Podcast #1: Overview of What’s to Come

This is the first of many MyStrangeMind podcasts, which gives an overview of the kinds of topics we’re going to get into over the coming weeks. The primary focus is:

What can we do to improve our lives? What can we do to improve our health and our well being?

From that question, we look into ways in which we can improve our everyday lives by being more aware of our habits and the effect they have on us. What kinds of projects you can do around your home, to improve its ability to be a safe and healthy environment, promoting a healthy routine that you can carefully craft to meet your goals.

We’ll get into all of these ideas and more in today’s podcast. Please have a listen and feel free to drop some feedback so I can improve it.

Market Commentary From Monty Guild

THE GLOBAL BANKING CRISIS CONTINUES…

STAGE 2: EUROPEAN SOVEREIGN DEBT UNDER ATTACK

Taken together, the Icelandic and Greek financial crises can be seen as the second stage of the larger global banking crisis.  The first stage of the global banking crisis, which began in late 2007, was centered in the European and U.S. mortgage and mortgage derivative market.  The second stage began with Iceland’s monetary and fiscal crisis in 2009 and continues with the current Greek crisis, and is centered in European sovereign debt.

The global crisis banking crisis is a multi-phase global economic crisis caused by years of over-borrowing followed by the current deleveraging.  This deleveraging was, of course, set in place by all those who gambled with their own and other people’s money.  As time passes, more and more of these gamblers will be unmasked and there will be more countries, companies, industries, and individuals who will lose face and capital in coming months and years.  We anticipate that these problems will continue as various sectors delever over the next six to eight years.

Many believe that the other European nations will act to bail out Greece, and then perhaps Spain or other over-levered nations in Europe who experience debt problems.  We disagree.  In our opinion, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is the lender who will bail out the damaged European nations.  In our opinion, it is too hard for European nations to go to their taxpayers and tell them that they are directly or indirectly guaranteeing the debt of a foreign country. read full article »

Independent Egyptologist John Anthony West Discusses Ancient Egypt on Red Ice Radio

One of the most fascinating and brilliant researchers and alternative historians, on the ancient Egyptian world, simply must be John Anthony West. His work has truly revitalized many people’s understanding of ancient Egypt, a subject which is often clouded by the uninspired and often dim witted theories of the modern-day quackademics in the field of Egyptology.

West is well known for his work with actor Charleton Heston and geologist Robert Schoch on Mystery of the Sphinx; a documentary which details his theory that, due to evidence of water erosion on the Sphinx, this monument must be thousands of years older than is currently believed by the academic Egyptologists. He also made a fantastic documentary called Magical Egypt, which is a Symbolist view of the ancient Egyptian world.

This alternative perspective, espoused by J.A. West, operates under the premise that the ancient Egyptians can do a far better job of telling their own history, in their own words, than the contemporary researchers. These academics largely ignore the Egyptian writings as fanciful myths and fail to grasp the true meaning of many of the temples and artifacts they study. read full article »

You Should Have a Robust Backup System For Your Computer

I’ve had several friends with drives going out recently and it occurred to me that I should really look into getting a decent backup system. At first I thought of just burning DVD’s periodically or getting one of those 1-2 TB drives which attach to your USB port; but it all seemed to be a bit labor intensive. I just know that I would forget to backup at just the wrong time and lose critical files.

If you do anything business related on your computer, I think you will find that a good backup solution, even if it is only used ONCE, will pay for itself many times over.  Just think about all of the work that goes into creating and organizing the files on your computer and if your time and effort is worth anything, a few hundred dollars will seem like a pittance; especially when you consider the fact that, with a good backup solution, you can simply replace your drive and be back up and running with a few hours as if nothing happened.

Network Attached Storage

The solution which I feel is finally coming of age, for the home user on a budget, is Network Attached Storage (NAS); particularly NAS systems which support at least RAID 1 mirroring or similar setups which allow for redundancy.

While most of us can get away with having an external drive that we periodically copy our data to; there is still a good possibility that this drive will crash. If you are using this drive to archive files, then you will have lost data. So it is imperative to have a mirrored system to hold your data.

I waded through the various systems out there and the reviews. I found many which are “adequate” but inflexible; because they do not allow for future expansion. For example, I saw many which allow you to swap out drives; but cap the number of Terabytes you can have in the array.

Well, after a night of searching, I ran into a combination which gives you a total of 2TB (redundant, actually 4TB total) on a nicely featured NAS box.

Mirrored Hot Swappable 4TB Network Attached Storage System for Under $600

I recently ordered one of these diskless NAS boxes for under $200 after rebate:

It runs a tiny version of Linux and supports a variety of backup and file system protocols including Apple’s “Time Machine”. One nice aspect of it, is the fact that you can plug in any SATA or SATA II hard drive and have it do RAID 1. So you can always buy a larger drive in the future.

I saw this interesting bit of info in one of the reviews:

“It does Netgear’s own proprietary XRAID mirroring (but not RAID 0). XRAID apparently allows the automatic upgrade to more then two drives, if you would use it in a Netgear box, which supports more then two drives. Unlike with other home office NAS, the firmware is saved in a flash and not on the drives itself. The drives are hot swappable and rebuild themselves automatically unlike with many other personal NAS products. The NAS can share directories via CIFS, NFS, AFP, and HTTP. It also can do FTP and TFTP, which comes in handy in the lab.”

So if a 3TB drive came on the market and you wanted to incorporate it into your box, you would just pull one of the 2TB drives out and pop it in; then it will copy the data over. Then you would pop the other 2TB array out and the data on the newly copied drive would be copied back; so you can expand the array easily.

When you toss in 2 x 2TB Western Digital Hard Drives, the whole system with 2TB of redundant network accessable storage came out to under $600.

Tired of Being Bound to Social Networking Sites

I would love to see social networks de-centralized. Something like a blog (with openID authentication or something similar), feed reader and email; this would likely accomplish much of what is done with networking sites like FB.

Unfortunately, most people do not have the desire or the know-how to have such a set-up. So until this propagates to a larger sub-set of the population; most of this kind of communication will be stuck on places like FB & MySpace.

I can sense a growing dis-content among many, with this kind of centralized set-up. I think they really are tired of giving control of their content, feed management and social network to a large company.

If someone can implement a very simple, easy to install, open source, app, which accomplishes much of what these network sites do; then there may be a big change in store for this kind of communication.

It will have to be something that people can equate to their existing social network sites (at first). Most likely, it will also have to integrate with sites like FB, in order to remain connected to the legacy network.

That would be a good project for an enterprising programmer. Something to finally put an end to these large networking sites controlling our experience and profiting from our everyday activities.

TSA Wants Kids and Grandmas Naked

John Tate | Campaign for Liberty

After a lone Nigerian would-be terrorist tried to detonate explosives in his underclothes Christmas Day on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, TSA immediately grabbed for even more invasive power over American citizens.

Most disturbingly, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) wants to implement full-body scans at the nation’s airports-allowing unelected bureaucrats to virtually strip-search and gawk at kids, moms, grandmothers, grandfathers — you and all other American passengers — through your clothes.

Predictably, misinformation on the graphic nature of the images and ability of TSA personnel to copy, photo, and save the images poured forth from TSA flaks.

I have included direct contact information for the TSA at the end of this post. Call them today and let them know how disgusted you are with their latest plan to invade our privacy.

It’s a peeping tom’s dream, and a nightmare for those of us who believe in the great American principles of liberty, restrained government, and privacy.

Unless we stop this outrage, TSA agents will be snooping at the undergarments of such “threats” as American kids, grandmothers, and grandfathers. And if you or they refuse? You will be physically searched by TSA employees just like a criminal after being arrested.

The TSA’s dirty little secret is the agency has been pushing for full-body imaging since 2002 and even introduced the technology at a handful of airports in 2007-without ensuring that passengers knew they were being watched in this manner.

As Congressman Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) said, “Nobody needs to see my wife and kids naked to secure an airplane.”

Despite self-serving assurances from the TSA, these full-body scans are an unconstitutional, unacceptable intrusion into the privacy of American passengers nationwide.

Last year, Campaign for Liberty Director of Development Steve Bierfeldt sued the TSA for detaining him for carrying cash. Because Steve so strongly stood up to them, the TSA backed down from its unconstitutional searches of passengers’ non-terrorism-related property.

But such victories for liberty are rare in today’s America and must be fought for by a vigilant public jealous of its liberty.

We now risk losing the gains we have made against the surveillance state, all because of the “systemic failure” of the federal government-as Obama himself called it. Now the TSA wants to know far more about us than just the amount of cash we’re carrying.

Use the numbers below to contact them today as we show the TSA that the freedom movement will not sit idly by in this fight.

Just as Big Brother advocates jumped on the intelligence failure of 9/11 to nationalize airport security, they once again want to use their own failure as an excuse for more power.

But we know that this latest move will not keep us safe. So far, it has been passengers and flight crew who have stopped such incidents as this and the attempted “shoebombing” of December 2001.

They can keep stripping away our privacy and liberty, all to foil the last attack, but the terrorists will continue to circumvent any of their freedom-crushing “security” measures.

As Judge Andrew Napolitano has explained, “Airline travel is safer today because pilots have guns, cockpit doors are like bank vaults, and the passengers have become courageous. All this was done by individuals in the private sector, not by the government. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, if the feds had not stripped us of our natural rights to keep ourselves safe-by keeping and bearing arms-9/11 would never have happened.”

If we want to diminish the threat of terrorism and fly more safely, we can restore the Second Amendment, hand airline security back to the private sector, and end our government’s policy of foreign interventionism.

Contact the TSA’s “Office of Civil Rights” by phone toll free at 1-877-EEO-4-TSA (1-877-336-4872) or (800) 877-8339 (TTY) and by email at TSA-ContactCenter@dhs.gov.

Benjamin Franklin said, “Those who give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Let us do our part to show Washington and the TSA that Americans not only deserve and want both, but that we will not stop until our privacy and all our other freedoms are secure.

Symbolist Egypt – the Meaning Behind the Magic

This video features John Anthony West speaking at a conference; it only recently became available on the web. The video was excerpted from a conference called Return to the Source : Rediscovering Lost Knowledge and Ancient Wisdom.

In the lecture, he explains his theories on ancient Egypt, detailing the manner by which his truly independent perspective was developed: his influences, experiences and how his understanding of symbolist Egypt evolved over the many years of his career.

Architecture does in stone what music does in sound; in other words, its visual vibrations that are affecting us. We’re inside the symphony, as it were, when we’re inside a sacred space. We’re being affected emotionally by the vibrational nature of that particular building.

So when we go into an Egyptian temple, we are resonating to its harmonies and proportions and so-on. The great sages of the past understood that each of the cosmic principles, which are the gods as it were. The gods are not some strange animal headed beings, they are the embodiments of cosmic principles and those cosmic principles are inextricably related to certain interplay of numbers which give rise to geometry, harmony, proportion and measure.

When you know the secrets of the numbers and secrets of the principles, you are able to produce a building that will evoke within the emotional center of the beholder, that particular principle.

–John Anthony West

Latest From Jim Sinclair on the Federal Reserve Gold Certificate Ratio

source: jsmineset.com

Jim,

Armstrong sees the Gold bull market lasting until roughly 2016 (17.2 years starting in 1999). Is it at this point that you see the USDX bottoming at .5200?

Is it at that point when you see the Federal Reserve Gold Certificate put in place? According to cyclical analysis it would come at the low point business wise of the 17.2 cycle.

How long do you think this world monetary system will take to be implemented?

I guess once again the US will lead the process.

Do you think China (or India) will take a major role in it?

Will it be done under the IMF umbrella?

After the Federal Reserve Gold Certificate is in place, do you believe that the world´s economy can enjoy some period of stability (with the exception of geopolitical considerations)?

Best regards,
CIGA Christopher

Christopher,

I see the USDX bottoming between .4600 and .5200, yes. I have learned not to argue with Armstrong on cycle timing. Gold should have a temporary high point between January 14th and June 25th, 2011.
Implementation is not a process, it is a surprise.

The US will not necessarily lead the process. By then the IMF will be the Western World Central Bank, if not in name, certainly in function.

China and India will play a major role by demand via back financial channels.

It will likely be done under the IMF umbrella as part of a Super Sovereign Currency.

After the Federal Reserve Gold Certificate is in place the world’s economy should be able to enjoy a period of stability for a considerable amount of time, but with a total rearrangement of positions of national economic powers moving towards Asia and do not forget Jakaya Kikwete and the common market of sub Sahara African countries of merit and leadership. They are there.

Regards,
Jim

Golden Comet Now Seen By The World: $1650 Target In Sight

As I write to you this evening, the very real prospect of hyper-inflation, a catastrophic currency event, is staring down the vast world of US dollar-denominated paper promissory notes. Gold is behaving like a bright comet in the sky, grabbing the attention of the keen observer and giving them an edge over others who are too distracted to look up.

The confidence model is rapidly crumbling, after many years of neglect; the US dollar bubble is finally bursting in an awesome way. If there were genuine integrity, then surely such a model would do; but the lack of sufficient moral fortitude in the hearts of men, makes it virtually impossible to have a confidence based economy for very long; because the confidence is merely an illusion and the model can only be sustained as long as the illusion persists.

On the daily chart, we see panic buying (and short covering) driving the price of gold to well above $1200 dollars. Major central banks, such as the Indian central bank, have become large-scale buyers of Gold.

It looks like my original medium-term target of $1379 is going to be upon us relatively soon. Our next target may soon be followed by a touch of the inflation-adjusted high of $1650, followed by a period of consolidation.

Gold Daily Chart: December 21, 2008 - December 2, 2009

The picture becomes clearer if we look at the inflation-adjusted monthly chart, showing the gold price action clear back to 1970. Considering official inflation statistics, we can see that gold has yet to move past its previous high, despite a vast expansion in monetary aggregates, which has occurred during the past several decades.

Gold Monthly: 1970 - 2009: $1650 Price Objective

Nobody can say for sure what will happen with the short-term fluctuations. But longer-term it is quite clear that the price of gold will move into the $5,000 range, as the reality of the need for hard assets sets in. It doesn’t take but a few billion dollars worth of gold purchases to create a significant increase in the gold price. Given all of the trillions of dollars already in circulation and the trillions planned for bailouts; the target of $5,000 will likely turn out to be a conservative target, once the dust has all cleared.

A Golden Comet in the Sky

A golden comet now lights up the sky; an omen of what is in store for our future.  Gold is up just over 50% during the last 1-year period.  Given the buying strength we are seeing lately, especially from central banks, we will likely see gold in the $1600 range quite soon.

Of course, there will be road-bumps along the way; but the general course will take us to $1650 and then into the $3000-5000 range.  Where Gold goes beyond there depends on the monitary policies of the United States and what kind of thinking takes hold as all of this inflation begins to hit hard where it hurts.

The beautiful thing about gold, is the fact that it gives us all a clear omen, which allows the wise and observant among us, a chance to prepare for difficult times ahead.  This golden comet will become ever more brilliant with the passage of time.  Perhaps most of us will soon realize what is occurring and what they must do to deal with the situation.  This situation isn’t going to go away on it’s own and nobody is going to solve the problems  it creates for us in our stead.

Gold Swiss Stair Formation Following Wedge Breakout