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Simplicity is wonderful. A one sided conversation is meaningless.

Canada Intentionally Making the Same Mistakes as the US

I am constantly amused by the fact that people cannot see some of the simplest patterns. I read news from all over the US and the world, if you do that, certain things start to become clear. Firstly, real estate is always a local thing. Historically, prices for real estate were based on distance to working centers and the quality of the housing and schools. As the amount of and type of work fluctuated so would the housing market. Pretty simple. After 2001, we began to see a growing housing bubble across the whole nation at the same time even as areas were losing manufacturing jobs.

Now you need to remember that the housing bubble was not just in the United States, it happened in European countries too and again, all at the same time. What I am going to do next is provide a few links to stories about what is going on in Canada. One should remember that Canada was not impacted by the global financial crisis in the same way America and Europe were.

Yahoo - CBCNEWS.CA - Teachers' pension up next for reforms.

In the article it talks about how in Canada the Teachers Pensions are in great condition; but, the Canadian government still wants to change it to restrict benefits. They don't have to, they just want to. Why would anyone want to go after the pensioners when it is fully funded and quite healthy? Why should there be an attack on pensions in Canada that directly mirrors what is going on in the United States?

Yahoo - CBCNEWS.CA - 6 myths and realities about Canada Post. Canada is attempting to destroy their postal service in the same way were are in the United States and they want to blame it on pensions costs, what a surprise.

Yahoo - The Corporate Takeover of Canada. The video discusses a Canadian free trade agreement that allows corporations to sue Canada in an international court over their laws. Hey, didn't I recently write about how the United States is doing the exact same thing.

Yahoo - Cashless Society Coming to Canada, MINT (RFID) CHIP. I wont say that the whole video is great but the discussion about MintChip is interesting. The Canadian government is creating their own version of Bitcoin. The push in both England and Canada is to get rid of coins and make all small purchases use electronic currency while at the same time eliminating checks.

In Poland, the government confiscated 1/2 of all the pension funds. I am pretty sure that what happens in Canada and the United States did not require the Poles to go after pensions, there is no connection between our pensions and their pensions. Why is the ex head of the Bank of Canada now in charge of the Bank of England and intentionally causing them to have a housing bubble just like we did? Why do something that you know will end in the same way that our housing bubble did?

There are people who are exposing many of the things I talk about; but, the vast majority of them have personal interests in doing so. Some sell gold, some sell advertising and some just sell their soul. One of the things I find very disturbing is how they blame people for not "waking up" and stopping what is going on. The truth is, you can wake up as much as you want and it is still going to go down the way it is going to go down. I do not say this pessimistically, I say it realistically. We could all go out on the streets and demand the government to keep printing physical cash and ever outlaw digital purchases. So what. The world is going electronic and we don't have a choice unless we could convince the world to not go digital and that is not going to happen. The biggest adopter of electronic currency is Africa because they have so few banks, they are also the leaders in the usage of cell phones.

I have to be truthful and brutal with my readers or I fear I will not be doing my job and not deserve your readership. From day one I have posted on what I believe is going on in the world. I am sure nobody agrees with me all the time and that is okay; but, I don't think people would keep reading it if they did not believe I was being truthful. This is not some cat video amusing blog, it talks about corruption and things to be wary of.

I want to be very, very clear. When I say we are going to become a cashless society, it isn't a guess it is the fact. As for genetic manipulation and modification, I hate it and there is absolutely nothing you or I can do to prevent it. We could pass any law we wanted; but, it will go on. The point is to be aware of what is going on if you can. Most people do not have the time to read the news as I do. The few of you who bother reading this blog don't have the time; but, you make an effort. Heck, you read this blog and that is an effort.

The vast majority of people neither have the time nor the understanding to really follow something like this blog or all the different news sources to figure out what is going on. When I was working two 8 hour a day jobs to just survive, I could never have written this blog or read any news.

Where Are We Headed? What is Justice?

Someone told me about this Friday; but, I only came across the actual article today.

Yahoo - Good Morning America - Victims' Family Speaks Out Against Sentencing in 'Affluenza' Case

Basically, some wealthy kid got very drunk and drove his fathers car into another car killing four people. He was tried, found guilty and sentenced to probation. The reason he didn't go to jail was supposedly that he grew up wealthy so he didn't know how to be responsible. He was too affluent to know any better. Now to be fair, he won't be able to see his parents for two years because he will be away at a $450,000 a year treatment facility. So, his prison will be like being at a private club med facility.

A couple of years back our Governor Mr. Schwarzenegger pardoned a young man for murder because he was the son of a politically important person. Schwarzenegger said that it was the type of thing you do for a friend. We later found out that he also slept with his made and had a child with her. Thats the kind of thing you do when you are privileged.

Pensions Versus Compassion That is the Coming Game

There has been a growing attack on Social Security and Pensions, everyone is being scared into thinking that they are not going to be able to retire. We are being led to believe that our 401ks and retirement accounts will be looted by the government to pay it's bills. At the same time we are being told that all of our taxes are being used to pay freeloaders. What would you do if you were told you could keep your retirement, pension or 401k if we stopped having welfare?

We are being played. There is no way that with our aging population anyone in congress would survive if they allowed our Social Security or pensions to be stolen, not in the United States. You would have elderly people with guns in the streets and they own a lot of guns. The attack on the baby boomers retirements is a play to get them to vote a certain way.

Scientists Arguing Over Stupid Ideas

I grew up during the space race and had many family members that worked in aerospace for at least part of their lives all the way from the first rockets to the stealth bomber and other things. I grew up loving science and still do. In particular I like quantum physics because I love to watch the scientists make sense of what they observe on the sub-atomic level.

The bottom line is that on a quantum level (sub-atomic) things don't follow the rules of physics that we see on a atomic level. On a quantum level particles interact on a quicker than speed of light manner. Basically things which are not connected to one another effect one another in a manner that could only happen if the objects could move faster than the speed of light. According to Einstein, nothing can move faster than the speed of light. It has to do with mass and force.

The next problem is that there is not enough mass in an atom to account for gravity and gravity is believed to be the reason why things pull on each other. The idea is that the bigger an object is, the more it attracts objects to itself. The world spent a whole lot of money to build a machine to examine atoms and their parts to figure out why things don't have enough mass to account for gravity. I simplified that as much as I could.

The answer that was offered to the issue of gravity was that science believed there was a particle that somehow magically gave mass to other particles while retaining it's mass. That it gave more than it had. There are some problems with this conceptually. This particle was called "The God Particle"; but, is actually named the Higgs Boson. Some scientists claim that they have found it. They don't know what it does though and therefore have not actually proven anything. Still, they are getting the Nobel prize for saying they found it.

Quantum physics is fundamentally having a problem why there is gravity and why things react to each other faster than the speed of light. Well, some scientists are being hailed for having a new and better explanation.

Huffington Post - Nature - Is The Universe A Hologram? Physicists Say It's Possible.

Wired - Scientists Discover a Jewel at the Heart of Quantum Physics

The new theory is basically that there is no space between things, that distance is an illusion. It also suggests that time is an illusion. Wow. This is as dumb as the idea that there are unlimited numbers of alternate dimensions. They are all afraid to address the real question, why isn't there enough mass in an atom to account for gravity. Very simple. The question they are forced to contend with is wrong. They are trying to say that there does not need to be enough mass, that concept of mass and or space and or time is a mistake or that these things appear from other dimensions that cannot be examined or explained.

Let me give an analogy on a human level. Lets say you and nine other people were in a room. The ten people in the room weigh 100 lbs each. Another person person, the 11th, walks in the room and he too weighs 100 pounds. As soon as he walks in the room everyone else in the room gains 10 lbs and he continues to weigh 100 lbs. The 11th person never touches anyone; but, everyone gains weight just from his being there. That is how the Higgs Boson is supposed to work.

The new theory, the one about holograms. They are basically saying that you were always in the room and always touching everyone else in the room. It is just that to you and everyone else and the room and any observer of you all in the room were mistaken about your ever not being in the room.

Too many people to count have reported that they were aware and had consciousness even after they were dead. They also report that they had seen and heard things in the area around them that they could not have seen or heard. This is called the Near Death Experience (NDE). Scientists are disturbed by medical people talking about NDEs because they don't fit in with the material concept of the universe. They would like to believe that thoughts are the consequence of matter rather than matter being the consequence of thoughts.

We know and can scientifically prove how objects interact. The laws of physics work. We cannot prove why the universe exists only that it should not. If we accept that awareness exists outside of the physical then we can see the answer; but, that means there might be a God.

The Wealthy and Politicians Don't Like Paying Taxes

Yahoo - CNBC - The rich pay all the taxes. That is the headline of an article by CNBC, there is a video or their report included in the link. Those poor rich people, don't you feel sorry for them.

According to a government report the top earners pay for all the taxes and people in the bottom 40% receive more in government benefits then they pay out, this is presented as outrageous; but, it is also very misleading. Lets start with some basics. According to this report, the lowest income group, the bottom 20%, made $8,100; but, received $25,000 in "transfers". Huh? I know people who made under $8,100 and the government did not send them $25,000. Oh, wait are they including the unemployed or people on Social Security? I bet they are and lets consider that. We all contribute to unemployment insurance and social security and that money is paid to the government, when receive it, it is not charity. If you pay into social security for 40 years, when you finally get it back it is not coming from the tax on "the wealthy".

As income inequality has grown I am reading and seeing more and more from "libertarians" and financial media whining that they shouldn't have to pay taxes. We hear repeated all over the news when they talk about the "job creators" and it is still a lie. If they were really sincere then they would asked to be taxed based upon the number of full time jobs they created in the United States. Maybe that doesn't work for the wealthy because they certainly haven't created any jobs recently. In fact, we have lost millions of jobs because of the fraud and abuse that was allowed to go on in Wall Street and by banks which eventually led to our recession. Why don't we call them job exporters instead because most of the jobs that have been created in the past few years were jobs that these same people outsourced to China and India.

I have talked about some of this before. Personally, I am in favor of a flat income tax, everyone pays 10% or whatever percent of their income regardless of how it is derived, no deductions. It is slightly more complicated than that; but, not much. I don't want to tax people on welfare income because that then just becomes a paper chase. If hand you a dollar and make you hand me ten cents back, doesn't it make more sense just to hand you 90 cents in the first place. The same should be applied to military pay.

Some people don't like income tax and prefer a sales tax. I have a couple of problems with that. The most important one is very simple again, I want to tax people based on how they have benefited from the nation. We have built a lot of infrastructure and business relies on that infrastructure. Instead we give tax breaks to companies. Those breaks don't show up in the income tax report done by the Congressional Budget Office.

We are seeing this game end for America and the West. We have given away our industrial base and debased our currencies. After the financial crisis, the pie got smaller. The cost of that crisis was all born by the bottom 60% us. The only winners were the top 10%. From the beginning this blog has talked about the financial crisis, what led to it and where it is heading next. I don't know why this information is less read; but, in many ways it is the most critical to our immediate future. Next year should be really interesting.

European Banks and You

I don't think most people understand that after the crash of 2007, the Federal Reserve "lent" hundreds of billions of dollars from the TARP fund to European banks. In addition, to provide liquidity, they also traded billions of dollars for a supposedly equivalent amount of Euros and other European currencies. At the time this happened I wrote about how badly it exposed us to European bank failures, it still does.

The reason I mention the above is so that when you read the following two linked articles you will understand that this is not just some problem over there; but, was intended to make their guaranteed failure take our banks with them. None of this is an accident. I used to play poker a lot, I even beat a couple of professionals and won a few tournaments (I am talking about in person tournaments at proper casinos - I won hundred on line and with non-pros). What I learned from playing pros is that they don't make mistakes very often and watch everything that goes on even when they are not in the hand.

People that are real professionals do the same thing. I am not talking about stock traders, I am talking about smart investors and money managers. People like Greenspan and Bernanke and Paulson do not make mistakes no matter what some media might like you to believe. They are the smartest guys in the room. They would have us believe that Greenspan was a follower of Ayn Rand and he was; but, he is also really smart and violated Ayn Rand's philosophy by agreeing to lend money to failed institutions. He believes in something even more than free markets, he believes in globalism.

Yahoo - Reuters - Europe edges toward plan to close failing banks. The European Union has been working on a program for closing failing banks. Now you have to ask why, don't they have laws for closing banks and businesses, they do, they have bankruptcy law too. The claim is that because of how Europe is now integrated, they have to agree on how to close banks. NO, they don't. There is a line somewhere in the article where it says that because they are not like the United States having the same power to change things is more complicated. They made it clear previously that the EU believes the past problems were not fixed because they lacked a true political union. This is all being used to achieve that goal.

Yahoo - CNBC - Europe outlines plan on closing troubled banks. What a shock, they arrived at a plan, it just happens to be in agreement with the IMF plan and the same one that has been agreed to by the United States and the European Central Bank, it just took them more time to adopt it. Maybe that's what they meant in the previous article? LOL.

In poker, the best don't play the cards, they play the player. It is no different in finance. When a group of poker players is working together, we call that cheating. In finance, they call it cooperation. The game is rigged and the purpose is simple. European banks are going to fail and they already decided which ones, read the second article where it says they have already identified the banks that could not survive their stress tests and are at risk.

Lets assume for the moment, as the Europeans apparently do, that some European banks are going to fail and go away, not just restructure, go away. What happens if a country like Greece ceases having any national banks? They financial system would then be completely dependent on the EU.