Japan’s Vacant And Abandoned Houses: Visions of Detroit

Wolf Richter   www.testosteronepit.com   www.amazon.com/author/wolfrichter

Unlike Detroit, which will run out of cash next month, Japan prints its own money, so bankruptcy in the Detroit sense is not in the cards. But they do have two things in common: depopulation and a ballooning stock of abandoned houses. For Japan, it’s an issue that even the most prodigious and reckless money-printing binge cannot resolve.

These decrepit buildings dot neighborhoods in surprising places. There was one just down the street [...]

NASA: We May Be On the Verge of a “Mini-Maunder” Event

by WashingtonsBlog

Is a Planetary Cooling Spell Straight Ahead?

All climate scientists agree that the sun affects Earth’s climate to some extent.   They only disagree about whether or not the effect form the sun is minor compared to man-made causes.

We noted in 2011:

This week, scientists from the US Solar Observatory and the US Air Force Research Laboratory have discovered – to their great surprise – that the sun’s activity is declining, and that we might experience the lowest solar output [...]

3 workers suffer cardiac arrest at Japan waste incineration plant — 49 microSv/hr found in scrap last month — Doctor associates with Cesium-137

July 10, 2012 report in Yahoo Japan translated by Dissensus Japan:

3 out of 7 workmen who was taken to a hospital from the waste incineration in Akita City suffers cardiopulmonary arrest, according to Kyodo News Service.

2 of them recovered consciousness.

Later, Kyoto corrected the number of workmen who was taken to a hospital was 9.

[...]

According to Akita Sakigake Shimbun, about 16:30 on July 10, the workmen fainted and the city’s environmental [...]

‘UFO’ at the bottom of the Baltic Sea ‘cuts off electrical equipment when divers get within 200m’

Object is raised about 10 to 13ft above seabed and curved at the sides like a mushroom
Hole is surrounded by an strange rock formation that expedition team can not explain
Stones are covered in something ‘resembling soot’ which has baffled experts
Divers say phones and some cameras switch off when close to the object

The divers exploring a ‘UFO-shaped’ object at the bottom of the Baltic Sea say their equipment stops working when [...]

The UFO-shaped object found at bottom of the Baltic Sea… covered in soot, with ‘little fireplaces’ and lying at end of 1,000ft ‘runway’

Object is raised about 10 to 13ft above seabed and curved at the sides like a mushroom
It has a 60 metre diameter with an egg-shaped hole leading into it from the top

Hole is surrounded by an strange rock formation that expedition team can not explain
Stones are covered in something ‘resembling soot’ which has baffled experts

Sceptics expected that a deep-water dive would debunk the slew of extra-terrestrial theories surrounding an unidentified [...]

Dead obese woman had so much body fat she set the building on fire during her cremation

Crematorium oven reached 300C and set alight to the filter
Black smoke billowed into the building
Firefighters battled the blaze in special breathing kit, but got covered in burnt grease
Officials call for weight limit on bodies to be cremated

Austrian crematorium officials have blamed a deceased woman’s obesity for causing a blaze which had to be tackled by firefighters.

Firemen in the southern city of Graz were covered in thick sticky soot as they [...]