Hi there. Are you ready to dance to your own tune?; Here are the words, 'fiscal here and fiscal there, fiscal, fiscal, everywhere:E
Illustration by Victor JuhaszApril 25, 2013 1:00 PM ETConspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world's largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three – and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that's trillion, with a "t") worth of financial instruments. When that sprawling con burst into public view last year, it was easily the biggest financial scandal in history – MIT professor Andrew Lo even said it "dwarfs by orders of magnitude any financial scam in the history of markets."That was bad enough, but now Libor may have a twin brother. Word has leaked out that the London-based firm ICAP, the world's largest broker of interest-rate swaps, is being investigated by American authorities for behavior that sounds eerily reminiscent of the Libor mess. Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world's largest banks to manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps.Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It's about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget.It should surprise no one that among the players implicated in this scheme to fix the prices of interest-rate swaps are the same megabanks – including Barclays, UBS, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and the Royal Bank of Scotland – that serve on the Libor panel that sets global interest rates. In fact, in recent years many of these banks have already paid multimillion-dollar settlements for anti-competitive manipulation of one form or another (in addition to Libor, some were caught up in an anti-competitive scheme, detailed in Rolling Stone last year, to rig municipal-debt service auctions). Though the jumble of financial acronyms sounds like gibberish to the layperson, the fact that there may now be price-fixing scandals involving both Libor and ISDAfix suggests a single, giant mushrooming conspiracy of collusion and price-fixing hovering under the ostensibly competitive veneer of Wall Street culture.Why? Because Libor already affects the prices of interest-rate swaps, making this a manipulation-on-manipulation situation. If the allegations prove to be right, that will mean that swap customers have been paying for two different layers of price-fixing corruption. If you can imagine paying 20 bucks for a crappy PB&J because some evil cabal of agribusiness companies colluded to fix the prices of both peanuts and peanut butter, you come close to grasping the lunacy of financial markets where both interest rates and interest-rate swaps are being manipulated at the same time, often by the same banks."It's a double conspiracy," says an amazed Michael Greenberger, a former director of the trading and markets division at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and now a professor at the University of Maryland. "It's the height of criminality."The bad news didn't stop with swaps and interest rates. In March, it also came out that two regulators – the CFTC here in the U.S. and the Madrid-based International Organization of Securities Commissions – were spurred by the Libor revelations to investigate the possibility of collusive manipulation of gold and silver prices. "Given the clubby manipulation efforts we saw in Libor benchmarks, I assume other benchmarks – many other benchmarks – are legit areas of inquiry," CFTC Commissioner Bart Chilton said.But the biggest shock came out of a federal courtroom at the end of March – though if you follow these matters closely, it may not have been so shocking at all – when a landmark class-action civil lawsuit against the banks for Libor-related offenses was dismissed. In that case, a federal judge accepted the banker-defendants' incredible argument: If cities and towns and other investors lost money because of Libor manipulation, that was their own fault for ever thinking the banks were competing in the first place."A farce," was one antitrust lawyer's response to the eyebrow-raising dismissal."Incredible," says Sylvia Sokol, an attorney for Constantine Cannon, a firm that specializes in antitrust cases.All of these stories collectively pointed to the same thing: These banks, which already possess enormous power just by virtue of their financial holdings – in the United States, the top six banks, many of them the same names you see on the Libor and ISDAfix panels, own assets equivalent to 60 percent of the nation's GDP – are beginning to realize the awesome possibilities for increased profit and political might that would come with colluding instead of competing. Moreover, it's increasingly clear that both the criminal justice system and the civil courts may be impotent to stop them, even when they do get caught working together to game the system.If true, that would leave us living in an era of undisguised, real-world conspiracy, in which the prices of currencies, commodities like gold and silver, even interest rates and the value of money itself, can be and may already have been dictated from above. And those who are doing it can get away with it. Forget the Illuminati – this is the real thing, and it's no secret. You can stare right at it, anytime you want.
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/everything-is-rigged-the-biggest-financial-scandal-yet-20130425#ixzz2SD7rjHsn
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Dr Burzynski and the revelation of the cancer scams and his treatments.
Dr Burzynski is one of many qualified doctors who have been persecuted, killed,threatened and forced to live in hiding because they have found and proved that cancer can be treated and cured. Unfortunately cancer is so scary that the standard treatments are sought after for the first place to go, and understandably so.
The treatments offered by orthodoxy in the form of hospital oncology is very painful and debilitating, often killing off healthy cells. It is also very lucrative for the Big Pharma, like alternative energy and complimentary medicine it has not the huge profits. Healthy people are not good cash cows.
- Sitting for extended periods of time is an independent risk factor for poor health and premature death.
- An analysis of 18 studies found that people who sat for the longest periods of time were twice as likely to have diabetes or heart disease, compared to those who sat the least
- Research by a former NASA scientist shows your body needs perpetual motion to function optimally. The good news is that there are virtually unlimited opportunities for movement throughout the day, from doing housework or gardening, to cooking and even just standing up every 10 to 15 minutes
- To compensate for long hours spent sitting down at work, you could incorporate Foundation Training exercises; powerful simple structural movements that help strengthen and realign your body posture
- Grounding, by walking barefoot outside, is another grossly neglected foundational practice for optimal health that you can easily correct.
- Physical exercise may help protect against some of the brain damage caused by drinking.
- Among chronic drinkers, those who were the most physically active had less damaged white matter -- the connective "wiring" of your brain's communication system -- in their brains compared to those who were less active.
- One of the risks of chronic heavy drinking is that it speeds the shrinkage of key regions in your brain; exercise is also useful in this area, as research has shown that people who engaged in the most physical exercise showed the least amount of brain shrinkage.
- Exercise may also help to lessen cravings for, and dependence on, alcohol, as the rewarding feeling you get from exercise provides you with a suitable alternative to the rewarding feeling you previously got from alcohol.
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| Not quite like me----yet? |
BIG SUNSPOTS: The sun is peppered with several large sunspots. One of them, AR1731, has an unstable delta-class magnetic field that harbors energy for strong eruptions. NOAA forecasters estimate a 30% chance of M-flares and a 5% chance of X-flares on May 3rd. Solar flare alerts: text, voice.
"At least 4 sunspot groups are visible in the image I took using an unfiltered Canon 7D DSLR digital camera," says Jett Aguilar of Quezon City. "The photo reminds me of an Escher print, with the sunspots transforming into birds!"
More sunspot-shots may be found in the realtime space weather gallery: {Courtesy of spaceweather.com
Health News (Week 18 - 2013)
By Robert Redfern
I understand the Corporate Medical Business is not interested in health and is simply a profit making business but the BBC and Government Health Information Services are paid by taxpayers and should be unbiased and present the facts in a proper manner. What’s a proper manner?
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| What with Obama's health bill, UK 's NHS, the war on complimentary medicine and natural substances, maybe we need a ticket to some off world paradise!! or becoming in tune by shedding the brain washing as in Robert Redfern's clip above. |
Most important about Earthing, Growing your own vegatables.
Woodstock 1969, Richie Havens was the festivals first performer, he held the crowd for nearly three hours (in part because he was told to perform a lengthy set because many artists were delayed in reaching the festival location), and he was called back for several encores. Having run out of tunes, he improvised a song based on the old spiritual "Motherless Child" that became "Freedom".
Video of Richie Havens at Glastonbury Festival in England, 2002. Richie passed over at the age of 72. This was an era of great events and characters.
'You didn't create your body, nor are we able to control the body's functions. An Intelligence greater than the human mind is at work.
It is the same Intelligence that sustains all of Nature.
You cannot get any closer to that Intelligence than by being aware of your own energy field---by feeling the aliveness, the animating presence within your body' Eckhart Tolle
I have posted the video several times, and I will probably in the future. Some of my scientific colleagues have seen this and their response is 'well Darwin had the answer, gradually from the soup as it were on the early Earth, through the chaos, a self organising system arose, because of the survival instinct, it gathered itself together with other organisms and then it started it's search for food and so predators and prey arose which fuelled the systems to grow and become more complex, and over the billions of years, the self instructing information gathered into a memory and data base of survival mechanisms. To suggest there was AN Intelligence that started the process and imbibed the primitive organisms with information, or a plan from a Divine Mind is both non logical, primitive and ludicrous. So you see from the big bang matter was without instruction, random and dumb, but the electro/magnetic properties of the particles attracted one another or repelled and so the first communities were formed and self organised themselves and developed simple reflexes and memories and so organised chaos'.
It sound and reads so logical. However, call me naive, however I feel deep within me that their is a supreme Intelligence that started the ball rolling, and like a crafts person, built up the constituents as the master craftsmen put the pieces of the puzzle together, I feel the two theories compliment one another.
Big Bang
Many years back I was sitting quietly contemplating several ideas which went away and decided to make a cup of tea, gently stirring the tea, in a intense quiet moment of 'no mind' out of the void popped a 'flash' and AH HA, a eureka moment. I knew and had a brilliant idea, a conception in a micro moment. Seemingly coming from nowhere when my logical mind, which is limited, gave way to a vast Intelligence. THEN I used my logic to bring about the idea into form. I collected data, materials, and hey presto after many a fine adjustments the micro flash had become a 'solid' content of a flash of 'whatever'.
I had a big bang in my head---it was an AH HA. Was it in my head? Was it in my brain? Was my brain like a TV the receiver of a programme from elsewhere.
Question dear reader can you measure Intelligence, information?
Well we can see the result of intelligence in its creation, we can see the electrical currents in the brain, are these not merely signs of activity? Like electricity, we know that electrons move down a wire, cause a filament to heat up causing light, heat, colour, we know potential from + to - in a battery causes a flow of current, yes but no one knows what an electron is at quantum levels, it is a movement of what? So Intelligence is invisible, does not have form, so to be aware of Itself it creates and so by that creation become self aware.
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| The Chicken or the Egg? Hey pal how do I plug in? |
With that conundrum I wish you well and lots of AH HA'S
Be Well. Geoff
BIG ASTEROID APPROACHES: Near-Earth asteroid 1998 QE2 is approaching the Earth-Moon system for a flyby on May 31st. There's no danger of a collision; at closest approach the asteroid will be 3.6 million miles away. Even at that distance, however, the 1.7-mile-wide space rock will be an easy target for mid-sized backyard telescopes. Using a 14-inch Celestron, Alberto Quijano Vodniza of Narino, Colombia took this picture of 1998 QE2 on May 17th:
The sunlit side of the asteroid will turn more squarely toward Earth during the first week of June. At that time it will reach a maximum brightness of 11th magnitude.
NASA radars will be monitoring the flyby, too. "Asteroid 1998 QE2 will be an outstanding radar imaging target at Goldstone and Arecibo and we expect to obtain a series of high-resolution images that could reveal a wealth of surface features,"says radar astronomer Lance Benner of JPL. "Whenever an asteroid approaches this closely, it provides an important scientific opportunity to study it in detail to understand its size, shape, rotation, surface features, and what they can tell us about its origin."
Stay tuned for updates and observing tips. BIG MARCHES IN MANY COUNTRIES PROTESTING ABOUT GM FOOD AND MONANTO
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