Gerald Celente’s Dire Predictions For 2012
Gerald Celente
Gerald Celente of Trends Research International has a habit of predicting nasty events before they happen. He just emailed us his selection of 12 things we’d rather not see in 2012:
One megatrend looms on the near horizon. And we forecast that when it strikes, it will be a shock felt around the world. Hyperbole it’s not! Our research has revealed that at the very highest levels of government this megatrend has been seriously discussed. Read on:
1. Economic Martial Law: Given the current economic and geopolitical conditions, the central banks and world governments already have plans in place to declare economic martial law … with the possibility of military martial law to follow.
2. Battlefield America: With a stroke of the Presidential pen, language was removed from an earlier version of the National Defense Authorization Act, granting the President authority to act as judge, jury and executioner. Citizens, welcome to “Battlefield America.”
3.…
In Defense of the Hipster
PART ONE: WHAT IS A HIPSTER, AND WHY DOES EVERYONE HATE THEM? or: YOU’RE SO FAKE (AND SO AM I)
My name is Tuna Ghost and I have a confession: I’m a hipster.
One may think this is a self-defeating statement, like “this sentence is false” or “all Cretans are liars, says so-and-so of Crete”, as one of the commonly accepted hallmarks of a hipster is that he or she will vehemently deny that they are a hipster. This bit of conventional wisdom is easily verified, all one has to do is ask the hipsters around one if they self-identify as a “hipster”. Personally, I have to look no further than my own friends to see evidence of it. By the traditional definition of “hipster” they are obviously hipsters, but thus far I am the only one who will gladly self-identify as such. One may wonder why anyone in their right mind…
New York Entangled In Yarn Graffiti
The New York Times reports on “yarn bombing”, the softest, coziest form of urban vandalism. Leave your bike parked for too long and it could end up like the one at right, which has been chained for months in front of my friend’s store:
“Street art and graffiti are usually so male dominated,” Ms. Hemmons said. “Yarn bombing is more feminine. It’s like graffiti with grandma sweaters.”
Yarn bombing takes that most matronly craft (knitting) and that most maternal of gestures (wrapping something cold in a warm blanket) and transfers it to the concrete and steel wilds of the urban streetscape. Hydrants, lampposts, mailboxes, bicycles, cars — even objects as big as buses and bridges — have all been bombed in recent years, ever so softly and usually at night.
It is a global phenomenon, with yarn bombers taking their brightly colored fuzzy work to Europe, Asia and beyond. In Paris, a yarn culprit…
Why Do Girls Wear Pink?
No, it’s not an immutable law of nature. In the 1920s, retailers began encouraging pink (a strong color) for boys and blue (a dainty one) for girls, before the trend reversed after World War II. For centuries prior, both boys and girls wore white dresses.
In light of hysteria over a photograph in J. Crew’s new catalog depicting a mother painting her son’s toenails pink, Smithsonian Magazine explores how we got to this point:
For centuries, children wore dainty white dresses up to age 6. “What was once a matter of practicality—you dress your baby in white dresses and diapers; white cotton can be bleached—became a matter of ‘Oh my God, if I dress my baby in the wrong thing, they’ll grow up perverted,’ ” Paoletti says.
The march toward gender-specific clothes was neither linear nor rapid. Pink and blue arrived, along with other pastels, as colors for babies in the mid-19th century, yet the…
Police Warn Of Growing Teen ‘Vodka Tampon’ Use
Time to check in on the latest youth trends: teens (both girls and boys) are increasingly using liquor-soaked tampons as a novel and stealthy means of getting drunk. A number of Facebook pages have popped in honor of the practice, called “slimming”. Ah, kids with their crazy fads! The Local enlightens on the scourge every parent should be most worried about:
Police in southern Germany warned this week of a dangerous new form of alcohol abuse among teens – using tampons soaked in vodka to get drunk quickly and hide the smell. The practice poses grave health risks, they said.
In early March a 14-year-old girl collapsed during a street festival in Konstanz, apparently highly intoxicated from using a vodka tampon, the paper reported. Youth researchers have since found out that this form of alcohol abuse is trendy in the region.
The trend arose among teens in the United States, where it is known as…
Is Twitter Suppressing Discussion Of WikiLeaks?
Ah the irony: social networking sites were heralded as the savior of democracy, transparency, and change — but perhaps that’s only the case when the villain is conveniently a U.S. enemy such as Iran.
Today, there are growing grumblings that Twitter is attempting to suppress the spread of WikiLeaks discussion by removing it from “trending topics” lists. Starting with a volcanic surge in popularity on November 28, the hashtag #WikiLeaks has been white-hot on Twitter. And yet, it hasn’t made a blip on Twitter’s Trends list, which has been occupied by far less popular topics. Has Twitter caved to anti-WikiLeaks pressure à la PayPal and Mastercard? There’s a full explanation at Student Analysis.
Teen Werewolves In Texas
Somewhere in between goth, occult, and furries: San Antonio’s KENS 5 reports on the teens-who-identify-as-werewolves trend.
5 Media Trends To Watch
Via Mediapunk:
Here are the five media trends I’m watching and will focus on in future articles on this site:
Sources and advertisers going direct Context is King Journalist as brand Reporting as service Media companies as technology companies I have a heavy emphasis on journalism, but most of these actually apply to other media fields as well.
Sources and advertisers going direct
Dave Winer coined the the phrase “sources go direct” to describe how organizations and individuals are routing around traditional media by using their own web sites and social media. Jay Rosen, as I recall, used the phrase “advertisers going direct” as well.
Another expression of this trend comes from Tom Foremski: Every Company is a Media Company.
But this is by no means limited to companies – activists, watchdog groups, whistle blowers, politicians, sporting leagues (which I guess are usually companies), etc. are now media organizations and all individuals are now media personalities.
[continues at Mediapunk]
…
10 Web Trends To Watch In 2010
By Pete Cashmore for CNN:
Editor’s note: Pete Cashmore is founder and CEO of Mashable, a popular blog about social media. He is writing a weekly column about social networking and tech for CNN.com.
(CNN) — As 2009 draws to a close, the Web’s attention turns to the year ahead. What can we expect of the online realm in 2010?
While Web innovation is unpredictable, some clear trends are becoming apparent. Expect the following 10 themes to define the Web next year:
Real-time ramps up
Sparked by Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed, the real-time trend has been to the latter part of 2009 what “Web 2.0″ was to 2007. The term represents the growing demand for immediacy in our interactions. Immediacy is compelling, engaging, highly addictive … it’s a sense of living in the now.
But real-time is more than just a horde of new Twitter-like services hitting the Web in 2010 (although that’s inevitable — cargo…
