Mereja

Author: arclein

  • China and India Shrink Slums




    This item includes a chart that helps with the fine detail of mapping the general global move up the economic S curve that has so rocked all the global economy.  The only countries not actively participating in a rush to build a healthy middle class economy are out two perennial communist regimes of Cuba and North Korea.  However, catch up in both will be extraordinarily fast once the system changes.  They both have a prepared population.
    Unprepared populations are still proceeding in a positive direction and the numbers are accelerating.  Even rejectionist societies such as those of Islam are finding sufficient active players to establish some growth.  Everywhere else, folks are discovering micro banking and similar ideas to build with.
    In a century, I suspect that we will largely see true poverty off, if not a great deal sooner.  But just seeing these trends to completion will do it all.
    Recall in these statistics that every twenty years brings a complete new generation far better prepared that the past generation.  That is the natural super juice in this picture.  A bright young boy discovers a way out of the slum and his whole family is uplifted.
    China and India Make Big Progress on Slums
    MAY 11, 2010

     http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/05/china-and-india-make-big-progress-on.html

     China and India have lifted at least 125 million out of slums between 1990 and 2010.

    * China improved the daily conditions of 65.3 million urban residents who were deprived of shelter


    *     China’s urban population living in slums fell from 37.3 percent in 2000 to some 28.2 percent in 2010, a relative decrease of 25 percent
    * 227 million people in the world have moved out of slum conditions since 2000 but at the same time 55 million new slum dwellers were added 

    * the number of people living in slums rose from 777 million in 2000 to 830 million in 2010. Unless urgent steps are taken, UN-HABITAT warned, that number could rise to 900 million in 2020 (Since there was net migration out the increase is from births inside slums)

    *     India has lifted 59.7 million people out of slums conditions since 2000. Slum prevalence fell from 41.5 percent in 1990 to 28.1 percent in 2010.

    China‘s strategy of enabling slum dwellers to gain access to more than 20 million new and affordable housing units has been particularly successful. “The state did this by using equity grants as a mortgage to get leases on cheap housing built by developers and by giving developers special tax rates to encourage development of cheap homes

     State of the World’s Cities 2010/2011 – Cities for All: Bridging the Urban Divide (UN report)

    * the top 25 cities accounted for roughly 15% of the world’s GDP in 2005. This share increases to around one-quarter of the world’s GDP when the top 100 cities are included


    * In India and China, the five largest cities were about 15% of national GDP in 2004, which was roughly three times what could have been expected based solely on their relative shares of the population
    http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_VyTCyizqrHs/S-mUvEYvF6I/AAAAAAAAHl0/99b0SAjNj_g/s640/worldcities.jpg



  • Glen Beck, Meet Maurice Strong




    The best that I can determine, Maurice Strong is a world class meddler who is adept at working the media and all the right cocktail parties.  Think of him as diplomat for some self appointed cabal of pseudo intellectuals who think that they can run things differently and who are humored by those who do run things.  After all, the cocktail party might get boring for your wife without at least one polished snake oil salesman on board.

    I have been aware of this poseur’s career for over thirty years, if career it is because it is not clear who if anyone pays him.  He is yet another example of how a liberal arts education is a poor preparation for developing opinions on matters of scientific weight.

    In the meantime he has clearly been cozy in the UN global warming promotion scheme and may well have had a lot to do with it all.  If we ever need a scapegoat, he will be happy to stand in.  Having met far too many of his ilk, I am not optimistic.

    In the meantime he has attracted media attention again through Glen Beck and so continues to pursue his agenda, whatever it might be.

    Glenn Beck: Meet Maurice Strong

     By Judi McLeod  Thursday, May 13, 2010
    All that President Barack Obama is doing to transform America, Free World over to One World Government begins and ends with one Maurice Strong. Soros is merely the financier
    http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/23141
    Great job on shining the FOX flashlight on man-behind-the-curtain Maurice Strong last night.
    You asked for people to send you information on Strong. 

    While the entire cable network world, thanks largely to The One Thing, now knows that Strong is on the Chicago Carbon Credit Exchange board of directors, it gets worse, much worse.

    It’s true that Strong explained that he had only fantasized the end of the world in his now famous interview with a Canadian reporter.  Unfortunately for the free world, the fantasy is Strong’s philosophy.

    As recently as 2006, speaking from an air conditioned boardroom somewhere in Communist China, Maurice Strong—the same man who would deny air conditioning for you to save the environment—was hatching his latest anti-American initiative. 

    “Having cashed in his Kyoto credits and having launched his ManyOne Internet project from afar, Strong is back on the international scene, ready or not.  With his latest comeback, the elusive Strong is stepping back into the limelight after his alleged links to the UN Oil-forFood scandal took him off the radar screen for more than a year.  This comeback sees Strong teaming up in the biz world with George Soros.  The deadly duo aims to flood the American market with cheap Chinese-made cars.

    (Strong & Soros in Business: A Partnership from Hell, CFP, June 15, 2006).

    “Strong’s public predictions that China would replace the United States, as world superpower is not happening fast enough.  So Strong and President George W. Bush malcontent George Soros are contemplating pouring hundreds of millions into a Communist China automaker that manufactures the “Chery”.”

    So Strong and Soros were working on anti-American schemes as far back as 2006.

    They had hoped to decimate Ford, Chrysler and GM by flooding the U.S. market with cheapo Cherys on a 2007 deadline.

    Well, we now know what happened to the American auto industry in 2009.

    But it doesn’t even begin or stop there.

    Maurice Strong has almost as much impact on average Americans as the air that they breathe.

    All that President Barack Obama is doing to transform America and the Free World over to One World Government begins and ends with one Maurice Strong. Soros is merely the financier.

    Here, in his own words, is what Strong wants for the middle class: “It is clear that current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class—involving high meat intake, consumption of large amounts of frozen and convenience foods, use of fossil fuels, appliances, home and work-place air-conditioning, and suburban housing—are not sustainable.  A shift is necessary towards lifestyles less geared to environmentally damaging consumption patterns.”  (1992 Rio Earth Summit 11).

    Strong’s portrayal as a Wizard Oz in a fog of ether was helped along by Canada’s state-owned, liberal and largest television network, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC)l

    The CBC 2004 special, The Life and Times of Maurice Strong, features a visit by Strong to former Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev who gives Strong a CBC-described “glass saber full of the same brandy Stalin used to send Winston Churchill every week.” 

    It was in an admiring way that CBC reporter Ann-Marie MacDonald described Strong as a sort of “cross between Rasputin and Machiavelli.”

    You could say that it’s downright Machiavellian how Strong and Gorbachev consorted back in 1997 to replace the Ten Commandments with the UN Earth Charter. 

    Although it defies belief,  their jointly authored Earth Charter is carried around in a wooden chest called the Ark of Hope. 

    The Ark of Hope is described as a “magnificent large sycamore chest, which was conceived as a visual message of peace, sustainability and concern for the Earth.” 

    Gilt-covered and lavish in the looks department, the chest carries Temenos Earth masks.  The 96” poles of the 200-lb. chest are “unicorn horns which render evil ineffective”.

    The Ark carries Gorby’s and Strong’s Earth Charter, an international peoples‘ treaty, need of which was foreseen and initiated at the Strong-led Rio Earth Summit in 1992. At last count, the Ark was being carried into New York classrooms.

    Now you know, Glenn why Strong is too busy to write novels.  Besides, it must be so much more fun rewriting history.

    Lest you think CFP is pulling your leg, this is what Gorbachev has to say about the Earth Charter: “The Ten Commandments are out of date.  They will be replaced by the 18 principles of the Earth Charter.”

    It is CFP’s belief that the way for The Messiah was cleared for Barack Obama by Maurice Strong and that Louis Farrakhan was right on the money when he said “before he was elected, he (Obama) was selected”.

    So how does Maurice Strong get away with it?

    By relying on the media-hyped conspiracy theory charges.  You know, those rednecks still waiting for the black helicopters.

    Meanwhile, when Glenn pulled the curtain back on International Man of Mystery Maurice Strong last night, he hit the motherlode. 

    Judi McLeod Most recent columns
    Copyright © Canada Free Press

    Judi McLeod is an award-winning journalist with 30 years experience in the print media.

    A former Toronto Sun columnist, she also worked for the Kingston Whig Standard. Her work has appeared on Rush Limbaugh, Newsmax.com, Drudge Report, Foxnews.com, and Glenn Beck.

    Judi can be emailed at: [email protected]
    Older articles by Judi McLeod

  • Mayan Plumbing





    Arm chair thinkers have often argued that hydraulic engineering was difficult to somehow imagine and implement.  Yet I argue the opposite.    It is the one technology that can be modeled on a table top in clay and shown to work.  Arguing that canal locks are a major invention is a good example.  Everyone who actually needed them built them immediately.  The problem was that they were rarely needed.  They required a large flow of traffic to justify the expense of maintenance.   Until then skidding worked fine.
    In this case we have an impressive complex, possibly a palace, with a system of built in fountains.  Sounds pretty normal to me.  And yes, it was necessary to provide pressure to operate the fountains.  They found a way.
    I expect we will find much older examples in New World.
    Also the stone structure could have supported a wood tube system easily to contain pressure as needed.  Not overly lasting, but sufficient for a year’s effort at least.  We are spoiled by better solutions.
    Maya Plumbing, First Pressurized Water Feature Found In New World
    by Staff Writers

    University Park PA (SPX) May 05, 2010
    http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Maya_Plumbing_First_Pressurized_Water_Feature_Found_In_New_World_999.html
    http://www.spacedaily.com/images-lg/maya-piedras-bolas-aqueduct-lg.jpg
    This is a depiction of Piedras Bolas aqueduct functioning as a fountain. This illustrates one plausible explanation of how the feature used water pressure. Due to destruction of the aqueduct, exact details of the its use are unknown. Note that during the monsoon, excess runoff flows over the freature while the buried conduit continues to function. Credit: Reid Fellenbaum

    A water feature found in the Maya city of Palenque, Mexico, is the earliest known example of engineered water pressure in the new world, according to a collaboration between two Penn State researchers, an archaeologist and a hydrologist. How the Maya used the pressurized water is, however, still unknown.

    “Water pressure systems were previously thought to have entered the New World with the arrival of the Spanish,” the researchers said in a recent issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science.

    “Yet, archaeological data, seasonal climate conditions, geomorphic setting and simple hydraulic theory clearly show that the Maya of Palenque in Chiapas, Mexico, had empirical knowledge of closed channel water pressure predating the arrival of Europeans.”

    The feature, first identified in 1999 during a mapping survey of the area, while similar to the aqueducts that flow beneath the plazas of the city, was also unlike them. In 2006, an archaeologist returned to Palenque with a hydrologist to examine the unusual water feature. The area of Palenque was first occupied about the year 100 but grew to its largest during the Classic Maya period 250 to 600. The city was abandoned around 800.

    “Under natural conditions it would have been difficult for the Maya to see examples of water pressure in their world,” said Christopher Duffy, professor of civil and environmental engineering. “They were apparently using engineering without knowing the tools around it. This does look like a feature that controls nature.”

    Underground water features such as aqueducts are not unusual at Palenque. Because the Maya built the city in a constricted area in a break in an escarpment, inhabitants were unable to spread out. To make as much land available for living, the Maya at Palenque routed streams beneath plazas via aqueducts.

    “They were creating urban space,” said Kirk French, lecturer in anthropology. “There are streams in the area every 300 feet or so across the whole escarpment. There is very little land to build on.”

    These spring-fed streams combined with approximately 10 feet of rain that falls during the six-month rainy season also presented a flooding hazard that the aqueducts would have at least partially controlled.

    The feature the researchers examined, Piedras Bolas Aqueduct, is a spring-fed conduit located on steep terrain. The elevation drops about 20 feet from the entrance of the tunnel to the outlet about 200 feet downhill.

    The cross section of the feature decreases from about 10 square feet near the spring to about a half square foot where water emerges form a small opening. The combination of gravity on water flowing through the feature and the sudden restriction of the conduit causes the water to flow out of the opening forcefully, under pressure.
    “The conduit could have reached a theoretical hydraulic head limit of 6 meters (about 20 feet),” said Duffy.
    At the outlet, the pressure exerted could have moved the water upwards of 20 feet.

    “The experience the Maya at Palenque had in constructing aqueducts for diversion of water and preservation of urban space may have led to the creation of useful water pressure,” said French.

    The Piedras Bolas Aqueduct is partially collapsed so very little water currently flows from the outlet. French and Duffy used simple hydraulic models to determine the potential water pressure achievable from the Aqueduct.

    They also found that Aqueduct would hold about 18,000 gallons of water if the outlet were controlled to store the water. One potential use for the artificially engineered water pressure would have been a fountain.

    The researchers modeled the aqueduct with a fountain as the outlet and found that even during flood conditions, water would flow in the aqueduct, supplying the fountain, and above ground in the channel running off the slope. Another possibility could be to use the pressure to lift water onto the adjacent residential area for use as wastewater disposal.

    “The palace has features that suggest something similar,” said French