In yet another truly astonishing announcement that demonstrates the desperation of this hour, German steelmaker ArcelorMittal, one of the largest steel production facilities in Europe, has shuttered operations due to high energy prices. (See their announcement here, in German.)
“With gas and electricity prices increasing tenfold within just a few months, we are no longer competitive in a market that is 25% supplied by imports,” said CEO Reiner Blaschek.
This comes after announced closures of aluminum smelters, copper smelters, and ammonia production plants over the last few weeks. Ammonia — necessary for fertilizer — is now 70% offline in the EU.
Adding to the misery, in just the last 24 hours, Russia announced a complete ban on natural gas exports to Europe until the West’s economic sanctions are lifted. This means the Nord Stream 1 pipeline is now shuttered for the foreseeable future, since delusional NATO countries are incapable of correcting their errors and backing down from Russia.
With steel and other industrial metals also offline, one wonders how Western Europe is supposed to function over the next six months of winter:
No steel = No industry (or industry jobs)
No fertilizer = No food
No natural gas = No electricity or heat
In essence, three of the pillars that allow a modern society to function are being severely crippled by economic sanctions and sky-high energy prices across Europe.
And it’s only the first week of September. The cold weather hasn’t even arrived yet. No matter how much natural gas is already stored for the winter, Europeans are facing both sky-high costs and scarcity on a level that hasn’t been experienced since World War II.
There simply isn’t enough energy available to power European cities and heat all the buildings this winter, and there’s not enough food in the pipeline to feed everyone in 2023, either.
Take that, Putin!
California’s rolling blackouts may begin today
The San Francisco Chronicle is reporting today that rolling blackouts may begin in California this evening. There’s simply not enough electricity to meet demand, so thousands of homes and businesses are going to be forcefully disconnected from the power grid. This is after the state begging electric vehicle owners to avoid charging their EVs from 4 – 9 pm. (Question: What happens if millions more Californians buy electric vehicles and plug them in?)
Via the Chronicle:
State officials anticipate needing 48,817 megawatts of electricity Monday, which would leave the state with a 2,000 to 4,000 megawatt deficit, according to the California Independent System Operator.
Ruh-roh. It turns out that dismantling the power grid infrastructure in order to appease left-wing greenies doesn’t keep the lights on. This must be incredibly confusing to the Leftists, given that they thought if all fossil fuels were shut down, a magical utopia would spontaneously emerge. Instead, they’ll be burning candles, cranking wind-up radios and crapping in buckets when the water towers run dry due to lack of electricity for the water pumps.
To combat the rising prices of electricity and food, Gov. Newsom has just signed a bill requiring fast food restaurants to pay as much as $22 / hour to workers. This is going to bankrupt many restaurants in California, worsening the lack of food options and job opportunities for locals. Via the WSJ:
“You can’t charge enough for food to offset what will happen from a labor perspective,” said Greg Flynn, president of Flynn Restaurant Group, which operates franchise brands in 44 states and owns 105 restaurants in California.
Mr. Flynn says he donated to Newsom’s political campaigns. It turns out you always get the tyranny you support. As long as oblivious Californians keep voting for Democrats, they’re going to continue collapsing into destitution and authoritarianism.
Where are all the people in Jackson, Mississippi crapping?
Don’t forget that the entire municipal water system has failed in Jackson, Mississippi, meaning there’s no water to flush toilets. It begs the question: Where are all the people crapping there?
If they’re crapping in the toilets, they have to hand-carry water to flush them. Where are they getting all that water?
Or maybe they’re crapping in buckets and tossing the contents in the back yard. That’s going to create a nightmare for the Health Dept and some interesting conversations among neighbors, especially when it rains again.
How are businesses functioning in the city if there are no working toilets? When locals need to get together for a meeting, do they ask to meet at the corner of Cholera and E.Coli? Seriously, at what point does all the feces become a public health issue reminiscent of a collapsed Third World nation like Haiti?
It’s all breaking down
All by design, globalists are decimating the pillars of civilization in order to cause collapse and depopulation. They are attacking:
Food
Energy
Health (vaccines, bioweapons)
Supply chains
Finance
Elections (massive rigging / mules)
Liberty and self-defense
Weather / geoengineering
The overarching goal is to exterminate the vast majority of the human population, then enslave the survivors.
The oblivious masses are going along with it, having no clue that if they took multiple covid jabs, they’re probably already dead.
Learn more in today’s hard-hitting Situation Update podcast:
Trump’s Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is reporting an increase in the homeless population of California of 16.4% over the course of the last year and alarm bells are ringing the corridors of power. The human misery of destitution has now reached such levels that the cash registers are being affected.
Homelessness is spinning out of control in many places, not least right here in Toronto. However, in California, the situation is now generating an acute political crisis. So great is the problem of mass destitution in that state that whole urban areas are facing a threat to public health and a level of social dislocation that undermines public order and the basic level of social stability needed for capitalism to conduct business. Trump’s Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is reporting an increase in the homeless population of California of 16.4% over the course of the last year and alarm bells are ringing the corridors of power. The human misery of destitution has now reached such levels that the cash registers are being affected.
When a hard right champion of the austerity agenda like HUD Secretary Ben Carson says that he wants to ensure homeless people “go to the places that are designed to help them get out of that situation,” it is very necessary to anticipate what he might have in mind. The Trump Administration is “considering moving homeless people in California off the streets and into unused federal buildings.” This could be interpreted in several ways but the political character of those involved leads to a very strong suspicion that what is being contemplated is not a supply of social housing but, rather, a round up of those who have been thrown on the streets, so as to place them against their will in holding pens for homeless people.
The above mentioned Mr. Carson is not known for the depth of his social analysis. To him, broken and sinful misfits are getting in the way of profitable business dealings and need to be taken somewhere where no one will see them. His moral assumptions are quite impervious to any consideration of the actual factors driving this homeless crisis. If he were presented with an explanation of “the rising cost of housing, coupled with wage stagnation at the lower end of the income spectrum that has led to a housing affordability crisis across Southern California” the HUD Secretary’s eyes would simply glaze over.
The same factors, that have put 36,300 people onto the streets of Los Angeles, are playing out across North America and on the other side of the Atlantic. The British Medical Journal is clear that, “Austerity policies lie at heart of soaring homelessness and related health harms.” The US Coalition for the Homeless informs us that “an estimated one-third of homeless families in New York City are working but unable to afford market-rate rents” and that the number of shelter residents who are employed has shot up. The role of “soaring housing prices” in putting people onto the streets of Vancouver is abundantly clear. Escalating homelessness is, in fact, an inevitable effect of the convergence of the agenda of austerity, coupled with the extreme commodification of housing in what has come to be known as the “neoliberal city.”
Repression vs Concession
Margaret Thatcher’s infamous suggestion that there’s no such thing as society was the product of some highly selective reasoning on her part. She certainly was not signalling an intention to disband the police forces or military. Nor did she intend to fling open the doors of the prisons. What she actually meant was that the state’s secondary role in the area of social provision needed to be drastically reduced in line with the needs of the neoliberal agenda. The state has always ensured public order by way of some mix of meeting peoples’ needs and applying physical coercion. If the social infrastructure is to be weakened, the readiness and ability to resort to the billy club must be increased. The neoliberal decades have seen hugely increased rates of incarceration (most strikingly in the US) and the favouring of police budgets over social spending.
This increased use of the repressive power of the state has certainly been brought to bear on the homeless populations that the agenda of neoliberal austerity has produced. As destitution has assumed ever more serious proportions, governing authorities devoted to the neoliberal reordering of urban space, have predictably favoured the authoritarian option when it comes to trying to contain the problem. So, with Toronto’s homeless shelters bursting at the seams, and people forced to try and survive outside, City Hall has put a premium on raiding and dispersing homeless encampments. When a right-wing Tory government in Ontario introduced the Safe Streets Act in the 1990s, it was rightly regarded as a draconian attack on people forced to ask for spare change on the street. No one would have imagined, however, that this legislation would survive fifteen years of Liberal rule and be used far more extensively today than its original sponsors ever anticipated. Meanwhile, in British Columbia, the Mayor of Nanaimo publicly ruminates on the forced institutionalization of homeless people.
So it is that, in California, where the intensity of the homeless crisis runs ahead of the grim situation in other parts of North America, the neoliberal agenda’s ‘collateral damage’ creates a defining moment. It appears that the Trump Administration favours the razing of the extensive network of homeless camps and the placing of those driven from them in “temporary government facilities.” Some local politicians, however, are alarmed at the prospect of such rampant authoritarianism and favour a significant concession that would ensure a significant part of the homeless population are housed. The dilemma really comes down to the limitations of how far austerity and social abandonment can be taken within the framework of a liberal democracy.
The capitalist state has come a full circle from the days when the Elizabethan authorities, deciding they must stave off unrest and social dislocation, came up with the first model of social provision in 1601, in the form of a Poor Law. On the streets of California’s cities, the same stark choice is now placed before modern-day state officialdom. The homeless population there is vast and, with the global economy moving towards a slump, the even greater numbers of people precariously poised on the edge of destitution are at risk of losing their housing. Unless a significant concession is made that partly reverses the austerity agenda, the choice will be between tolerating destitution on a scale that threatens the social order or a sweep of the streets that takes on the features of selective martial law.
The authoritarian option can only be seen as a very real threat. In Hungary, the hard right regime of Viktor Orban has passed legislation making it illegal for people to be homeless. Trump’s political instincts are striking similar to the ‘illiberal’ Orban and, no doubt, there would be a base of support for a crackdown on California’s homeless. Once removed from the streets and out of sight, those swept up would find that their ‘temporary’ holding facilities became horribly permanent and a strict prohibition of camping outside, coupled with a complete lack of housing options, would turn these facilities into de facto prisons. It would be a return to the labour camp approach that was adopted by governments during the Great Depression and that was challenged by the unemployed movements of that period, including with the great On to Ottawa Trek of 1935.
As the economy sinks into global slump, and the already dreadful homeless crisis intensifies dramatically, it is very likely that the ‘solutions’ coming from the Trumps and Orbans will become the ‘policy options’ of the neoliberal centre. It will be more important than ever to bring the fight against homelessness into a broader struggle against austerity. We must stop the attempt to drive out homeless people and demand, instead, the social housing, living income and decent wages that can tackle the homeless crisis. Instead of a society that sweeps people from the streets when they have nowhere to go, we need one that considers housing a human right and that acts accordingly.
Socialist policies are not what caused this problem. Unfettered capitalism and obscene wealth inequality are the culprits but this is what right-wing Christians believe based on what they hear from the mainstream American media. Jesus was a socialist ye doofuses.
“There are now nearly 60,000 homeless people living in Los Angeles County, a 12% increase from the previous year, according to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.”
The homeless crisis in the Democrat stronghold of California has reached epic proportions. Even after throwing billions of dollars at the problem, the state is unable to solve the epidemic they created.
According to National Interest, Los Angeles is not the only county suffering under the weight of freedom-trampling socialist regulations that make it difficult for the average person to even get by, let alone afford a roof over their head. Other localities in California also saw substantial increases compared with 2017, when they last conducted a count, accordingto a report by The Wall Street Journal.In San Francisco, the number [of homeless people] rose 17% while Alameda County, which includes Oakland, saw a 43% increase. Homelessness grew 42% in San Jose over the past two years and 31% in Santa Clara County, the heart of Silicon Valley.
“Even in the good old days, there was a Skid Row. Now the beggars, drug addicts, and lost souls are all over the city,” wrote San Francisco Chronicle columnist Carl Nolte.
The city is out of control. Traffic is a mess, but it’s rare to see a traffic control officer. Trucks are double-parked everywhere. The city is dirty—a friend just back from Mexico City was astounded to find the streets there far cleaner than the ones in her native city. There is so much human waste on the streets of San Francisco the city formed a ‘poop patrol’ where workers are paid $71,000 a year, about the same as the average school teacher. -Carl Nolte, San Francisco Chronicle
Nolte even nails the direct cause of the problem and it’s California’s government and the people who elect them.
To cope with these problems, the citizens have continued to elect weak city governments, all built on compromise and deals with competing pressure groups. At City Hall, everybody is responsible for everything and nobody is responsible for anything.
To make a complex problem worse, the city has so many rules and regulations that it has become nearly impossible to build anything. And the city desperately needs new housing. San Francisco has the highest building costs in the country. Architects and builders say it costs an average of $650,000 to build an ordinary San Francisco home these days. Even affordable housing is not affordable. Carl Nolte, San Francisco Chronicle
To those who continue to warn of the destruction of socialist policies, this is obvious. To those who want everything handed to them after it’s first stolen from someone else, it looks like a utopia. But that’s because it’s easier to vote for politicians to “steal from the rich” than it is to beat the politicians own rules and become rich. Humans have lost their sense of individuality and their freedom in the process of taking the easy road.
California’s government also seems to have more pressing matters to attend to anyway, like banning plastic straws, plastic bags, and paper receipts. They’ve also begun providing free health care coverage to illegal immigrants while their homeless population burgeons. California maintains a generous welfare regime, and it’s temperate and generally pleasant weather make it a natural haven for homeless people.
But the best way for the state to help the people is by doing the one thing the state won’t do: get the hell out of their way.
The ground is constantly shaking in southern California right now, and this has many concerned that another large earthquake may be coming. I have been keeping my eye on Cal Tech’s recent earthquake map, and as I write this article it says that there have been 10,053 earthquakes in California and Nevada over the past 7 days. I have never seen that number so high, and southern California is being hit by yet another new earthquake every few moments. Most of the earthquakes are happening out in the Ridgecrest area where we witnessed the magnitude 6.4 earthquake that hit on July 4th and the magnitude 7.1 earthquake that hit on July 5th. But as you can see from Cal Tech’s map, there has been a tremendous amount of seismic activity along the San Andreas fault as well. As I discussed the other day, the San Andreas fault is “locked and loaded” and it is way overdue for “the Big One”. Could it be possible that all of this earthquake activity is leading up to something really big?
And it isn’t just earthquakes that we need to be concerned about. According to Fox News, “geologists are nervously eyeing eight nearby volcanoes”…
California’s uncanny “earthquake pause” is over. It should have already had several “big ones” by now. All that pressure has to go somewhere. Now geologists are nervously eyeing eight nearby volcanoes. And why has Yellowstone supervolcano been acting so weird?
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has warned Southern California to expect more big earthquakes to come. Some, they say, may even be more powerful than those experienced in the past few days.
“(These quakes do) not make (the Big One) less likely,” local seismologist Lucy Jones told The Los Angeles Times. “There is about a one in 20 chance that this location will be having an even bigger earthquake in the next few days, that we have not yet seen the biggest earthquake of the sequence.”
Could you imagine the chaos that would ensue if a volcano suddenly erupted in California?
For the record, I am personally far more concerned about Mt. Rainier and the other volcanoes in the Northwest. But that is a topic for another article.
One angle that hasn’t really been talked about much is what would happen to California’s nuclear reactors if “the Big One” suddenly hit the San Andreas fault.
According to Natural News, there are currently five nuclear reactors right along the San Andreas fault and another one that is located directly along the coast…
A Natural News investigation into the geolocation of nuclear power facilities in California reveals that five nuclear facilities were built in close proximity to the San Andreas fault line, with some constructed right in the middle of earthquake zones that have up to a 50% chance of a severe earthquake every 30 years.
One nuclear power plant – the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant which produces 2,160 megawatts — was constructed on the coast, making it extremely vulnerable to the very same kind of ocean water surge that destroyed the Fukushima-Daiichi facility which suffered a 2011 meltdown in Japan.
Who was the genius that decided to build those reactors near the San Andreas fault?
The potential for an unprecedented nightmare is definitely there. If a magnitude 9.0 earthquake were to hit the San Andreas fault, it would be 707 times more powerful than the magnitude 7.1 earthquake that we just witnessed.
And we live at a time when our planet just continues to become even more unstable. According to NBC News, the number of “great” earthquakes between 2004 and 2014 was 265 percent higher than during the preceding ten year period…
The annual number of “great” earthquakes nearly tripled over the last decade, providing a reminder to Americans that unruptured faults like those in the northwest United States might be due for a Big One.
Between 2004 and 2014, 18 earthquakes with magnitudes of 8.0 or more rattled subduction zones around the globe. That’s an increase of 265 percent over the average rate of the previous century, which saw 71 great quakes, according to a report to the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America this week in Vancouver, British Columbia.
But despite all of the unusual shaking that we have witnessed so far this century, the state of California hasn’t seen anything remotely close to the shaking that we have witnessed over the last 7 days.
Of course seismic activity is just one element of “the perfect storm” that is starting to unfold. According to the NOAA, the 12 month period ending in June was the wettest 12 month period in all of U.S. history. In fact, for three months in a row “the past 12-month precipitation record has hit an all-time high”. We just keep setting record after record, and the flooding in the middle of the country seems like it will never end. Millions of acres of prime farmland will not be used at all this year, and tens of millions of acres of crops are in extremely poor condition right now.
Lines of thunderstorms associated with a weather system that is predicted to develop into a hurricane by Friday struck New Orleans with as much as 7 inches of rain within a three-hour period Wednesday morning, forecasters said.
The city was engulfed with water, leaving residents to contend with swampy streets, overturned garbage cans and flooded vehicles. Some even paddled their way down the street in kayaks.
But the worst is still yet to come. The storm may become a hurricane before it makes landfall, and it is going to push the Mississippi River to one of the highest levels ever…
The deluge may have just been a preview of more serious flooding situation from Tropical Storm or Hurricane Barry, which could affect the area into the weekend.
On Saturday, the Mississippi River is projected to see one of its highest crests on record in New Orleans, or the highest in seven decades.
A state of emergency has already been declared in Louisiana, and this could turn out to be the biggest disaster for the state since Hurricane Katrina.
Why is disaster after disaster suddenly pummeling the United States?
And could it be possible that this is just the beginning of our problems?
A time of great change is now upon us, and I have a feeling that what we have experienced so far is just the tip of the iceberg.
Typhus and other infectious illnesses hit homeless communities
“The diseases have flared as the nation’s homeless population has grown in the past two years: About 553,000 people were homeless at the end of 2018, and nearly one-quarter of homeless people live in California.”
Jennifer Millar keeps trash bags and hand sanitizer near her tent, and she regularly pours water mixed with hydrogen peroxide on the sidewalk nearby. Keeping herself and the patch of concrete she calls home clean is a top priority.
But this homeless encampment off a Hollywood freeway ramp is often littered with needles and trash, and soaked in urine. Rats occasionally scamper through, and Millar fears the consequences.
“I worry about all those diseases,” said Millar, 43, who said she has been homeless most of her life.
Infectious diseases—some that ravaged populations in the Middle Ages—are resurging in California and around the country, and are hitting homeless populations especially hard.
Los Angeles recently experienced an outbreak of typhus—a disease spread by infected fleas on rats and other animals—in downtown streets. Officials briefly closed part of City Hall after reporting that rodents had invaded the building.
People in Washington state have been infected with Shigella bacteria, which is spread through feces and causes the diarrheal disease shigellosis, as well as Bartonella quintana, which spreads through body lice and causes trench fever.
Hepatitis A, also spread primarily through feces, infected more than 1,000 people in Southern California in the past two years. The disease also has erupted in New Mexico, Ohio and Kentucky, primarily among people who are homeless or use drugs.
Public health officials and politicians are using terms like “disaster” and “public health crisis” to describe the outbreaks, and they warn that these diseases can easily jump beyond the homeless population.
“Our homeless crisis is increasingly becoming a public health crisis,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said in his State of the State speech in February, citing outbreaks of hepatitis A in San Diego County, syphilis in Sonoma County and typhus in Los Angeles County.
“Typhus,” he said. “A medieval disease. In California. In 2019.”
The diseases have flared as the nation’s homeless population has grown in the past two years: About 553,000 people were homeless at the end of 2018, and nearly one-quarter of homeless people live in California.
The diseases spread quickly and widely among people living outside or in shelters, fueled by sidewalks contaminated with human feces, crowded living conditions, weakened immune systems and limited access to health care.
“The hygiene situation is just horrendous” for people living on the streets, said Dr. Glenn Lopez, a physician with St. John’s Well Child & Family Center, who treats homeless patients in Los Angeles County. “It becomes just like a Third World environment where their human feces contaminate the areas where they are eating and sleeping.”
Those infectious diseases are not limited to homeless populations, Lopez warned. “Even someone who believes they are protected from these infections are not.”
At least one Los Angeles city staffer said she contracted typhus in City Hall last fall. And San Diego County officials warned in 2017 that diners at a well-known restaurant were at risk of hepatitis A.
There were 167 cases of typhus from Jan. 1, 2018, through Feb. 1 of this year, up from 125 in 2013 and 13 in 2008, according to the California Public Health Department.
Typhus is a bacterial infection that can cause a high fever, stomach pain and chills but can be treated with antibiotics. Outbreaks are more common in overcrowded and trash-filled areas that attract rats.
The recent typhus outbreak began last fall, when health officials reported clusters of the flea-borne disease in downtown Los Angeles and Compton. They also have occurred in Pasadena, where the problems are likely due to people feeding stray cats carrying fleas.
Last month, the county announced another outbreak in downtown Los Angeles that infected nine people, six of whom were homeless. After city workers said they saw rodent droppings in City Hall, Los Angeles City Council President Herb Wesson briefly shut down his office to rip up the rugs, and he also called for an investigation and more cleaning.
Driven by the high costs of higher education and the absurdly high cost of living in California, a recent survey revealed a stunning figure: Nearly 20% of Community College students in America’s most populous state are homeless.
Whether they’re sleeping in their cars, or crashing on couches, or are among the growing number of California’s “unsheltered” homeless, some 19% responded to a survey of community college students saying they either didn’t have a place to live, or were simply crashing or living in their vehicles.
What’s worse, instead of seeking out shelter in one of California’s many homeless shelters (which we’ve heard are fantastic environments for fostering academic curiosity), many students are simply “too proud” to do this.
Community colleges are two-year education institutions meant to provide affordable degrees for people who have usually graduated high school but have not enrolled in schools which can give them a four-year college degree. They are often known as junior colleges. In one state, nearly 20% of the students enrolled in these schools are homeless.
There are 1,167 community colleges in the U.S. according to the American Association of Community Colleges. The enrollment in these institutions is more than 12.4 million students. Almost half of all undergraduate students in the United States attend community colleges. Homelessness among students at these institutions is prevalent.
In California, the number is extraordinarily large. Nineteen percent of attendees in the largest state by population are homeless. California is among the states with the most unshelterd homeless. It also has several four-year colleges where applications are on the rise.
A study by the Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice at Temple University’s College of Education in Philadelphia, polled almost 20,000 students at 57 colleges in California. The data was collected during the fall semesters of 2016 and 2018. The report’s lead author Sara Goldrick-Rab told the Mercury News if the information is projected across all of California, it yields the 19% number. She added, “Only 6 percent of students said they were homeless,. The other 13 percent indicated their homelessness by saying where they stayed.”
Community college is inexpensive in most cases compared with four-year institutions. However, that does not mean it is affordable for everyone. According to the Community College Review, among public community colleges, the annual tuition for in-state students is $4,835 per year. For out of state students, the figure rises to $8,594. The data from the study cover 2018 and 2019.
Among the reasons that students do not turn to shelters which are available is that people who consider themselves relatively well educated sometimes have problems admitting to others they are homeless. Goldrick-Rab commented, “And many students don’t go to shelters because these are well-educated people who don’t want to be stigmatized.”
Proposed solutions, at least in California, are for more state support of these students. They also might be supported, financially and in terms of food and housing, by local communities. In the meantime, a number of nearly 20% is high enough that finding a solution for most of these people will take a very long time.
* * *
Of course, maybe if California’s stringent energy-efficiency laws didn’t make building homes in the state roughly 3x more expensive than the national median, there wouldn’t be a housing-shortage crisis, and valuations for existing homes wouldn’t be so high.
Left Image: Kanye West and Kim Kardashian. (Photo by Chesnot/WireImage) Right Image: Megan and Matthew Saxton (photo courtesy the Saxton family)
Around 2 AM last Friday, a neighbor knocked on Megan and Matthew Saxton’s door. It was time to go.
The previous day, the Woolsey fire had begun charting a path of destruction along the Pacific coast of southern California. In Malibu and nearby affluent enclaves, the fire has so far devoured more than 98,000 acres and over 600 structures, killing at least three. Some residents, most infamously Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, were able to call in a private army of firefighters to save their properties. Many others were lucky to escape the state’s latest bout of flames with their lives—the Camp fire, simultaneously raging in northern California’s Butte County, is the deadliest in state history with over 60 fatalities to date and well over 10,000 structures eviscerated.
The Saxtons, both 31, lived with their three sons at the Seminole Springs mobile home park in an unincorporated piece of LA county land off Mulholland Highway. They recalled buying their mobile home and a lot in the park for a combined $420,000 in 2016—not the cheapest spot in town, but a far cry from the neighboring Malibu mansions that go for millions.
There were no official evacuation orders when they were woken in the middle of the night, but the air was getting smoky and they decided better safe than sorry. After grabbing some photo albums and the kids, the Saxtons drove north to stay with Megan’s brother in Thousand Oaks, figuring they’d be home soon to inspect the damage.
They soon found out through the NextDoor app that more than half of the mobile home park had burned. A few days later, Matthew went to the park to see the damage for himself and their worst fears were confirmed: Their home was gone.
The Saxtons were lucky enough to have an insurance policy—it was required as part of their mortgage, they explained. But the policy won’t cover the full cost of rebuilding, they noted, and the soonest they expected to rebuild was a year from now. “We were a middle-class neighborhood in the middle of the canyon, an affordable gem in the middle of all these really expensive homes,” Matthew said.
Natural disasters typically have the most devastating effects on those with the fewest resources. A 2016 UN report on the nexus of wealth inequality and climate change found that the two were locked in a vicious and increasingly terrifying cycle: “…the disadvantaged groups suffer disproportionate loss of income and assets (physical, financial, human and social) when these hazards actually hit them. Consequently, inequality worsens, and the cycle perpetuates with greater force.”
“No matter what the kind of natural disaster, whether it’s flooding or wind damage or fire, the biggest burden of the longest duration falls on the already-poor,” David Lodge, director of Cornell University’s Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future, told me.
In addition to the immediate threats to life and limb that come with any severe natural disaster, there may be a temporary period of homelessness or unemployment that can send someone on the brink of poverty over the edge. Without adequate insurance, savings to rebuild, or a reliable social safety net in place, what Lodge has called “the human face of policy-induced suffering” is revealed.
And with the current trajectory of increasing weather disasters, that suffering is likely to grow. In addition to the spectacular events of the last few years—the current spate of fires in California, January’s wildfire-related mudslides in Montecito, the 2017 hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria—at least 99.7 percent of all US counties have incurred significant property damage from natural hazards since 2000. Between the 1960s and the 2000s, the yearly average of financial loss attributable to disasters (per capita) in the US soared from about $25 to about $80, adjusting for inflation.
Junia Howell and James R. Elliott, sociologists who study social inequality, try to look away from the spectacle and find out what happens after the reporters leave Malibu, or Houston, or New Orleans. Their longitudinal study of how natural hazards impact wealth inequality in the US was motivated by the reality that “these events keep happening,” as Elliott explained to me. “This is not a California problem, this is not a Texas problem, this is not a Florida problem. It’s an American problem.”
It’s obviously also a global problem. Still, understanding the specifics even within American states can help show the bigger picture. So how might this worsening of economic inequality play out in the Los Angeles and Ventura county regions where the Woolsey fire continued to rage Friday?
Lodge suggested thinking of the archetypal Malibu mansion as a small business that employed a staff of service workers.
“While their homes are perhaps not harmed by the fire, their place of employment is destroyed,” he pointed out. “The consequences for them may be almost as severe as if their own homes were destroyed if they’re living on the edge, as many service workers are already, even without a disaster.”
Elliott offered a broader view, pointing to the ways disaster damage to property can affect inequality over time. “If you’re a low-income resident in Los Angeles, even if your property wasn’t directly affected, there can be these indirect knock-on effects for lower-income and middle-income people either because of supply potential going down in housing, or disruptions in work just giving you general precarity,” he said. For California residents, one of these indirect effects might prove to be astronomical utility bills, as Pacific Gas and Electric Company has struggled to stay afloat in the wake of unprecedented wildfire damage.
Of course, like the Saxtons, not everyone directly affected or displaced by the Woolsey fire is a Malibu millionaire. For those in the humbler neighborhoods affected, or for those who bought decades ago before the local real estate market became too hot for most to handle, rebuilding may not be an option. One measure of the fallout will be gauged by following how many of these residents end up having to put more geographical and social distance between themselves and their elite former neighbors.
Elliott predicted that number would be high. “The more costly the event, the more inequality in wealth is going to emerge over time,” he told me. “Given the amount of property damage there, that would be our expectation for Southern California.”
To some extent, good policies can mitigate effects of the disaster-inequality crises. Local government can carefully consider where people are allowed to build or rebuild, for example, keeping in mind whether it’s fair for taxpayers to subsidize homes and businesses in areas that are frequently flooded or burned, as Lodge suggested. Or they could earmark funds for affordable housing or rental assistance for those whose homes weren’t directly impacted by a disaster, but who have suffered economically from the fallout, as Elliott offered.
For the Saxtons, the future seemed shaky. Their property now “looks like the landscape of the moon,” Matthew said, and they expected its value to plummet. They figured they’d need to rebuild and stay there for four or five years just to break even on their original investment, and that they’d have to find a way to cover the difference between the cost of their new mobile home and what their insurance would pay them. Matthew worked at an office in Malibu, and when we spoke earlier this week, he was waiting to find out once the evacuation orders were lifted whether the building* remained.
Against a broader backdrop of accelerating political chaos and routine mass shootings—including one that left 13 dead in Thousand Oaks, where the Saxtons took refuge, just hours before the Woolsey fire forced residents to evacuate—an increasingly dystopian reality loomed. Though the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department said there has been no looting in Malibu, singer Pink’s husband Carey Hart posted a photo to Instagram on Tuesday of a group of gun-toting, masked men bearing a sign that read “LOOTERS WILL BE SHOT ON SITE!” Another Instagram feed with the handle @prayformalibu posted a photo of a similar sign: “Welcome 2 Point Dume Looters get bullets Fireman get hugs.”
At a moment when asking what really stands between Americans and civil war is not entirely unreasonable, addressing “wealth inequality is an issue not only of fairness,” as Lodge noted, but also critical to maintaining social stability.
*Correction 11/16/2018: A previous version of this story suggested Matthew Saxton was concerned about his job, when in fact he was worried solely about the office building in which he worked. We regret the error.
A rather unusual phenomenon was captured in an up-close video of one of the current California wildfires in which a fiery-electric-looking pilar of intense heat can be seen supercharging the massive blaze.
ABC 7 News reporter Laura Anthony posted footage of the Camp Fire to her Twitter page last Friday showing what she is calling a ‘fire devil’ which is essentially a ‘fire whirl.’
Some online conspiracy theorists believe there is much more to the recent fires and are even going as far as to say that “directed energy weapons” a.k.a. “DEWs” are to blame.
Melted cars, wheels, engine blocks, blown out neighborhoods, they all look suspicious as renown MMA fighter Eddie Bravo pointed out on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast in which he appeared on Saturday.
“There are some crazy people out there saying they are being started by some sort of directed energy weapons,” the Jujitsu master explained. “I don’t know that’s what the crazy people are saying.”
“There’s just a lot of weird shit out there like houses like you can see house, house, house completely leveled and all the trees around them nothing wrong the trees at all,” Bravo said. “Weird. Just weird shit like that.”
When German soldiers used the “I was just following orders” defense during the Nuremberg trials as a justification for heinous war crimes, it was established that “defense of superior orders” is not a defense for war crimes. As Nuremberg Principle IV states, The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior […]
The Facts:Dr. Tomo Shibata has proposed a Bill to members of the California legislature entitled ‘The Organized Torture Act,’ which seeks to criminalize many of the types of attacks that are clandestinely made on Targeted Individuals.
Reflect On:How does making each individual in society culpable for their immoral and illegal actions, despite the pressure brought to bear on them to do these acts by their authority, help to liberate us as a collective?
When German soldiers used the “I was just following orders” defense during the Nuremberg trials as a justification for heinous war crimes, it was established that “defense of superior orders” is not a defense for war crimes. As Nuremberg Principle IV states,
The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.
Now, Human Rights Analyst Dr. Tomo Shibata would like this form of culpability governing war crimes extended to all those who are participating or are complicit in the ‘Organized Torture’ of Targeted Individuals, which involves a multiplicity of tactics and processes including gangstalking, intimidation, surveillance, and directed Electronic Weapons attacks. Dr. Shibata views these acts at least on a par with war crimes if not even more insidious in their nature and intent. She maintains that, “The proposed bill titled the ‘Organized Torture Act’ declares that Organized Covert Torture is a Crime against Humanity.”
This proposal was made, Dr. Shibata states, on the basis of complaints to human rights groups from high numbers of residents across California from various cities including San Diego, Berkeley, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Palo Alto, and others, of “organized covert torture” whereby, in lieu of outright abduction, victims are kept under constant control of the covert torture organizations by organized stalking, sustained surreptitious monitoring, cyberstalking, and stealth physical assault and battery with radiation weaponry such as microwave/radar surveillance weapons. Different sources offer varying estimates, running into hundreds of thousands, of the numbers of organized covert torture victims often labeled “Targeted Individuals” within the USA and around the world.
Why this particular form of crime is so insidious is that victims are often unaware that such intentional activities are being performed on them, and as these crimes often involved a concerted combination of physiological, social, mental and emotional attacks carried out clandestinely, the victim is often left in a state of isolation, to deal with feelings of paranoia and doubts about their own sanity.
If any type of crime needed the attention of the general and awakening public it is this one, as a growing awareness and acknowledgment of this phenomenon is absolutely essential to bring solace to the victims as well as empowering them to find ways to overcome these attacks. Dr. Shibata’s initiative is an important avenue for this, and it is why she needs to be supported by the public in this endeavor, especially in California where interested legislators are looking for signs that there is a public need and demand for this bill before tabling it in the legislature.
Who Is Doing The Targeting?
Here is where it gets complex, and for good reason. It’s hard to know who is calling the shots here. In all likelihood, the technology and organization that make these covert attacks possible and prevent any resistance from the citizenry comes directly from the secretive bowels of the Deep State and those areas of the Military-Industrial Complex that this group has infiltrated. Certainly this power has been around for a long time, as John F. Kennedy clearly identified back in 1961:
We are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence–on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations. Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed. It conducts the Cold War, in short, with a war-time discipline no democracy would ever hope or wish to match. (source)
And as technology has improved, and remote influence has become more powerful and accurate, it appears that one growing cog of the Deep State’s strategy of domination and enslavement is to experiment on individuals, not in laboratories as they did with MK Ultra experiments that ultimately led to citizens successfully suing the government for damages, but in the course of individuals’ normal lives, while they smugly observe our inability to clearly detect and understand what is going on.
Whistleblower Testimony
We do have brave whistleblowers who have come out to help us see some pieces of the puzzle. One is former FBI Special Agent Geral Sosbee, who spoke with Ramola:
Former FBI Special Agent and Whistleblower Geral Sosbee testified that he believed the FBI leads the process to wrongfully name people Suspected Terrorists or criminals and centrally command DHS Fusion Center contractors and local police to commit and condone the organized stalking and organized covert torture with stealth weapons against them.
Geral Sosbee stated that it was his “personal opinion–based on also my professional experience–that the FBI is spearheading the most colossal and evil attacks on people ever conceived on the face of the Earth, and they are using Deep Space-based technology, they are using Bio-Chemical Bio Warfare Elements and Agents, and they’re using Psychological Warfare to destroy people.”
Further, Mr. Sosbee testifies that the FBI operate as a global Mafia syndicate; historic analyses of how CIA and FBI operate have shown that they incorporate elements of the Mafia, gangs, and criminal networks in informant, infiltration, and entrapment operations. (source, source)
“I have learned through my battles with FBI that the agents, operatives, hoodlums, thugs and murderers are the essence of all FBI operations, even though the FBI puts on a charade of semi respectability on popular media. The FBI is in reality a global MAFIA syndicate and most people fear or idolize them.”
In an article describing how the FBI persuades corrupt Federal Magistrate Judges (FMJ) to issue fraudulent court orders against people of integrity and whistleblowers they wish to destroy by making them targets of Fusion Center Surveillance and stealth-weapon “monitoring,” Sosbee describes how local police become pawns in this mission:
“All police and all private security companies are especially reminded not to interfere with the secret orders of a FMJ. With any effort to defend the Target against the order, the licensed investigator or police officer loses his license or is fired through contempt orders.”
The Reason Individual Conspirators Need To Be Held Accountable
There are other testimonies from former agents, politicians, and military people, but the reason I bring up Sosbee’s testimony is for how it paints a picture of the hierarchical web of complicity that makes these operations possible. Law enforcement, fusion center contractors, criminals and even some members of the general public can be complicit in the enterprise. Thus a hierarchical chain-of-command leading upwards into the most secretive and protected bowels of the Deep State means it is nearly impossible for us to get to the head of the snake.
Leilani Farha was being given a walking tour in central San Francisco. Near a thronged artisanal grocery store and a food-truck park, she saw something under a freeway that gave her pause.
A young homeless man sat on the ground. He wore two pairs of jeans and had a hood pulled over his long brown hair. Before him was a crockpot filled with burning paper, over which he was heating tortillas in a dirty skillet. As cars, cyclists and tech commuter buses rushed past, white smoke poured into the darkening air.
“The last time I saw cooking on a sidewalk,” Farha said, “was in Mumbai.”
Farha, 49, is a Canadian lawyer. She is also the United Nations special rapporteur on adequate housing, charged with probing deplorable living conditions and assessing compliance with international human rights law. Her latest project is a report on “informal settlements” – shanties, favelas, tent cities – which will be presented at the UN general assembly.
In Mexico City, she spent time in a slum by a railway line. In Manila and Jakarta, she visited decrepit and makeshift houses. San Francisco has a median home value of $1.3m and would seem an incongruous next stop. Farha had come on an unofficial visit, at the invitation of academics and advocates.
“The situation is unacceptable in light of the wealth of the country,” she said, adding that she was “deeply, deeply concerned” by the homelessness she saw.
Poverty in the US is an established UN focus; last month, another rapporteur was dismayed by visits to Skid Row in Los Angeles and hookworm-afflicted deep south communities.
In 2011, a UN representative visited Sacramento. After discovering that homeless people were defecating into plastic bags, the official wrote to the city’s mayor. Such circumstances, she said, could amount to “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment”.
Despite the record stock market and unemployment at 4.1% (despite a December jobs miss), the socialist utopia known as California is home to an ever-sprawling tent city which estimated to contain over 1,000 residents.
After a ZeroHedge report last March on the sprawling tent cities, a 10-minute video, dubbed by some as “incredible” has emerged showing the shocking growth of the encampment near Angels Stadium in Anaheim, CA along the Santa Ana river.
Locals have become increasingly alarmed by the rapid spread of unregulated squatters and their belongings and their waste.
As a cyclist who uses the trail to ride to the beach often, over this last year it has gotten substantially worse. It is unsafe and unsanitary with loose dogs everywhere and human fecal matter scattered on the trail.
The area is disgusting and reeks of trash and feces.
He reports that the bike trail, once popular with outdoors enthusiasts and families which runs for miles to beaches along the Pacific Ocean, has become unsafe as miscreants plot assaults and robberies on passing riders, even laying tripwires across the path. –Dan Lyman
Domestic Migration
As we pointed out last March, California’s Democrats aren’t just failing the poor people that have been relegated to tent cities (see “Americans Fleeing Expensive, Over-Taxed Metro Areas In Pursuit Of Affordability“). In fact, people of all income brackets are fleeing the state in droves. Not surprisingly, these domestic migrants are flocking to areas with a lower cost of living, lower/no state income taxes, less regulations and higher job growth (aka “Red” states).
Ironically, the dark areas on the map above seem to match perfectly with the dark areas on this map which indicate those with the highest state income tax rates.
El Cajon, CA — In spite of the myriad stories over the years, in which police and governments across the United States have been exposed as tyrants, cities and their armed agents continue to persecute good people who help those less fortunate than them. The latest case of police oppressing those who’d dare to help the homeless comes out of El Cajon, California this week in which more than a dozen good Samaritans were arrested.
In October of last year, the El Cajon City Council unanimously voted to ban the act of sharing food on city-owned property. This ban was put in place for the ostensible purpose of preventing the spread of hepatitis A.
While the government held the fear of hep A over everyone’s head as a reason to not share food, their hypocrisy was revealed in the details of the law.
If a group of people attempts to hand out food as a charitable act, they are in violation of the law and are subject to arrest. However, if a group of people hands out food for non-charitable acts—such as birthday parties, group events, etc.—then they are not in violation of the law and are not subject to arrest.
Naturally, the good citizens of El Cajon saw the law for what it is—as hep A certainly cannot differentiate between charitable and non-charitable food—and they moved to stop this war on the homeless.
A group called Break the Ban organized the event on Sunday knowing they were in violation of the law but also knowing that what they were doing was morally right.
“It was absolutely necessary to break this law until they were willing to enforce it, and, now that they have, we will continue this fight in court,” said another organizer, Shane Parmely.
Mark Lane, one of the organizers of the event told the San Diego Union-Tribune that more than a dozen people—including a 14-year-old child—were arrested at the Wells Park.
Showing the sheer hypocritical nature of the arrests, the group was also handing out toiletries which would actually help to prevent the spread of hep A, yet they were still arrested.
“This park is part of city property so you aren’t allowed to food share,” the officer in the video below says. “…If you guys continue to food share, then you guys are subject to arrest, all right?”
Knowing that what they were doing was right, despite the police making their announcement, the group disobeyed and continued to hand out food and supplies to the homeless.
That is when the arrests began.
Most of the folks arrested were each charged with a misdemeanor for violating El Cajon municipal code 1.28.010, which prohibits “food sharing” in public spaces for charitable reasons.
In what was likely a PR move by police, none of the people who were arrested were actually taken to jail. Instead, they were given notices to appear in court for their charges.
Smugly speaking to NBC 7, Councilmember Ben Kalasho addressed the good Samaritans, telling them that if they really wanted to help “you can go out there, pick them up, take them back to your house and feed them and board them and room them and have them take a shower if you’re really wanting to help.”
However, this would most likely be against some other ordinance. As TFTP reported last week, cities have ordinances in places that prohibit property owners from providing temporary refuge to homeless people unless they meet rigorous industrial standards.
Greg Schiller, a good Samaritan in Chicago, learned the hard way about the police state who forced him to stop helping homeless people by threatening to condemn his home and charge him.
The good news is that the kind-hearted folks at Break the Ban have no intention of stopping what they are doing. They are going to continue to break the law because people need their help.
“Our goal is to get the ban overturned and sit down and figure out how to humanely deal with something that’s not going away,” Lane said.
Change does not come from sitting idly by and rolling over. True change comes when good people decide it is time to break bad laws.
Matt Agorist is an honorably discharged veteran of the USMC and former intelligence operator directly tasked by the NSA. This prior experience gives him unique insight into the world of government corruption and the American police state. Agorist has been an independent journalist for over a decade and has been featured on mainstream networks around the world. Agorist is also the Editor at Large at the Free Thought Project, where this article first appeared. Follow @MattAgorist on Twitter, Steemit, and now on Facebook.
The San Andreas fault has seemingly come alive in recent days, putting the highly populated Bay Area in California on alert. “The Big One” is coming, and it could be right around the corner.
The earthquake that rattled the Bay Area on Thursday was just one more reminder of the power and danger of the Hayward Fault, which runs below the populous East Bay area. But the San Andreas fault could awaken at any time, causing the Hayward fault to also shift, which would rock the area. The Hayward fault could easily produce a magnitude 7 or greater earthquake and it is directly underneath heavily populated areas.
“So who knows, California!” says Joe Joseph of the Daily Sheeple. “Better buy a boat, build an ark, who know what the heck you’re gonna need. And anybody out there that’s feeling ambitious in the real estate market, why don’t you go and buy up some desert land…who knows! Maybe you’ll have beachfront property soon!”
On its website, the USGS calls the Hayward fault the region’s “tectonic time bomb,” which could “cause hundreds of deaths, leave thousands homeless and devastate the region’s economy.” In 2016, David Schwartz, a USGS geologist, said in an interview that above the Hayward fault are “2 million people who directly live on top of it. It sits geographically in the center of the Bay Area. There’s a tremendous amount of infrastructure built upon it — water systems, gas, electrical, BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) crosses it — so a large event on that fault is like hitting the bull’s eye on a target.”
Of course, the San Andreas fault is well overdue for a massive earthquake as well. The last major earthquake on the San Andreas fault happened in 1857 and scientists say they’re due every 100-150 years.
“One thing’s for certain,” says Joseph. “The San Andreas fault is a fault that’s certainly nothing to ignore. And if you live in California, you know how to deal with earthquakes.” Hopefully. Hopefully, those in California are taking these two faults seriously.
It appears that something unusual is happening along the California coastline. Over the past 24 hours, California has been hit by 46 earthquakes. That is approximately twice the normal daily number, and much of the shaking has taken place in the southern part of the state. In recent weeks I have been writing repeatedly about the alarming seismic activity that we have been seeing along the west coast, and many believe that the potential for a megaquake is significantly higher than normal right now. Unfortunately, most residents of California are not paying any attention to what is going on at all, and so if there is a major event they will be completely blindsided by it.
When a magnitude 4.0 earthquake struck near Julian, California on Wednesday, that immediately got my attention, and that quake was followed very rapidly by several others…
The shaking began at 4:33 p.m. on Wednesday when a 4.0 quake occurred nearly 10 miles beneath the earth’s surface, just east of the Earthquake Valley fault, one of the most active systems in Southern California. The temblor had originally been listed at 4.2.
The main shock was followed five minutes later by a 3.0 aftershock in the same spot. Then a 3.6 quake occurred near the same spot at 7:57 p.m. Wednesday.
Seismologists say that a 3.6 quake broke in the same area at 2:32 a.m. on Thursday, continuing the seismic spasm.
Of course Julian is not the only one that has seen a substantial earthquake over the past 24 hours. Just 6 hours ago, a magnitude 3.2 earthquake struck Gonzales, California. Anything in the magnitude 3 or magnitude 4 range is not going to cause any significant damage, but the concern is that these smaller quakes may be building up to something larger.
According to a study published by the USGS, there is a “99% chance” that California will be hit by a major earthquake within the next 30 years…
In a 2008 study, the US Geological Survey found there’s a greater than 99% chance of a 6.7 magnitude quake or larger hitting the California area over the next 30 years. That type of quake along the San Andreas Fault in Southern California could kill an estimated 1,800 people, the study said, injure 53,000 and result in $214 billion in damage. California’s infrastructure could be crippled for weeks, if not months.
Such an event would definitely be catastrophic, but California could definitely recover.
However, if the California coastline were to be hit by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake, the devastation would be unlike anything that we have ever seen before in American history.
Not too long ago, the Los Angeles Times published an article that discussed what the damage from a magnitude 8.2 earthquake would look like. The following is a short excerpt from that article…
Main freeways to Las Vegas and Phoenix that cross the San Andreas fault would be destroyed in this scenario; Interstate 10 crosses the fault in a dozen spots, and Interstate 15 would see the roadway sliced where it crosses the fault, with one part of the roadway shifted from the other by 15 feet, Jones said.
“Those freeways cross the fault, and when the fault moves, they will be destroyed, period,” Jones said. “To be that earthquake, it has to move that fault, and it has to break those roads.”
The aqueducts that bring in 88% of Los Angeles’ water supply and cross the San Andreas fault all could be damaged or destroyed, Jones said.
And remember, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake would be far, far worse than a magnitude 8.2 earthquake.
At the same time all of this shaking has been happening in California, we have also seen very disturbing seismic activity elsewhere on the globe.
For example, just recently a supervolcano in Russia shot hot volcanic ash “six miles into the sky”…
A Siberian super-volcano is worrying scientists after it’s shocking and sudden eruption flung hot ash six miles into the sky. This volcano is one of the most active in Russia.
Scientists working at the geophysical department of the Russian Academy of Science in north-eastern Russia’s Kamchatka Krai region have confirmed the giant eruption took place at the site of the Shiveluch Volcano yesterday over a 20 minute period. They also verified and saw the volcano spew piping hot ash 10 kilometers (6 miles) into the sky. So far, no locals or villages have been affected by this volcano’s eruption, but it’s sparking fears that a larger and more powerful explosion could occur in the very near future.
A major eruption of just a single supervolcano anywhere in the world could cast enormous amounts of dust and ash into the atmosphere and cool global temperatures significantly for up to a decade. If that happened, we would see massive crop failures all over the planet and millions upon millions of people could end up dying from the resulting famine.
With each passing year our planet is becoming increasingly unstable, and scientists assure us that absolutely cataclysmic seismic events are in our future. Now is the time to get prepared, but unfortunately most people aren’t listening to the warnings.
“This is not your traditional nuclear apocalypse scenario. A lot of people will be killed but a large percentage of the population will survive. They will be at risk and they will need help.”
With each passing day and each new ICBM launch from a seemingly unhinged North Korean dictator, the fears of an attack on the U.S. mainland, though faint, increasingly weigh on the hearts and minds of Americans, particularly those in California. As The Guardian points out today, those fears have even prompted a group of California public health officials and emergency responders to gather for a strategy session with Hal Kempfer, a retired marine lieutenant colonel, to discuss which areas are the most likely targets and how citizens should respond to an attack.
Hal Kempfer, a noted international security expert, is getting a roomful of California public health officials and emergency responders to think about the unthinkable – a nuclear bomb exploding at the port of Long Beach, about four miles away.
“A lot of people will be killed,” he said, “but a large percentage of the population will survive. They will be at risk and they will need help.”
“If you want to mess up southern California, if you want to mess up the west coast, if you want to mess up our country – where do you attack?” Kempfer asks. “If I’m sitting in North Korea and looking at possible targets, I’m going to be looking at Long Beach very closely.”
He talks about the port and downtown Long Beach being “toast” – no exaggeration, since the blast wave is likely to vaporize everything in its immediate path. But the city health department, the Long Beach airport and fire department might not be; they are all somewhat protected by a hilly area that is likely to halt the initial blast wave. And so the city can, tentatively, think about setting up a center of emergency operations.
Of course, the radioactive fallout created as the explosion gathers up tremendous quantities of dust and ocean water and spits them into the atmosphere would represent a secondary grave risk, especially in the first hours after an attack.
Not to mention the electromagnetic pulse that is likely to knock out electronic systems including phones and computers, the pile-ups expected on the freeways as drivers are blinded by the flash of the explosion, the rush for food, water and gasoline as millions of Angelenos attempt to drive out of the region, and the terror triggered by even the idea of a second, follow-up attack.
Meanwhile, lest you think this was all just a creative way for some public employees to skip work for a day, Ventura County, located just northwest of Los Angeles, has even taken the unusual step of prepping a 250-page plan on how to respond to the humanitarian crisis that would result from a nuclear attack in Los Angeles.
In fact, their efforts even include this truly bizarre public service announcement that instructs folks to shelter in place and cover windows with plastic.
Of course, as we pointed out back in August, while a global nuclear confrontation is generally viewed as a bad thing, for Ron Hubbard, President of Atlas Survival Shelters in Los Angeles, it has resulted in an economic windfall as a staggering number of Californians have suddenly turned into doomsday preppers.
“It’s crazy, I’ve never seen anything like it,” Ron Hubbard, president of Atlas Survival Shelters, told Fox11. “It’s all over the country. I sold shelters today in North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, California.”
The company, based in Montebello in eastern Los Angeles, sells shelters priced from $10,000 to $100,000. Hubbard told the station that the shelters are designed to be buried 20 feet below ground and can sustain survivors for up to one year, depending on the size and model.
He told the station he had sold more than 30 units in recent days, including to customers in Japan.
All that said, Kempfer points out that there is a silver lining here because any attack from North Korea likely wouldn’t result in “your traditional nuclear apocalypse scenario” because Kim Jong-Un probably only has weapons capable of destroying about 1 square mile at a time.
Rather, it’s likely to be a Hiroshima-sized bomb – large enough to obliterate everything within a square-mile radius and kill tens of thousands of people, either immediately or through the lingering effects of radiation. But still leaving millions of survivors across the region who would need help.
“We’re talking about smaller North Korean things,” Kempfer emphasized, though the word “smaller” sounds very far from reassuring. “This is not your traditional nuclear apocalypse scenario.”
So, Californians at least have that going for them, which is nice.
Back in 2008, local news reported on a UFO that crashed near Needles, California. Residents in the tri-state area of Nevada, Arizona, and California saw something weird blaze out of the sky and crash on the banks of the Colorado River, South of Needles.
The California State flag flies outside City Hall, in Los Angeles, California on January 27, 2017. (Photo by AFP)
A campaign for the state of California to secede from the United States over the election of Donald Trump as president is gaining momentum after supporters were allowed to start collecting signatures for the independence measure to be put to a vote.
California’s Secretary of State Alex Padilla gave permission on Thursday for proponents of “Calexit” to start collecting the nearly 600,000 signatures needed to initiate a referendum for exiting the country.
Some 585,407 signatures are required by July 25 for the measure to qualify for an initial ballot in November 2018. Voters would then need to decide in another referendum in 2019 whether California should become a separate country.
A “Yes” vote would repeal clauses in the California Constitution “stating California is an inseparable part of the United States and that the United States Constitution is the supreme law of the land,” a statement by Padilla’s office said.
California is the most populous state in the US with nearly 40 million residents and the world’s sixth-largest economy.
The Yes California Independence Campaign, which promotes the secession of California from the United States, was formed in August 2015.
Trump’s election gave a huge boost to the campaign, which is also called Calexit by pundits comparing the effort to Brexit – Britain’s referendum to exit the European Union.
One in every three California residents supports the state’s peaceful withdrawal from the union, with many of them strongly opposed to Trump’s presidential election, according to a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll released last week.
People attend a rally and candlelight vigil in Los Angeles, California, January 26, 2017, to protest against Islamophobia and US President Donald Trump. (Photo by AFP)
At an anti-Trump demonstration in Los Angeles and San Francisco on Friday, protesters waved signs saying “California out of the United States” and “US out of California.”
“There’s such hostility towards Trump that many citizens believe it would be smarter to leave than fight,” said Democratic political consultant Steve Maviglio.
However, secession is deemed highly unrealistic, facing political, legal and possibly even military obstacles. The United States fought the Civil War from 1861 to 1865 after eleven Southern states attempted to secede from the union.
As High Times noted, a report by the Drug Policy Alliance in 2013 found the average cash seized totaled $5,100 — an alarmingly high sum, considering the same report cited an investigation which discovered in roughly 80 percent of those cases, the person was never charged with a crime.
California — In a refreshing and unfortunately rare instance of reasonableness in policy, California Governor Jerry Brown recently signed into law a piece of legislation requiring police to secure an actual conviction before stealing people’s stuff in drug-related offenses.
Civil asset forfeiture has been rightly likened to state-sanctioned armed robbery, as it allows police to commandeer cash, vehicles, homes, or any property of value — even if the person is never charged with a crime — and then use or sell the items for profit for their departments.
Police in Oklahoma, for example, recently honed their thievery by rolling out nefarious Electronic Recovery and Access to Data machines, known as ERAD, which can scan your bank account and prepaid cards, and — if an officer believes any balances are tied to a crime — can wipe those accounts dry.
California’s new law, formerly Senate Bill 443, quashes this nightmarish policing-for-profit in the exact way advocates of civil asset forfeiture (CAF) reform have been demanding for years.
For police to keep cash stolen from people in amounts under $40,000 under the premise it has something to do with a drug-related crime, there must be an actual guilty verdict in court.
“The new law establishes some of the strongest property rights protections in the most populous state in the nation,” explained Theshia Naidoo, legal director of criminal justice at the Drug Policy Alliance, in a statement. “The reforms are a model not only because of the policy enacted, but also for how the legislative process should work to promote the best interests of Californians.”
California’s version of legalized armed robbery is particularly pernicious, as the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California pointed out, allowing some police departments to keep 80 percent of the proceeds from their CAF booty — well over the 65 percent cap mandated by state law.
In part, this is due to civil asset forfeiture’s evil twin — federal equitable sharing — a convenient workaround for strict laws protecting civilians from greedy cops.
“Unfortunately, California law enforcement has found a lucrative way to evade the state’s better-than-average laws: the federal government’s equitable sharing program,” wrote the Institute for Justice last year. “Indeed, a recent report by the Drug Policy Alliance noted that while state forfeiture revenue has remained flat, equitable sharing revenue has skyrocketed. Between 2000 and 2013, California agencies collected an eye-popping $696 million, or nearly $50 million each calendar year, through equitable sharing with the Department of Justice. A large majority of both assets seized and proceeds received resulted not from adoptions but from joint task forces and investigations with the federal government. This vehicle for equitable sharing will continue despite DOJ policy changes announced in January 2015. California law enforcement also hauled in almost $108 million from the Treasury Department’s equitable sharing program during fiscal years 2000 to 2013.”
As High Times noted, a report by the Drug Policy Alliance in 2013 found the average cash seized totaled $5,100 — an alarmingly high sum, considering the same report cited an investigation which discovered in roughly 80 percent of those cases, the person was never charged with a crime.
Law enforcement unions around the country have adamantly opposed any reforms to their convenient second profit source, and after a brief federal suspension of civil asset forfeiture at the beginning of the year, the Department of Justice reversed course, re-implementing CAF in April.
As voracious as police appetites’ for your stuff might be, one of the original creators of the civil asset forfeiture program excoriated its current manifestation as profiteering from behind a badge in an op-ed penned in the Wall Street Journal in February this year. Brad Cates, director of the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Asset Forfeiture Office from 1985 through 1989, wrote:
“During the Reagan administration I helped establish these programs because I believed they would quickly channel seized criminals’ profits into the fight against organized crime and drug cartels. Yet over time we have created a new bad incentive: policing for profit, out of the reach of the proper legislative budget process.”
California’s law will go into effect in the beginning of 2017, and — out of several states recently attempting to curb the ridiculous practice — is so far the only legislation to mandate an actual conviction, a guilty verdict, in order for police to keep assets.
“Civil asset forfeiture has allowed the government to seize and keep cash, cars, real estate, and any other property suspected of being connected to criminal activity even if the owner is never convicted of a crime. While civil asset forfeiture was originally conceived in the 1980s as a way to target the resources of criminal organizations, it has become a method for law enforcement to confiscate and profit from the savings and property of those not charged with any criminal wrongdoing […]
“SB 443 requires that state and local agencies abide by stricter standards before they profit from federal forfeitures.”
Echoing countless others, Cates concludes his editorial in no uncertain terms:
“Three decades ago I helped create our civil-asset forfeiture system; now it is time to end it.”
“Our citizens should know the urgent facts…but they don’t because our media serves imperial, not popular interests. They lie, deceive, connive and suppress what everyone needs to know, substituting managed news misinformation and rubbish for hard truths…”—Oliver Stone
Tales from the Conspiratum 