Arizona Planning for Exodus of Californians to State in Event of Major Quake
May 21st, 2018Via: NBC:
Government agencies, businesses and other organizations in Arizona plan to participate in an exercise to practice how the state would respond to a migration of 400,000 people following a catastrophic earthquake in Southern California.
The Arizona Department of Emergency and Military Affairs says participants in the National Mass Care Exercise in the coming week will tackle how to organize operations such as providing food, shelter and medical services.
The department says its planning for the exercise has been underway for nearly a year.
New Zealand: Northlanders Living in Cars as Housing Crisis Hits Hard
May 21st, 2018We had a couple with five children turn up to Playcentre. They’re living in tents. They fled Wellington with a plan to build some sort of shack on a small piece of land that they bought a couple of valleys over from us. Until that happens: Tents. Both mum and dad had been in the IT field. *chortle*
We are seeing every manner of outlaw dwelling imaginable going up all over this area. Shipping containers. Yurts. Old buses. Uninsulated garden shed-type structures. Cob. Re-cycled houses, which are teardowns from other areas that have been put on trucks and dropped in cow paddocks.
There are many factors contributing to the mess up here. I’ll just touch on three.
First, Northland is very poor compared to the rest of the country and property prices are relatively low—if you’re from Auckland, Wellington or Christchurch. So you have people selling out of the cities, quite literally running for the hills, driving prices higher. People who were poor to begin with in Northland are finding it even more difficult to find housing. The next thing you know, people are aspiring to live in shipping containers with a couple of solar panels for power.
Second, it’s extremely expensive to build a legal dwelling in New Zealand. In the Far North, since so many people live in upmermitted homes, the council seems to want to severely stick it to anyone who tries to comply. Everyone knows this and increasingly they’re saying, “F-it. I’ll live in a shack.”
Third, it’s hard to find places to rent. I don’t see this mentioned much, but here’s why it’s hard to rent in Northland: Property owners know that if they rent out a house up here, they could easily wind up with a deadbeat renter who’s difficult and expensive to dislodge or a renter who trashes the property. A meth lab operation is another real possibility.
There have been so many nightmare situations with renting that property owners would rather not deal with it. And why risk renting when property prices have never been higher? If someone has an extra house, it’s easy to sell it for a relative fortune to people fleeing Auckland.
NZ is billed as some sort of Switzerland of the South pacific. Maybe, for a few people, but the reality on the ground is very different for most.
The new government is apparently going to crack down on foreign property speculators, but that’s not going to solve the problem. The government could tell wealthy foreigners, “Sure, you can buy your doomstead, but you have to build two more houses for sale, one in Auckland, Wellington or Christchurch and one in some other district. We would be getting two new homes for sale for every one bought by a speculator. Don’t worry. It’ll never happen.
How about some sort of inexpensive and fast way for councils to approve smaller dwellings?
The way permitting is done now, with the breathtaking fees and Kafkaesque red tape and delays, just has to change.
Via: New Zealand Herald:
Northlanders are living in cars and cowsheds amidst a public housing crisis that won’t be solved by plans to build or buy 147 houses by 2020, a community leader says.
One Double Five Community House co-ordinator Carol Peters said Northlanders were living on streets, in emergency houses, in overcrowded houses and even in cowsheds.
Peters said building cheaper houses was a way to alleviate the problem but that required partnership between the Government, local councils and community housing providers.
Her comments come as a Ministry of Social Development report revealed it is regularly paying more than $1 million each week to Northlanders for accommodation supplements (AS) and temporary additional support (TAS).
Related: Left Behind: Why Boomtown New Zealand Has a Homelessness Crisis
Saildrones
May 20th, 2018Via: Bloomberg:
Engineer and adventurer Richard Jenkins has made oceangoing robots that could revolutionize fishing, drilling, and environmental science. His aim: a thousand of them.
Drinking Baking Soda Could be an Inexpensive, Safe Way to Combat Autoimmune Disease
May 20th, 2018Warning: Nothing that appears on Cryptogon should be viewed as medical advice.
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Thanks to the Cryptogon reader who told me about taking sodium bicarbonate after my kidney stone disaster!
Via: Agusta University:
A daily dose of baking soda may help reduce the destructive inflammation of autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, scientists say.
They have some of the first evidence of how the cheap, over-the-counter antacid can encourage our spleen to promote instead an anti-inflammatory environment that could be therapeutic in the face of inflammatory disease, Medical College of Georgia scientists report in The Journal of Immunology.
They have shown that when rats or healthy people drink a solution of baking soda, or sodium bicarbonate, it becomes a trigger for the stomach to make more acid to digest the next meal and for little-studied mesothelial cells sitting on the spleen to tell the fist-sized organ that there’s no need to mount a protective immune response.
“It’s most likely a hamburger not a bacterial infection,” is basically the message, says Dr. Paul O’Connor, renal physiologist in the MCG Department of Physiology at Augusta University and the study’s corresponding author.
…
One of the many functions of the kidneys is balancing important compounds like acid, potassium and sodium. With kidney disease, there is impaired kidney function and one of the resulting problems can be that the blood becomes too acidic, O’Connor says. Significant consequences can include increased risk of cardiovascular disease and osteoporosis.
“It sets the whole system up to fail basically,” O’Connor says. Clinical trials have shown that a daily dose of baking soda can not only reduce acidity but actually slow progression of the kidney disease, and it’s now a therapy offered to patients.
“We started thinking, how does baking soda slow progression of kidney disease?” O’Connor says.
That’s when the anti-inflammatory impact began to unfold as they saw reduced numbers of M1s and increased M2s in their kidney disease model after consuming the common compound.
China Reportedly Holding Thousands of Muslims in Internment Camps
May 18th, 2018Via: AP:
Since last spring, Chinese authorities in the heavily Muslim region of Xinjiang have ensnared tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of Muslim Chinese — and even foreign citizens — in mass internment camps. This detention campaign has swept across Xinjiang, a territory half the area of India, leading to what a U.S. commission on China last month said is “the largest mass incarceration of a minority population in the world today.”
Chinese officials have largely avoided comment on the camps, but some are quoted in state media as saying that ideological changes are needed to fight separatism and Islamic extremism. Radical Muslim Uighurs have killed hundreds in recent years, and China considers the region a threat to peace in a country where the majority is Han Chinese.
The internment program aims to rewire the political thinking of detainees, erase their Islamic beliefs and reshape their very identities. The camps have expanded rapidly over the past year, with almost no judicial process or legal paperwork. Detainees who most vigorously criticize the people and things they love are rewarded, and those who refuse to do so are punished with solitary confinement, beatings and food deprivation.
Recovery: 51 Million U.S. Households Can’t Afford Basics
May 18th, 2018Via: United Way:
There are 50.8 million U.S. households that can’t afford a basic monthly budget including housing, food, child care, health care, transportation and a cell phone, according to new data released by the United Way ALICE Project.
This calculation includes the 16.1 million households in poverty as well as another 34.7 million families called ALICE, which stands for Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed. These households earn above the Federal Poverty Level, but less than what it takes to survive in the modern economy. Combined, these households make up 43 percent of America’s 119 million households. The Project compares 2016 household costs versus incomes at the county-level in each state, exposing the failure of calculations based on national averages to accurately represent the extent of financial struggle in America.
Google: Behavioral Sequencing
May 18th, 2018Via: The Verge:
Google has built a multibillion-dollar business out of knowing everything about its users. Now, a video produced within Google and obtained by The Verge offers a stunningly ambitious and unsettling look at how some at the company envision using that information in the future.
The video was made in late 2016 by Nick Foster, the head of design at X (formerly Google X) and a co-founder of the Near Future Laboratory. The video, shared internally within Google, imagines a future of total data collection, where Google helps nudge users into alignment with their goals, custom-prints personalized devices to collect more data, and even guides the behavior of entire populations to solve global problems like poverty and disease.
U.S. Birth Rate Hits All-Time Low
May 17th, 2018Via: LiveScience:
The number of babies being born in the United States continues to fall, with the birth rate reaching a new record low in 2017, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Last year, about 3.8 million babies were born in the U.S., which is 2 percent lower than the number born in 2016, and the lowest recorded number of births in 30 years, according to the report.
What’s more, there were about 60 births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44, which is 3 percent lower than the rate in 2016, and the lowest recorded rate since the government started tracking birth rates in 1909.
The decline in the U.S. birth rate from 2016 to 2017 was the largest single-year drop since 2010, the researchers wrote in the report, which was published today (May 17).
The teen birth rate fell 7 percent from 2016 to 2017, to a rate of 19 births per 1,000 teens ages 15 to 19. In addition, birth rates generally declined for women under 40, reaching record lows among women in their 20s, the report authors found.
Part of the reason for the decline in U.S. birth rates may be that people are in a general state of economic uncertainty, said Karen Benjamin Guzzo, associate director of the Center for Family & Demographic Research at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Even though the Great Recession technically ended in 2009, people may still feel uneasy about their economic situation; they may be employed but working part time, or going to school and working, or trying to pay off student loans, Guzzo said.
“People feel just really uncertain about the future,” Guzzo told Live Science. “And that generally does not bode well for having kids.”
U.S. Cell Carriers Are Selling Access to Real-Time Phone Location Data
May 17th, 2018Via: zdnet:
Four of the largest cell giants in the US are selling your real-time location data to a company that you’ve probably never heard about before.
In case you missed it, a senator last week sent a letter demanding the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) investigate why Securus, a prison technology company, can track any phone “within seconds” by using data obtained from the country’s largest cell giants, including AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint, through an intermediary, LocationSmart.
The story blew up because a former police sheriff snooped on phone location data without a warrant, according The New York Times. The sheriff has pleaded not guilty to charges of unlawful surveillance.
Yet little is known about how LocationSmart obtained the real-time location data on millions of Americans, how the required consent from cell user owners was obtained, and who else has access to the data.
Kevin Bankston, director of New America’s Open Technology Institute, explained in a phone call that the Electronic Communications Privacy Act only restricts telecom companies from disclosing data to the government. It doesn’t restrict disclosure to other companies, who then may disclose that same data to the government.
He called that loophole “one of the biggest gaps in US privacy law.”
DIA Report on Warp Drive, Extra Dimensions, Anti-Gravity
May 16th, 2018This seems to be associated with the Tom DeLonge/To the Stars PSYOP.
At best, this is a limited hangout.
Via: The Drive:
The modern understanding of the Pentagon’s relationship with unexplained flying phenomena has become remarkably more pointed in the last six months since the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program was uncovered. Its disclosure came in between our own exclusive reporting on two very strange and well-documented encounters with strange aircraft operating in U.S. airspace. Now, new documents are coming to light that show the Department of Defense’s own spy agency was also interested in subjects that border on science fiction and the even the paranormal, including warp drive, extra-dimensional manipulation, dark energy, and other highly exotic forms of space travel.
