-- Joseph Goebbels
Stupid is as stupid does...
Next gen motion sensor tech...
We are the 99%...gifts for the special 1% in your lives...
Introducing Susan Kare...the artist who gave the computer a face...
Flute beatboxing...
Gold = cursed prison of souls...
Beware the avian flu...
Now that's a winner!
How many people existed when you were born?
School House Rock explains OWS...
Shocking truth behind the OWS crackdown...
See the blindspots...
Introducing the iShred...
The price of a stolen identity...
Awesome catch!
Good thing the fan wasn't on...
Holy Banyan Tree Batman!
Organic food may become extinct...
Companies that serve you wood...
NASA pics for your desktop wallpaper...
Sledgehammery folksy music video...
High IQs = drug partaking...
Paving the way for the North American Union...
Peering into the future?
All vaccines are contaminated...
Life-size Mario Karts!
The new 7 wonders of nature...
Siri...who's your daddy?
How to stop the government from tracking your cell phone...
Breakthrough material slightly more than air...
Can you keep the oath?
Do you eat this cancer-in-a-can?
Circle the cat... (an oldie but a goodie)
Legally you are a Freemason...
Keep drinking that toxic beverage from China...
The Bible Code revisited...
We want to be free...
The Biggest Farm Bill Loser...
Never give up your firearms...
Keep drinking that fluoride...
Knowledge
Garden of EdenThe Garden of Eden is the companion to PBS's NOVA presentation on the 'extraordinary natural history of the Seychelles, an ancient archipelago of about 100 islands scattered between India and Madagascar.' The site will explain the breakup of the supercontinent Gondwana of which only the Seychelles remain, the conservation of the Seychelles magpie robin which had dwindled to only 16 individuals in the 1970's, 'gigantism and dwarfism among the species arriving on oceanic islands,' as well as a demonstration of the formation of a coral atoll, the theory behind which is attributed to Charles Darwin. The Resources are excellent and of course there is the Teacher's Guide for more ideas on the presentation of the material. Here's a great way to visit the Seychelles, oceanic islands that fascinate geologists because 'they are so very un-oceanic in nature!'
| Brace Yourself For...: Impact Earth | |||||||||||
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Freak yourself out with this Purdue-developed web tool by entering the size of a hypothetical asteroid, the velocity and angle of its atmospheric entry, and its impact location, which'll return info on the resulting crater depth, tsunami potential, and even sound intensity, which surely will be greater than that of Bill Haley's Comets. Paint your own doomsday scenario at Purdue.edu/ImpactEarth |
"It is difficult to understate the importance of the Sun. Its light and warmth provide energy for growing plants, and ultimately makes life itself possible. In our fast-paced modern world, we have become disconnected from the natural world, hence it is easy to take the Sun for granted. In ancient times, however, people understood and honored the Sun’s life-giving power and majesty." Traditions of the Sun makes it possible for us in the modern world to reconnect with the sun as well as understand the importance of our star. Two 'Sun' locations are featured, Chaco Canyon and the Mayan cities in the Yucatan. "We invite you to explore this site, to learn about the ancestral Native Americans in New Mexico and the ancient Maya in the Yucatan, while gaining a better understanding of the active Sun, and its importance to them — and, to us."
| Made The Favourite 5: Alchemist Dreams | |||||||
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Widespread Vitamin D Deficiency May Help Explain the Cancer Epidemic
What's really going on in is that, largely due to shunning the sun, the vast majority of Americans are now vitamin D deficient, which means they are missing out on this vitamin's cancer-preventive properties and increasing their risk of cancer, including skin cancer.
Even sunny Californians are suffering from vitamin D deficiency. The University of California Davis discovered that more than 67 percent of Northern Californians have insufficient levels of vitamin D. In reality, the problem is far worse because they used outdated criteria to define vitamin D "deficiency."
According to the Vitamin D Council, vitamin D deficiency has been linked to a large number of diseases, including:
A study by Dr. William Grant, Ph.D., internationally recognized research scientist and vitamin D expert, found that about 30 percent of cancer deaths -- which amounts to 2 million worldwide and 200,000 in the United States -- could be prevented each year with higher levels of vitamin D.
- Many cancers, including skin cancer
- Cardiovascular disease
- Diabetes
- Asthma (especially in children)
- Psychiatric and neurological diseases
Exposure to sunlight is the optimal way to maintain therapeutic blood levels of vitamin D. So while it is true that excessive UVB and UVA exposure will increase your risk of skin cancer and result in some loss of lives, it is even more relevant for health and longevity to understand that inappropriate avoidance of the sun will result in diminished vitamin D levels, which will result in HUNDREDS of times more deaths.
For every person that dies from sun exposure there are hundreds more that die from cancer and heart disease from not getting enough sun exposure and vitamin D.
Several studies have confirmed that appropriate sun exposure actually helps prevent skin cancer, and there are over 800 references supporting vitamin D's effectiveness in lowering your overall cancer risk.
You should stay out in the sun just long enough that your skin turns the very lightest shade of pink. The length of time this takes depends on your skin type, of course, and you never want to let yourself burn. It is the burning of your skin and chronic excessive exposures -- not the limited, sensible exposure to ultraviolet light or sunlight -- that increases your risk for skin cancer. For optimal benefit, strive to have at least 40 percent of your skin uncovered. And for an extra measure of protection from sunburn, consider taking astaxanthin, which is a natural "internal sunscreen." If you can't get natural sun exposure, then a SAFE tanning bed is the next best option. But how do you know if your tanning bed is safe?
The Type of Tanning Bed Matters
You can use a tanning bed to stimulate your skin to make vitamin D, but you should only use certain types of tanning beds. Here are a couple of factors to keep in mind:
Contrary to popular belief, calling a tan "skin damage" is misleading, because tanning is your body's natural protection against sunburn; it's what your body was created to do. Tanning devices can be used safely and effectively, provided you adhere to the basic safety guidelines.
- The Tanning Device Should Have Electronic Ballasts Many commercial tanning beds use magnetic ballasts to generate the light, and these create significant electromagnetic fields (EMFs). EMF exposure is linked to cancer, so it's important to keep your exposures as low as possible. If you hear a loud buzzing noise while in a tanning bed, it has a magnetic ballast system. Newer tanning beds will use electronic ballasts instead of the older magnetic ones, and this change will virtually eliminate the EMF risk.
- UVA Bulb Percentage Normal sunshine has about 95 percent UVA and five percent UVB. Safe tanning bed bulbs produce less of the cancer causing and damaging UVA as they output less than the sun at 90 percent UVA and ten percent UVB, or double the beneficial rays that your body uses to produce vitamin D and vitamin D sulfate.
Make Sure Your Vitamin D Levels are Optimized to Prevent Skin Cancer
If regular sun exposure is not available and you don't have access to a safe indoor tanning device, then your next option is taking an oral vitamin D3 supplement. Researchers have found adults need daily vitamin D intakes in the neighborhood of 8,000 IU to achieve therapeutic blood levels.
Whiskey and Gunpowder
by Jeffrey Tucker
November, 8, 2011
Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.A.
It's true that inequality is growing, but the focus on that alone is sheer folly. Equality applies to math equations. You could also use it to describe how the law should be impartial with respect to persons -- the traditional use of the term "equality" in the classical liberal literature. But that's it. Otherwise, an obsession with this topic is very dangerous for a free society.
That's because the people who invoke equality have no intention of creating the conditions to make it easier for the poor and for middle-income earners to grow rich. Leveling upward is never the goal. Egalitarians want to flatten incomes at the top so that the rich no longer exist. This can't help anyone but the envious, those who get a kick out of destroying, rather than creating.
As Shikha Dalmia writes, "Income inequality tells us zilch about the only thing that really matters: Are the lives of Americans, rich, poor and in between, getting better or worse?"
Try an experiment in your mind with a society of 10 people. Five people earn $50,000 and five earn $100,000. Let's say we flatten out the top half so that everyone earns the same. Equality! But who benefits? Absolutely no one. Society as a whole is poorer, and that is to the detriment of everyone: less capital, less wealth available for wealth-forming projects, demoralization among the smartest and most inspired and a ceiling on those who might have previously desired to move from the lower half to the upper half.
In any case, the supposed egalitarian ideal can always be achieved by driving everyone into the dirt and universalizing poverty. There is a serious problem, with an ideal that can be achieved by wrecking the lives of absolutely everyone.
In a free society, we just have to get used to the idea that some people are going to be vastly richer than other people. And those rich people do act as benefactors to the rest of us. They give more to charity. They start the new businesses that employ us. They take the risks that make capitalism dynamic and progressive. They act as society's economic leadership team. And the individual members of that sector of society are constantly changing, and this is a good thing.
What's more, in a free society, the rich are completely dependent on the poor and the middle class, who, in a market setting, make it possible for the capitalists of society to accumulate wealth in the first place. It is the voluntary choices of the masses that direct the use of society's resources. The "distribution" of wealth is a result of the choices we all make in our capacity as consumers.
Yes, I've watched lectures by people who claim that societies with more equality are happier places. What they end up pointing to are places like Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Japan, Norway. This is just a mistake: These countries are demographically homogeneous and cannot be compared in any way to places like the U.K. or the U.S.
Consider this... Where would you rather live? Ethiopia or the Netherlands? Ethiopia has more income equality, according to the statisticians who calculate the so-called Gini coeffiicient. Another example: Tajikistan or Switzerland? The former has more equality than the latter. Another: Bangladesh or New Zealand? According to the egalitarians, we should rather live in one of the poorest places on the planet than one of the richest.
Again, the degree of equality is not in any sense related to the quality of life.
So why the hysteria right now? The real problem is more fundamental in the United States. The poor are growing and entrenching. The unemployed are staying this way. The middle class is slipping, and more substantially after the the recession statistically ended than when the statistical recession was on (and polls show that hardly anyone believes we are out of recession).
Now, this is catastrophic, not because this increases the income gap, but because it is killing the American dream. What the political left is doing is attempting to change the subject away from what matters (we are all getting poor) to what doesn't matter (the income gap between the top and bottom). And this rhetorical shift is scary: It prepares the way for higher taxes, more redistribution, more attacks on the financially successful and more of all the policies that are causing our worst problems right now.
So why the focus on the equality? As Mises says in his great work Socialism (1922): "The principle of equality is most acclaimed by those who expect to gain more than they lose from an equal distribution of goods. Here is a fertile field for the demagogue. Whoever stirs up the resentment of the poor against the rich can count on securing a big audience."
Americans should know better. Even when our economy was the freest in the world, we had one of the most unequal distributions of that wealth on the planet. It was during these years that the lifespans of everyone increased, when the chances of moving from poor to rich were huge, when the per capita income was growing as never before in human history. Growing inequality is likely to coincide with growing wealth (see How the West Grew Rich, the masterpiece by Nathan Rosenber).
We need to learn to admire the justly rich and strive to emulate them and their outlook on life. This is what the advice manuals of the late 19th century said. The most popular magazines of the time chronicled their lives, and they were held up as national heroes. This is a sign of a healthy society. It is because of this ethos that the poor of today live vastly better than the richest of the rich 100 years ago.
Today, on the other hand, we are told to resent the rich, attack them, hate them, expropriate them. This is the sure path to disaster. Freedom is what enables the poor to become rich. The state is the means by which everyone in society is driven into poverty. We need less state and more freedom.
 | Revisiting “The Illusion of Capital” |
| More Reason To Expect a Rise in Gold... | |
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| Dan Amoss |
Today, I’m preoccupied with thoughts of how financial capital (money and credit) interacts with intellectual capital (ideas) and physical capital (productive resources) to create the modern world we live in. The scenes from my window spur these thoughts, as they provide examples of a seemingly bygone world that depended on intensive investment of physical capital and a brave new world built on paper money.
Passing by Sunoco’s Marcus Hook refinery, you can’t help but admire this feat of engineering. Situated on the Delaware/Pennsylvania border, this 800-acre campus covered in miles of steel pipe has the capacity to crack 175,000 barrels of crude oil into refined products in a single day.
Minutes later, we pass Harrah’s Chester Casino & Racetrack. It stands in stark contrast to the refinery. This industry of guaranteed profits and minimal capital requirements has long been a magnet for investment dollars. The only similarity between the two is that you wouldn’t want either in your backyard.
Yet in the all-important calculation of gross domestic product (GDP), a dollar pumped into Harrah’s one-armed bandit is treated the same as a dollar Sunoco invests in maintaining its refinery. For those who only look at surface numbers, GDP can be a very misleading gauge of economic health. In itself, it tells you nothing about capital formation.
Without production of fuel and petrochemicals, most modern amenities would not exist. Refineries are indispensable stores of capital. Casinos are not. Will America’s capital formation process continue in a sustainable manner, when investment dollars are constantly directed away from refineries because they are too “capital intensive”?
And can the value of our refineries and casinos be measured accurately on an ever-shifting scale of paper money? With credit so easy to borrow into existence, can the dollar’s integrity last another generation? Or are we in the twilight years of the global paper money standard?
The price of gold provides a hint. It’s a barometer of monetary conditions, and the higher it goes, the sooner the paper money standard will end.
Of Mind, Money and Matter
The ability to cheaply unleash crude oil’s chemical energy is made possible by intellectual capital that has compounded over the years, thanks to consistent investment in research. This intellectual capital translates into material wealth when it’s combined with physical investment in steel, concrete and the like. Productivity improves as this process of intellectual and physical investment is repeated and refined over time.Compare this with intellectual capital stored in the minds of mathematicians writing algorithms for Harrah’s computerized slot machines. Casinos are good businesses because the house always wins. But aside from the entertainment value they provide, they do not add to the capital base of the U.S. economy.
Instead, casinos are vehicles to transfer wealth from gamblers to Harrah’s shareholders. While this casino’s perpetual profits add to overall corporate earnings numbers, does it really create wealth?
Who contributes more to the wealth-creation process in the United States — the maintenance worker at Sunoco’s refinery or the Ph.D. mathematician writing algorithms for Harrah’s?
As I consider this question, our train approaches the Philadelphia stop. The urban decay surrounding the University of Pennsylvania’s ivy-draped buildings comes into focus. Ghosts of factories long dormant stand hollow.
This landscape must represent the picture of progress to proponents of the “information economy.”
Most Penn students are trained for roles in finance, medicine and law, while most residents of surrounding communities face a bleak future in an information economy.
Someone in China is able to undercut entry-level manufacturing wages by 90% in order to earn a standard of living that approaches the U.S. poverty level. If this trend continues, manufacturing anything in the United States will not be feasible within a generation.
This leaves non-information workers the option of working in unexportable service industries. Not all of us can enjoy the privilege of thinking for a living. But all Americans do have the right to vote, and we have every reason to expect a louder populist voice at the ballot boxes as we head down the bumpy transition to an information economy. As most populist politicians have done in the past, they will make promises that can be paid only through newly printed paper money.
Paper Money Is a Claim on Wealth
Paper money is popular under democracies. Under the control of a central bank, paper money provides modern economies with the illusion of great flexibility and resilience. Without the rigidity of the gold standard, bad bank loans are easily swept under the rug. This prevents the possibility of setting a Depression-era bank failure into motion.But what are the long-term costs of paper monetary systems? How can an economy develop in a healthy, sustainable manner when wealth’s scale constantly changes?
Contrary to popular opinion, paper money is not wealth. Paper money is a claim on wealth. It only has value to the extent that it can be exchanged for things — a bushel of corn, a gallon of gasoline, a dental cleaning or an Intel microprocessor.
When the government prints more money, it gives a public fixated on asset prices the illusion that they are growing wealthier, when, in fact, they are growing poorer. As paper money becomes more and more plentiful, the producers of valuable products will, eventually, demand more units of money in exchange for their products or services.
This chart shows the Dow Jones industrial average divided by an ounce of gold. This indicates how much real wealth has been created in the United States since the year 2000. [Ed. Note: The Dow/Gold ratio is down to 7, from 20 at the time this piece was published in March 2007, and 40 in January 2000]:
The Global Economy Floats on a Sea of Paper Money
Over the past decade, a few billion new capitalists began their quest to achieve Western living standards. They will demand energy and industrial metals on an unprecedented scale, and the best way for investors to benefit from this trend is to own shares in the companies fulfilling this demand.This capitalist revolution is well under way, and nothing short of an economic meltdown will stop it. Just in case the economic machine that funds mortgage payments and all other manners of debt begins to sputter, central banks will slash interest rates yet again.
But unlike the 2001-03 series of rate cuts, long-term rates are more likely to increase as CPI fears mount, causing demand for long-term bonds to dry up.
If that were to occur, the U.S. Federal Reserve would implement Chairman Bernanke’s well-outlined “unconventional monetary policies.” This would involve a new role for the Fed: buyer of last resort for bonds of any maturity. And lest you think the Fed could ever run out of money, check to see what institution guarantees the value of the “Federal Reserve notes” sitting in your wallet. If necessary, the Fed can use its ability to create an unlimited amount of this paper to keep the debt pyramid solvent.
If this scenario were to develop, the U.S. dollar would quickly be added to history’s long list of worthless paper currencies. Under the status quo, the U.S. dollar’s rate of decay will depend on public perception of inflation, and perceptions are likely to worsen after this year’s corn crop.
Thanks to corn-based ethanol subsidies, a huge portion of the country’s corn-derived food supply — everything from sweeteners in packaged foods to chicken and beef — will suffer from shortages and price increases. Much of this will be passed on to the consumers who can least afford it. So investors should expect the current momentum behind populist political movements to grow stronger. This will be bad for longer-maturity bonds and the overall stock market, but good for gold prices.
The global economy now floats on a sea of paper money. This grand monetary experiment has been in place for only a few decades — a mere tick in the clock of civilization. We know how this show ends, having seen previews in Weimar Germany and several banana republics.
Will the price of gold ultimately increase from its current $620 to $3,000 per ounce? I expect that it will [Ed. Note: With gold now at $1,770, $3,000 seems an awful lot closer]. A better way to frame this large number is to flip the ratio from dollars per ounce to “ounce per dollars.”
Investors who hold gold will be very reluctant to sell it when dollar holders around the world anticipate the endgame of paper monetary systems. For its holders, gold will serve as a solid bridge on the journey from this monetary system to the next. Steady accumulation of gold-related investments remains a prudent strategy.
Why Critics of Wall Street Exist Among Avowed Capitalists
About 18 years ago I started writing columns about how the banking industry is taking over every other profession. My students at Oxford, where I had already served for four years as Rabbi, would discard their training as doctors and attorneys if the investment banks made them offers. I worried that the brain drain into banking would handicap professional talent in so many other sectors. How could it not? With the banks offering starting salaries in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and the potential to make tens of millions a year, you had to be crazy not to accept it.
But even I could not foresee hedge fund managers routinely making half a billion dollars a year or feeling like failures for making just 10 to 20 million, a phenomenon I addressed in my book The Broken American Male. Now, since I am an avowed capitalist, why should there be any issue with banks or those who have legitimately found a means by which to produce staggering wealth, especially when a great many of the hedge fund managers known to me are highly charitable?
For two reasons. The first is that any of us who have dealings with banks have learned just how awful they can be, how condescending, how greedy, and how dismissive. The second is that there seem to be two standards, one for Wall Street, the other for Main Street, and to the extent that OWS has garnered wider support, then it deserves it, because Wall Street refuses to reform itself and insists on retaining unfair privileges.
I have earlier written of my battle with Bear Stearns over my treatment at the hands of a trader who tried to gorge me with fees. Then I had my issues with JP Morgan Chase, and I wrote about how, amid tens of billions of dollars in TARP money they received, they obstructed virtually every effort I attempted at a mortgage adjustment, which was the purpose of them receiving government assistance in the first place. Just getting someone on the phone was a near impossibility, and it was common, after waiting an hour to speak to someone, to suddenly have the line drop and nobody call you back. I have also had my run-ins with American Express and the utter incompetence and arrogance of some of the staff associated with the elite cards they offer, even as they charge you an annual fortune to have it. And if these were just my experiences, you could dismiss me as a grouch, but in the most prestigious and reliable news outlets, you will see endless horror stories of how the banks treat their customers.
The same arrogance is manifest in the fact that the fund managers are insisting on retaining their absurd 15-percent capital gains loophole. Said loophole allows hedge fund managers and private equity firms to treat a substantial portion of their compensation as capital gains, meaning they are taxed at 15 percent rather than the 35-percent rate that applies to income such as wages and salary.
To be sure, I think all taxes in this nation are way too high, and the last thing I want to see is tax raised anywhere. But I don't want us little people to be suckers, either. And the idea that the tax rate is 35 percent on income over $379,150 but fund managers like John Paulson, earning as much as $15 billion in a single year, are able to pay a 15-percent tax rate on the majority of their income is unfair.
The same of course applies to the bailouts that were given to banks but did not trickle down to end users like me. In August 2009 The New York Times released a story detailing former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's calls to his former firm, Goldman Sachs, in the days leading up to the A.I.G. bailout and financial collapse of 2008. Paulson asked for and received an ethics waiver from both the White House counsel's office and the Treasury Department, allowing him to speak freely with Goldman Sachs chairman Lloyd Blankfein. Information obtained by The Times shows that during the week of the A.I.G. bailout Paulson spoke with Blankfein two dozen times, making their communication far more frequent than with any other bank chairman. Goldman Sachs, of course, was the bank that benefitted most from the A.I.G. bailout. All the above highlights a huge conflict of interest that the public is arrogantly told to accept as necessary on account of the "too big to fail" notion.
And why, when the banks are borrowing money at 0.25 percent from the Federal Reserve, do we have to borrow at a minimum 3.25-percent prime rate that is often far greater for individuals with even a single credit blemish? Why the huge spread?
This is where the objectors to Wall Street are gaining traction even among avowed capitalists, by demonstrating to the public that too many bankers insist on a privileged position, as if they are masters of the universe whom we have to support.
I don't want to see Wall Street punished, and I don't want bankers treated any worse than anyone else. I reject class warfare. If people work hard and find ways to become extraordinarily wealthy, G-d bless them, and I hope they devote huge sums to charity. But just as the bankers should not be treated worse, they should not be treated better, either. What is needed is an even playing field, which, once achieved, will help reestablish the credibility of bankers and undermine their opposition.
Peace, love and happiness until next time...
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