I don’t know anything about Mr Winters or the full circumstances of the last few days. However, it does suggest that there are some survivalists out there who are capable of being on the run for very long. Stockpiling weapons is one thing, but keeping dry and safe in the outdoors takes a bit more skill.

According to officials, Winters told an undercover agent he had 50 AR-15 rifles buried on his property and other properties. The agent also said Winters told him he wanted to burn his house down and then shoot agents as they arrived to the scene.

Winters also said he had at least 40 men that were willing to participate in his “last stand,” officials said. [Gawker]

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I guess we’ll never know, but I’d like to think that the key causes of this murder are alcohol and rage… even if they were arguing about the end of the Mayan Calendar.

Smith said in opening arguments Thursday that Humphreys shot Peterson during an alcohol-fueled rage that was exacerbated by his mother’s recent death and his obsession with the 12-21-12 “Mayan Apocalypse” prophecy that the world would end that day. Humphreys hadn’t slept the night before, waiting to see if the world really would end, a neighbor testified.

Testimony during the trial included neighbors saying they heard the two men arguing the night of Dec. 21, 2012, and Peterson telling Humphreys to go home just before they heard a shot. Both men lived at the Executive West apartment buildings in the 4500 block Ocean Beach Highway. The shooting happened in the doorway of Peterson’s apartment.
[Source: TDN]

Interestingly, the same small apartment block had someone else die after an argument in 2010.

Ostensibly an exercise in leveraging a popular meme for profit purposes only, the “official” Dec 21 2012 site has now been revived using the most generic cop out – the change has already begun, you just haven’t noticed….

I think the site’s latest menu speaks loudly:

The last 6 items are fear-based, primarily fear of authority & fear of those who are different. Not bad survival strategies, but not great if you wish to fit into current-day society.

Click on The Racial Divide and you get to read this:

You have the NAACP. You have BET. If we had WET (White Entertainment Television), we’d be racists. If we had a White Pride Day, you would call us racists.

If we had White History Month, we’d be racists.

If we had any organization for only whites to ‘advance’ OUR lives, we’d be racists.

This are valid, logical points. But why bring them up? You only look to penalize the other team if you are losing… I can’t help but feel what began as a money-making exercise has now become a political platform. Watch out for John Kehne running for office (somewhere in the south I presume).

I just found some images I was considering for my Survive 2o12 book cover (and then forgot about). They certainly show that survivalism is a cyclical topic:

Following a 2012-recap interview over the weekend, I found myself double-checking comet discoveries of recent times, looking for a match I may have missed. I think I have found a possibility. There’s no way of proving that this is what the Long Count calendar was all about, but it is perhaps the best scientific educated guess.

Kreutz Sungrazers

(from Wikipedia)

The Kreutz Sungrazers Listeni/ˈkrɔɪts/ are a family of sungrazing comets, characterized by orbits taking them extremely close to the Sun at perihelion. They are believed to be fragments of one large comet that broke up several centuries ago…

The three most impressive have been the Great Comet of 1843, the Great Comet of 1882 and Comet Ikeya–Seki. Another notable Kreutz Sungrazer was the Eclipse Comet of 1882…

Tracing back the orbits of Ikeya–Seki and the Great Comet of 1882, Marsden found that at their previous perihelion passage, the difference between their orbital elements was of the same order of magnitude as the difference between the elements of the fragments of Ikeya–Seki after it broke up. This meant it was realistic to presume that they were two parts of the same comet which had broken up one orbit ago. By far the best candidate for the progenitor comet was that seen in 1106 (Great Comet of 1106): Ikeya–Seki’s derived orbital period gave a previous perihelion almost exactly at the right time, and while the Great Comet of 1882’s derived orbit implied a previous perihelion a few decades later, it would only require a small error in the orbital elements to bring it into agreement.

X/1106 C1, also known as the Great Comet of 1106, was a Great Comet that appeared on February 2, 1106, and was observed across the world from the beginning of February through to mid-March. It was recorded by astronomers in Wales, England, Japan, Korea, China and Europe. It was observed to split in two, and may have formed the Great Comet of 1882, Comet Ikeya–Seki and SOHO-620.

The best astronomers have determined is that the Great Comet of 1106 split up (being so close to the Sun at perihelion means that brightness goes hand-in-hand with a tendency to fall apart from its ice melting) and its descendants returned in 1843 and 1882. I’m guessing that the most accurate return (relative to that of a comet that stayed intact) would be the earliest return – the Great Comet of 1843.

That gives us an orbital period of 737 years. That equals seven returns of 737 years for a total of 5159 years. The Long Count calendar was 5125 years long. That’s a difference of less than 5 years per return – the sort of accuracy that only modern-day astronomers can achieve given the difficulty of calculating the effects of the numerous, simultaneous effects of the gravitational forces within our solar system.

For: The brightness of the comet would most likely diminish with time if it was shedding material. That means that back in 3114 BC it could have been an awesome sight worthy of fear and the creation of a countdown calendar.

Against: Even though modern science cannot reverse engineer the previous orbits, people expect a 2012 solution to be accurate, and matching the precise day that they were told the world would end.

Not only is it the most likely reason for the existence of the Long Count calendar (while we lack any other clues), it is also a really good combo of awe and benign. I like it. It’s not a great fit, and I’m not especially convinced, but it is the best I have found to date.

This is blog post #1001. Quantity doesn’t necessarily equal quality but at least someone is still trying to solve this ancient enigma…

European nuclear power plants ill-set for disaster

It’s just as well earthquakes and tsunamis are comparatively rare in Europe, because the continent’s nuclear power plants are ill-equipped to cope with them, a report has revealed. Commissioned in the wake of the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan following an earthquake and tsunami on 11 March 2011, the investigation by the European Nuclear Safety Regulators Group used “stress tests” to assess the readiness of Europe’s reactors for similar events.

Of 145 reactors checked, 121 had no or inadequate seismic instruments to detect earthquakes, and 32 lacked venting systems to prevent pressure build-ups in reactor vessels if the primary cooling system fails. Without these systems, reactors can explode and release radioactive pollution, as happened at Fukushima. Some 81 reactors did not have adequate equipment available for coping with severe accidents such as earthquakes or floods, and 24 didn’t have backup emergency control rooms.

Yes, earthquakes and tsunamis are rare in Europe, but rare still means they could happen at any time. This is high-level complacency that puts millions of lives at risk, just to save corporate profits. Not as rare are terrorist attacks, and possibly in the next short while there will be a solar storm that could knock out power grids. Nuclear power plants are globally under-prepared for worst-case scenarios. As a rule of thumb, try and live more than 200 miles from them. Or just move to the southern hemisphere

I think it looks bigger in the photo than it really is, because it is only 600 meters from the shoreline:

The earthquake was so powerful that it caused the seabed to rise and create a small, mountain-like island about 600 metres off Pakistan’s Gwadar coastline in the Arabian Sea. [ABC Australia]

“It’s an oval shaped island which is about 250ft to 300ft (76-91m) in length, and about 60 to 70ft above the water,” he said. It has a rough surface, much of which is muddy and some parts are mostly made up of fine- to coarse-grained sand. [BBC]

So if an island can come into rapid existence, presumably one can disappear just as easily, like Atlantis allegedly did.

Check out these snippets from an article in the South China Morning Post:

You produce some 500 litres of urine and 50kg of faeces a year. Besides water and organic carbon, your annual output contains about 10kg of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium compounds, the three main nutrients plants need to grow – and, helpfully, in roughly the right proportions.

Scale that up and the world’s population excretes 70 million tonnes of nutrients annually. Applied to fields, this could replace almost 40 per cent of the 176 million tonnes of nutrients in chemical fertilisers used by the world’s farmers in 2011.

In India, despite laws banning the practice, an estimated one million people, mostly women and girls from lower castes, are still paid to scrape poo from the nation’s 100 million or more tanks and latrines, usually with nothing more than a shovel and bucket. They dump the contents in nearby drains or on waste ground. [Truly a waste].

“China’s use of night soil … is probably the reason that its soils are still healthy after four millennia of intensive agriculture,” wrote author Rose George, in a 2008 edition of Slate magazine; and since the 1890s, most of the sewage from Mexico City has been piped untreated to the fields of the Tula Valley, to the north. Today, that megacity’s 21 million people continue to fertilise more than 100,000 hectares with their faeces. The remains of the city’s digested beans, tortillas and chilli peppers double yields of corn and almost triple the rentable value of farms, says Blanca Jimenez, of the Mexican Academy of Sciences. In essence, poo has made Tula Valley farmers wealthy.

The biggest argument against agricultural recycling of sewage – whether from sewers or latrines and septic tanks – is that it carries disease. While urine is largely pathogen-free, faeces are rich in viruses, bacteria and worms. There are more than two million deaths a year worldwide from diarrhoea and other diseases associated with human waste. Most of these are down to poor hygiene, such as a lack of hand-washing, and are concentrated in areas where people still defecate in the open. Farming or eating crops fertilised by sewage is thought to play a minor role.

——–

The big problem is that people in countries that don’t have proper sewers, tend to be the ones who lack basic hygiene. Illness from food grown in poop could be avoided by clever preppers:

• Always wash your hands and food thoroughly.
• Don’t grow salad vegetables in shit.
• If possible, mix in human waste with compost and bury it below the soil – the deeper the better, as long as roots can still reach it.
• Don’t forget to use animal poo, compost, seaweed, charcoal and other natural fertilizers as well.

Source: SpaceWeather

Solar cycles vary between 10 and 13 years, so cycle 24 should definitely be peaking right now. The previous peaks of 1989 and 2001 were doubles. So, unless we have a lopsided double-peak, it is either a weak double-peak or it has already peaked and that’s all folks.

I’m certainly not disappointed, but the only three 2012 doom’n’gloom experts who had some degree of respectability (myself, Geryl and Joesph) all nominated the Sun as the most likely cause of harm.

The research, which was published in Science, examined 60 previous studies from all major regions of the globe. The results suggest that changes such as drought, flood and high temperatures strongly correlate with spikes in conflict.

Researchers noted examples including increased domestic violence in India and Australia, assaults and murders in the United States and Tanzania, ethnic violence in Europe and South Asia, land invasions in Brazil, police violence in the Netherlands and civil conflicts throughout the tropics.

The biggest culprit: higher temperatures. Out of 27 modern societies studied, all 27 showed a positive relationship between higher temperatures and violence.
[Source: Huff Post]

The study says that a rise of two degrees Celsius would double the occurrence of civil wars. And I think it is obvious that countries closer to the equator are more violent, generally speaking. Perhaps preppers should vacation somewhere cool for the summer?

*Now of course each of those individual studies could have found data that fitted their thesis, and few such studies would be published if no correlation was found. Still, if this news prompts people to prepare, that’s a good thing.