Economic Collapse Inevitable?

Corporate greed has been unchecked for too long. Many economists are now warning of a total meltdown in the global economy. Perhaps we should have listened to Thomas Jefferson long ago when he talked about the potentially negative role that the financial institutions would play in the future of America if they were allowed to control the issuing of currency.

“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around (these banks) will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent of their fathers conquered. The issuing power (of currency) should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belong.”  Thomas Jefferson 3^rd President of the United States. 

Extracted from FUTUREdition Volume 14, Number 18

The Future [TheFuture@FUTUREdition.org]

Am I worried?  You bet! It won’t be the big Corporations or the Bankers that suffer, probably not the Politicians either, it will be you and me, our friends and family, our neighbours and our communities. Brace yourselves.

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Phone call to tell me my computer is infected

I’ve just spent fifteen minutes on the phone to a girl (Chinese? Indian? Martian?) who was trying to convince me my computer was badly infected with a programme that can be used by hackers to access all my personal information. She said her company is affiliated to Microsoft and they want to clean up my computer and keep me safe. You know the sort of call – we’ve nearly all had them. Do people still fall for this bullshit????? I thought I’d have a bit of fun. I kept asking her to repeat everything she said (three times) as, “I’m a bit deaf dear. Can you speak louder and more slowly? No, still too fast. Slower. Slower. Louder. Slow down. Can you repeat that dear? No sorry, still can’t hear you.” She was very obliging and slowed down almost to a stop  – it was hilarious. Then she asked me if I was at my computer now. I said yes. She asked if it was a desktop or a laptop. I said I didn’t know, what was the difference?  Now she thought I was stupid as well as deaf. As she scrabbled round trying to find the right words, I got bored and put on my confident, authoritative voice, zapping her with the legal stuff. She panicked and put me through to the “Technical Manager”, who sounded exactly like her. I was told they needed to ask all these personal questions for verification purposes. I explained that the RLS (rate limiting step) was me verifying them, not the other way round. I went on and on and on, without pause, about how they were committing fraud, how I’d recorded this conversation and how they were acting criminally. She told me to “Get Lost”. Which caused me to discharge shrieking laughter into the mouth piece. Hopefully it hurt her ear. There followed a panicked conversation in a foreign language at the other end of the phone and then a voice, in pigeon English, pleaded, “Dr. Harthan. Dr. Harthan, are you still there?” Then the phone was put down. Morons. But morons who somehow have got hold of my name and my landline number, despite my having been registered with TPS for years. What a strange world we’ve made for ourselves!

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How to get rid of worms

Mr. Rouyer is a French farmer living in the village of Gripperie-Saint-Symphorien. He was burgled a couple of months ago. I don’t know what was stolen but it was obviously enough to warrant him calling the police. As well as cows and sheep, Mr. Rouyer keeps organic ducks, which are in excellent health without the use of duck medicine. They never suffer from worms, which Mr. Rouyer maintains are very common parasites of ducks. If you keep ducks, I expect you’ll want to know his secret. Well, the good news is that his secret is not a secret anymore. One of the eagle-eyed Gendarmes spotted 12 cannabis plants at Mr. Rouyer’s farm, and a further search turned up 5kg of the drug.  (Wouldn’t you think he’d have hidden it all before calling the Police!) In his defence, Mr. Rouyer told the police that he grows the weed to feed to his ducks because it’s an excellent de-wormer. He was also heard to say, “That’s correct Officer, I don’t have worms either.”

Sadly Duck a la Marijuana is now off the menu! 

Political Deceptions?

I’m not interested in politics. Never have been. Though probably should’ve been. Should be. After all it’s the Politicians that direct the flow of our society. Well hey, they’re doing that alright at the moment! Take, for instance, the fact that we’re now being told that what we were told a few months ago, was wrong. Of course I’m talking about the recession. It seems we’re not coming out of it at all and things will get much worse, with inflation threatening to remain six times higher than the Bank of England base rate. What does that mean? It means that we’re all paying more for essential consumables and services, our savings are worth less with every week that passes and our main asset, our home, will continue to depreciate in value. Oh and don’t forget the job losses and the reduced pension funds. How many of us realise that national and global economies are controlled by un-elected shadowy figures who stay in the wings of societies stage. Have you been wondering why the Banks still aren’t giving mortgages unless you’ve got that huge deposit. If you aren’t, you should be. Is the answer that they KNEW that house prices would drop further, despite the temporary apparent recovery? How did they know? I can’t help but see the obvious. What am I talking about? The fact that if you make houses unaffordable by demanding a huge deposit that first time buyers can’t raise; houses don’t sell and prices fall as vendors compete in a shrinking market – supply and demand; it’s not rocket science. So, is it because they predicted that property prices would continue to fall or is it possible that they have engineered the whole thing? Why? So that we lesser mortals, will save and save and save in an effort to raise the deposits they demand, while they use our savings to bring back their big fat profits. And then, when we lose our jobs and are given a paltry redundancy package, we’ll spend our savings on just living from day to day, as we won’t be entitled to any social security benefit until all our savings are spent. That’ll save the Government a fortune AND boost the economy into the bargain. And those poor souls who don’t have any savings, will join the millions of graduates and undergraduates who are so deep in debt that they may never be free of it. People in debt are easily controlled by those who hold the purse strings. Should you be worried? You bet!

And while I’m having a rant about political deceptions, what about the “new” NDM-1 (ESBL) gene that’s being transferred between Gram negative bacteria such as E.coli? This gene codes for an enzyme that confers resistance to most of our antibiotics. We were told yesterday that there are 50 cases in the UK and that the majority of these have come from India. That puzzles me. I was informed two weeks ago that my elderly Mum has a urine infection caused by E.coli carrying this gene. She’s never been to India, hasn’t had any surgery for years BUT was hospitalised after a stroke last summer and has been in residential care ever since. If she’s one of these 50 people, then the other 49 are likely to be the rest of the elderly people in this residential home. Someone, somewhere, is playing this down!

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ARCHETYPES

This weekend I’m spending time thinking about which archetypal patterns are the main drivers for my life. It’s interesting stuff that can illuminate, not only the path we’ve trodden, but also, the path that lies ahead. It looks like it might be a useful way to ensure I make the right choice at the crossroads that have just become visible on the horizon.

Looking at archetypes and their shadows can start to make sense of why you walked out of work in tears after being treated unjustly, why you always run away from the bullying of older siblings instead of standing your ground, why you can turn your back on some relationships so easily, whilst holding onto the memory of others for decades. Why certain people/situations empower you and make you feel good about yourself, while others make you feel demoralised and hurt.  Caroline Myss has written about this in her book “Sacred Contracts”. The book makes interesting reading though I’m not sure I agree with her method of assigning archetypes to the different areas of one’s life. Also her book may need far more time to work through than most people have available. But then this shouldn’t be a quick fix process; after all your life depends on it! However, there has been a lot of research into archetypes and archetypal patterns, including of course by Carl Jung, so a Google search will pull up a wealth of information and may be all you need.  And of course, you can always start recording your dreams. Archetypal patterns are very easy to recognise in what Jung termed “big dreams”. These are the dreams that seem to have a fairytale or mystical quality; dreams that seem to be about spirit rather than everyday life. A close examination of these dreams will reveal the patterns passing through your life in the present. I also recommend that you re-awaken the child within and read again those fairytales that had you enthralled as a child. Fairytales deal with archetypes, that’s why they’re so appealing and have stood the test of time. Which fairytale(s) has scripted your life?

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Aerobic exercise improves brain function

Neuroscientists working on mice showed that even a few days of running stimulates the brain to grow new cells in a part of the brain involved in memory and recall.

The scientists divided the mice into two groups: one group had a running wheel they could use at any time, and the other group didn’t. In subsequent memory tests the scores of mice with access to the running wheel were almost double those of the non-running group.

I don’t know about you, but I’m gonna get my running shoes out tomorrow and start pounding the tarmac again – mind you I’d like to know how they tested mouse memory. Perhaps they let them try the free brain games on Lumosity.com (http://www.lumosity.com/users/me/home ) Try them, they’re really good – kept me amused for hours J

Now where did I put that cheese?#

Life, the Universe & Everything: A New Perspective.

If you’ve ever studied science, you’ll know (at least a little) about the 2^nd Law of Thermodynamics. Let me remind you. Put very simply, it states that the entropy of the Universe is increasing. Entropy is energy and so an increase in energy means an increase in disorder. So, the 2^nd Law is often summarised as an increase in disorder with the passage of time. Again put very simply, and using the most common example, you will never see a broken glass becoming more ordered as, to do this, it would have to re-assemble back into its unbroken form. That’s fine as far as it goes, it sounds logical. Astronomers and Astrophysicists have observed that our Universe is expanding in all directions; the glass has shattered and so we are told that the Universe is becoming more disordered; more chaotic. Of course, the nemesis of the 2^nd Law is that somehow life defies it by having become more organised over time, not less. This has often been used by Creationists as evidence for intelligent design.

I’m not a Creationist, nor a Physicist, nor an Astronomer. My understanding of quantum mechanics is probably not much beyond that of the average lay persons understanding, but I do understand enough to know that things just aren’t adding up. And I’m not on my own. Scientists with hugely more brain power at their disposal than me have been trying to understand the underlying force(s) of the Universe in terms of quantum physics for a very long time. Their theoretical and research papers make my head spin; I don’t have the knowledge to understand their arguments or theories fully. Because of that, I have no idea how what I’m about to say fits into their existing theories, all I do know is that I’ve just finished reading an amazing book by Gevin Giorbran “Everything Forever” that, to me, makes perfect sense of all aspects of existence. I cannot hope to do justice to his theory in a few sentences, so I would encourage you to read his book yourself. I’ll try and give you a flavour here – at least in terms of my understanding.

The Universe is not increasing in disorder as the 2^nd Law of Thermodynamics states, it is moving towards balance (equilibrium) and symmetry. The driving force is an attraction of opposites; let’s call these matter and anti-matter for simplicity, having been borne out of asymmetry at the “big bang” – the point at which time began. The Universe we see (and are part of) is expanding and so moving forward in time, (at least that is our observation of it) and this forward motion is governed by electromagnetism and the weak electronic forces. The strong nuclear force (this is the force that holds positively charged protons and neutrons together in atomic nuclei) and gravity (which currently we have no understanding of) are the opposing forces that are pulling the Universe back towards the past. In the anti-matter Universe, the opposite is true (which Universe we live in is debatable of course, as it’s all relative to our point of observation). Because the two Universes exist in the same spatial dimensions, they are continually in contact and thus we see quantum particles popping in and out of existence. Rather than annihilating each other they join together to produce “something” greater than the fragmented part that we observe as mass and/or density. Eventually, at the end of time as we understand it, both the matter and anti-matter Universes will be united at absolute zero (this is the point at which there is no molecular/atomic movement/vibration)and will exist in what Physicists call flat space. This will be a timeless eternity, where everything will be in equilibrium and perfect symmetry; a pure lattice.

So, rather than the Universe’s evolution being determined by the big bang, it’s being determined by the final state of equilibrium or perfect balance. If you’ve ever studied chemical or biological processes you’ll recognise immediately that this makes perfect sense. All natural processes move towards equilibrium, it is arguable the driving force behind everything.

WOW – mind blowing stuff. I hope I’ve done justice to the theory (but suspect I haven’t). For me, the book has given me a new perspective on Life, the Universe and Everything and has brought Science and Religion/Spirituality much closer together. It is most certainly on a level playing field with Fritjof Capra “Tao of Physics”.

Perhaps more importantly for me, is that it’s led me to explore new ways of explaining my own experiences of dream precognition, telepathy and intuition in terms of the quantum microcosm operating within a conscious universe. #