule called a hohlraum, from the German for "empty room". This produces light as bright as that emitted from stars. In the final stage, they send the first beam of photons into the hohlraum where the two streams of photons collide.

The scientists' calculations show that the setup squeezes enough particles of light with high enough energies into a small enough volume to create around 100,000 electron-positron pairs.

The process is one of the most spectacular predictions of a theory called quantum electrodynamics (QED) that was developed in the run up to the second world war. "You might call it the most dramatic consequence of QED and it clearly shows that light and matter are interchangeable," Rose told the Guardian.

The scientists hope to demonstrate the process in the next 12 months. There are a number of sites around the world that have the technology. One is the huge Omega laser in Rochester, New York. But another is the Orion laser at Aldermaston, the atomic weapons facility in Berkshire.

A successful demonstration will encourage physicists who have been eyeing the prospect of a photon-photon collider as a tool to study how subatomic particles behave. "Such a collider could be used to study fundamental physics with a very clean experimental setup: pure light goes in, matter comes out. The experiment would be the first demonstration of this," Pike said.

Andrei Seryi, director of the John Adams Institute at Oxford University, said: "It's breathtaking to think that things we thought are not connected, can in fact be converted to each other: matter and energy, particles and light. Would we be able in the future to convert energy into time and vice versa?"

The Truth about Money-What you need to know

 

The truth is out: Our currency is just a shell game  

 

David Graeber

The Bank of England's dose of honesty throws the theoretical basis for austerity out the window

 

 

 

'The central bank can print as much money as it wishes.'

Photograph: Alamy

Back in the 1930s, Henry Ford is supposed to have remarked that it was a good thing that most Americans didn't know how banking really works, because if they did, "there'd be a revolution before tomorrow morning".

Last week, something remarkable happened. The Bank of England let the cat out of the bag. In a paper called "Money Creation in the Modern Economy", co-authored by three economists from the Bank's Monetary Analysis Directorate, they stated outright that most common assumptions of how banking works are simply wrong, and that the kind of populist, heterodox positions more ordinarily associated with groups such as Occupy Wall Street are correct. In doing so, they have effectively thrown the entire theoretical basis for austerity out of the window.

To get a sense of how radical the Bank's new position is, consider the conventional view, which continues to be the basis of all respectable debate on public policy. People put their money in banks. Banks then lend that money out at interest – either to consumers, or to entrepreneurs willing to invest it in some profitable enterprise. True, the fractional reserve system does allow banks to lend out considerably more than they hold in reserve, and true, if savings don't suffice, private banks can seek to borrow more from the central bank.

The central bank can print as much money as it wishes (Look up the term FIAT currency). But it is also careful not to print too much. In fact, we are often told this is why independent central banks exist in the first place. If governments could print money themselves, they would surely put out too much of it, and the resulting inflation would throw the economy into chaos. Institutions such as the Bank of England or US Federal Reserve were created to carefully regulate the money supply to prevent inflation. This is why they are forbidden to directly fund the government, say, by buying treasury bonds, but instead fund private economic activity that the government merely taxes.

It's this understanding that allows us to continue to talk about money as if it were a limited resource like bauxite or petroleum, to say "there's just not enough money" to fund social programmes, to speak of the immorality of government debt or of public spending "crowding out" the private sector. What the Bank of England admitted this week is that none of this is really true. To quote from its own initial summary: "Rather than banks receiving deposits when households save and then lending them out, bank lending creates deposits" … "In normal times, the central bank does not fix the amount of money in circulation, nor is central bank money 'multiplied up' into more loans and deposits."

In other words, everything we know is not just wrong – it's backwards. When banks make loans, they create money. (Look up the term Fractional Banking) This is because money is really just an IOU. The role of the central bank is to preside over a legal order that effectively grants banks the exclusive right to create IOUs of a certain kind, ones that the government will recognise as legal tender by its willingness to accept them in payment of taxes. There's really no limit on how much banks could create, provided they can find someone willing to borrow it. They will never get caught short, for the simple reason that borrowers do not, generally speaking, take the cash and put it under their mattresses; ultimately, any money a bank loans out will just end up back in some bank again. So for the banking system as a whole, every loan just becomes another deposit. What's more, insofar as banks do need to acquire funds from the central bank, they can borrow as much as they like; all the latter really does is set the rate of interest, the cost of money, not its quantity. Since the beginning of the recession, the US and British central banks have reduced that cost to almost nothing. In fact, with "quantitative easing" they've been effectively pumping as much money as they can into the banks, without producing any inflationary effects.

What this means is that the real limit on the amount of money in circulation is not how much the central bank is willing to lend, but how much government, firms, and ordinary citizens, are willing to borrow. Government spending is the main driver in all this (and the paper does admit, if you read it carefully, that the central bank does fund the government after all). So there's no question of public spending "crowding out" private investment. It's exactly the opposite.

Why did the Bank of England suddenly admit all this? Well, one reason is because it's obviously true. The Bank's job is to actually run the system, and of late, the system has not been running especially well. It's possible that it decided that maintaining the fantasy-land version of economics that has proved so convenient to the rich is simply a luxury it can no longer afford.

But politically, this is taking an enormous risk. Just consider what might happen if mortgage holders realised the money the bank lent them is not, really, the life savings of some thrifty pensioner, but something the bank just whisked into existence through its possession of a magic wand which we, the public, handed over to it.

Historically, the Bank of England has tended to be a bellwether, staking out seeming radical positions that ultimately become new orthodoxies. If that's what's happening here, we might soon be in a position to learn if Henry Ford was right.

Hydraulic Fracture Drilling-Part 12

Investors pushing for methane emissions rules now worth $1.5 trillion

 

Ben N. Ratner / Published July 6, 2015

 

 

 

 

California public school teachers and religious charities. New York police officers and firefighters. A college endowment. What do all of these groups have in common?

They happen to be investors representing $1.5 trillion in assets under management for retirees and workers – and they’re calling for strong rules to limit harmful methane emissions from the oil and gas sector.

This level of outpouring – from diversified wealth managers with holdings in the oil and gas industry, to boot – represents investments worth five times the support such stakeholders expressed for methane rules last year.

A trend is emerging.

The investors, including the largest retirement funds in California and New York, issued a powerful statement in support of President Obama’s proposal to cut the greenhouse gas by 45 percent in a decade.

Methane is the primary ingredient in natural gas and also a powerful climate pollutant: For the first 20 years after being released it has more than 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide and it’s responsible for 25 percent of the warming we’re facing today.

From their vantage point as long-term fiduciaries, the serious threat methane poses to climate stability compels these major investors to support action to cut emissions.

As they say in their letter, methane rules will help avoid near-term “infrastructure and economic harm that will weaken not only the companies we invest in, but the nation as a whole.”

Hydraulic Fracture Drilling-Part 11

Opinion: Dirty Little Secret About Natural-Gas Fracking: Fugitive Methane Emissions

 

 

July 10, 2015


According to recent research, the global-warming impact of FMEs is two-thirds greater than coal’s over the near term






Credit: Amanda Brown
R. William Potter

In energy circles, conventional wisdom holds that natural gas is the ideal clean and cheap “transition fuel.” TV ads tell us that gas is the bridge from the fading era of fossil fuels to a newly emerging sustainable future based on renewable energy (solar and wind).

Don't believe it.

As so often is the case, what passes as conventional wisdom turns out on closer inspection to be flat-out wrong or at best half true. In fact, available data and numerous studies now show that natural gas -- depending on its source -- can be as bad if not much worse for planetary health than coal, the usual nemesis.

When natural gas's impacts on the environment are measured only at the point of consumption, gas is both cheaper and cleaner than burning coal to produce electricity. As gas-industry advertisers intone, “natural gas has half the CO2 footprint of coal” or “clean-burning gas has half the carbon footprint of coal.”

True enough at the burner tip. But when gas is measured across the entire fuel cycle -- from drilling, extraction, and transmission through rapidly-built pipelines to the burner tip, a very different, and potentially ominous picture emerges.

The problems start with the production segment of the fuel cycle. Increasingly, new sources of gas come from fracking. This process drives chemicals and water through wells at very high pressure to split open (fracture) sedimentary rock, trapping gas fields that can be forced to the surface.

Fracking is rapidly becoming the new source of gas for New Jersey utilities, arriving here from hundreds of wells across Pennsylvania’s Marcellus shale formations, where a frenzy of drilling is leading to hurried efforts to lay pipelines across both states, generating a great deal of opposition along the way.

Fracking can pollute local groundwater, residential wells, and waterways -- besides triggering earthquakes, as in Oklahoma – while also fouling the air. Much worse, however, the process releases fugitive methane emissions (FMEs), a major contributor to global warming and climate change that is threatening to everyone.

How bad is FME? Worse than burning coal in the near term. That’s because methane gas remains suspended in the atmosphere for “only” 10-20 years, compared with carbon dioxide), the major greenhouse gas by volume from coal, which stays airborne for a century or more.

When measured over a two-decade period, methane pollutants do far more climate damage than carbon. The estimates of FME impacts over that 10-20 year period vary from a low of 70 percent of coal (according to the natural-gas industry) to a high of 400 percent greater than the carbon footprint of coal, according to independent researchers at the NASA Goddard Space Institute. If we average the published estimates, natural gas has a global-warming footprint that’s 167 percent of coal’s -- or two thirds greater impact over the near term.

(There is a short informative video on methane and its role in global warming available online, featuring Dr. Drew Shindell, a leading climate scientist formerly with Goddard and now at Duke.)

Temple of the Holy Spirit: The Human Body

Update:  As of July 1, 2015 I officially reached my ideal weight for my age and height.  I have walked over 800 miles since February first of this year.  Total weight loss was 61 pounds in 5 months.  My waist size dropped from a 44 to a comfortable 38.  I am now jogging 2K every morning.  I walk another 5K in the evening.  Joint and back problems have disappeared.  There is new found enjoyment in eating three healthy meals a day along with two between meal snacks.  Because I was not part of any fad diet, now that I am finished with weight loss, maintaining my current weight is not a big problem. All of the same tools I used to lose weight will help me keep it off.   If your over weight, don't delay getting a handle on your lifestyle now.  Its without doubt what God wants you to do with his temple.

 

Temple of the Holy Spirit: The Human Body

By Todd Carey and Doctor J. Mark Rodgers, DPM

Its one thing to be given the tools and resources to create a new wine skin, but are we carrying into this new season a decrepit lifestyle?  What good is a new physical environment if we are not healthy enough to enjoy it?  Its time for us to get our "house" in order.

Did God give us human bodies to use and abuse as we like, or does He expect more? How does He expect us to view and care for the marvelous bodies He designed? Many people believe, “It’s my body, and I can treat it any way I like.” But what does our Creator God say?

Hydraulic Fracture Drilling-Part 10

What's Killing the Babies of Vernal, Utah?

A fracking boomtown, a spike in stillborn deaths and a gusher of unanswered questions
By Paul Solotaroff June 22, 2015






A midwife comes under attack after she starts asking questions about dead babies in a Utah fracking town. Photo-Illustration by Sean McCabe

Every night, Donna Young goes to bed with her pistol, a .45 Taurus Judge with laser attachment. Last fall, she says, someone stole onto her ranch to poison her livestock, or tried to; happily, her son found the d-CON wrapper and dumped all the feed from the troughs. Strangers phoned the house to wish her dead or run out of town on a rail. Local nurses and doctors went them one better, she says, warning pregnant women that Young's incompetence had killed babies and would surely kill theirs too, if given the chance.

The Journey

The price of being prepared

 

 

Often times any great achievement is preceded by a time of mind numbing training, pruning, seasoning, and instruction. To be prepared we have to endure the mundane often lonely routine of conditioning.   Many of us have been training now all our lives for the "great goal" we now face.  this repost from Fabrizio Zangrilli http://fabriziozangrilli.blogspot.com sums up the process well.

 

 

 

 

 

“The journey is the destination” and all the other trite sayings about being in the moment, forcing us to be excited about the process of training, about the pain and effort of repeated movement, of practice making perfect movement and eventual execution of routes has always bothered me. Bothered me because I always felt it somehow belittled the need to have a huge end goal. Would I train for the sake of training? Would I run just to run? I have needed and used big goals as good motivators over the years. Would I be happy without the passion of heading towards a big goal.

G7 Agree to phase out Fossil Fuel use by the end of the century.

 German chancellor Angela Merkel announces commitment to ‘decarbonise global economy’ and end extreme poverty and hunger
 

 

 G7 leaders, including Angela Merkel (in pink jacket), and invitees line up for the traditional group photo at the end of the summit. Photograph: Sven Hoppe/dpa/Corbis
Kate Connolly in Garmisch Partenkirche

The G7 leading industrial nations have agreed to cut greenhouse gases by phasing out the use of fossil fuels by the end of the century, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, has announced, in a move hailed as historic by some environmental campaigners.          

Toxic Charity

What is the honest nature of our charity towards others.

There once was a young man who lived next door to a older man.  Each morning the young fellow watched the old man struggle out to pick up his mail and newspaper at the end of his drive.  Without really thinking about the issue the young man decided to help out his neighbor by taking his mail and newspaper to his door each morning.  This went on for some time until one day he learned that his neighbor had been hospitalized due to failing heart conditions.  Upon further inquiry it was primarily due to his lack of exercise.  It hit the young man's heart that his good turn had actually contributed to his debilitation as the morning exercise to the end of the drive way was the only activity he could participate in.  In this case the neighbors charity had been toxic to someone he was trying to help.

I highly suggest before anyone engage in any kind of building program, that they read the book "Toxic Charity" by Robert Upton.  http://fcsministries.org/books/toxic-charity Mr. Upton is doing an excellent job in "outing" the infectiveness of much of what we do as the body of Christ.  The missions "industry" of the western church is wasting millions of dollars annually.  Much of what happens has little to do with the recipitant and more to do with "feel good" Christianity.

Community Planning from the Kingdom of God's perspective-Part 5

Sustainable Building Technologies

It would be a true tragedy to get to this point in the design process to abandon our organic approach to building development to non-organic support systems.  Now that we have the finger print unique to our site, we make informed decision about the technology we will employ to maintain our environments at a comfortable level.  Some of these technologies involve increased “front end cost,” but reduce the operational cost thru the developments “life cycle.”  Our ultimate litmus test is that of being called by God as steward.  There are some decision we make not based on “mammon” but on stewardship.  Some of these approaches involve the sacrifice of our time or lifestyle. 

We are reconciled to the Father, thru the Son to come into alignment with God’s design intent.  By partnering with God thru sustainable approaches, we allow his creation to “rest” thru order in our lives.  We do not worship creation in any way but we honor God by becoming his Gardner. 

Community planning from the Kingdom of God's Perspective-Part 4

Organic Architecture

 

Once we understand our role as biblical steward, pray thru any "leans" on a proposed site, and map God's "master plan" for development, we then look at a deeper level to the biology that may inhabit a location. By studying these attributes we may find clues as to form and function that work hand in hand with sustainable land use planning.

This approach as steward of creation partners with God from the macro to the micro scale of each building site. owners and designers divorce themselves from "personal preferences" over "style" in lieu of allowing God to speak through creation itself to be the form giver.

Each building, on each site has a unique solution. Its appearance and function can be traced back to foundational principles God placed on and in the land. The architecture is not therefore interchangeable between sites or regions of the country. It is site specific and unique. By following this approach we defer personal preferences to allow God's fingerprints to show through.

Community Planning from the Kingdom of God's perspective-Part 3

Sustainable Land Use practices 

 

 

Once we have resolved any spiritual “leans,” we turn to the land to examine Gods foundational deposits. Sustainable land use practices work hand in hand with our scriptural call to stewardship. By mapping the geographic and biological processes active in a specific region, we allow the site to be both designer and planner. God placed resources foundational to site. By studying the underlying approaches God used during creation, we may discover his “finger print.” When we work with Gods order, we allow the literal resources in the land to create a symbiotic relationship. We partner with the land in living with a site not just on it. 

This “master plan” can derive functionality from these mapping processes. Some of the natural determinates include: soil types, solar orientation, slope, vegetation types, wildlife habitat, and water resources. Those “overlays” derived through GIS mapping help the designer arrive at environmentally friendly solutions on behalf of the end user.

Three color tones are assigned each evaluation. White being the highest potential, gray being the average, and black being the least desirable. The team established the best combination of land use thru the use of a matrix. By overlaying all of the maps based on our matrix hierarchy, the design team can readily see the best use for each location by what appears the “clearest” on the plan. Conversely, the darkest portion of the plan indicates incompatibly to any proposed land use. The following case study is from the Borough of Richmond, New York, compiled by Ian L. McHarg.

Community Planning from the Kingdom of God's perspective-Part 2

Spiritual Mapping

One of the fist steps in transferring stewardship of property is to perform a title search. A title search is a review of all known legal claims connected to the property. Should a lien or encumbrance be found, this issue has to be resolved prior to transfer of ownership. The heirs of the person holding a lien in the distant past can, in some cases, have recourse against a “New” owner in this present age.

A spiritual map is nothing more than a title search. If we want to remove grounds for which Satan interferes with a potential development, we must research the history of our land. In this review of history, we see who released evil in or communities. Once a “lien” is found in the spiritual realm, we simply apply repentance before God to release the “lien.”

Satan continually accuses us before God. There is only one reason he has this access to the courts of heaven. That is unconfessed sin. The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof. It is through the hand of man that the accuser has access to interfere with the destiny of mankind. Thru these many open doors he is granted grounds to inflict injury, destroy lives, and bringing about conflict.

Spiritual mapping is the tool that unlocks strategies to release our communities into higher levels of kingdom understanding. It was settled on the cross; we need to find out what sin patterns have not been confessed before the Father.

When we have brought to bear the authority of the cross thru acts of repentance by those who are the offending party, the accuser no longer has the grounds to interfere with the harvest deposited in the land. Historically repeated generational cycles of sin are broken. Shifts can occur releasing us into an open heaven.

Community Planning from the Kingdom of God's perspective-Part 1

 Biblical Foundations for Environmental Stewardship

 

 

i. The Earth (Dirt) is foundational to all God does

            1 Samuel2:8 For the foundations of the earth are the Lords upon them he has set the world

            John 12:32 But I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself.

ii. Spiritual issues regarding earth (Cultivated land, dirt)

         Genesis 1:24 Then God said, "Let the earth bring forth living creatures after their kind: cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth after their kind"; and it was so.

             Genesis 2:7 Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.

NOTE: Generational sin from our ancestors.  The view that the land is part of our family tree
Generational transfer from the land.  Cleansing the land in a region Breaks sin patterns,                       

Patagonia "outs" the Asian slave market

What Patagonia Did When It Found Human Slaves in Its Supply Chain
 

Here's how the socially-conscious retailer turned a rare misstep into an opportunity to change worker conditions in its supply chain.


 

By Anna Hensel

"We quite frankly discovered modern slavery in our supply chain," says Adam Fetcher, Patagonia's global director of PR. He adds that the problem is pervasive and plagues manufacturers of all kinds in many industries. "For Patagonia, it became an urgent priority to fix it," he says.

In a blog post, the outdoor outfitter says that it first became aware of mistreatment of its factory workers after extending its "social responsibility audits" to include its Tier 2 suppliers in 2011. Looking specifically at the conditions of migrant workers in its factories in Taiwan, Patagonia discovered that many migrant workers were subject to long hours, low wages, and enormous broker fees.

Migrant workers have long had a tumultous history in Taiwan. Over the past 30 years, Taiwan has been losing factory business to China, where labor costs are much lower. As a result, factory owners in Taiwan have started to hire migrant workers over locals. Local workers were further thwarted when the Taiwanese government passed a law in 2012 permitting companies to have a workforce of up to 40 percent migrant workers, a 5 percent increase from the previous cap.

Patagonia partnered with Verite, a NGO that focuses on securing fair working conditions for workers around the world, to implement changes in its supply chain. As of June 1, Patagonia's Taiwanese suppliers can no longer require migrant workers to pay broker fees to secure a job. They must also repay current workers affected by broker fees. Going forward, factory owners either have to pay the fee themselves, or find workers without using a broker. The company also wrote a guide outlining its new employment standards for migrant workers, displaying it on Patagonia's website, and held meetings with Taiwanese suppliers to explain the new changes.

This isn't the first time Patagonia has highlighted its problems on its company blog--it acknowledged using a Durable Water Repellent in its jackets that had toxic byproducts for years. Still, it's a rare misstep for the typically-polished company. And while it seems to have taken a few too many years to address the oversight, the company's effort to address its supply chain is admirable--and serves as a lesson for other entrepreneurs who must cope with similarly systemic shocks.

That pledge has paid off in the eyes of some big players. In January, the retailer's Chief Operating Officer, Doug Freeman, and Director of Social Environmental Responsibility Cara Chacon were asked to present on the company's work at the White House Forum on Combating Human Trafficking in Supply Chains. By acknowledging its mistakes to customers, Patagonia has proven that its commitment to social issues doesn't just start and end in the store.

Published on: Jun 3, 2015

Hydraulic Fracture Drilling-Part 9

Maryland joins New York as Pennsylvania border state banning fracking

       

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Fracking well


Posted: Wednesday, June 3, 2015 5:51 pm 

 


By AD CRABLE | Staff Writer

As surging natural gas drilling makes Pennsylvania second in the nation in production, a second neighboring state has banned fracking wells.
Last Friday, a moratorium on fracking became law in Maryland. A two-year ban on natural gas extraction by fracking had passed overwhelmingly in both houses of the state General Assembly earlier in the year. New Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, did not veto the bill, allowing it to become law.
Maryland officials and residents have expressed concerns about fracking’s impact on the environment and public health.

Last December, New York state’s newly elected Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo declared a statewide ban on fracking. The declaration came after years of debate in the Empire State on the safety of the drilling method.

Cuomo’s announcement came after the release of a long-awaited state Department of Environmental Conservation review on fracking's potential effects on health and the environment that was six years in the making. A study by state health officials found “significant uncertainties” about fracking.

Vermont and Massachusetts also have banned fracking, but they do not have any Marcellus Shale deposits of gas and the moves are largely symbolic.

Hydraulic fracturing is a drilling technique used to reach deeply buried natural gas deposits by injecting a high-pressure mix of water, sand and chemicals underground, fracturing bedrock and releasing the gas.

As two Pennsylvania border states refuse to allow fracking to start, new Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf has taken several actions recently that seem to encourage continued fracking, despite his campaign pledge to lower a heavy severance tax on natural gas production.

Last week, Wolf announced he is forming a task force to get communities, the gas industry and state agencies to cooperate in siting up to 30,000 miles of gas pipelines needed to be built in the next decade.

A proposed natural gas pipeline through 35 miles of Lancaster County has been controversial. Many feel Lancaster County will be targeted for more pipelines as getting gas to market catches up with heavy production at well pads.

“We need to work with the industry to make sure that the positive economic benefits of Pennsylvania’s natural resources can more quickly be realized in a responsible way,” Wolf said in forming the task force.

‘This task force is part of our commitment to seeing the natural gas industry succeed,” he said.

Wolf has said that natural gas drilling must be done safely without harming people or the environment. He has reinstated a moratorium on additional fracking on state forest lands and state parks

Meanwhile, the recent bans in New York and Maryland are not expected to have much impact on Pennsylvania’s active drilling. Deep gas deposits in both Maryland and New York are considered inferior to gas found in Pennsylvania.

Hydraulic Fracture Drilling-Part 8

Danger in the Heartland: Man-Made Quakes Mark New Hazard Map

By Zain Haidar

Published May 1 2015 09:43 AM EDT

weather.com

 

Where Are Earthquake Hazard Zones in America

Meteorologist Ari Sarsalari talks about earthquake hazard zones in the U.S., and the impact a powerful quake would cause in America.             

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There's a new hazard in the Heartland. 

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) recently released a map highlighting the future risk for man-made earthquakes, and up to eight states have an increased chance to see ground shaking. 

               

A new preliminary earthquake hazard map shows an uptick in the risk of non-tectonic earthquakes all the way from southern Kansas to north Texas.   (USGS)