Depression

Low Sperm Counts and Deformed Penises: The Chemical Industry Has a Hold on Your Reproductive Future

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By Joshua Zaffos, Colorado Springs Independent
Posted on June 26, 2008

From car seats to condoms, nasty compounds have invaded our lives.
Hormones are going haywire, and our human future is at risk.

I am half the man my father is.

This disturbing fortune came to me about five years ago, but not from an odd relative or a sadistic girlfriend. Instead, this dinner-table diagnosis came from Theo (short for Theodora) Colborn, an internationally known scientist who has helped develop the field of research exploring how chemical compounds interfere with the hormones that guide human development.

Known as endocrine disruption, chemicals found in computer screens and car seats, shower curtains and shampoo, plastic water bottles and prophylactics are skewing our odds against cancers and causing developmental delays and reproductive roadblocks, including declining sperm counts.

So, when Colborn informed me of my inferior manhood, I took consolation in the fact that she was indicting my entire generation — and her own — for loading our natural environment, our workplaces and our homes with tens of thousands of chemical compounds without really having a clue about what we’re doing. Our Stolen Future, the book Colborn co-authored in 1996, first delivered this bad news to the general public.

More than a decade later, scientists are still conducting experiments and measuring results, from cramped basement labs at universities to expansive high-country lakes in the wilderness. The hypotheses generally aren’t questions of whether chemicals are pervading and persisting in the environment, but rather how severely they are stunting our development and health. The federal government has investigated these questions with timidity, if not contempt, operating a regulatory system practically beholden to the chemical industry.

With half of my manhood at stake and hopes for a better assessment in the future, I’m wondering how we can heed the warning signs and reverse our chemical course.

A day in my half-life

For years, I started off each day drinking coffee out of a metallic cup, likely coated with bisphenol-A, a chemical commonly used to line plastic bottles and other food and beverage cans and containers. Anyone who has lugged around a Nalgene bottle made of polycarbonate plastic, trying to save the Earth one paper cup at a time, has gotten his or her share of bisphenol-A, which leaches from containers into liquids to enter our bodies. A U.S. Centers for Disease Control study detected bisphenol-A in 93 percent of all Americans.

Inside us, bisphenol-A mimics estrogen, plugging into hormone receptors; this is endocrine disruption. In pregnant or breastfeeding mothers and young and prepubescent children, it can have critical impacts, rewiring our developmental profiles and opening up our risks for cancers and physical and behavioral abnormalities. Lab tests suggest that chronic, low-dose exposure to bisphenol-A — like drinking out of a coated cup or polycarbonate bottle daily — may cause women to have greater chances of breast cancer and polycystic ovary syndrome, a leading cause of infertility, and men to have increased odds of prostate cancer and reduced sperm counts.

That’s a lot to think about during the day’s first cup of coffee or sip of water. Now I try to stick to ceramic mugs and glasses.

As my body starts to properly caffeinate in the mornings, I usually sit in front of a laptop and do whatever it is writers do to put off writing — checking e-mails and boxscores — until I’m warmed up. As a computer warms up, particles inside start to fly and some catch a ride on dust. For years, I breathed in polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) from my laptop.

These compounds are flame-retardants, nearly universally used in couch cushions, televisions, cars and carpets. PBDEs have similar chemical structures to thyroid hormones, and, according to lab tests, they can lower our bodies’ production of the real thing.

Over time, thyroid-hormone deficiencies can hurt metabolism. Hypothyroidism causes fatigue, depression, anxiety, hair loss and a waning libido. Women with low thyroid-hormone counts are five times more likely to have children with IQs that qualify them as mildly retarded, according to one study. A 2005 experiment found that a single low dose of a common PDBE given to rats in utero resulted in a class of hyperactive rodents with persistent low sperm counts.

Read moreLow Sperm Counts and Deformed Penises: The Chemical Industry Has a Hold on Your Reproductive Future

Dollar Diving

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Dollar to fall to metals in upcoming rallies, rate hikes soon wont be able to fix economic problems, real inflation understated for years, USDX contracts plummet, why arent people fleeing from the stock market… Exchange Traded Funds are a disaster, losses from global write downs, Fed still invited to intervene in spite of failures

The dollar has once again collapsed. Get ready for the next dollar debacle and the coming rally in gold and silver which have just broken out. The elitists have lost all credibility. The would-be lords of the universe have told so many pathological lies that no one “in the know” believes anything emanating from the forked tongues of Buck-Busting, Bear-Bashing, Big-Ben Bernanke and Hanky Panky Paulson. If our Fed Head and Treasury Secretary had been characters in the Walt Disney movie entitled “Pinocchio,” their noses would have quickly grown to lengths that could have been wrapped around the earth’s equator several times. God would have had to reverse the earth’s rotation to extricate them.

Wall Street tells us the odds favor two quarter percent rate hikes to the Fed funds rate by the end of the year. We ask whether that would be before or after the economy collapses? If before, the Fed’s rate hikes will destroy what is left of our economy, and the dollar will collapse, thereby erasing any benefits from the rate hikes. If after, you will see rate cuts instead of rate hikes as the Fed attempts to save the fraudsters on Wall Street who are not even remotely close to recovering from the credit-crunch despite what the elitists might tell you to the contrary. We ask who the morons are that make up these odds, and what planet they come from. They give aliens a bad name. These index predictions are just another form of jaw-boning and disinformation.

As soon as the economy starts its final descent into Davy Jones’ Locker, which is likely to occur in the very near future, the Fed and the US Treasury will unceremoniously toss the so-called “strong dollar” policy into the nearest financial dumpster in order to save the economy and the fraudsters. Accompanying the “strong dollar” policy on its way to the dumpster will be the next round of derivative toxic waste that is on its way courtesy of the upcoming surge in fallout from tanking real estate markets in a process that will see the Fed blow what remains of its general collateral in exchange for such waste. Once the Fed’s general collateral is exhausted, we will be ushered into a new hyperinflationary era characterized by direct monetization of US treasuries to fund our deficits and to absorb more toxic waste as it continues to pour down on elitist financial institutions like Niagara Falls.

A few measly quarter percent cuts will do absolutely nothing to slow the acceleration of inflation, especially if the Fed keeps the M3 at current levels. Only a double-digit Fed funds rate and greatly reduced M3 could have any eventual and meaningful impact on the inflation that is built into the system for at minimum the next year and one half at levels in the area of 15% to 18%, and even then the impact will not be felt until the current baked-in inflation has run its course. Direct monetization of treasuries to replenish Fed collateral and to absorb our growing deficits will put inflation beyond the point of no return, as will the breaking of OPEC dollar pegs.

As you can see, there is no way that any of the proposed diminutive rate hikes will have a positive impact on the economy, on the dollar or on the balance sheets of the fraudsters. Therefore, there will not be any rate hikes. Any increase in the Fed funds rate would be accompanied by an economic catastrophe of epic proportions that would occur as a direct result of the raising of that rate. Any rate hike would take a year to a year and a half to have an impact on inflation. By the time the anticipated Fed rate hikes could have any kind of impact whatsoever, the economy will already be in a state of rampant hyperinflation, and would be well on its way to depression, far too late to save the dollar or the economy. Ergo, the new elitist motto will soon become: “Damn the inflation, full greed ahead!”

Read moreDollar Diving

Gold May Rise to $5,000 on Inflation, Schroder Says

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Related articles:
– Gold
– Weimar Inflation in America
– Silver Rationing
– Don’t Be Afraid Buy Gold
– The Only “Win-Win” Investment I know of …

June 19 (Bloomberg) — Gold prices may rise to $5,000 an ounce as investors seek to protect themselves against accelerating inflation, said Schroder Investment Management Ltd., which oversees $277 billion of assets globally.

“You could easily see for the next several years that prices rise not to $1,000 an ounce, but prices rise to $5,000 an ounce or beyond as inflation psychology becomes more and more embedded and people become desperate to have a source of value,” said Christopher Wyke, London-based emerging market debt and commodities product manager at Schroder, which oversees about $10 billion of commodity assets.

Investors are turning to gold for protection as two-thirds of the world’s population cope with inflation rates that are climbing to more than 10 percent, Wyke said. Cash and inflation- linked bonds are poor substitutes as low interest rates, coupled with surging inflation, erode the real value of assets, he said.

Read moreGold May Rise to $5,000 on Inflation, Schroder Says

Wealthy Investors Shift Funds From Global Banks to Reduce Risks

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June 19 (Bloomberg) — High-net worth individuals, those coveted financial-services customers with at least $2 million to invest, are shifting assets from brokerages and large global banks to smaller, more conservative alternatives.

“For the first time in my career, I saw concern about the location of one’s assets,” said Robert Balentine, the head of Wilmington Trust Corp.‘s investment management group. “We’ve seen tangible evidence of very wealthy clients shifting assets out of brokerage firms in great numbers.”

Trust companies like Wilmington are benefiting from record subprime-infected losses at companies led by Zurich-based UBS AG, the world’s biggest money manager for the rich. UBS clients probably withdrew a net $39 billion during the past three months after the company reported more than $38 billion of writedowns and credit-market losses in the past year, London-based analysts at JPMorgan Chase & Co. estimate.

Clients may say “if UBS can’t manage its own capital, then what the hell are they going to do with mine?” said David Maude, a financial services consultant in Verona, Italy, who calls UBS the “Rolls Royce” of the industry. “It does tarnish their reputation, certainly.”

UBS contacted 2.5 million Swiss consumer and wealth- management customers last month after losing 11.5 billion francs ($10.9 billion) in the first quarter and seeing a net withdrawal of 12.8 billion francs in its asset and wealth-management units.

The company has responded with “proactive, ongoing communication” with clients, said Jim Pierce, co-head of UBS’s U.S. Wealth Management Advisory Group, in an e-mailed response to questions. UBS is “willing to have the difficult conversations,” Pierce said.

U.S. Market

Read moreWealthy Investors Shift Funds From Global Banks to Reduce Risks

Flawed St. John’s Wort Study on ADHD Failed to Use Active Form of Herbal Extract

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(NaturalNews) On the heels of shocking revelations that top psychiatric research Dr. Joseph Biederman secretly took $1.6 million from drug companies while conducting psychotropic drug experiments on children, it has been learned that Dr. Biederman is now one of the key collaborators behind the latest efforts to discredit St. John’s Wort. In a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association and widely reported in the mainstream media, Dr. Biederman and fellow cohorts “concluded” that the St. John’s Wort herb is useless in treating ADHD in children.

What’s astonishing about this study, as you’ll learn in this article, is that all the children used in the study were given inactive forms of the St. John’s Wort herb where the active ingredients had been oxidized and rendered useless! In other words, this clinical trial, which was widely reported in the mainstream media with headlines like “St. John’s Wort Found Useless!” didn’t test the herb’s active ingredients at all! It sort of makes you wonder about the agenda of the people running the study, doesn’t it?

Keep in mind that one of the study’s authors, Dr. Biederman, is not merely on the take from drug companies that sell competing pharmaceuticals, but that he also lied about how much money he was being paid by drug companies, hiding the truth about his income by underreporting $1.6 million he took from psychiatric drug companies. See my report on that here: http://www.naturalnews.com/023408.html

Dr. Biederman has a clear financial interest in promoting patented prescription drugs for brain chemistry disorders while discrediting competing natural alternatives such as St. John’s Wort. This blatant conflict of interest was not disclosed by JAMA, nor was it mentioned in the text of the study on ADHD and St. John’s Wort. It appears Dr. Biederman would prefer his financial ties to Big Pharma continue to remain secret, even while producing questionable studies that desperately attempt to show that herbs don’t work.

Testing Herbs to Treat Fictitious Diseases

Read moreFlawed St. John’s Wort Study on ADHD Failed to Use Active Form of Herbal Extract

Central bank body warns of Great Depression

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The Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the organisation that fosters cooperation between central banks, has warned that the credit crisis could lead world economies into a crash on a scale not seen since the 1930s.

In its latest quarterly report, the body points out that the Great Depression of the 1930s was not foreseen and that commentators on the financial turmoil, instigated by the US sub-prime mortgage crisis, may not have grasped the level of exposure that lies at its heart.

According to the BIS, complex credit instruments, a strong appetite for risk, rising levels of household debt and long-term imbalances in the world currency system, all form part of the loose monetarist policy that could result in another Great Depression.

Read moreCentral bank body warns of Great Depression

Russia blames U.S. for global financial crisis

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ST PETERSBURG, Russia (Reuters) – Russian President Dmitry Medvedev blamed “aggressive” United States policies on Saturday for the global financial crisis and said Moscow’s growing economic muscle could be part of the solution.

“Failure by the biggest financial firms in the world to adequately take risk into account, coupled with the aggressive financial policies of the biggest economy in the world, have led not only to corporate losses,” Medvedev told Russia’s main annual event for international investors in St Petersburg.

“Most people on the planet have become poorer.”

The Kremlin leader said investment by cash-rich Russian companies abroad, promotion of Moscow as a major financial centre and use of the ruble as a reserve currency were part of the answer.

These could help solve problems created by what he said was a gap between the United States’ leading global economic role and “its true capabilities.”

The Kremlin leader said economic nationalism had played a big part in triggering the current crisis, which he compared to the Great Depression of the 1930s.

“No matter how big the American market and no matter how strong the American financial system, they are incapable of substituting for global commodity and financial markets,” Medvedev told the St Petersburg International Economic Forum.

The Kremlin leader also attacked big bonuses paid out in the financial world, saying regulators needed to ensure that incentives promoted “rational behavior based on a balanced evaluation of risks and rewards.”

U.S. Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez, who spoke shortly after Medvedev, appeared to reject the criticism.

He said the United States had never based its policies on “economic egoism” and believed in free trade.

“Globalization is in the national interest,” he added.

Read moreRussia blames U.S. for global financial crisis

Bilderberg Seeks Bank Centralization Agenda

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“Jim Tucker from the American Free Press speaking on the Alex Jones show today stated that one of his Bilderberg sources revealed to him that the global elite are planning to push forward their cashless society grid agenda with the use of implantable microchips. The implantable microchips would be sold as a way for people to easily move through the militarized control grid that they’ve setup via the bogus terror war.”
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Fresh off of the 2008 Bilderberg Meeting, it looks as if New York Federal Reserve president Timothy Geithner is set to push a new agenda in the world of central banking that was likely decided upon at Bilderberg. Geithner yesterday, wrote an article in the Financial Times calling for a global regulatory banking framework.

In addition, Geithner called for the Federal Reserve to have an instrumental role in this new framework. Geithner cites all of the problems that were actually created by the central bankers in the first place as the rationale for having greater centralized power. It is interesting Geithner decides to write this piece right after the Bilderberg Meeting where some of the most powerful figures in the world of central banking attended.

Not only did Geithner attend, but the attendee list included Ben Bernanke the Federal Reserve Chairman, Henry Paulson the U.S. Treasury Secretary, Jean-Claude Trichet the president of the European Central Bank, Robert Zoellick the president of the World Bank and other high profile bankers.

With the who’s who of central banking attending the Bilderberg Meeting, it is highly unlikely that what Geithner is proposing in his Financial Times article was not discussed at the Bilderberg Meeting. It is no secret that the true objective of the Bilderberg Meeting is to steer the world into accepting a global government.

By establishing a new global regulatory banking framework, this will inch the planet ever closer to a one world currency operating in a cashless society where microchips are used to facilitate transactions. Make no mistake about it, this system will not be good, because it will be controlled by a bunch of criminal psychopaths like the one’s who attended the 2008 Bilderberg Meeting.

In his Financial Times article, Geithner wrote the following:

Read moreBilderberg Seeks Bank Centralization Agenda

Credit crisis expands, hitting all kinds of consumer loans

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WASHINGTON – The credit crisis triggered by bad home loans is spreading to other areas, forcing banks to tighten credit and probably extending the credit crisis that’s dragging down the economy well into next year, and perhaps beyond.

That means consumers are going to have an increasingly difficult time getting bank loans for car purchases, credit cards, home equity credit lines, student loans and even commercial real estate, experts say.

When financial analyst Meredith Whitney wrote in a report last October that the nation’s largest bank, Citigroup, lacked sufficient capital for the risks it had assumed, she was considered a heretic.

However, Whitney was proved correct: Citigroup pushed out its CEO, sought foreign investors and slashed its dividend. Her comments now carry added weight on Wall Street, and she has a new warning for ordinary Americans: The crisis in credit markets is far from over, and it increasingly will affect consumers.

“In fact, we believe that what lies ahead will be worse than what is behind us,” Whitney and colleagues at Oppenheimer & Co. wrote in a lengthy report last month about threats faced by big national banks, including Bank of America, Wachovia and others.

The warning is scary considering what’s already behind us in the credit crisis – the resignation or firing since last August of CEOs at almost every large commercial or investment bank; the Federal Reserve lowering its benchmark lending rate by 3.25 percentage points; a Fed-brokered deal to sell investment bank Bear Stearns; and weekly auctions of short-term loans from the Fed worth billions of dollars to keep credit markets functioning.

(Got Gold and Silver? – The Infinite Unknown)

Read moreCredit crisis expands, hitting all kinds of consumer loans

Traders predict house prices will fall by 50% in four years

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· Investments based on property ‘fall off a cliff’
· Job losses hit estate agents and mortgage firms

The slide in house prices will continue for at least three years and crush the value of a home by almost 50% in real terms, according to a key index of property price futures. Indications from futures trading on long term property prices shows that the average UK home will recover its current value only in 2017.

By the end of this year prices will be down by 10% and by a further 10.5% in 2009, according to the index. Prices will keep dropping through 2010 and cut values by 23.5% when they hit rock bottom in 2011. House prices will then begin a slow climb back to current market values over a period of about six years.

If an average retail price inflation rate of 4% is included in the calculation and in addition the 8% drop in prices over the last eight months already registered by the Halifax index, the fall in values over almost four years will reach 47.5% in real terms.

The Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman, Lord Oakeshott, said the figures revealed that property investors had little confidence in the market and were predicting steep and prolonged falls in prices.

“This government says this housing depression will be different from the early 1990s. Yes, that’s right. It will be worse.”

Read moreTraders predict house prices will fall by 50% in four years

Banks’ credit crisis solutions have echoes of 1929 Depression

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As banks look to shore up their balance sheets in the wake of the credit squeeze, Philip Aldrick asks whether it is all short-term trickery


Investors gather in New York’s financial district after the stock market crash of 1929, which heralded the onset of the Great Depression

‘We are in the midst of the worst financial crisis since the 1930s,” warns the eminent financier George Soros in his latest book, The New Paradigm for Financial Markets. It’s a rather extreme view, but the man who broke the Bank of England is not alone in his dark funk. At a recent event, one banker laced Soros’s sentiment with a little gallows humour, ruefully predicting “10 years of depression followed by a world war”.

Comparisons with the great crash of 1929 are inevitable and the parallels manifold. Then it was an over-inflated stock market that burst before wider economic malaise ushered in the Great Depression.

This time, in the words of Intermediate Capital managing director Tom Attwood, sub-prime was merely “a catalyst” for the inevitable pricking of the credit market bubble as “disciplines were bypassed in favour of loan book growth at almost any cost”. Again the talk is of recession, certainly in the US and possibly in the UK.

Perhaps the most intriguing parallel, though, is the crude attempt at self-preservation made by the investment trusts in 1929 and the banks now.

In the great crash, investment trusts with vast cross-holdings in each other tried to stem their collapse by buying up their own stock in what the economist JK Galbraith in his book, The Great Crash 1929, described as an act of “fiscal self-immolation”. At the time, “support of the stock of one’s own company seemed a bold, imaginative and effective course,” Galbraith wrote, but ultimately the trusts were just “swindling themselves”.

Modern economists have compared the trusts’ actions with what the banks are now doing. “They seem to be just papering over the cracks,” says Brendan Brown, chief economist at Mitsubishi UFJ Securities.

Read moreBanks’ credit crisis solutions have echoes of 1929 Depression

Weimar Inflation in America

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“Instead, take those steps necessary to protect yourself and your family to prepare for the dollar’s inflationary collapse. Buy gold. Buy silver. Avoid the US dollar.” – James Turk
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Probably almost everyone is familiar with the hyperinflationary episode that engulfed Germany after the First World War. That nation’s economy was crippled by monetary problems that resulted in dreadful personal hardships, even though up to that time Germany had achieved one of the highest living standards in the world.

The newly formed German government, named for the city where their constitution was drafted after the Kaiser’s abdication in 1918, kept pumping up the money supply. The process started relatively slowly, but quickly the pace of money creation accelerated.

The Weimar government was paying its bills on credit – just like Zimbabwe is now doing. The Weimar government was issuing currency in exchange for valuable goods and services that it was receiving, and the vendors of those goods and services accepted the newly issued currency in the expectation that they would be able to exchange it for goods and services of like value. However, they soon realized that they were deluding themselves. Prices were rising rapidly, with the consequence that a flight from the currency into commodities and other tangibles began.

There was no discipline on the creation of new currency, with the result that it was being issued to excess. Within a few short years, the German government eventually destroyed the Reichsmark, the currency it had been issuing, making the words Weimar Germany synonymous with hyperinflation, economic collapse, deprivation and personal hardship. All the wealth saved in Reichsmarks was wiped out.

For example, in his classic book, “Paper Money”, penned three decades ago under the pen name of Adam Smith, George J.W. Goodman recounts the story of Walter Levy, an internationally known German-born oil consultant in New York. Levy told him: “My father was a lawyer, and he had taken out an insurance policy in 1903. Every month he had made the payments faithfully. It was a 20-year policy, and when it came due, he cashed it in and bought a single loaf of bread.”

The following photo is from an insightful book by Bernd Widdig entitled “Culture and Inflation in Weimar Germany”. This photo shows one way in which people coped with rising prices.

As the inflation worsened, people sold whatever they could to survive. Widdig succinctly describes it in the caption to the above photo as follows: “The impoverished middle class has to sell its cherished possessions.”He should have correctly stated though that it was the “newly impoverished middle class”. They only became destitute after the inflation had destroyed their savings and ability to maintain their standard of living.

Sadly, the problems of Weimar Germany are now appearing in the US. To survive the impact of rising prices, Americans today – like Germans did eight decades ago – are selling cherished possessions, as explained in a recent story by Associated Press entitled “Americans unload prized belongings to make ends meet”. The full article is available at the following link: http://abcnews.go.com/Business/Economy/story?id=4750846&page=1

Read moreWeimar Inflation in America

How to Profit from the Coming Economic Collapse

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Peter Schiff is the author of the book: Crash Proof: How to Profit From the Coming Economic Collapse

Source: You Tube

(Preparedness is everything! Have a closer look at the World Situation and the Solution.
– The Infinite Unknown)

Warning: Using a mobile phone while pregnant can seriously damage your baby

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Study of 13,000 children exposes link between use of handsets and later behavioural problems


Scientists found that mothers who did use the handsets were 54 per cent more likely to have children with behavioural problems and that the likelihood increased with the amount of potential exposure to the radiation

Women who use mobile phones when pregnant are more likely to give birth to children with behavioural problems, according to authoritative research.

A giant study, which surveyed more than 13,000 children, found that using the handsets just two or three times a day was enough to raise the risk of their babies developing hyperactivity and difficulties with conduct, emotions and relationships by the time they reached school age. And it adds that the likelihood is even greater if the children themselves used the phones before the age of seven.

Related Video: Dangers of the wireless cell phone wi-fi and emf age – Dr. George Carlo

(Dr. Carlo was the responsible scientist for conducting the biggest study ($ 25 million) on cellphones ever. He later hissed all red flags possible. He got ridiculed although he was the favored/desired independent scientist to conduct the study by the industry and government. He has written a book about it:
“Cell Phones: Invisible Hazards in the Wireless Age: An Insider’s Alarming Discoveries About Cancer and Genetic Damage” – The Infinite Unknown)

The results of the study, the first of its kind, have taken the top scientists who conducted it by surprise. But they follow warnings against both pregnant women and children using mobiles by the official Russian radiation watchdog body, which believes that the peril they pose “is not much lower than the risk to children’s health from tobacco or alcohol”.

The research – at the universities of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and Aarhus, Denmark – is to be published in the July issue of the journal Epidemiology and will carry particular weight because one of its authors has been sceptical that mobile phones pose a risk to health.

UCLA’s Professor Leeka Kheifets – who serves on a key committee of the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection, the body that sets the guidelines for exposure to mobile phones – wrote three and a half years ago that the results of studies on people who used them “to date give no consistent evidence of a causal relationship between exposure to radiofrequency fields and any adverse health effect”.

The scientists questioned the mothers of 13,159 children born in Denmark in the late 1990s about their use of the phones in pregnancy, and their children’s use of them and behaviour up to the age of seven. As they gave birth before mobiles became universal, about half of the mothers had used them infrequently or not at all, enabling comparisons to be made.

They found that mothers who did use the handsets were 54 per cent more likely to have children with behavioural problems and that the likelihood increased with the amount of potential exposure to the radiation. And when the children also later used the phones they were, overall, 80 per cent more likely to suffer from difficulties with behaviour. They were 25 per cent more at risk from emotional problems, 34 per cent more likely to suffer from difficulties relating to their peers, 35 per cent more likely to be hyperactive, and 49 per cent more prone to problems with conduct.

The scientists say that the results were “unexpected”, and that they knew of no biological mechanisms that could cause them. But when they tried to explain them by accounting for other possible causes – such as smoking during pregnancy, family psychiatric history or socio-economic status – they found that, far from disappearing, the association with mobile phone use got even stronger.

They add that there might be other possible explanations that they did not examine – such as that mothers who used the phones frequently might pay less attention to their children – and stress that the results “should be interpreted with caution” and checked by further studies. But they conclude that “if they are real they would have major public health implications”.

Professor Sam Milham, of the blue-chip Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, and the University of Washington School of Public Health – one of the pioneers of research in the field – said last week that he had no doubt that the results were real. He pointed out that recent Canadian research on pregnant rats exposed to similar radiation had found structural changes in their offspring’s brains.

The Russian National Committee on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection says that use of the phones by both pregnant women and children should be “limited”. It concludes that children who talk on the handsets are likely to suffer from “disruption of memory, decline of attention, diminishing learning and cognitive abilities, increased irritability” in the short term, and that longer-term hazards include “depressive syndrome” and “degeneration of the nervous structures of the brain”.

By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor
Sunday, 18 May 2008

Source: The Independent

Buying Opportunity For Gold And Silver

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The international banking cartel during the past month has managed to push the price of gold down to the $850 – $880 level and silver down to the $16 – $17 level. The manipulation of the gold and silver market is incredibly obvious just by looking at daily charts of the gold and silver prices. Quite frequently you’ll see a nose dive in the price of both gold and silver without any sort of rationale behind the price swing. Also consider the fact that the price of oil is around $120 barrel which means that gold is incredibly undervalued relative to the oil price.

Even a 10 to 1 gold to oil ratio is low from a historical perspective and as we speak, gold is well under that ratio. Gold at the $850 – $880 level is a tremendous buying opportunity. The corporate controlled media is telling us that the commodity bull is over and the U.S. Dollar is stabilizing. Therefore it is prudent to do the opposite of what they are advocating. Anyone saying that the U.S. Dollar has stabilized is living in fantasy land. The Federal Reserve recently cut interest rates another 25 basis points and they continue talking about creating more money out of thin air to bailout banks that are on the brink of collapse. The U.S. Dollar is heading further down the toilet unless there is a dramatic reversal in monetary policy and that doesn’t look as if it will happen anytime soon.

(Buying Gold and Silver may save your life, when the economy crashes. But you can’t eat it.
Thats why you have to store lots of food and water as well. – The Infinite Unknown)

Read moreBuying Opportunity For Gold And Silver

The Great Depression of the 2010s

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Economics is not rocket science. Neither is power.

Depressions are monetary phenomena caused by central bank issuance of excessive credit. In 1913, the newly created US central bank, the Federal Reserve, began issuing credit-based money in the US. Within ten years, the central bank flow of credit ignited the 1920s US stock market bubble; and shortly thereafter, following the collapse of the bubble in 1929, the world entered its first Great Depression in 1933.

Investment banks are the undoing of central banking. While all banks, central, commercial and investment, view credit as the opportunity to exploit society’s growth and productivity, investment bank exploitation of growth and productivity exposes society to extreme risks—for investment banks use society’s savings to make their volatile and speculative bets.

The speculative risks undertaken by investment banks is done by leveraging the savings of society; and, when investment bank bets are sufficiently large enough and the bets go bad—as they inevitably do as the luck of investment bankers is due more to their proximity to credit than to their ability to foresee the future—it is society that will bear the brunt of the pain in the loss of its savings.

Inevitably, investment bankers cannot resist the temptations of excessive credit and, like the buyers of teaser-rate home mortgages, they will always overreach themselves—an overreaching that will have disastrous consequences for the society whose savings they bet.

The leveraged overreaching by investment banks in the 1920s caused the Great Depression of the 1930s and their more recent overreaching in this decade, the 2000s, is about to cause another Great Depression in the next, the 2010s.

Read moreThe Great Depression of the 2010s

Soldier suicides could trump war tolls: US health official

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Suicides and “psychological mortality” among US soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan could exceed battlefield deaths if their mental scars are left untreated, the head of the US Institute of Mental Health warned Monday.

Of the 1.6 million US soldiers who have been deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, 18-20 percent — or around 300,000 — show symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression or both, said Thomas Insel, head of the National Institute of Mental Health.

An estimated 70 percent of those at-risk soldiers do not seek help from the Department of Defense or the Veterans Administration, he told a news conference launching the American Psychiatric Association’s 161st annual meeting here.

If “one just does the math”, then allowing PTSD or depression to go untreated in such numbers could result in “suicides and psychological mortality trumping combat deaths” in Iraq and Afghanistan, Insel warned.

More than 4,000 US soldiers have died in Iraq since the US invasion of 2003, and more than 400 in Afghanistan since the US led attacks there in 2001, of which some 290 were killed in action and the rest in on-combat deaths.

“It’s predicted that most soldiers — 70 percent — will not seek treatment through the DoD or VA,” Insel said at the meeting, at which the psychological impact of war is expected to top the agenda over the next four days.

Left untreated, PTSD and depression can lead to substance abuse, alcoholism or other life-threatening behaviors.

“It’s a gathering storm for the civilian and public health care sectors,” Insel said.

Read moreSoldier suicides could trump war tolls: US health official

Federal Reserve may Want Inflation

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We are now importing inflation. This does not only apply to the cost of commodities, such as oil, but also to consumer goods imported from Asia. This is a newer trend as, in our analysis, Asia had been exporting deflation until the summer of 2006; since then, we have seen increased pricing power by Asian exporters.

Inflation is not just a U.S. phenomenon; as Asian economies are far more dependent on agricultural and industrial commodities, rising inflation may become a serious concern in the region. The stronger and more prudent Asian central banks may realize that allowing their currencies to float higher versus the U.S. dollar may be the most effective way to combat inflationary pressures.

Read moreFederal Reserve may Want Inflation

Senator: VA lying about number of veteran suicides

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WASHINGTON — The Veterans Administration has lied about the number of veterans who’ve attempted suicide, a senator charged Wednesday, citing internal e-mails that put the number at 12,000 a year when the department was publicly saying it was fewer than 800.

“The suicide rate is a red-alarm bell to all of us,” said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash. Murray also said that the VA’s mental health programs are being overwhelmed by Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans, even as the department tries to downplay the situation.

“We are not your enemy, we are your support team, and unless we get accurate information we can’t be there to do our jobs,” Murray told Deputy Secretary of Veterans Affairs Gordon Mansfield during the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee hearing.

Read moreSenator: VA lying about number of veteran suicides

Hyperinflationary Depression

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Until now, I have given equal credence to two possible scenarios:

  1. We could have several years of inflation as we do now, and the powers-that-be would have a sudden rush of brains to the head, like Paul Volcker and Ronald Reagan did in 1980, and stop the “printing press,” ending inflation and the gold and silver bull market, for at least a few years; or
  2. It is too late to stop it. The political forces and the Unfunded Liabilities would prevent the powers-that-be from ending the money-printing process, and in fact, would grossly accelerate it. This would result in a hyper inflation (400 percent inflation or more), and the eventual total destruction of the dollar. Suddenly America would find its money totally useless. Store shelves would be empty, gas would go through the stratosphere, and Americans would suffer through the greatest threat since the Great Depression of the ’30s.

So what caused me to settle on number two?

I received John Williams’ recent newsletter “Shadow Government Statistics,” www.shadowstats.com in which he describes his case for a hyper-inflationary depression. It was most persuasive. It certainly persuaded me, and is consistent with what I’ve said for years.

I spent the ’70s fending off the media label of “Prophet of Doom,” arguing that I expected much less than doom. It turned out to be so.

With my new book in circulation, I’ll face the same accusations, and this time they are right. The financial world we know and love is facing genuine doom. You could lose the value of all your assets in the stock market. You could find yourself unable to buy essential commodities, when you want them, and gold and silver will be valued, not in the tens or hundreds of dollars per ounce, but in the thousands!

John Williams’ Shadow Government Statistics newsletter is most unusual. John is a consulting economist with all of the academic credentials. Most of his clients are bank officers and high-ranking corporate officers. He has rearranged the government data according to historical analysis.

For example, the government says inflation is under four percent by the simple expedient of eliminating energy and food from their calculations. John says inflation is over 11 percent, including energy and food.

His academic credentials are way ahead of mine, but at least I know enough to understand his work. It’s my job to try to reduce such things to terms my subscribers can grasp.

Here are some brief paragraphs from this 25-page report.

“With the creation of massive amounts of new fiat (not backed by gold) dollars will come the eventual complete collapse of the value of the U.S. dollar and related dollar-denominated paper assets.”

Read moreHyperinflationary Depression

One in five US servicemen has brain injury

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The psychological toll of America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has touched one in five servicemen and its consequences will be long-lasting, a study suggested yesterday.

The Rand Corporation, a leading research operation, said that 320,000 soldiers suffered brain injuries on the battlefield, while more than 300,000 suffered mental disorders on returning home.

The report said that US veterans are incurring “invisible wounds” of war, most notably traumatic brain injury. A survey of 1,926 soldiers represented a statistically significant sample of the 1.6 million troops sent to Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001, Rand said.

Read moreOne in five US servicemen has brain injury

Vaccines and Medical Experiments on Children, Minorities, Woman and Inmates (1845 – 2007)

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Think U.S. health authorities have never conducted outrageous medical experiments on children, women, minorities, homosexuals and inmates? Think again: This timeline, originally put together by Dani Veracity (a NaturalNews reporter), has been edited and updated with recent vaccination experimentation programs in Maryland and New Jersey. Here’s what’s really happening in the United States when it comes to exploiting the public for medical experimentation:

(1845 – 1849) J. Marion Sims, later hailed as the “father of gynecology,” performs medical experiments on enslaved African women without anesthesia. These women would usually die of infection soon after surgery. Based on his belief that the movement of newborns’ skull bones during protracted births causes trismus, he also uses a shoemaker’s awl, a pointed tool shoemakers use to make holes in leather, to practice moving the skull bones of babies born to enslaved mothers (Brinker).

(1895)

New York pediatrician Henry Heiman infects a 4-year-old boy whom he calls “an idiot with chronic epilepsy” with gonorrhea as part of a medical experiment (“Human Experimentation: Before the Nazi Era and After”).

(1896)

Dr. Arthur Wentworth turns 29 children at Boston’s Children’s Hospital into human guinea pigs when he performs spinal taps on them, just to test whether the procedure is harmful (Sharav).

(1906)

Harvard professor Dr. Richard Strong infects prisoners in the Philippines with cholera to study the disease; 13 of them die. He compensates survivors with cigars and cigarettes. During the Nuremberg Trials, Nazi doctors cite this study to justify their own medical experiments (Greger, Sharav).

(1911)

Dr. Hideyo Noguchi of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research publishes data on injecting an inactive syphilis preparation into the skin of 146 hospital patients and normal children in an attempt to develop a skin test for syphilis. Later, in 1913, several of these children’s parents sue Dr. Noguchi for allegedly infecting their children with syphilis (“Reviews and Notes: History of Medicine: Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in America before the Second World War”).

(1913)

Medical experimenters “test” 15 children at the children’s home St. Vincent’s House in Philadelphia with tuberculin, resulting in permanent blindness in some of the children. Though the Pennsylvania House of Representatives records the incident, the researchers are not punished for the experiments (“Human Experimentation: Before the Nazi Era and After”).

(1915)

Dr. Joseph Goldberger, under order of the U.S. Public Health Office, produces Pellagra, a debilitating disease that affects the central nervous system, in 12 Mississippi inmates to try to find a cure for the disease. One test subject later says that he had been through “a thousand hells.” In 1935, after millions die from the disease, the director of the U.S Public Health Office would finally admit that officials had known that it was caused by a niacin deficiency for some time, but did nothing about it because it mostly affected poor African-Americans. During the Nuremberg Trials, Nazi doctors used this study to try to justify their medical experiments on concentration camp inmates (Greger; Cockburn and St. Clair, eds.).

Read moreVaccines and Medical Experiments on Children, Minorities, Woman and Inmates (1845 – 2007)

Jim Rogers: China’s Economic Advance is All But Unstoppable

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“The only thing that worries me permanently about the China story is water.

I’ve been around the world twice. I’ve seen many cities, societies, [and] nations that disappeared because the water disappeared. China has a huge water problem. In Northern China, they’re running out of water. They know this and they’re working on it, big time. But if they don’t solve it, or if they don’t solve it in time, then China – as you put it – has failed.

By the way, Northern India has the same problem, only worse. Many places have it now. Water is becoming a huge problem worldwide. The same is true in the Southwestern United States. You know, you may have Arizona going to war with California. Some sections of Nevada, Colorado …they’re desperate there.

So it’s not just China – but water’s the main thing that worries me about China.”

(As I said: In ten years the glaciers in the Himalaya region will be gone and 50% of the worlds population will have not enough or no water at all. The governments know this and they won’t sit & wait and do nothing about it. There will be World Water Wars.
And if China where to lose a million soldiers in a war so what. To them their soldiers have the same worth than to the US their soldiers in Iraq: They are considered as canon fodder.
If you think that this is wrong than I recommend the movie “NO End In Sight” (2007) as a first eye-opener.
Please read the whole article. – The Infinite Unknown)

Read moreJim Rogers: China’s Economic Advance is All But Unstoppable

USA 2008: The Great Depression

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Food stamps are the symbol of poverty in the US. In the era of the credit crunch, a record 28 million Americans are now relying on them to survive – a sure sign the world’s richest country faces economic crisis

We knew things were bad on Wall Street, but on Main Street it may be worse. Startling official statistics show that as a new economic recession stalks the United States, a record number of Americans will shortly be depending on food stamps just to feed themselves and their families.

Dismal projections by the Congressional Budget Office in Washington suggest that in the fiscal year starting in October, 28 million people in the US will be using government food stamps to buy essential groceries, the highest level since the food assistance programme was introduced in the 1960s.


Disadvantaged Americans queue for aid in New York

Read moreUSA 2008: The Great Depression

Federal Reserve staff move into offices of investment banks to monitor activities

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The US Federal Reserve has sent staff into some of Wall Street’s biggest firms and its New York branch is gathering evidence on key traders’ activities as America’s central bank raises its scrutiny of risk to an unprecedented level.

Fed staff have set up shop in Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and Bear Stearns to monitor their financial condition just days after Henry Paulson, the US Treasury Secretary, proposed that the Fed become the financial industry’s “risk czar”.

This is the first time in more than a decade that the Fed has put staff in securities firms and is a response, in part, to its decision to extend to investment banks the “discount window” of cheap loans traditionally offered only to the commercial banks. The Fed argues that if it is to act as lender of last resort to the securities firms, it should keep a closer eye on their activities.

The move comes as the central bank’s New York branch separately compiles a list of names and numbers of key traders in specific, esoteric securities such as auction rate preferred securities. These obscure instruments can be traded only at auctions and demand for them has virtually evaporated in recent weeks.

A senior US mutual fund executive, whom the Fed has approached, said: “They are looking in every corner to understand every esoteric financial product – who its traders are, who holds the most, whether its market is liquid and how great the losses could be. They are approaching people like me to find the key players in particular securities and then contacting them to find out the details. I have never heard of that being done before.”

Read moreFederal Reserve staff move into offices of investment banks to monitor activities