“Conspiracy theorists concentrate their time
on transmuting the "base matter" of current events, official stories,
propaganda and public relations into the gleaming golden truth buried within.
They do this through the very right-brained activity of uncovering and
inventing connections between disparate elements.
They create
story-systems to understand and explain events - essentially a religious activity.
For whatever reason, it’s much easier for us to deal with our internal contents
by projecting them into the world around us. These outward signs inevitably
become carriers of the archetypal content and psychodrama latent in the seeker.
Conspiracy theory
also overcomes the strictures of literalism and the problems of simplistic
thinking by experimenting with multiplicity of meaning. Ordinary events, people
and signs become symbols bristling with complex, malleable, even contradictory
meanings. Mystery is revived and idealized. Facts become more than the sum of
their parts. Theory becomes poetry and even theology.”
Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around us in awareness. - James Thurber
The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself. - Archibald MacLeish
None of us are responsible for our birth. Our responsibility is the use we make of life. - Joshua Henry Jones
Visualizing a Plenitude Economy: The Secret To Creating Jobs...
Renaissance 2.0: Understanding the Financial Empire...
Bike to the Future!
Cannabis revealed...
Introducing artist
Drew Morrison...
Extreme
tech log cabin...
2 dogs dining in a restaurant...
What most schools
don't teach...
Give me liberty...and give it in a
classroom!
Monsanto gets
owned by an 11 year old...
Mega canyon found
beneath Greenland...
Rise of the
super bugs...
Why
Tesla was a brilliant geek...
Does Iran have
free energy technology?
The
riskiest places in the world...
You are now entering the
Big Internet Museum...
Photocarver...
Below the boat...
From
box to boat in 10 minutes...
10 signs that you're fully awake...
A
vampire walks into a bar and asks the bartend for a glass of hot water...
Robotic animals...
Tearing down a building without your knowledge...
Life isn't unfair...
Protect your
2nd amendment!
LED pixel art...
Pregnancy is
beautiful...
10 facts about the
Earth you may not have known...
Using
LinkedIn to your advantage...
14
martial arts movies every guy (and gal) should see...
Grand Theft
Iron Man...
General Motors is
becoming China Motors...
Bang your coworkers...
Make your
outdoor parties epic...
Detoxify yourself from
mercury...
Basics of beneficial weeds...
Rings over Guatemala...
The mighty
Wurlitzer organ...
Magic stair
trick...
What could the
massacre of 40,000 elephants tell us?
North Pole moving towards Russia!
Magnetic
silly putty power...
Got
chemtrail flu?
Russia is preparing to
attack the US...
Are you ready for the Tri-bul-ation?
Third Reich -- Operation UFO...
The Nephilim Agenda...
10 Facts About Fluoride You Need to Know
If
you drink water from a municipal supply in the US, you're probably
drinking fluoridated water; here are 10 eye-opening fluoride facts that
are imperative to understand...
One of Your Body's Best Early Warning Signals - Yet Ignored by Nearly Everyone
Almost
everyone makes the mistake of rushing past these red flags in their
haste to "get back to" what they were just doing. Be smarter, and get on
the fast track back to health at the first hint of trouble...
Health Science Institute eAlerts
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The muck and the mire
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A little girl sits at a kitchen table. In front of her is a glass of fresh, cold milk.
Scenes of Americana don't get much more wholesome than that.
But it's an illusion. Because that glass of milk is far from wholesome. In fact, it isn't even healthy.
Oh the irony...
What makes that milk so unhealthy is exactly what we've been brainwashed into believing is the only thing that makes it safe enough to drink: pasteurization.
In fact, pasteurized milk should never pass that child's lips. Or your lips. Or anyone's. That's because it's fresh, cold junk.
Now, for years, we've all heard just the opposite. "Pasteurization kills bacteria." "It is what makes milk safe and wholesome."
Don't believe a word of it.
Let's start with the "wholesome" lie...
Pasteurization strips away nutrients like CLA, an essential fatty acid
that boosts metabolism. Milk, straight from a healthy cow, contains FIVE
TIMES more CLA than it does after it's pasteurized.
Other valuable nutrients are also depleted. They include...
* Vitamin C
* Amino acids
* Key enzymes
* Magnesium
* Calcium
That's right -- calcium! And the missing magnesium makes it harder for your body to absorb what little calcium survives.
Also missing: bacteria. The whole point of pasteurization is to kill
bacteria. But that includes beneficial bacteria that your digestive
tract needs to function smoothly.
So everything that would actually make milk a healthy choice gets destroyed during the process of pasteurization.
And it doesn't stop there. Because dairy farmers who pasteurize their milk also do much, much worse.
Factory farms are filthy places, which tends to make the cows unhealthy.
So farm workers dump antibiotics in the animal feed. And, of course,
traces of the drugs end up in the milk.
I wish I could tell you that antibiotics are the only junk that gets
into the milk. But we've barely gotten started. And fair warning -- some
of these items might turn your stomach...
* Growth hormones
* Painkillers
* Pesticides
* Herbicides
* Blood
* Pus
* E. coli
* Fecal matter
Could it get any worse? Yes it could. Here's the final insult...
Cows would naturally graze on grass if allowed. But factory farm cows
never see a pasture. Workers feed them genetically modified corn and
soy. But some farmers have found an even cheaper, lower-quality feed...
Candy.
Seriously. They feed their cows candy and sugar-rich kids' cereals. The
very same things you're trying to get off your child's plate!
So to start, after its pasteurized, that milk is pretty much nothing but
low-quality fat and sugar -- and then we add the lovely list of
ingredients above.
Suddenly that kitchen-table scene seems much more Amityville horror than pure Americana...
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It's a killer
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Forget about trans fats, sugars or allergen warnings.
The FDA is ignoring the greatest threat to your health when it comes to what they require on food labeling.
If they weren't busy signing loyalty pledges to their big business
benefactors, boxes of cereal and loaves of bread would come with the
following warning:...
"May cause heart disease, depression, Alzheimer's, cancer, or gastrointestinal disorders."
Does the word "glyphosate" ring a bell? If not, I'll bet you're probably familiar with glyphosate's brand name.
Glyphosate is the killer ingredient in RoundUp weed killer. And RoundUp
is everywhere. Your neighbors spray it in their yards and gardens. It's
used in parks, golf courses, and other public areas.
And, of course, farmers spray millions of acres with glyphosate in the
U.S. and around the world. After all, it's a very effective weed killer.
Just one problem. One huge and very serious problem...
Because of its pervasive nature, traces of glyphosate creep into our
food. And if you eat packaged foods that include soy, sugar, corn,
wheat, or canola, you're essentially eating RoundUp.
A new study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shows us why this glyphosate exposure is devastating.
Glyphosate inhibits an enzyme that helps us detox. When glyphosate
undoes the action of this enzyme, food chemicals and environmental
toxins become more active in our bodies.
And the damage takes a terrible toll.
Brace yourself. Here's a quote from the study... "Negative impact on the body is insidious and manifests slowly over time as inflammation damages cellular systems throughout the body." (Emphasis added.)
Researchers believe ingesting glyphosate plays a role in
gastrointestinal disorders, obesity, diabetes, heart disease,
depression, autism, infertility, cancer and Alzheimer's disease.
And virtually every one of us may be picking up traces of glyphosate
every day. Don't count on the FDA to change the labeling requirements
any time soon. Monsanto won't have it!
But with a little diligence, you can dramatically reduce your exposure.
Read more about simple ways to avoid RoundUp-laced foods here.
Scientists
on Unparticle Hunt Give Earth a Spin
|
|
|  It may be under our feet, buried deep within
the Earth's surface: A previously undiscovered force of nature that could
send a generation of physicists back to the chalkboard. A team led by an
Amherst professor is searching for such a force -- and it's using the Earth's
mantle as its laboratory.
[See
Full Story] |
| Pulling a Mob Job on America |
|
| by Chris Mayer |
|
You know the routine.
Mobsters shake down, say, a restaurant owner. They
drink all the booze
and eat all they want and pay
nothing. They rob the cash register. They
even go out
and borrow money against the place and spend it.
When
they've finally bled the thing dry and the
business is about to
collapse, they burn the place
down and collect the insurance money.
That's pretty much what Goldman Sachs did to AIG.
The taxpayer footed
the bill.
We are fast approaching the fifth anniversary of the
day the U.S.
government stepped in to bail out AIG,
the insurance giant. It happened
over the weekend of
Sept. 14, 2008. And even though I feel like I know
the
story, I keep learning new wrinkles about the whole
debacle. It
really was a mob job on the U.S. taxpayer
— and just one of many during
that whole crisis.
I'll explain and show how this is still going on…
I
was in Pompano Beach, Fla., this week with the
family, visiting my
91-year-old grandmother. And I
picked up a copy of Matt Taibbi's Griftopia: A Story
of Bankers, Politicians and the Most Audacious
Power Grab in American History. It's great beach
reading.
Taibbi is a Rolling Stone
correspondent and wrote
the now immortal description of Goldman Sachs
as a "vampire squid wrapped around the face of
humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into
anything that smells like money." Hunter
S.
Thompson, probably the greatest writer ever to write
for Rolling Stone, would be proud.
Taibbi is a worthy heir. The book, published in 2010,
is mostly a
collection of pieces that appeared in
Rolling Stone from
2008-2010 reworked and
updatedwith new material. Taibbi has style, and I
like his prose. He has a gift with metaphor and simile.
He calls the crazy tactics of one hedge fund "the
financial equivalent
of performing open-heart surgery
with unwashed hands, using a Super 8
motel
bedspread as an operating table."
He says Bernanke's claim that a weak dollar only
really affects
Americans going abroad "is a bit like
saying a forest fire only really
sucks if you're a
woodpecker."
Some people are turned off by his style, which
involves occasional
profanity. (His chapter on
former Fed chief Alan Greenspan is titled
"The
Biggest Asshole in the Universe.") But I like it
because it has the
effect of unmasking these
criminals so we can see them for what they
really are. Most of the government officials and
corporate bigwigs under
analysis are just high-
class thieves.
Besides that, Taibbi does a lot of terrific
investigative reporting.
He's more than a stylist.
And I think his perspective is spot on. He
fully
appreciates that what we live in is an economy
that is fast
becoming a Kafkaesque nightmare.
Here is Taibbi:
"Your average working American looks around
and sees evidence of
government power over his
life everywhere. Hepays high taxes and can't
sell
a house or a car without paying all sorts of fees.
If he owns a
business, inspectors come to his
workplace once a year to gouge him for
something
whether he's in compliance or not. If he wants to
build a shed in his backyard, he needs a permit
from some local thief in the clerk's
office."
For most people, a run-in with government
officialdom is something to be
avoided. It means
you are in for a costly experience, if not outright
financial ruin -- even when you've done nothing
wrong.
But then there is what Taibbi calls the grifter class.
These people use
the government as a way of
making money. This is a large and sweeping
cast
that includes people at the top of the financial/power
pyramid --
such as the senators, representatives
and upper-level officialdom and
the sharks at
gangster firms like Goldman Sachs, Morgan
Stanley, JP Morgan and the like. But it also includes
lowlife crooks snookering
everyday folks, bribing
people, falsifying appraisals and generally
acting
like scum.
More from Taibbi:
"The new America… is fast becoming a vast
ghetto in which all of us,
conservative and
progressives, are being bled dry by a relatively tiny
oligarchy of extremely clever financial criminals and
their castrato
henchmen in government…
This stuff is difficult to unravel, often
fiendishly so.
But those invisible processes, those unseen
labyrinths of
the Grifter Archipelago that are
indifferent to party affiliation, are
our real politics.
Which make sense, if you think about it. It should
always have been obvious that a country as rich
and powerful as the
America should be governed
by an immensely complex, labyrinthine
political
system, one that requires almost unspeakable
cunning and
wolfish ruthlessness to navigate with
any success."
If you can play the game, you can make a lot of
money and take almost no
risk. The taxpayer will
pick up the tab. One example Taibbi spends a good
bit of time on is the whole housing
bubble. I
enjoyed reading some of the craziness of that era.
The home in
Fort Myers, Fla., that sold for $399,600
on Dec. 29, 2005, sold again
the next day for
$589,900 and was in foreclosure a month later. Or
the
$615,000 house sold to a glasscutter where the
mortgage was 96% of his
take-home pay. And then
the Wall Street magic that turned this huge pile
of |
mortgage garbage into AAA-rated securities.
Taibbi details the inner workings of it all in an
accessible and fascinating way. He describes it as
a "financial sewage system designed
to stick us all
with the raw waste and pump clean water back to
Wall
Street." The amount of fraud and greed and
thievery involved by all
parties is still breathtaking to
read about, even though I lived through
it.
And this brings us to AIG. The chapter on this
episode is called "Hot
Potato." In a sense, AIG was
the firm that got stuck with the hot
potato. It is a
riveting story, actually, and I can't do justice to it here.
But it encapsulates the mafia-style economy we find
ourselves in.
Essentially, at the end of the tale, AIG
owed Goldman Sachs tens of
billions of dollars. AIG
couldn't pay it. So… Well, here's Taibbi
describing the
showdown:
"When the CEO of Goldman Sachs stood up in the
conference room of the
New York Federal Reserve
Bank and demanded his money, he did so knowing
that it was more profitable to put AIG to the torch than
it was to try
to work things out. In the end, [CEO Lloyd]
Blankfein and Goldman
literally did a mob job on AIG,
burning it to the ground to for the
'insurance' of a
government bailout they knew they would get…"
And they got it. Now, you might claim the taxpayer
made money on the
deal, as was widely been
reported late last year. The idea is
ridiculous, because
AIG was clearly a heist in which AIG had no choice
and
the price offered was a fire sale price. (Not that we
should feel
sorry for AIG, which was a gangster firm
with its own crooks). Besides,
where is the check for
the taxpayer? I never got it. The truth is the
government
used our money for free and taxpayers will never see it.
The whole perspective this book offers is important.
Because if you think of the economy as this vast thing
where success or failure is a
matter of serving
customers well, then you are deceiving yourself. (I've
written about this before, about how America's largest
companies are
basically products of state privilege.)
This perspective is good too because the reality of the
thing shatters many illusions. Think Obamacare is a
socialist redistribution scheme? Take another look.
What it really amounts to is the largest corporate
giveaway and pork-filled legislation in the history of the
country.
The book also pops a lot of inflated reputations, like
Warren Buffett's. My view of Warren Buffett as a
person has basically plummeted in the last half-decade
or so. Buffett and his firm Berkshire Hathaway benefited
immensely from government bailout money. Wells
Fargo, of which
Buffett is a major shareholder, got $50
billion in bailout money. In
fact, many Berkshire holdings
were direct beneficiaries of bailout money. And Buffett
himself used his influence to make sweetheart deals
with the government.
It makes you want to throw up, then, when Buffett's
vice chairman, Charlie Munger, said of struggling
Americans during the housing bust that they should
"suck it in and cope." Yeah.
Buffett lobbied hard for taxpayer bailouts. He is, today,
just another grifter -- like Goldman Sachs -- using
taxpayer money and his influence
over those in power
to enrich himself and his corrupt firm. (As an
aside, the
hero worship around Buffett is sickening and
sophomoric and
really should end. Buffett was a great
investor, perhaps the greatest
that ever lived. But that
doesn't make him a good person, or a wise
person, or
even a great investor today. I know he's giving his
money to
charity. Maybe he should start by giving it
back to the people he stole
it from.) Honore de Balzac,
the French novelist, once said that behind every great
fortune there is a crime. Sadly, in the U.S., this is
more and more
often the case.
(By the way, Taibbi's latest Rolling Stone
piece is
called "Ripping off Young America: The College Loan
Scandal."
It shows again the same grifter dynamics
at work. You can find it easily
online.)
Anyway, Griftopia
is a great book. I enjoyed it
immensely and recommend it to anyone who
wants
to get a better understanding about how things work. |
Introducing Frank Karsten's... Democracy is Inherently Broken
 |
| Frank Karsten |
Like the U.S., many democratic nations are suffering
from permanently high unemployment, staggering public debts and budget
deficits, and a deep economic recession. Although many people blame
politicians for their problems, virtually no one ever considers blaming
the democratic system for our woes. If you think about it, however, it's
clear that it's the collectivist nature of democracy that has led us
into this hole.
Over the last 150 years, government debts have grown inexorably.
During that period, average government spending increased from 12% of
GDP to a hefty 47% among major Western countries.
At the same time, the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations ballooned from
one to a whopping 200 books. This shows that government interference
into the private lives of individuals has mushroomed and that democracy
is a danger to liberty.
These trends are not a coincidence. They are the logical result of the
principles and dynamics of the democratic system. In a democracy,
politicians experience a strong incentive to make debts and raise taxes.
After all, they are in power for a short period of time and, therefore,
tend to behave more like shortsighted tenants than responsible,
future-oriented owners.
When they overspend, over borrow, or overprint money, their
successors will have to deal with the negative consequences, and in
their turn feel the same perverse impulse. Despite austerity rhetoric,
government debts keep rising in most democratic countries. "Austerity"
is a code word for "spending less than we had wanted, but more than in
the past." In the end, they wind up raising taxes, rather than lowering
expenditures to cut deficits.
Democracy is like going out to dinner with a group of people and
deciding in advance to split the bill equally. If you order a nice $10
dessert, you pay only a fraction of the cost and the others pay the
rest. So everyone will eat and drink more than they would have done if
they had paid their own bill.
The result is a much higher total bill -- and no one will be in a position to do anything about it.
In a democracy, voters have the chance to put their personal
desires on the collective tab. Welfare recipients demand higher welfare
payments, parents want "free" education, farmers lobby for higher
subsidies, and so on. Everyone tries to live at the expense of others.
But in the end, almost everyone loses, just like the dinner companions
in the example above.
The politician that promises the most, no matter how unrealistic, usually wins the elections.
If democracy has built-in perverse incentives, what would be the
alternative? People tend to think that the only alternative to democracy
is dictatorship. They're used to equating democracy with freedom. But
this is nonsense.
Democracy is rule by "the people", i.e., the majority. The
logical alternative to majority rule is self-rule. In other words,
personal liberty. Instead of the government spending tax money and
making decisions for people, individuals should spend their own money
and make their own decisions.
Democracy is a form of collectivism in which the individual is
subordinate to the wishes of the collective. It's a one-size-fits-none
system in which billions of free individual choices are reduced to a
small number of coercive decisions by politicians.
A much better alternative to such a centralized system would be
to have many decentralized systems. This would create a market for
governance where new types of government could be tried and tested,
e.g., startup "countries" like Shenzhen and Dubai.
Getting back to the example of the dinner table: If people could
split up into many different tables, the diners at each table would feel
the negative effects of their spending much more strongly. Then the
feedback mechanism would work far better. In addition, the tables would
compete with each other, so tables spending irresponsibly would be
quickly deserted. Thus, decentralization and competition would foster
responsible behavior.
In the U.S. democratic system, one state or group can live at the
expense of the other. In the European Union, one country can burden the
other countries with their debts and the more frugal countries can't
escape.
But Switzerland, geographically positioned in the center of the
EU, was never part of this collective folly and suffers little from the
economic crisis (their current unemployment rate is a modest 3.1%). The
country must live within its own means, and others cannot spend at the
expense of the Swiss.
The Swiss democracy itself is a very decentralized one. It
consists of 26 regions known as cantons, or provinces, that on average
have 300,000 inhabitants. These cantons enjoy remarkable autonomy, and
they compete on matters like taxes, regulation, health care, and
education. Because of that competition, people and businesses can not
only vote with their pencils, but also with their feet. That fosters
sensible governance, which has led to the prosperity and social
stability the country is famous for.
Switzerland has a direct democracy at the federal, cantonal, and
municipal level. One could, therefore, counter that this Alpine country
offers an argument for more democracy. But its success seems to stem
from its decentralized structure with relatively small units.
In governance, "small is beautiful." Of the 20 most prosperous
regions in the world, many have fewer than 8 million inhabitants. A
number of those, like Singapore, Hong Kong, Liechtenstein, and Monaco,
are not typical liberal democracies.
The current economic crisis cannot be solved by more democracy,
centralization, and government interference. There are currently only
about 200 countries for 7 billion people. That is far too few. We need a
better market for governance in which more countries compete for
companies and people. This will drive down taxes and foster economic
growth and social stability.
Democracy is broken because it's a collectivist system, like socialism and fascism. We have to break it up in order to fix it.
Peace, love and happiness...until next time!