The Science of One Stock Picker

I am the scientist and have lost my science!
As surprising as it might seem, this is the best it has happen since the evolution of the internet, scientists losing their science to the global community of services is such wonderful event, specially for living room amateurs like myself.
As individuals, in our living rooms, making a buck trading (or applying the law of the next sucker) we were comfronted with the constant threat of the asymetric knowledge and these are serious disavantages. The asymetric knowledge is build on the system of monpolized superior information by corporate greed supporters.
In fact, today many large trading corporations follow the moves of some of the larger systems of trading. The purpose of teh effort is to cannibalize on those opportunites. Watch out! If you are using trading method that is well advertized all over, and you have a hard time getting the promised results, you better be aware that some big boys are in it for the take, and your money is their play ground. You are their take.
As we continue this infatuation with risk by privatizing all support systems for our future, the stock market is the easiest way to gamble pensions and other assets. Thus, the need to learn some of the statistical help one can get for gambling in Wall Street with your money.
The kind of gambling that occurs with equities is more dangerous than playing Texas hold-en. When you engage Wall Street in your game, you are engaging the souless people in this planet willing to do anything to take your money and use any method force any law to accomplished. You will hear more stories of grandiosity than of terror, the fact of the matter is that equity trading has a ratio of 20 stories of deception for one of affection. The reason you hear the affection stories is becuase the people who get caught in the losing end are usually "small people" as Leona Hemsley put it and we are insignificant for the news, becuase we lose a little at the time, but when the winner of South Street call it, the win is or gargantuan proportions. As an example this year the average bonus for a middle to top management employee in the firms of Wall street is going to celebrate Santa with a check of two million plus. Do you hear well, two million for X-mas in bonus at an average, or playing with OPM. Well this guys are also the big spenders in lobbyst against minimum wage and secure pensions for the rest of us.
Let's put this out of the way and to the meat of the post.
If you plan to gamble some money in stocks, you must follow a few fellows tactitians who have done well with a few formulas. The first idea is: No all stocks react similarly to all markets conditions, thus some stocks are profitable using specific indicators to buy and take profits(sell). By using RSI 14 (.75-.25) for long an short entries some stocks demostrate excellent behavior others are just dogs, stay alert and narrow your winners to their most profitable and reliable mathematical behavior. Second some very bright guys have follow consistent methods and they have the accumulation of returns on their bank, my favorites screens are: Martin Zweig on value and growth, next is the neofacist O'Neill growth, then in "dull" markets like the present stagnant situation, Graham value and enterprising is the one method to follow. The difficulty here is to select the top winners of the three selection methods. This is where the science begins.
You can use the resources of msn.com screener or my favorite aaii.com. I also use Schwab screens as additonal tool. After I have a list I screen every single stock using investors.com ratings. But my final decision is to intuitively base my picks on going forward strength based on their fundamentals and people who manage the company.

Losing The Benefit of the Doubt

Every honorable person has the right to be believed honorable and trust-worthy of telling the truth. Every community gains the same right and every country is granted this gracious courtesy of diplomacy. Many people choose to lose their right to honor, and communities follow them and countries cave to powerful interests.
While fighting the corporate abuse predators and robber barons kings of their monopolies something back fired to this arrogant stance, residents of the North American colonies rebelled against corporate greed. Strong minded individuals and small business owners perceived and they were right to support their business, realized of the serious threat that the “Company” will do to them and took it to the streets. After incredible amounts of blood won the hard fought battle. The soldiers were send to fight the so called rebels, corporations always use the power of the military to fight rebels, and ended up realizing who they were supporting in many cases deserting. Armies in most cases succeed in suppressing the freedom fighters.
Today, we must be alert and recognized the fact of the power of corporations to kill for profit and they are unapologetic about using all citizen assets; from the rubber war of Viet Nan to the oil war of Iraq, stopping in the diamond war of Angola and the water war of Palestine and Israel.
There is not question power has corrupted individual and most importantly people’s leaders. The present motto of honor has truncate it into “if we do not get caught in the deception, then we are supreme.”
This not a new event or logic to justify dishonorable actions.
Such justifications come from a retired intelligence services people and other retired military individuals since Mesopotamia generals raid the land of Egypt and used methods that will seem incredible familiar today, six thousand years later the Roman leaders took great leaps and created the utmost despicable machine of people’s deception, and today we continue to be served with such tricks every single minute thanks to the communications advances.
Today, it is easy to see this logic in Fox News political and military commentators. Such candor expressed is a display to justify the insertions of bought “ true news” in Iraqi newspapers, the operation of secret jails and torture while denying they exist, black face killings under the idea of target killings, or the sophisticated wording of civilian “collateral damage” by American operators abroad. The tendency is justify every single item as do good. But in fact not all those justifications are seen equally and they are not a healthy way so show people the real good that can be developed with good will and
honesty. The distortions are a daily event, but reason must raise and fight to prevail, or redemption will not come easy.
Such unhealthy contentions to support deception are asserted as “the fact that we do all this unpleasant stuff is not important, the bad part if that we get caught,” a so called expert, continued saying on Fox News “secret operations are not for the faint of heart, many things we do they might seem bad and in fact they are bad, but you cannot get caught” his connotation was clear, doing bad things are a fact of secret operations, that’s why they need to be secret or people will revolt, we need to perfect how we do those bad things and do not get caught.

There is a clear popular stance that doing “what it takes” it is an acceptable position and procedures for most people do not need to be revealed, this acceptance ranges from enforcing illegal operations under the fancy name of “extraordinary renditions“ to the outright drug dealing with dictators, or support for corporations that break every single international law.

When such attitude starts to cross boundaries of human acceptance, it must be understood that without much warning this unhealthy behavior starts to cross dangerous borders of arrogance.
To arrive to such state of arrogance requires a blunt desire to disregard all common sense rules of decent behavior.

There is an evolving and growing displeasure with the acknowledgement that the American government due to actions that are unacceptable, even for the most fanatic supporter. It is becoming “too much.”
This is nothing new among leadership, some roman emperors were the creators of present populace manipulation, master popular manipulation to the extend of self-destruction, and we might be witnessing it if we do not start to recant some of the present accepted social behaviors instilled by leaders.

Business As Usual: Corrupt

Below is an wonderful article about our present American reality.
Kisnley is a wonderfull human being a witty writer and thoughful American. On its article one can read the underling malasie we are getting too use to accept as matter of fact.
When you lose the benefit to be doubted, as is happening today to American leaders, it is an indication your ways are so corrupt. Today, the most capable negotiatior representing Amrican interests encounters resistance for teh most simplest negotiation. Therefore, it is an indication of your ways been tremendously corrupt and becomes too late for redemption. This is the earth grounded reality that many good-doers are encoutering around the planet, under the burden of qualifications the present American admistration.
A very sad and radical and poor image driven by fanatism and uncontrolled absolutism under the flag of nationalism. You cannot find common ground when you fight your adversary, fighting brings never ending revenge, there is not pace in fighting.


Business As Usual: Corrupt

By Michael Kinsley
Friday, December 2, 2005; A23

It used to be said that the moral arc of a Washington career could be divided into four parts: idealism, pragmatism, ambition and corruption. You arrive with a passion for a cause, determined to challenge the system. Then you learn to work for your cause within the system. Then rising in the system becomes your cause. Then, finally, you exploit the system -- your connections in it, and your understanding of it -- for personal profit.

And it remains true, sort of, but faster. Even the appalling Jack Abramoff had ideals at one point. But he took a shortcut straight to corruption. On the other hand, you can now trace the traditional moral arc in the life of conservative-dominated Washington itself, which began with Ronald Reagan's inauguration and marks its 25th anniversary in January. Reagan and Co. arrived to tear down the government and make Washington irrelevant. Now the airport and a giant warehouse of bureaucrats are named after him.

By the 20th anniversary of their arrival, when an intellectually corrupt Supreme Court ruling gave them complete control of the government at last, the conservatives had lost any stomach for tearing it down. George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism" was more like an apology than an ideology. Meanwhile, Tom DeLay -- the real boss in Congress -- openly warned K Street that unless all the choice lobbying jobs went to Republicans, lobbyists could not expect to have any influence with the Republican Congress. This warning would be meaningless, of course, unless the opposite was also true: If you hire Republican lobbyists, you and they will have influence over Congress. And darned if DeLay didn't turn out to be exactly right about this.

No prominent Republican upbraided DeLay for his open invitation to bribery. And bribery is what it is: not just campaign contributions but the promise of personal enrichment for politicians and political aides who play ball for a few years before cashing in.

When Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham pleaded guilty this week to accepting a comic cornucopia of baubles, plus some cash, from defense contractors, the vast right-wing conspiracy acted with impressive speed and forcefulness to expel one of its most doggedly loyal loudmouths and pack him off to a long jail term. Even Bush, whose affable capacity for understanding and forgiveness on the personal level is one of his admirable qualities, seized an unnecessary opportunity to wish the blackguard ill. There was no talk of "sadness" -- the usual formula for expressing sympathy without excusing guilt.

This astringent response would be more impressive if the basic facts about Cunningham's corruption hadn't been widely known for months. The San Diego Union-Tribune reported in June that a company seeking business from the Pentagon had bought Cunningham's Southern California house from him, held it unoccupied briefly and sold it -- in the hottest real estate market in human history -- for a $700,000 loss. You didn't need to know that Duke's haul included two antique commodes to smell the stench. Yet all the Republican voices now saying that Cunningham deserves his punishment were silent until he clearly and unavoidably was going to get it.

Like medieval scholastics counting the angels on the head of a pin, Justice Department lawyers are struggling with the question of when favors to and from a member of Congress or a congressional aide take on the metaphysical quality of a corrupt bribe. The brazenness of the DeLay-Abramoff circle has caused prosecutors to look past traditional distinctions, such as that between campaign contributions and cash or other favors to a politician personally. Or the distinction between doing what a lobbyist wants after he has taken you to Scotland to play golf and promising to do what he wants before he takes you to Scotland to play golf.

These distinctions don't really touch on what's corrupt here, which is simply the ability of money to give some people more influence than others over the course of a democracy where, civically if not economically, we are all supposed to be equal. So where do you draw the line between harmless favors and corrupt bribery?

It's not an easy question if you're talking about sending people to prison. But it's a very easy question if you're just talking: The answer is that it's all corrupt bribery. People and companies hire lobbyists because it works. Lobbyists get the big bucks because their efforts earn or save clients even bigger bucks in their dealings with the government. Members of Congress are among the world's greatest bargains: What is a couple of commodes compared with $163 million worth of Pentagon contracts?

Perhaps conceding more than he intended, former Democratic senator John Breaux, now on K Street, told the New York Times that a member of Congress will be swayed more by 2,000 letters from constituents on some issue than by anything a lobbyist can offer. I guess if it's a lobbyist vs. 1,900 constituents, it's too bad for the constituents. That seems fair.

kinsleym@washpost.com

The real outrage: pensions, not petrol

Another great piece in the subject of wealth and pensions by William Fleckenstein and a good follow up to the prior one by Bob Kiyosaki.
If you have not read Robert Kiyosaki books, I will suggest you read every single one, they are very helpful and they illustrate the need for awareness on the value of accumulating wealth.

My personal interest on pensions has to do with my believe and personal views about the value of community and the social structure of a community as support system for evolution.
I am seriously concerned about what I see in people's attitudes in non-challange way to neglect the weakest. This is accomplished by the use of fallacies and religion as tool to supress teh inmorality of their actions with weekly cleanings of their wrong doings. The justification are insane, in fact it is totally contradictory to what the preach, this arrogant stance has consequences. We all deserve the punishement for this outirght darwinian behavior. We are allowing to continue to thrive rapantly and unchecked.
It will not take much imagination to see all the present corruption that surround us from government elected officials to thier cronies in a rush to pilfer anything at the reach of their hands.
All this greed running amok is not sustainble. The present situation is arrogant and outright acceptable about stealing from any vulnerable person or institution.

***

The real outrage: pensions, not petrol

Forget all the hoopla about oil price gouging; markets set oil prices. For real cases of rich execs cheating real people, study what they're doing to corporate pension plans.

By Bill Fleckenstein

Outrage is an emotion that's always intense -- but not always justified. This week's column will take a look at both kinds, as it swings from the oil patch to the pension-accounting arena. First off, a rant on the lunacy surrounding the fact that oil companies are making money.

The weather vanes in the Senate have held hearings about oil-company price manipulation. There has also been plenty of incoherent chatter about price gouging, much of it coming from TV talking heads who ought to know better.

To begin with, the price of oil is set in the marketplace. The Russians, Canadians, Mexicans and OPEC generically have a hell of a lot more to say about the price of oil than do our domestic oil companies.Start investing with $100.
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The price of oil is up thanks to money-printing by the Fed and every other central bank, which has triggered the global boom that everyone seems to love. People drive Hummers and other urban-assault vehicles, yet they expect the oil companies not to make money, as though they were charitable institutions?

'Home'-free from scrutiny?
Amidst the talk of taxing the oil companies on windfall profits, why isn't there a windfall-profits tax on the home builders? Why aren't there any hearings about price gouging in real estate? How come nobody complains about the price of bottled water being as expensive as it is? Because they don't see water companies making a whole bunch of money?

And how come the public never complained about Microsoft's (MSFT, news, msgs) price-gouging practices, as it had monopoly status in operating systems? Or when Intel (INTC, news, msgs) was the only game in town and able to charge whatever it felt like charging? Microsoft (publisher of this Web site) and Intel are the reason why PC prices aren't 50% lower than they are. The public didn't complain about that. Why? Because they were giddy about making money speculating in their shares.

Greed and broken promises
If the Senate and TV commentators want to be outraged, why not look into the real abuses occurring in the somewhat obscure pension-accounting arena? It essentially impacts only a few dozen large corporations, but it affects hundreds of thousands of lives.

What prompts this discussion: three well-written articles in last week's New York Times and Wall Street Journal that point out:


The potential problems for the folks counting on the past promises of these corporations.

How the corporate chieftains running them can jigger their pension assumptions to make their companies' earnings look good.
Of course, the two groups don't have their interests aligned. Those running the show have an entirely different agenda -- to boost the stock they hold options on, and probably their bonuses -- even if it puts all these hundreds of thousands of people at risk. It's a classic case of greed and broken promises.

The inflate-the-rate elixir
Probably the best primer on how the "math" works was "Pension Inquiry Shines Spotlight on Assumptions," an article in the Nov. 9 Wall Street Journal. It led off with General Motors (GM, news, msgs) because the SEC is now looking into the assumptions used in its pension accounting.

The article pointed out that there are two ways to make your results look better. One is to pick a high "assumed rate," which is the rate of return you expect your pension assets will yield. (Until 2002, GM had assumed 10% and has recently taken it down to 9%.) The second way is to manipulate the discount rate used to put a value on your future liabilities. The higher the rate you use, the lower the present value of that future liability looks and the more stable you appear.

The discount rate GM uses is 5.75%, down from 7.8% in 1999. A 25-basis-point (0.25 percentage point) change in the discount rate would impact its pension liabilities by $160 million. Similarly, a 25-basis-point change in the expected rate of return would affect GM's obligations by $220 million.

An example of how that was used to the benefit of corporations -- and to the detriment of workers -- was noted in "Pension Accounting Rule, Sometimes Murky, Is Under Pressure," a Nov. 8 New York Times article: "In 2004, for instance, Lucent Technologies (LU, news, msgs) said it earned $1.2 billion from operations. But $1.1 billion of that actually resulted from pension calculations." As you can see, moving these numbers around can change your results quite dramatically.

No-can-do candor
The New York Times article passed along another nugget to show the size of the potential discrepancy: "Last summer, the Securities and Exchange Commission said that it had studied a sample group of companies and found that they had told their shareholders they had an aggregate surplus of $91 billion in their pension funds, when a more honest accounting would have shown an aggregate deficit of $86 billion." (The emphasis is mine.)

Now, I don't know exactly what the words "more honest" mean. Nor do I know how real-world those calculations might be, as the numbers could be better or worse. If I had to guess, they would be worse, but, in any case, the size of the discrepancy is already quite large.

IBM (IBM, news, msgs) was a serial abuser of those same variables. The Times story noted that the company's reported earnings for 1999 to 2003 would have been reduced from $36 billion to $21 billion, "once the pension effect was removed." The article also pointed out that by putting more money in riskier assets, the plan sponsors can thereby justify higher assumed rates of return, thereby making the current levels of funding look better, thereby raising earnings and helping the bosses' narrow self-interests.

In the end, these strategies almost certainly place all the people in the plan at greater risk. But by then, the executives will be long gone -- and living large on the money they "earned" while pulling these levers.

Pension cop tails GM
When the chickens come home to roost, companies wind up (if things get bad enough) at the door of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. According to another article in the Nov. 9 Wall Street Journal, titled "Pension Agency Casts Shadow on GM Sale," the PBGC, which partly guarantees defined-benefit pension plans, is concerned that the automaker's plans are underfunded to the tune of $31 billion, as opposed to being fully funded, as GM asserts.

The PBGC calculations don't even vary any of the overly optimistic assumptions I've already discussed. The agency arrives at its determination by assuming that GM's plans are terminated today instead of on some future date.

Grubby paws vs. pensioners' cause
The actions by the PBGC may cause headaches for Kirk Kerkorian, the investor who's been assembling a large stake in GM. As the Journal article noted: While GM is hoping to raise $11 billion to $15 billion by peeling off a stake in its consumer-finance arm, the agency may force the company to put some of the proceeds into the pension plan. That's probably something Kerkorian and other GM bulls hadn't counted on, as the stock is now lower than it was before he first showed up back in May.

To repeat, these problems only pertain to certain companies. But they do turn out to matter to plenty of people. This example of greed and broken promises is the type of behavior that gives capitalism a black eye.

Bill Fleckenstein is president of Fleckenstein Capital, which manages a hedge fund based in Seattle. He also writes a daily Market Rap column on his Fleckenstein Capital Web site

Why the Rich Get Richer

I found this article by Roberth Kiyosaki to be a good copilation of knowledge on retirement. Each person should add some present knowledge of the situation of many presetn retirees, with that at hand, most people should have clear picture of what to expect in their late days on life.


Why the Rich Get Richer
by Robert Kiyosaki

So Long Pensions, Hello Fees
by Robert KiyosakiUtility Links

Tuesday, November 15, 2005

From 1945 to 1974, the Western World -- including America - was more socialistic than capitalistic, more pro-labor than pro-business. While that may sound surprising, when taken in context it makes perfect sense.

World War II had just been won and the Great Depression was still fresh in most Americans' minds. Having lived through these challenging times, Americans wanted a more benevolent, worker-friendly government. And they weren't alone. In England, Winston Churchill lost the 1945 election -- even though he was a war hero -- primarily because the English people wanted a pro-labor government, not a pro-capitalist government. Back in the U.S., President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's pro-worker policies were already in place, including the New Deal and Social Security.


This trend began to shift in 1974 with the passage of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA). Under ERISA, companies were allowed to switch from defined benefit plans to defined contribution plans. Simply put, the primary responsibility -- as well as the expense and long-term consequences of retirement -- passed from the employer to the employee. As a result, pension plans gave way to self-managed plans like the 401(k) and Roth IRA.


Retirement Investor, Meet Wall Street


One might think that employers were the biggest beneficiaries of the changes ERISA put in motion over three decades ago, but I'd argue that biggest beneficiary was actually Wall Street.


Let me explain.


When I buy a piece of real estate, I may pay a 6 percent commission once. Even though I make money every month for years from my investment, I still only pay my real estate broker once. If I sell, I may or may not have to pay a commission. The choice is mine.


Yet when I invest in mutual funds (the vehicle of choice for most retirement plans), I very often pay a commission, or "management fee," every month -- even if I lose money.


Now I'm not against paying fees or commissions -- as long as I'm making money. But I do have a problem paying commissions or fees every month for bad advice. And most mutual fund advice has been bad, especially since March of 2000.


The Feeling Isn't Mutual


In his book "Unconventional Success," Yale University Chief Investment Officer David Swensen writes, "Sales charges from buying funds and tax burdens from churning funds combine to reduce already poor investor returns. Owners of actively managed mutual funds almost invariably lose." He goes on to say, "Other factors -- unethical kickbacks and indefensible distribution practices -- remain generally hidden from view."


Swensen also quotes a 20-year study which examined mutual fund returns over two decades ending in 1998. The study shows that over two decades mutual funds had miserable returns, an average shortfall of -2.1 percent when compared to the Vanguard 500 Index. And, the study ended in 1998 near the highs of the market!


In other words, most mutual fund managers cannot beat a mechanical method of investing, such as an index fund. But that doesn't stop them from regularly collecting "management fees."


In fact, says Swensen, the fees themselves are one reason many mutual fund managers don't manage to beat index funds. "A significant portion of the ... underperformance arises from the payment of management fees," he writes.


So if you're thinking about parking your retirement money in a mutual fund, be sure to ask about commissions and management fees. Or, even better, consider an index fund.

Proverbs and Sayings Save Energy

One of the healthiest ways to live a healing life is in parallel with a series of well known advice from our ancestors. Via proverbs sage people have ruled in wise ways. Present economic implications have direct link to energy savings and those proverbs. A little change in our daily modus operandi following the sage advice of the past might prove to be an enriching experience.
A few classic old proverbs to prove my point:

“Rise with the sun and rest with the sun and your wealth will abound.” I will add here the obvious if there is no much need for electricity you will save a few bucks every day. Natural light will also provide the much need it vitamins for a good looking and healthy skin.

“Read to your soul to gain in your brain.” Well, and easy one here no more TV for a while, and pick one of the many greatest authors from your local library and enjoy the ride.

“Dress me slowly that I am in a rush, I need to walk far away.” This one came to me from my great-grandmother. In the process I learned physics and it proved her right. Walks farther and slower you will save in gasoline and keep better cholesterol levels. Clearly, we all need to walk farther and often, and we do not do so, if as a community decide that all we need must be in walking distance, we can revive our local economies, supporting local businesses and healthier lives. A very simple equation, it supports a better tomorrow.

If you find proverbs and sayings to be entertaining, find a book at your local library and enjoy!

Must Reads

Building pensions via savings or any other method after a person working live was understood as an advance. Today many people are in the path of 100 years ago: poverty at late age.
Many people are starting to suffer in poverty, and they thought it could happen to them. Any safety net gained over two generations is being reversed, the gains of your great-grand parents will be lost soon. I doubt that many will not support their genrational fight for a better future of their kin. But politicians andc corporate lobbyist continue to destroy the gains of the past 100 years.
The present question is:
Why American Leaders Are Neglecting 80% of the Citizens settings out the ground for proverty to be status quo? My answer is: apathy. Most Americans have become apathic and lost the meaning of solidaruty to other citizens except in extremenis. do we need to be destroyes to attrack attention?
The folloiwng web links will give you a sense of the present and I am sure it will send few chill in your spine. The upcoming future is not as bright as portrayed. You better be ready. Most likely you too will pay the price of the present elite and leaders policies in favor of coporatocracy.

READ:


http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/0,10987,1122017,00.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/30/magazine/30pensions.html?ex=1131426000&en=86dedbed66b5ca34&ei=5070

One and Two

One

In early 2002 when the drums of war were directed towards Iraq, many arguments were made today most proved wrong or decimated by comparable measures.
I usually provide the argument, when discussing of people deaths in concrete killing. Is the killing of people is about the quality or the quantity of the kill? Who are we to measure that Godly and tragic event?
There is a big difference in the approach one is quantitative the other is qualitative and both are related to humans actions and does not matter the perpetrator. It is not impossible to asses who is a good killer and who is a bad killer in the face of religion. The act is solid and carries no counter-argument.

We can take religions and as a simple example the self indulgence, in catholic law ten commandments is considered the supreme law. The rules were given to Moses to comply and pass along to its followers. In the most ancient text of these rules they have no caveats for human interpretation and was said not to be interpreted by humans or altered by humans. The rules in case of human interpretation, those rules will become unfit to be Godly. For centuries after the first document was accepted humans have found ways to unfit those rules by building caveats and convenient interpretations. I will challenge anyone who is familiar with the commandments to randomly choose three of them and write below them accepted interpretations. For Example: Thou should no kill.
Does any one who kills be a Christian no following of the laws of God?

Once we crossed the threshold of justifications, we bias the fact. Thus knowingly we manipulate by convenience the event of killing. This is a normal procedure of self-justification, convenient and self exculpatory. It is the old rhetoric at work. We will not find many incarcerated folks that will admit any wrong doing. We might not find many killers no finding a good justification for their action at the time of kill.

Being true to my own knowledge, I can assert a few things in my spiritual being, one is that I can support killing and also I can support no killing. But I will not fail in the hypocrite camp and call myself something I am not and support killing.

Two

When the drums were already aligned by Colin Powell in the UN and the attack in the land of Iraq was imminent I made the following commentary:
“ If the neo-cons are going to bring death, destruction, obliteration of towns with depleted uranium bombs, bring back home thousands of maimed young volunteers, they better plan for the best. This is the time to show the world that not only bombs are going to be dumped by the thousand and thousand will be killed because interests of corporations are superior to interest of humans, but we are also going to rebuild Iraq to become an example of intellectual power, superior economic standing, Towns that Iraqis will be in awe, schools and museums to envy its neighbors, have such superior capacity to make Iraqis proud of this invasion; that is going to put the fear of their own people into those dictators that are under the same spade of Damocles that Iraqis were under Saddam. The day after the fall of Baghdad and it will fall Baghdad, an edit calling for full employment of Iraqis via job centers, focused to build hosing for all Iraqis with local materials, using local know-how of craftsmanship teams all paid in dollars at 20% above prevalent salaries. This presently exist and most structures will survived
If we do not fail to neglected and engage ourselves in continued bombing. By making Iraq such example, the president should make a national call for volunteers to ask for two million people to go to Iraq and build the most unique process ever seen. Nothing less, will evolve into a long a possible self destructive and new form dictators looking for revenge under the wraps of the war, time will tell but the signs of the paths we take today will the judge in time. Time will judge us all and our actions.”


Today, I can say we have fought a war in the cheap, but still have time to correct some of the mistakes, and made proud on our actions. I do not see the will to accomplish it, we are too wrapped up in mediocrity, a simple adjective to define the present process: we are Walmartized.
Every day the cheapest product, with the cheapest labor, with the poorest quality.

Give Me Five

A few days back I was cornered and begged to expose what are my top rules when dealing with money or its interactions. Is one of the present interactions considered to be the freedom that relates to money? In our present social structure it is. The better individuals understand the capacities that wealth accumulation provides the more active and wide open series of possibilities are available to experience.
I do not pretend to have wide global answers except my own and for myself. If you are stopping-by and have a few minutes; it will be gracious, if you would share your “secret” rules to manage your assets or how building assets have provide you with unique experiences.
Here are my latest basic behavioral actions:

1. Know how much you need, down to the dollar.

2. It isn't easy, so work at it.

3. Think in decades, not in years.

4. Buy one lottery ticket per month as a reminder of how easy it is to throw away money.

5. Find an investment strategy that produces positive results at twice the rate of inflation.

6. If you are going to work for money, save 50% of your earnings and treat your job like your own business. If you want to make even more money, start your own business.

7. Follow the John Tempelton rule: never spend over 16% of your income on renting shelter and never take a home mortgage exceeding 1/2 a year's income.

8. No money manager cares as much about your money as you do - learn how to manage your own money.

9. Accumulating wealth is not about money, it's about the freedom that wealth provides.

10. Stay focused on your plan.


Thanks for sharing your ideas.

Seven Lucky Questions:

1) If energy costs are at record highs and energy is costing you more than 40% than last year…..fast…….who is the Secretary of Energy? In other words, do you really care what are they doing to you energy bill?

2) Nearly 99% of locals taxes have increased in the past seven years, the excuse used by municipalities and the states are consistent with "federal taxes were re-allocated sending less to local coffers." If your local taxes increase but your federal taxes declined. Do you know if your total tax bill increased of declined or stayed the same?

3) Do you know how long and how much will cost the country to invest in terminating the dependence on foreign energy?

4) Do you know how much you and your kids owe every month to the Communist Government of China?

5) Do you know the US world ranking on children mortality rate?

6) We all know that we invented the modern internet “malgrais” Al Gore. Could you tell where the US global rank is on broadband deployment?

7) Could place in other of most corrupt to least country to do business of the following: Hong Kong, Canada, USA, Finland, Singapore



If you get the seven right:

Congratulations!!!!! You really know your place in this planet

If you get 4 to six right: I am very impress…..keep it up to get them all right next round.

If you get one to three right: You can do better you have interst but not enough

If you do not get any one right: Go Get a life and read a little more and not Harry Potter or Fox News talk shows....Seriously

Answers:

A) Samuel Bodman In case you decided he needs to hear from you, send him your thoughts @
http://www.whitehouse.gov/interactive/interact_1.html

B) A national review on taxes by the IRS asserts that most people had a tax increase of 11% in the past seven years as of Jan 2005. www.irs.gov

C) Experts and various universities lead by MIT have run models and believed that it will take less than 20 years to become totally independent of foreign energy and the cost will be null. Actually, it could create an average of $145 billion a year profits to Americans, and generate around five to seven million new jobs. All we need, it will be the re-allocation of expenditures and sweetheart tax breaks on the present federal budget.
If peolple demadn from their elected official a moon kind of project to be directed to the purpose of energy independence, the whole global economy will thrive as never seen before.

D) Each American is paying around $84 a month to the Chinese in the interest and principal.
The Communist Government of China is buying an average of $480 million dollars a month of American debt for the past fifteen years. www.fed.gov
Most of this debt is being incurr during the Bush 43 adminsitration.

E) The US ranks 42 below Cuba and other quality countries.
Based on the CIA fact book http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/rankorder/2091rank.html

F) BROADBAND NATION?
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20050501faessay84311/thomas-bleha/down-to-the-wire.html

In the first three years of the Bush administration, the United States dropped from 4th to 13th place in global rankings of broadband Internet usage. Today, most U.S. homes can access only "basic" broadband, among the slowest, most expensive, and least reliable in the developed world, and the United States has fallen even further behind in mobile-phone-based Internet access. The lag is arguably the result of the Bush administration's failure to make a priority of developing these networks. In fact, the United States is the only industrialized state without an explicit national policy for promoting broadband.

H) The answer is USA, Hong Kong, Canada, Singapore, Finland.
http://www.transparency.org/

Money, Money, Money, Moooooney

Forbes Magazine reported this month that the richest in this earth had grow their wealth by 10% last year alone. MSNBC reports that CEOs pay is at the highest ever, versus employees has lost ground at a rate of 1% year and pensions for mayor corporations are unfunded and the same managers of these pensions paid themselves handsomely to a ration of 4000 times their average employee salary. Forbes also reports, as an average, to make to the top 500 wealthiest in this our planet, a person needs to be near one thousand times millionaire. To put this in contest, the top 500 wealth accumulators have as a whole more than 99.5 % of all countries, they all bunched up and live in a single country they will be second to the US economy. All this, while poverty is at its highest ever in the number of people affected and wealth distribution is at its lowest. Laws continue to be enacted by the elite to continue their trip to who knows where.

That stated, let’s see if I can make some sense in talking money. Since I started to talk about oil a few years back and I did a kamikaze move by buying more than 60 % of my portfolio in natural gas and oil related Canadians trusts, I felt as I bought it all, last month I sold it all. My reason is simple, like always I sell early, and I follow the rule of the taxi driver.
When a taxi driver tells me it is time to get into anything in the stock market.
If I own what he is talking about, in this case oil, like I did, I will sell it, and if I do not own it I will stay at the sides and in a prudent way, short the commodity. So I am staying with a large cash position, until a clear pattern starts to develop. My first impression after one month in cash is that there is a repositioning of capital into large caps that are being hammered, and growth funds are also getting influx of money. I will suggest look for battered big caps with positive cash flows and growth of sales above average. As of yet, there is not a clear trend, but when allocations of funds start to take people in one direction, that trend becomes over a short period of one year or so the prevalent over priced area. The early the trend can be bought the easier is to capitalize on the price appreciation. We are too many darn people buying the same things so eventually the mass over weights rationality and we return to our mean value and senses. The theory of many says when many act in one direction the majority will follow the mean trend of that direction. When people vote with their dollars the argument is that because the size of the pool is so large the extension of the price paid at the transaction will eventually outpace the actual value. Some might say it is supply and demand, the problem is that, the supply can be altered in a matter of days and demand can become irrational in matter of years.

The other bubble people are talking about is real estate, it is well funded to some extend.
By the other hand it is the result of capital risk value. The risk involved in getting into investing in real estate is being compensated like other rational investment. Thus commanding comparable and fair market value returns.
At a macro level, the price of money drives the financing and pricing of housing, that is clear for all of us novices.
Plus, housing due to global migration and global investing is getting affected by global pricing of commodities and global flow of money.
As an example Manhattan market sales of top priced properties – two million or more dollars- are in pace to be above 50% for its fourth year purchased by foreign owners.
The rational behind is the simple item mentioned above: the cost of money.
The EU right now has interest rates far below the US, thus folks with access to capital can borrow at discount and their currency. The Euro has outpaced the dollar for the third year in the row to a revaluation of more than 40%. Thus, affecting the global capital market, top market buyers are attracted to the US, as a direct investment. In the debt area, because the interest rates are higher here and the majority of median priced houses are sold to the local market, the mortgage debt generated is been sold in the international market. A very sound strategy, that can back fired if not well timed.
Three years ago you could take $1 dollar and buy 1.35 of goods in the EU. Today, the reverse $1 occurs $1 dollar buys $0.85 cents of Euro and the cost of money is higher in the US than it is there, making a lot of sense to bring euros into dollars. Specially invest in bricks and mortar in our very mobile market. This is not limited to Europeans buying it is global reaction. Thousands of brokers are selling US houses or villas -how they are marketed in EU- to anchor US real estate sales.
Some market as Chief Alan said are overextended, this does not mean they will collapse. We should expect some decline or stagnation in pricing in those over priced areas, but do not expect bargain prices, and if for one reason occur they will not be that way for too long. The first of trouble will be to tabulate the number of listed properties at the HUD web site www.hud.gov. If the number of houses in the area you are interest starts to increase and the time of sales increases, there you have a declining market. With the national average sale at $216,000 per unit, as an investor you will do OK if you can start with that number and bring it down 20% to 30% and if sales occur at those levels, it is time to jump. Now, timing is of consequence, so do not rush into it, but do not overanalyze waiting for Godot.

A Better Alternative to Mediocrity

A Better Alternative to Mediocrity

I will not engage the dialogue by giving into a Straussian view of the need for deception to justify any mean to support the rationality of elitism. The funny thin is that most people feel that they are elite of something, when in reality elite means a total different status.
Thus, the need for a harder look to where are we going as a people and country.
We must start to learn to ask for better structures, from better roads to better food. We might get cheap import products. That does not mean progress, its present meaning is cheaper product with a below average quality, progress means a better product with improve quality at a cheaper price. We need to start to wake up before is too slate and start to demand better ways all around, and question every single thing and become specialist on asking for better management of the money we are taking away from and by government leaders a.k.a. politicians.
How we can demand a better investment of our efforts from the ruler politicians, I will start by suggesting the simplest way show at their offices and rest there your concerns, following up by showing up at meetings where decisions are being made to spend your money. You might choose to be apathetic and think that you do not have time for that. Around 40% of all your income, in your apathy, you are allowing it to be dispersed without your supervision. If you think you can trust politicians, think twice, they have proved untrustworthy except from the money they garner from your pockets.

Better than?
Let’s start by each individual. If you are satisfied with your medical care and medical prevention, then look no further.
If you are not satisfied, you must learn what others are doing this planet. This earth has 5 billion plus people, it means, we are a mere drop in the bucket and other developed countries must be doing something else, and if we believe the way we measure others, we rank below the 20th in care providing and far lower in healthy kid development, with a very low ranking in new birth survival, this is an indicator of how poor a society is acting upon its whole medical system.

If you are satisfied with the prospects of your education, look no further.
If you are not satisfied, and if you think that importing PhDs from abroad is the fountain of youth for the system, think twice. Brain-draining from other countries has evolved into brain loss at home. If we import people as we import cars, we continue to pay a price for purposes not all good for the good of citizens and weakening our educational system. Keeping education far away and weaken responsibilities during formation years of the family is a disastrous choice. Responsibility and coordination and constant higher goals need to be re-instated if we want to recoup the loose of ground of the past 10 years. The competition that is emerging from abroad is so large that is giving chills to the most severe.

You might be satisfied with the roads you drive. If that case you deserve mediocre roads and will miss to improve using a mediocre transportations system.
If you think that there is no better. You might want to drive around in another developed country to see is you are satisfied with the streets and roads around you.
As oil continues to grow in pricing, the cities and towns infrastructure of oil dependence will eventually prove to be obsolete and inefficient. With the present small spike on costs it is already showing signs of poor competitive capacity.

If you think that hugging trees is some malaise, well stay that way, but the price you will pay for thinking that way will be impossible to come up in the near future, and the signs are all over to be encounter.
As we continue to deny the ecology its right. The weather changes will continue this path of warming the planet. Until, we realize the solutions are difficult, to stop global warming is going to be an effort that is proving to test humans as the case in England is showing signs of impossibility.
Many countries are serious about saving the earth, some people are building the will to fight against earth destroyers. That approach is not an enhancing event for us who with less than 5% of the earth population we are using 25% of all its resources.

If you think the war in Iraq is an example of good planning, honesty, giving example of doing good and resolution. Then you must skip this one.
We must think of wars as temporary choices, the war in Iraq is proving to be an awful choice and no one is paying the price of poor or neglected decisions, Iraq is proving to be the most outrageous case of fraud. No only, from its purpose to carry out an action, but from the economic point, riddled of fraudulent and outright pilfering of funds, with already American officials arrested for fraud.

If you think that the largest military spender and powerful is also the most organized and resolute to support its citizens at home in case of disaster, then skip the subject of the latest related weather events.
The disasters of the latest weather related events in the Gulf of Mexico are proving damaging to the global economy, and more severely to the local economies around the United States. Moreover, the image that has project around the globe is of a half developed almost third world country dealing with large amounts of poverty in face of natural disaster that scientist have warmed for decades.

If you think the cost of living is low and getting lower, please move to the next subject.
High price of commodities from natural gas, gasoline, plastics, wood to water and many other vital elements for economic growth will eventually test the power of the system. The private banking system and its Federal Reserve policies are showing signs of serious weakening. This week the Federal Reserve raised rates again, at mist of the cutting of 10% of all gasoline production and inflation showing signs of creeping at very fast speed where most people will start to feel the pain.

We have yet to address the fact that foreign buyers of American debt and trade deficits are at historic levels, thus, worrying many decision makers.


What is a social storm! The ignorant will be absent from asserting a better tomorrow.

Philosophy of Deception

At times, some published articles reflect what I want to share with great detail.
Here is this one, that I found worth to keep alive.
For this autunm reading season I choose author John Perkins.
You can find Perkins books at www.borders.com

http://www.alternet.org/story/15935/
Leo Strauss' Philosophy of Deception
By Jim Lobe, AlterNet. Posted May 19, 2003.
Many neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz are disciples of a philosopher who believed that the elite should use deception, religious fervor and perpetual war to control the ignorant masses.
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What would you do if you wanted to topple Saddam Hussein, but your intelligence agencies couldn't find the evidence to justify a war?
A follower of Leo Strauss may just hire the "right" kind of men to get the job done – people with the intellect, acuity, and, if necessary, the political commitment, polemical skills, and, above all, the imagination to find the evidence that career intelligence officers could not detect.
The "right" man for Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, suggests Seymour Hersh in his recent New Yorker article entitled 'Selective Intelligence,' was Abram Shulsky, director of the Office of Special Plans (OSP) – an agency created specifically to find the evidence of WMDs and/or links with Al Qaeda, piece it together, and clinch the case for the invasion of Iraq.
Like Wolfowitz, Shulsky is a student of an obscure German Jewish political philosopher named Leo Strauss who arrived in the United States in 1938. Strauss taught at several major universities, including Wolfowitz and Shulsky's alma mater, the University of Chicago, before his death in 1973.
Strauss is a popular figure among the neoconservatives. Adherents of his ideas include prominent figures both within and outside the administration. They include 'Weekly Standard' editor William Kristol; his father and indeed the godfather of the neoconservative movement, Irving Kristol; the new Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, Stephen Cambone, a number of senior fellows at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) (home to former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle and Lynne Cheney), and Gary Schmitt, the director of the influential Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which is chaired by Kristol the Younger.
Strauss' philosophy is hardly incidental to the strategy and mindset adopted by these men – as is obvious in Shulsky's 1999 essay titled "Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence (By Which We Do Not Mean Nous)" (in Greek philosophy the term nous denotes the highest form of rationality). As Hersh notes in his article, Shulsky and his co-author Schmitt "criticize America's intelligence community for its failure to appreciate the duplicitous nature of the regimes it deals with, its susceptibility to social-science notions of proof, and its inability to cope with deliberate concealment." They argued that Strauss's idea of hidden meaning, "alerts one to the possibility that political life may be closely linked to deception. Indeed, it suggests that deception is the norm in political life, and the hope, to say nothing of the expectation, of establishing a politics that can dispense with it is the exception."
Rule One: Deception
It's hardly surprising then why Strauss is so popular in an administration obsessed with secrecy, especially when it comes to matters of foreign policy. Not only did Strauss have few qualms about using deception in politics, he saw it as a necessity. While professing deep respect for American democracy, Strauss believed that societies should be hierarchical – divided between an elite who should lead, and the masses who should follow. But unlike fellow elitists like Plato, he was less concerned with the moral character of these leaders. According to Shadia Drury, who teaches politics at the University of Calgary, Strauss believed that "those who are fit to rule are those who realize there is no morality and that there is only one natural right – the right of the superior to rule over the inferior."
This dichotomy requires "perpetual deception" between the rulers and the ruled, according to Drury. Robert Locke, another Strauss analyst says,"The people are told what they need to know and no more." While the elite few are capable of absorbing the absence of any moral truth, Strauss thought, the masses could not cope. If exposed to the absence of absolute truth, they would quickly fall into nihilism or anarchy, according to Drury, author of 'Leo Strauss and the American Right' (St. Martin's 1999).
Second Principle: Power of Religion
According to Drury, Strauss had a "huge contempt" for secular democracy. Nazism, he believed, was a nihilistic reaction to the irreligious and liberal nature of the Weimar Republic. Among other neoconservatives, Irving Kristol has long argued for a much greater role for religion in the public sphere, even suggesting that the Founding Fathers of the American Republic made a major mistake by insisting on the separation of church and state. And why? Because Strauss viewed religion as absolutely essential in order to impose moral law on the masses who otherwise would be out of control.
At the same time, he stressed that religion was for the masses alone; the rulers need not be bound by it. Indeed, it would be absurd if they were, since the truths proclaimed by religion were "a pious fraud." As Ronald Bailey, science correspondent for Reason magazine points out, "Neoconservatives are pro-religion even though they themselves may not be believers."
"Secular society in their view is the worst possible thing,'' Drury says, because it leads to individualism, liberalism, and relativism, precisely those traits that may promote dissent that in turn could dangerously weaken society's ability to cope with external threats. Bailey argues that it is this firm belief in the political utility of religion as an "opiate of the masses" that helps explain why secular Jews like Kristol in 'Commentary' magazine and other neoconservative journals have allied themselves with the Christian Right and even taken on Darwin's theory of evolution.
Third Principle: Aggressive Nationalism
Like Thomas Hobbes, Strauss believed that the inherently aggressive nature of human beings could only be restrained by a powerful nationalistic state. "Because mankind is intrinsically wicked, he has to be governed," he once wrote. "Such governance can only be established, however, when men are united – and they can only be united against other people."
Not surprisingly, Strauss' attitude toward foreign policy was distinctly Machiavellian. "Strauss thinks that a political order can be stable only if it is united by an external threat," Drury wrote in her book. "Following Machiavelli, he maintained that if no external threat exists then one has to be manufactured (emphases added)."
"Perpetual war, not perpetual peace, is what Straussians believe in," says Drury. The idea easily translates into, in her words, an "aggressive, belligerent foreign policy," of the kind that has been advocated by neocon groups like PNAC and AEI scholars – not to mention Wolfowitz and other administration hawks who have called for a world order dominated by U.S. military power. Strauss' neoconservative students see foreign policy as a means to fulfill a "national destiny" – as Irving Kristol defined it already in 1983 – that goes far beyond the narrow confines of a " myopic national security."
As to what a Straussian world order might look like, the analogy was best captured by the philosopher himself in one of his – and student Allen Bloom's – many allusions to Gulliver's Travels. In Drury's words, "When Lilliput was on fire, Gulliver urinated over the city, including the palace. In so doing, he saved all of Lilliput from catastrophe, but the Lilliputians were outraged and appalled by such a show of disrespect."
The image encapsulates the neoconservative vision of the United States' relationship with the rest of the world – as well as the relationship between their relationship as a ruling elite with the masses. "They really have no use for liberalism and democracy, but they're conquering the world in the name of liberalism and democracy," Drury says.
Jim Lobe writes on foreign policy for Alternet. His work has also appeared on Foreign Policy In Focus and TomPaine.com.

Myth Power and its Definitions

We are in a renaissance of Myths in the western cultures.
Going back in time we realize that this is just another blip in the history of human proclivity to self-destroy societies.
I does seem that we have not learn that much after 10,000 years of organize living communities. We just enjoy killing against any tenet we proclaim. We continue to self-justify what is not convenient at the time.

Zoroastrians lived for five thousand years in a reveled series of myths gave us the Code of Hammurabi and eventually all this codified power and religious zealotry became their destruction.
The Sumerian and Mesopotamian societies died due to the induction of religious intolerance. This was, projected from their leaders for self-enrichment purposes, ending in a tremendous black period of humanity. At the same time Babylonian kings where trying to salvage the damage in they kingdoms Egyptian mythology thrived.
Egyptians under even strictest codes, including how their Gods were to be please every hour of the day. Egyptians were strict in enforcing laws, in which they believed ferociously. Egyptians controlled how any object or person should be represented for any public purpose. Egyptians formalized the system of religious leaders by forming laws in their mythology, they had a two thousand years leadership that was their own destruction when they codified religion and social behavior and monetary greed went rampant.
Egyptians codified who was allowed to talk in righteous way of their Gods or who was a channel of their Gods. Egyptians went as far as codifying how the social leaders must be dusted with powder when portrayed in any public event.
The Egyptians kept a control of every aspect of their society for thousands of years. Egyptians had a proclivity to subjugate and slave any person they encounter along their path. Behavior they learned from Mesopotamian and it carried over to our present times.
By looking at a piece of art from the early Pharos period versus one thousand years later, the changes are imperceptible for the non-expert. One might think Egyptians were just a blip in history and all they know was to paint or cave straight lines and curious symbols so Egyptologists could make a living. All was a series of well crafted series of laws to control their citizens and still they destroyed their society and became a sand path forgotten for another thousand years. Time is not kind to abusers and destroyers of humans.
The Greeks took over from Egyptians and refined what the Egyptians learned from their social process and government controls. Greeks did realized the need of supporting their Gods and reduce the process of interpretation by religious arguments, as they arrived to their own decline due to grandiose omnipotent behavior, greed and subjugation of other people with abusive methods, very similar to their ancestor the Egyptians. This occurred in a much sorter period than the self-destructors predecessors. When the time for Greek theorists and elites arrived to feel the pain of the decline of their society, many moved to what we know now as Italy and build on what they thought was a better society.
Rome started to replicate what the Greek thinkers and military professionals learned from their past and started to accelerate their raise as leaders.
They also copied and tinker with religious and social myths, by the time Rome declined and was obliterated. The cycle of using religion to arise populace feelings was accompany by the used of horrendous spectacles, that made the Taleban soccer game intermissions of stoning people a dance ball. Rome had become a large corrupt monetary market, and religious orders were created to control production and taxes. When all ingredients of destruction of societies were in place, greed and religion did the job to destroy Roman society at a tremendous pace. We entered a dark age of seven hundred years. The rising of Arabian influence in Southern Europe, settle some of the regressions the destruction of Rome carry over hundred of years.
Suddenly, the east was having another raising start in Alexander, and the cycle continue with rise and declines accelerating. We all are familiar with the latest two thousand years of destruction and reconstruction.
The latest one, prior to the present cycle, was the European war, this process lasted just two Popes. The embattled industrialists using religion to induce radicalism and those who totally repudiated both premises, ended in a massacre that we all know it well. Up to day, the largest holocaust induced in any society.
This latest self-destruction by humans can be the biggest disgrace that we have to carry today.

But have not learn much.

Today, we have emerging greed driven mass murders as the Hutus and Tutsi situation or present Somalia. These two conflicts use religious connotations to obtain monetary greed and kill millions of people.
Myth is wonderful tool to manipulate populace by their educated leaders. Build myths has not other purpose that sue concepts of pseudo-simplicity to make the understanding pleasant with the purpose to extend fanaticism.

Now is time to see what the American Heritage dictionary says about the definition of MYTH:
1.a. A traditional, typically ancient story dealing with supernatural beings, ancestors, or heroes that serves as a fundamental type in the world view of a people , as by explaining aspects of the natural world or delineating the psychology , custom or ideals of society: the myth of Eros and Psyche; a creation myth. 1.b. Such stories considered as a group: the realm of myth.
2. A Story, a theme, and object, or a character regarded as embodying an aspect of a culture.
3. A fiction or half-truth, especially one that forms part of an ideology.
4. A fictitious story, person, or thing.

From Webster’s collegiate and Thesaurus:
Myth. A traditional story of ostensibly historical content whose origin was lost,
legend, mythos, allegory. Related to, saga, fable, fabrication, fiction, figment creation, invention.

From the dictionary of Cultural Literacy:
Mythology is the body of myths belongings to a culture. Myths are traditional stories about gods and heroes. They often account for the basic aspects of existence-explaining, for instance, how the earth
Was created, why people have to die, or why the year is divided in seasons. Classical mythology- the myths of the ancient Greeks and Romans- has had an enormous influence on European and American culture.

If we self reflect, and look around us we have a lot of work to find a better path.
Myths are dangerous and we are in a rising tide of myths becoming fanaticisms.

Envisioning

We cannot look at the entropy of each action and expect to collect positive results by sitting at the side-line. We must become leaders of our own good.
Looking at the grandiose temple of Artemis we might continue to be mesmerized as Ephesians. But do not be deceive. We need to take a look at the hortatory efforts of people like Deepak Chopra and many others and act upon their messages. Reach Deepak thoughts at http://www.intentblog.com

My principal focus here is to help you become proactive with your vision and call to action. We need to constantly envision a better way.

Direct anyone who wants to take action at any level. By applying consistent actions and have the tools to participate in the democratic process. The ideal would be if we achieve primus inter pares by taking a few simple actions.
I do not want any one to become short-winded while taking on the chore or following instructions.

First, anything you do is more than doing nothing. The next action you take has improved your prior action by 100%. If you reach 100% improvement, face sunward and delight yourself.
Second, you are not alone, like you many want to do something. There are millions of people that feel the same than you feel and they are prime ready looking for you, look for them. You need to start to somewhere, try first www.dfa.meetup.com you might be able to find people around you that are already moving forward. If this group might not tantalize you, keep looking, or build your own.
Third, the most important tools you have are your vote and your opinion. Make both count, your opinion by writing at your local editor and second following with your vote at the urns. Get a calendar of elections at your local County Board of Elections. It is easy to find your Board of Elections in the internet and the phone book. If you feel heroic, ask at the Board of Elections for a list or CROM disk of party registration in your town. It will throw you back around $15 dollars or three lattes. You can get all the people that vote like you do and contact them with your action idea. To write letters to the editor or articles follow http://www.blogforamerica.com if you cannot find it there you are in the wrong place.
Fourth, take a step forward. Understand the importance how to help one local election at the time. You will learn many things by volunteering locally. You will find it enlightening. It will change the country one citizen at the time. As Senator Moniham said “all politics is local” and that’s means YOU getting involved locally. I will suggest start by getting involved in supporting a local candidate actively even if it is for local library board to learn the ropes, and get involved to town level. You can dedicate as little as you want, but your candidate will embrace anything you can do for the campaign. After you participate, you will find out how much heart and dedication candidates put in getting elected. You will gain respect for their efforts. You find out how hard is to gain one vote.
Fifth, take the next step and find a grassroots training program. I suggest you start by checking out the most approachable program at present time is at http://www.democracyforamerica.com/training.php
Sixth, have a plan for change, your plan will drive change. Stay focus, give it time, and you will see results.
Seventh, the lucky number, You already have succeed by reading all the way to here. Good luck and follow your path.

Thank you for your help building democracy one citizen at the time.

I will be reproached for using “all links” to Democracy for America web sites. I will accept the punishment. If it can help you find a path to action this is a way to start and you will find your best fit with time. The fact is that they have the most proactive web site with the most active community around without falling into fallacies and preaching.

With intent and energy,

Tomas

Notes:
Deepak Chopra blog: http://www.intentblog.com
Democracy for America: http://dfa.meetup.com/
Training Program: http://www.democracyforamerica.com/training.php

The 35 Cent a Day Billionaire

The 35 Cent a day Billionaire

Really, who wants to stack in the bank one stick and nine donuts?

The reality is very few people consider getting near a chair and a desk to plan it, we are talking about one stick and six donuts, so the normal person will consider nine donuts, but the normal person will gamble ten times the amounts during its life and in return receive nothing. It is possible to accomplish this incredible feat with the value of time in the side of your kin and a generational goal.
People do not walk away from the consideration of wealth because it is not possible, most of us we walk away from the planning because we do not even consider worth it of thought.
Take those $35 cents spent by the average person in donuts every day. It needs a little sacrifice for your kin, put aside those thirty-five cents for a long while and build a billion dollars account. No kidding!
Do not let ego ruin the plan, teach your kin of the importance of the goal for generations to come.
This might sound weird, it is not, this weird concept is how generations over generations of the old and powerful keep their wealth over more a thousand of years. We can travel many countries around the planet and encounter this people, living quiet lives in quiet social environment and billionaire accounts if far remote places.
Now, some people like Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, George Soros and hundreds of others in the billionaires club, accumulate large sums of currency by adopting a different approach, the use of risk and power, this also deserves study, and is all over the place to be learnt.
In the case of Bill Gates or many others is matter of been very rich to become the richest, call it the asymmetric access to influence capital in your favor.
Back to our obscure subject: the non-donut eater billionaire.
Who will get to benefit if you decided to get involved in this goal, well, like everything in live there is a caveat, for most of us, in our life times, we will see the amount to grow at miniscule rate. What if I tell you, that if your great-great-parents would have planned for your grandkids to be billionaires, your grandkids will be billionaires and a quarter of a billion over. That is what it entitles.
It is a matter of setting the goal on time. We all read a lot about vision, but most of what we call vision is tunnel vision it is not peripheral vision nor focused.
Accepting the reality that you might not be able to do it for yourself but you might be able to do it for you generations to come and used it as a family idiosyncratic element is worth of consideration.
You can do the math yourself use any calculator that allows you to have compound interest and use the average return of a bond that is 7% in a tax sheltered account. They are many choices, each one should do their own DD.
I used the retirement calculator by http://www.bloomberg.com/analysis/calculators/retire.html
The data I entered was 35 cents a day in constant value or $10 dollars a month with a starting capital of $10 dollars, that is, an annual contribution of $120.
The time-frame used is the average live expectancy of a working person. I consider 50 years of contributions to the account per generational kin. I did not account for better results but the time-frame can be reduced substantially if the contribution is $1 a day.
The total amount after a five kin generation planning at 35 cents is $1.2 BILLION
If we raise the contribution to one dollar the generational kin is four and the amount $4,08 BILLION

WHO WANTS TO BE A BILLIONAIRE!!!!

No Wonder

No Wonder

“You must wonder,
And no wonder what you wonder.” By me

That said, I save your time. I will not spend much debating the rationality of ice melting in cold water and why social behavior applies its modicum and becomes simile in itself of such situation.
Now, I will spend a little time in sharing about what you should expect to learn in the very near future.
You are going to need to understand risk and its implications. Understanding risk demands sophistication. If you want to have a serious dialogue about your future, you must understand risk.
Specifically, you might not need to understand risk investing in all its intricate ways.
Now imagine how your way of live is going to be affect by your risk of your present savings or your kin status.
In the next seven to ten years, the largest shift in the history of wealth creation and wealth destruction is going to occur in a calm way, affecting all countries around the planet.
The first hints of this event are appearing in all communities around the planet. A huge majority is becoming poorer and a wider but very small minority continues to accumulate a larger amount of the available currency resources. Your knowledge of this wealth distribution it is going to determine of your well-being by adapting or non-adapting to this process and logic.
Money is opposite to life, money is infinite at will, can be printed and its amount is determined by which form and the wish of the creator of the money to distribute and the exchangers to accept the amount wish to make. Life of individuals is finite, most very lucky folks after 72 start to hear cranking noises from the suspension (legs) and unpleasant empty oil tanks (stomach aches) or even worse the chassis breaks.
Thus, money in infinite and life is finite in physical terms. How do you marry money and life? From the point of view of a person, with limited resources, life and time; how a person acquires the infinite resource, money?
The smartest answer is: make your own.
Do not laugh!
Spend a few days thinking about: how do you make your own money?
Money is the tool of exchange accepted by all of us, what is the next paradigm change or tool of exchange that we all can accept?
I am going to use my finite time to help others and my soul.

Heiristocracy

The following article is by Daniel Franklin consulting editor of The Washington Monthly.
History does funny things to people, we always look at everything in retrospective, and we continue to ignore what we have learnt. Today, we are building a new reinassance of laws with wider consequences than in the past, we are scrambling social development to the point of not return, without major adjustments. It is the prevalence of ignorant people acting on laws at a tremendous rate with majestic historical consequences, affecting a vast part of the population in negetive ways. This review of "Death Tax," Death By A Thousand Cuts, by Yale political scientists Michael Graetz and Ian Shapiro, demonstrates that the story is far more complicated."

The solution isn't usually found in the extremes. The all-or-nothing solutions implemented on people lives, will never be an acceptable proposal for more than one person.


""To the Democratic mind, there is no tax more just, more moral, more American, than the estate tax. If we must tax someone, who better than those fortunate few who have gobs of money and did nothing to earn it; the children of the wealthy? Every dollar taken from the ranks of Bergdorf blondes is a dollar that need not be taken from working Americans. And so that poor, beleaguered Democratic mind could be excused if it falls into a sputtering, senseless rage with the recognition that Republicans have turned eliminating a levy on the luckiest and least worthy into a legitimate populist movement.
How a populist movement arose to eliminate the most populist of taxes is a political mystery without parallel. Not since World War I has a progressive tax been excised altogether, and yet four years after President Bush signed a phase-out of the estate tax, he has yet to reap a word of backlash. Tempting as it is for Democrats to chalk up their loss on the estate tax to Republican lies or sleight of hand tricks like renaming it the "Death Tax," Death By A Thousand Cuts, by Yale political scientists Michael Graetz and Ian Shapiro, demonstrates that the story is far more complicated.
No doubt, the estate tax debate is riddled with misinformation and misperception. But the phony facts mask a fundamental and far-reaching change in how Americans look at the morality of taxation, one upon which Democrats appear to be on the losing side. Democratic leaders comfort themselves by saying, if people only knew the facts. But “the Democrats' failure,” the authors write, “goes to the very core of their approach to convincing the American public that they are right about two of the most fundamental questions in any system of government: how and why the country should tax its citizens.”
For all the book's many virtues, thrills are not among them. Those looking for a page-turner that captures the excitement of the legislative process should look elsewhere (and let me know when they find it). Instead, the book reads like a narrative of how termites ate your house. Out of sight and unopposed, the advocates of repeal just munched and munched and munched until support for the tax caved in like a corroded joist.
The story begins in the late '80s, as liberals would expect, with a few rich folks who wanted to keep more of their money. A key early figure in the movement was the boutique financial planner Pat Soldano, who handled the assets for the Mars candy bar family, the Gallo wine family, and the heirs to the Campbell's soup fortune, among others. The effort to repeal the estate tax was just another aspect of Soldano's investment advice. For a relatively small investment—a Heritage study here, some lobbying fees from Patton Boggs there—families might one day reap tax breaks worth hundreds of millions of dollars. It's a bet a growing number of wealthy families were willing to make, offering the leaders of the repeal movement all the resources they would need to make their case heard.
Since the plight of the Gallo heirs was unlikely to draw many tears around the country, activists smartly latched on to the emotional appeal of family farmers and small business owners. Despite a mountain of data proving that only a tiny fraction of farmers and entrepreneurs were affected, the activists showed that an anecdote beats a statistic any day. One of the most effective was that of Chester Thigpen, an African-American tree farmer from Montrose, Miss., recruited by Jim Martin, one of the leading repeal activists. The grandson of slaves, Thigpen was heaven-sent. Less than a month after Republicans took control of Congress in 1995, Thigpen was testifying before the House Ways and Means Committee. “Right now, people tell me my tree farm could be worth more than a million dollars,” he said. “All that value is tied up in land or trees. We're not rich people. My son and I do almost all the work on our land ourselves.... My children might have to break up the tree farm or sell off timber to pay the estate taxes when I die.”
Thigpen's story was recycled so many times that at one point, a strategist considered renaming repeal bill The Chester Thigpen bill. There was only one problem. Thigpen's farm was not, in fact, subject to the estate tax. It handily skated in under the minimum threshold, according to Thigpen's son. When the authors asked Chester's son, Roy, if his father had written his own testimony, the son broke up laughing. “Some professors,” wrote it and gave it to him to read. Repeal activists were untroubled, as they often were, by facts. Thigpen was an effective stalking horse, and his story democratized the image of the repeal effort.
As the numbers of Americans supporting repeal grew, Democrats responded with the same uncomprehending refrain: But it doesn't affect you. Illinois Senator Dick Durbin tells the story of how he was once asked by an O'Hare Airport baggage handler when he was going to do away with the Death Tax, “so I won't have to pay it.” The moral of the story, of course, was that, if only Americans knew the facts, support for repeal would melt away to the two percent of Americans actually affected. In fact, the numbers tell a different story. One CNN poll found that nearly 40 percent of Americans believe that they are in the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans or will be there soon. Only 26 percent had given up hope of reaching the top of the income ladder, a cold splash indeed to dedicated class warriors. For the Democratic strategy to work, they would first need to convince Americans that they were worse off than they feel. Who would vote for someone who tells them they have no chance of achieving the American Dream?
But good old American blind optimism only accounted for some of Americans' resistance to Democratic logic. More troubling for Democrats was the fact that they lost the moral argument—the idea that the fairest tax was the one that hit those most able to pay. Americans increasingly bought the Republican line that the estate tax was doubly unfair—first because it treated some Americans differently than others. Second, because it taxed the same money twice: when it was earned, and later when the earner died. The absurdity of the argument of double taxation has been made before: All kinds of money is taxed more than once, most frequently when, as the case of the estate tax, it changes hands. But facts, as Ronald Reagan said, are stupid things. Polls showed that nearly 90 percent of Americans believe the estate tax is unfair. In 2003, a NPR, Kennedy School, Kaiser poll found that only 15 percent of Americans wanted to preserve the estate tax. One respondent, a retired transportation director for a Delaware school district, said that he knew his estate would not be big enough to be taxed, but he wanted it eliminated anyway. “I knew this gentleman, he's worked his life doing what he does, and does it very well, and I know his kids. He told me once—he said they would have to sell 90 percent of what he's invested in order to pay his taxes. So, you know, it's just not fair.”
If it felt like repeal activists were pushing at an open door, it's because, to a large extent, they were. Democrats offered no real alternative to repeal, and no effective argument for preservation of the estate tax. Not unlike the Republicans, the Democratic Party is driven by its constituent groups. But where was the constituency for the estate tax? The pain of the tax was concentrated to a small group with the means to fight for their interests. The benefits, meanwhile, were spread thinly across 150 million taxpayers. The liberal Center for Budgetary Priorities and Policy didn't begin working against estate tax repeal until 1999, four years after Chester Thigpen testified to the Ways and Means Committee. In one clever measure of political attention, the authors note that Republican pollsters had conducted 20 separate studies of the politics of estate tax repeal. Democrats had conducted four polls, and three of these were done after the 2000 election, when, to a large extent, the fight had already been lost.
Graetz and Shapiro are at their best when depicting the subterranean interplay between activists, think tanks, lobbyists, and donors that fuels federal politics. If there's a weakness in their description of how Washington works, it's in their gross underestimation of the influence of campaign contributions. The authors dismiss as naïve the suggestion that congressmen fought for repeal for the sake of campaign donations. But I think it's Graetz and Shapiro who are being simplistic. The authors seem to take on face value various congressmen's argument that contribution limits prevent any one donor from wielding undue influence. This is true, as far as it goes. But when well-connected fundraiser organizes an event where $1,000,000 is raised from 1,000 different donors, it's as if he gave all the money himself. His calls get answered. Moreover, when politicians spend so much of their time cultivating people wealthy enough to give a campaign contribution, it has a tendency to shape their thinking. The authors suggest that personal contacts, rather than campaign contributions, persuaded members of Congress, including many Democrats, to support repeal. They quote Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.) saying, “everyone in the House knows one person who's affected” by the estate tax. But the chances are, they met that person at a fundraiser. After years of attending fundraisers with the same group of donors, the line between friend and donor gets awfully blurry. A former Senate Democratic leadership aide once complained to me of having to redirect Senators' attention when they returned from fundraising trips. “A fundraiser is not a focus group,” he would remind them. It's the rare politician whose perspective is not affected by his or her constant exposure to the wealthy people whose money they need to get elected.
The authors' suggestion for how Democrats can rebut the Republican onslaughts falls short for me, as well. Graetz and Shapiro chide the Democrats for letting Republicans focus attention on the working rich who accumulated the estates, rather than the decadent children receiving them once they died. Many of the people taxed could easily be made to look like the “Paris Hiltons of this world,” rather than the Chester Thigpens, they argue. Perhaps this would have helped. But since 40 percent of the country believes that they are or will be in the wealthiest one percent of which Democrats speak, it's just as likely the Republicans could have responded by saying, “Those are your children they're talking about.” Even reviving the original argument for the estate tax—preventing the establishment of an aristocracy built on generational wealth—seems doomed to fail. After all, Paris Hilton became Paris Hilton with the estate tax in effect. It seems probable that the ease with which the wealthy circumvent the tax has become one of chief causes of its demise, an argument the authors neglect. Since it accomplishes no clear good beyond the money raised, the estate tax becomes like any other: a necessary evil. Republicans have shown that in the minds of Americans the step from necessary evil to just plain evil is a short one indeed.
If the estate tax debate shows anything, it's that tax politics based on distinguishing Americans by class has failed the Democrats utterly. Something new that reaffirms the connection between all Americans and our obligations to one another, rather than our differences, must soon take its place. For Graetz and Shapiro are profoundly right when they discuss the implications of the estate tax debate for politics and the nation. “This death tax effort has been a critical piece of an attack on the very idea of progressive taxation in America.... They know that what they want cannot be accomplished at a fell swoop. Hence their strategy: death by a thousand cuts. What strategy is there on the other side?”"

Daniel Franklin is a consulting editor of The Washington Monthly.

Bite and Bite

Every time the national television announced some big special bullfight or soccer game, my mom will scream, FASCISTS AT WORK!!!
No wonder, she lived thru the executions young people while "the biggest bullfight of the decade" or the "the game of the century" draw the attention of people, and the government took the lives and freedom of hundreds of people.
Most, people felt no need to say anything, it was no them who were being affected.
Every time, the fascist government of Franco decided to have some special law that will erode the little freedom left, a special sporting event was created and broadcasted as if the planet had stopped. Those manipulations did not passed easy by many, who understood how easy is to manipulate populace opinion, those few fanatics endorsers from home and abroad continue the self feeding fanaticism of nationalism via second or third tier issues.

There is not breakthrough on what we are seing today around the planet in the way the news trickle down in to the populace. It is such global mislead the way issues of importance are treated, what we are receiving is propaganda, it is dangerous at minimum and treaterous if fully investigated. As citizens who have to make decisions about who govern us, we have lost a grip in the truth, there is not way to rationalize the preset news or accept them as the truth.

Humans have the tendency to eliminate -kill- each other, mostly with sentiments emanated from simple ideas, one idea is the need for greed, other is power to subjugate others and the last is material enrichment.
Most social philosophies as religion, pay homage to those actions by branding them as pernicious to humans and their societies, forgetting what the consequences are for abiding to greed, lying, killing for enrichment and doing harm to others. It is a dangerous behavior that always comes with strong punishment. Time will to continue to be harsh the judge, and pardon never arrives on time.

Cut and Run or Tie and Rest

Black or White
Night or Day
My way or the Highway
Rich or Poor
Run or Walk
Tall or Short
A or Z
Ferrari or Yugo
Gold or Dust
Sea or Sky
Truth or Lie
Cat or Dog
Fire or Ice
What is between the extremes?

A life is so poorly created and driven by dualistic and idiotic views, with masses allowing leaders to build their future in this bobo based logic, judgement day has not remorse, there is no kindness in history for this behavior nor its supporters.