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.
Thursday, December 12, 2013
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 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.
Wednesday, December 11, 2013
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.
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.
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.
Tuesday, December 10, 2013
Pension Theft and Broken Promises
I just read a couple of articles that show how one way or the other they are going to get your pension.
Huffington Post - Stealing From Federal Civil Servants: You May Be Next. Apparently the Federal Government is seeking to change the way that cost of living increases are calculated. Why does this matter, well, because these costs were promises made to retirees, completed contracts. Lets say you made a promise to me that if I worked for you for a year then you would pay me $100,000 at the end of the year. I give you a years worth of work and then you tell me you are only going to pay me $60,000. You don't complain about the work and you have the money; but, you want to spend the difference on someone else to work for you.
Maybe you don't care about federal employees being cheated; but, what is to prevent them from doing the same to everyone who has contributed to social security. There is an attack on all forms of retirement funds.
Bankrate.com - Is your public pension at risk?. State and local pensions are not part of the federal system. Yet, they are also being attacked. In Detroit's attempted bankruptcy the judge has stated that the city can reduce pension payments to people who are already retired even though the State's constitution specifically prohibits this.
The media just lies about public pensions. I read papers from all over the world and United States and see the same story repeated again and again. Do you really believe that not one public pension was properly funded? Not one? The best example of this nonsense is the Postal Service, they are being forced to front fund pensions that won't be drawn on for 30 years. I wrote about this recently, regarding how there are people who are attempting to end the public post office.
Pensions, retirement funds and social security are all under attack. Thieves go where the money is and they want everyone's.
Huffington Post - Stealing From Federal Civil Servants: You May Be Next. Apparently the Federal Government is seeking to change the way that cost of living increases are calculated. Why does this matter, well, because these costs were promises made to retirees, completed contracts. Lets say you made a promise to me that if I worked for you for a year then you would pay me $100,000 at the end of the year. I give you a years worth of work and then you tell me you are only going to pay me $60,000. You don't complain about the work and you have the money; but, you want to spend the difference on someone else to work for you.
Maybe you don't care about federal employees being cheated; but, what is to prevent them from doing the same to everyone who has contributed to social security. There is an attack on all forms of retirement funds.
Bankrate.com - Is your public pension at risk?. State and local pensions are not part of the federal system. Yet, they are also being attacked. In Detroit's attempted bankruptcy the judge has stated that the city can reduce pension payments to people who are already retired even though the State's constitution specifically prohibits this.
The media just lies about public pensions. I read papers from all over the world and United States and see the same story repeated again and again. Do you really believe that not one public pension was properly funded? Not one? The best example of this nonsense is the Postal Service, they are being forced to front fund pensions that won't be drawn on for 30 years. I wrote about this recently, regarding how there are people who are attempting to end the public post office.
Pensions, retirement funds and social security are all under attack. Thieves go where the money is and they want everyone's.
Monday, December 9, 2013
The Next Financial Meltdow Is Being Planned
We all know about the housing collapse and the stock crash and the bailouts. Well the House of Representatives has just passed a bill to eliminate the regulations over derivatives. Lets consider what that means. After the bailouts some regulations on certain types of financial instruments were put back in place and now we are eliminating those regulations. In England, they are actually promoting a new housing bubble similar to the one that happened in the United States. Why would anyone intentionally replicate something that has already failed? The answer is that a few made a lot of money on the financial collapse.
Wall Street created some rather fancy financial transactions, we call these derivatives. They knew that these products that they sold would fail and bet on them failing. As someone recently said, basically it is like someone making a car that they know will have and accident, selling you the car and then taking out insurance on the car having an accident.
Why would congress go back to allowing Wall Street to sell toxic financial instruments? The next crash is going to be worse and it is coming. Some people plan on making a lot of money on this coming crash.
Wall Street created some rather fancy financial transactions, we call these derivatives. They knew that these products that they sold would fail and bet on them failing. As someone recently said, basically it is like someone making a car that they know will have and accident, selling you the car and then taking out insurance on the car having an accident.
Why would congress go back to allowing Wall Street to sell toxic financial instruments? The next crash is going to be worse and it is coming. Some people plan on making a lot of money on this coming crash.
Sunday, December 8, 2013
Do You Ever Wonder Why Young Men Have Breasts Now
I was reading a weekly paper today and there was an add for male breast reduction. This is not a result of natural selection. Why do men under 35 have breasts now? Men born in the 1950s and 1960s don't have breasts. So, what has changed? What has changed is our food. What has changed is the hormones that we give to chickens and other animals. Why doesn't this bother anyone? Why doesn't it bother people that we are genetically modifying our crops?
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