Playing with numbers

Just watched House of Numbers, about the HIV / Aids epidemic. (see also: www.houseofnumbers.com) It's focussed on one thing: The statistics.

In the medical world we currently have two major deceases that receive billions in funding without creating results: Cancer and HIV/Aids.
For cancer the diagnose is simple. If you have tissue that can live without oxygen it's a cancer. There is no cure, people say. Other scientist claim to have found a cure but it's not profitable due to being 'alternative' and rejected by health organisations or because it can't be patented. (there was a follow up article on May 16, 2011. following the hypothesis of Otto Warburg) And if there is a cure, for example: smart bombs, the results are buried away or not made common knowledge.

For aids the results are not conclusive. Turns out that, not only, interpretation of the tests vary, but also that all tests have a clause stating: Further testing is needed.
Meaning that there is actually no conclusive test available and you can be tested positive in one country and negative in another. Also: you could be tested positive one day and negative the next.

Cooking up numbers is done regularly. As they say: 90% of all statistics are made up. Most of it is political. First, lets look at a bit of history. Polio vaccination in the US was instituted by Franklin D. Roosevelt. He wanted to eradicate the disease that caused him to be bound to a wheelchair.
From Fear of the invisible:

I found firm evidence that the regulatory authorities had employed from 1960 another weapon from their armoury to bring down the numbers of reported polio cases. They promulgated new regulations that rewrote the rules for polio diagnosis, effectively wiping polio nearly out of existence by simply changing the rules for polio diagnosis!
In 1956, the health authorities instructed doctors that they were in future only to diagnose polio if a patient has paralytic symptoms for 60 days or more. As polio was diagnosed previously if there were just 24 hours of paralytic symptoms, and as the disease in milder cases frequently lasted less than 60 days, this automatically meant vastly fewer cases of polio would be reported.
Furthermore, it was now decreed that all cases of polio occurring within 30 days of vaccination were to be recorded, not as possibly caused by the vaccine, but as ‘pre-existing'. This regulatory change also ensured that far fewer cases of vaccine failure would be recorded.

In case of the polio disease it was looking bad in politics that a vaccine actually increased the number of polio patients, so cooking up the numbers made it all better again. Vaccines are basically introducing the body with a 'harmless' virus, bypassing the natural defence systems of nose, skin, thyroid glands, etc by injecting the virus straight in the bloodstream. This will make the person sick and thus kickstart the anti-bodies to fight the virus that would normally be stopped by the body's defence system by creating white blood cells to fight of a possible infection before it actually starts.

In cancer there is evidence as well of cooking up numbers. Maybe incidental, but it does change the statistics and thus could be described as 'cooking up the numbers'.
For instance. Until the 1980ties in many countries it was mandatory to do an autopsy when somebody died. This is a very easy way to precisely determine the cause of death.  Often, cancer cells where found, even if those cells where not the cause of death, so cancer numbers where high. When this obligatory autopsy was stopped suddenly the number of people with cancer dropped as well. Researched of woman between their 40's-50's that died in car accidents in America showed that 40% of them developed microscopic cells of breast cancer.
(no direct resource found, quote by William Li)
If you watch the house of numbers, it becomes evident that not only HIV tests are not conclusive but also that pre-existing diseases or symptoms are suddenly labelled HIV/AIDS, inflating the numbers and thus inflating the infections. It seems very clear that if you politicise an issue, statistics are being adjusted/manipulated.

I suggest making up your own mind and doing your own researches. As always. Never take any body's word as absolute truth, as nobody has it. Even scientific truth is made through consensus or "general truth and general laws" and thus is by definition not the absolute truth.

So here's my hypothesis.
First off, it is understood by the general public that having unprotected sex will cause aids and you only need to do it once. True or false? Hmmm, kinda. Lets look at Nancy Padian's research, one that's quoted most often by 'deniers' and debunked the most by 'truthers'.

The current likelihood of male to female infection after a single exposure to HIV is 0.01-0.32%, and the current likelihood of female to male infection after a single exposure is 0.01-0.1%.

Group 1. Aidstruth.org states:

If safe sex practices are followed, and if there are no complicating factors such as those mentioned above, the risk of HIV transmission can be as low as our studies suggests. But many people misunderstand probability: they think that if the chance of misfortune is one in six, that they can take five chances without the likelihood of injury.

Group 2. Reducetheburden.org states

But what should strike the uninformed viewer to the drama as odd, is that her study – the longest and most rigorous of its kind on record – is absolutely and totally censored on the Wikipedia pages devoted to both “HIV” and “AIDS.” Even her own page does not mention the results of her longest study.

 Her study actually shows that condom use and abstention grew from about 30% to about 90% among the subjects. So is it true or false? Nancy Padian suggests the following: Read my study as it is.
So I'll read it as it is and conclude:
We looked at 175 couples where one partner has HIV, did 3384 tests among those couples over ten years where 30% of the couples had protected sex at the start and after 10 years 90% of them. In a maximum of 0.1% of the cases the uninfected partner contracted the HIV/AIDS virus.

So is it true to get infected if we have unprotected sex with an infected person after one time? Sure, the chance is there so it is true.
So what's the reason to bury this particular study as well as the 'smart bomb' study for cancer?
Well, first of, the aidstruth.org group are a group of scientists from the AIDS research field that "contribute to the website in their spare time, and decisions on content are made by the team members in the interest of global public health." with the purpose "to debunk AIDS denialist arguments and prevent further harm being done by AIDS denialists to public health."
So the site is biased from the start, focussing only on saying that the large numbers and the cause of HIV/AIDS is real because it's run by a group of people in the know that want to protect their work for what they get paid for. Same as any corporation that protect the sale of their products through marketing and that tend to downplay any consumer reports.

Secondly it's the "follow the money" theory. I quickly looked at how much is spend on cancer worldwide, but absolute world-wide figures are a bit buried, so to take the US alone: it's an average of 4.9 billion a year between 2005 and 2010 alone. And that's probably not taking in account donations and sorts. So in over 90 years of research (taking the research of Francis Peyton Rous as starting point) the amount of money pumped in is astonishing. AIDS is only discovered and named for the last 30 years. But received billions of money as well.
So it's safe to say that economically it's better to not come up with a solution than do come up with one. It's basically up to the moral obligation of the scientists and pharmaceutical industry to come up with an answer. And if that moral obligation is missing it's in their own interest of survival to bury, downplay or ignore any studies that show a cure.
On the other hand, it's in the interest of the people to not pursue any false claims.

Final point is the timing. And yes, this might be far fetched, so ignore this if you will.
On March 1980 the Georgia Guidestones where erected. Claiming that mankind needs to "Maintain humanity under 500 million in perpetual balance with nature." (that means that today over 6,5 billion people need to disappear)
Soon after, at the end of 1980 AIDS was discovered and, although first claimed to be a homosexual disease, it was quickly known that both sexes could get it by having unprotected sex. As "sex before marriage" was no longer a moral sin, it makes sense to scare the public in order to prevent an explosive growth in population.
Same with cancer, discovery, research and development of different cancers (this link is highly recommended) followed the, then popular, eugenics theories and was founded (and spread) by a known eugenic.
In both cases I can't confirm a correlation, just see coincidence and a pattern: Influential people with money, in the case of Cancer: Rockefeller and in the case of the Georgia Guidestones: Ted Turner, drive towards a cleansing or elimination of large parts of the population and research is being set up. Costing billions, with no end in sight.

Thanks to the internet alternatives do surface but can lack funding and proper research. There are many examples where scientists are portraited as quackery and their research being burned down, stolen, kept under wraps or otherwise disappeared from view. Some of these are indeed quackery, false claims, etc. And one should look closely into the methods and parties involved to make your own decision. To give a few of these examples in different fields: Tesla,(wireless cheap energy; much of his notes and research disappeared)  Dr Royal Rife (stolen documents, vandalising of his lab, etc), Paul Pantone (declared insane and institutionalised because he didn't trust his own layers any more), Dr. Reich (smear campaign) and Stan Meyer (his research disappeared right after his unexpected death). Especially in the fields of Tesla's research and the research of dr. Royal Rife, mankind could be years ahead and live in a completely different world today.
No doubt cancer is a real disease. With aids, looking at the way the statistics are made up and the tests involved I would say that it's being exaggerated but probably real. Just not as big as it's claimed to be and is rather a collection of different illnesses named the same. As the opposite was done with polio where it got differentiated into different illnesses and thus eradicated.
If there is a double agenda, involving economics or even a triple agenda involving eugenics, I don't know. Maybe it's just cases of cause and an opportunity, but undoubtedly big money is involved in prolonging or even growing the problem rather than solving it completely. Maybe we should start the Japanese doctors way: You pay your doctor when you stay healthy for a year. And you don't pay when you get sick. This way it's in the doctors interest to cure you, rather than keep you sick.

What the ^%&$ is going on?

Wikileaks Cable February 2008 "Extremists in Eastern Libya" states that the, now supported, rebels have nothing to loose and the area is a breeding ground for martyrs around the world. It also states that Ghaddafi used to try and keep that area poor, so they wouldn't revolt. Mind you, this region was and is loving their old king very much. The cable ends that the son of Ghaddafi promised to create jobs in the region.
According to this Pravda article, in 2009 Ghaddafi proposed to nationalise the oil companies, influence oil prices and share the profits with the people of Libya. The article also states the cable mentioned in the first link. They further mention the Sinjar documents that establish a fact that a disproportionate part of al-Qaida's network come from Libya. Disproportionate in relation to national populations, not in absolute numbers!
Now, there is the fact that at least one(!) rebel leader fought in Afghanistan against the US.
And these are the same rebels that formed an alternative government that is recognised by part of the world? Ah, it's not that bad... So far France, the EU with exception of Bulgaria and Qatar recognises this rebel government as the ONLY legit government in Libya.
So this "recognised" new government is already making big progress during this civil war. They already established a new central bank. And a new national oil company, and made a deal with Qatar to sell their oil. Qatar being one of the few Arab nations that are left in the coalition! Some others stepped out when air-to-ground strikes began.

Now, don't get me wrong. Ghaddafi has done a lot of bad things, but since 2001 he's on a PR drive to set the record straight. He was more than willing as he has a hot bed of potential Al Qaida fighters in his country. Some that he didn't like, so all international help would be welcome. US awarded his efforts by lifting a decades long weapon embargo back in 2003. EU followed in 2004.

In 2005 the world factbook published figures that Libya had 7.4% of their population living under the poverty line. In March 2011 this figure is corrected to 1/3th of the population. Mind you, that 7.4% was an estimate, but stating "1/3th of the population" is an even worse estimate. (See the history between the February 2011 and the March 2011 entry on wikipedia. Both sources are from the world factbook.
In six years time the poverty rate has more than quadrupled, despite efforts in 2008 to create jobs in the poorest region of Libya (wikicable), despite a call to the government from Ghaddafi in 2009 to nationalise the oilcompanies in Libya (Pravda article) and despite the abolishment of taxes on home grown and imported foods in the wake of the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings.   

I just find it hard to get the facts straight. Either the 7.4% was completely wrong, and other studies do not really support that, or the 1/3 part is completely wrong, just to enhance that Ghaddafi is so rich and his people are starving and that humanitarian aid is needed.
It's not the first time that facts are being distorted to get some UN resolution on the table.

Even though UN resolution 1973 is not fully compliant with the UN charter, especially part 2.4 it did found some grounds on other parts of the charter, buried deeper away (chapter 7). Even though article 2 establish the PRINCIPLES of the whole UN charter.

Now, I think it's safe to say that if the UN, or better: the coalition, is supporting rebels that are, likely to be, al-qaida influenced that it's rather strange that in the neighbouring country part of the coalition is supporting the opposite part. Especially now that that same state is having a civil war on it's own.

War is never good, and it seems hard to live with eachother in harmony. Especially when greed is a very big factor in play. I hope the world would change for the better, but I fear that as long as lies, greed and self interest play the high notes in this world, there will be no solution. These wars, point out hypocrite parties involved that would like nothing more to see one country destroyed, in order to get what they want. While at the same time doing the opposite in another country.
It's just striking that on the day the coalition came together in London to discuss Libya, that in Libya the rebels announce a new central bank. On top of that, they establish a new national oil company. All on the same day. There seem to be a lot of higher forces at stake, and although it's clear that Ghaddafi is getting less popular by the day in his own country and there are many educated people residing in Libya, this seems to be more orchestrated from outside Libya than from within. Only time would have to tell. It already told a tale that is very old in that same continent. And right now, it seems that this tale is not very different.

Did we just started world war III?

The United Nations was founded to establish world peace, use diplomacy and never have a repeat of world war II.
Now this very institute overruled their own chapter, article 2.4 stating:

All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.

And not only was a No-Fly zone imposed to a member state, there are also air to ground missles.  Those missles have nothing, nothing to do with a no-fly zone. Nato needs to pull out, the coalition needs to pull out and we should bring over any leader of a member state of the UN that supports this illigal war to The Hague for a trail. This is an illegal war. And the world is being dragged in.
There was no diplomacy and it seems that grabbing weapons was the only available option. Didn't Ghaddafi tried to win over the world with a charm offensive in recent years? Come on nations, we can do better than this. Yes, it's terrible to what is happening to the people of Libya, but that doesn't give any other nation the right to start a war against another UN member state.

Internet marketing

courtesy of http://www.jamesjordan.tv/tag/internet-network-marketing/ 

(as his copyright was only for 2009)

Pffff, sometimes internet is just not easy.
I needed to make a copy of a video for somebody. So I grab an empty DVD pop it in, start Nero and, wait, 4.7 gig space for a 730 mb video? That's a bit overkill isn't it? Especially for a lightscribe DVD...
Up to the next cd I had. Damn. 700mb space...

So now I have two options:
Simple: put it on a USB drive and bring it over.
Hard: Add more videos and make a proper DVD with a menu and stuff.

Why do I always go for the hard way??
In search of a free DVD movie maker that works I went with the mainstream and choose Sothink Movie DVD Maker. It's free, better than Windows DVD maker, and the only catch is: "Has a prompt text on interface; Leave information on burnt DVD chapter(s) indicating that is created by the free version." Does that mean a little watermark logo on the video? Screenshots? Nothing... So on to the internets for a search. After 10 google pages, mine shows 20 results per page, and about 15 tabs further on the terms "Sothink free movie DVD maker", "Sothink free movie DVD maker review", "sothink free movie DVD maker forum", "free DVD maker text on video", etc. I came to this conclusion:

• Free software is big business, because the amount of websites with free software offering and some copy-paste of the makers website is virtually endless, with dozens upon dozens of links to 'downloads for free software'.
• The program does what it says on the tin.

The only way to test this for sure is to burn it and check. Luckily the program saves to the harddrive if no writeable CD-rom is available! So in the hour I had to wait for the test run I had time to search for a "internet fail" picture.
I finally stumbled on the above picture and that shows exactly why the internet is not about giving information any more, but just leading people to nowhere. It's also surprising how many "marketing gurus" you'll find that sell stuff on the keywords "internet fail". But the only conclusion I have is... ...how to put it nicely. Ah well, let's use Bill Hicks' words: "If you are in advertising or marketing, go kill yourself. Seriously."

Personally I'm against suicide. It's the last thing I would ever want to do, but internet marketing is just getting sicker and sicker, leading to 100s of pages just to create links and links and links. Maybe I'm just old-school and wish to cut out the middle man.
Problem is that, due to this whole thing and my own business, I'm being forced to do the exact same thing. Drive traffic. It seems that it's all about traffic, traffic, traffic. Creating links to make google believe you are popular, creating clutter. "You have to have a clear vision" this so-called "internet millionaire" says. Posing next to a Ferrari owned by millermotorcars.com showing his ultimate vision. I think the best thing to become an internet millionaire is this. Just saying you have a vision and calling yourself millionaire just isn't cutting it. Especially if you are going arseways in creating traffic as the above picture taken from his website shows.

So, what do I think of the DVD movie maker? I don't know. While it's doing it's thing on the videos I discovered it converts all the AVI's to MPG's before creating the DVD. One AVI increased in size, the others decreased. The SRT-subtitle files where embedded automatically, and no sign of "Free" anywhere as a watermark on the videos, but the quality is not what I was looking for due to compression to the mpeg2-format. This was the only available option and it doesn't show on the website that the "Pro" version does have the capability to convert or better yet, no conversion at all.
It only shows a screen for a couple of seconds at the beginning of the movie, claiming it's made by the free version. Which is good. But the conversion from AVI to MPG before making the DVD is a big downside. Just copying the original AVI-versions was almost 4 gig. Using the DVD maker turned it into 4.17gig. I'll skip the whole DVD making process and keep the original files. My friend can only play DVD's on the computer any ways, so it doesn't really matter.
Time wasted, lesson learned: sometimes you just want something, sometimes you have this bright vision and sometimes you're just have to ask for it, but usually, in the end, it just doesn't work that way!

Cablegate

What is the significance of Wikileaks Cablegate?
First of all, the cables are marked 'secret' or 'non-foreigners' and where/are accessible by about 3 million US government employees. And all of them would have been released to the public in less than 20 years from now.
The cat and mouse game on keeping wikileaks.org running are in full swing. Amazon dropped hosting a single HTML page that explains how to get to the cables and other files, due to pressure from the US government. The DNS server dropped their entries from wikileaks.org to, for instance, http://88.80.13.160 (old 2008 IP address, server not loading)
This is stiffening access, but currently there is a swiss server, a Dutch, German and Finnish  domain name up and running. There are also dozens of mirror sites, like indymedia.org and The NYTimes keeps us updated with The Lede's blog. Besides that, NYTimes, The Gardian and other newspapers already have the full cables and that's where the juicy news came from in the first place.
The public had to do with information about Iran on the first and second day. Now it seems it will publicise from different embassies every day.
It worried me that it started off with cables about arms deals with Iran and other cables concerning mostly Iran. Was wikileaks a tool to ramp up the public for yet another war?
Still not sure about that yet. I stay with the old saying that if you make something illegal people will try harder to get it. So in the events around wikileaks it seems we are focussing more and more on it and will try harder to get the information.

What is more worrying is the man hunt after Assange and the cyberhunt to shut down the servers, that are based worldwide.
When advisers and would be president candidates start calling (and later apologizing) to assasinate Assange on this relatively unimportant data, we are made to fear our governments more and more.

What worries me the most is that this is accelerating the changes that our world governments want about the internet. Paygates, greater control of what is available on the internet and more. China is a prime example on how it deals with the internet and could end up in a template for the whole internet.
The internet is basically the 8th continent of the world, a place where you do not need a visa and can travel to instantly. Having companies restricting it, or worse: governments that limit it, will take this continent out of the hands of the people and into another tool for mass media, controlling what we should be informed of, and what we are allowed to see.
Already the big media companies are controlling what we see and what we are being informed. They are owned by only a few companies. If you see that Comcast, the US biggest internet provider, wants a piece of NBC that is owned by General Electric, you know what direction this is going. Comcast is not interested in Net Neutrality and thinks that issue should be scrapped from the senates agenda, leaving it to the corporations.  We all know what that did to banking.
This month the FCC asked to get Obama's Net Neutrality promise for a vote, just before christmas. Same as what happened in 1913, just before christmas.... Less congressmen, better chance of getting the vote on. And the plans don't look like how Obama envisioned it.

Let's put two and two together...

Interesting development in the world.
Ireland has his bailout against the will of the people. At 6.75 percent interest.
Let's see what a critic has to say about that:


what he says about China and other countries that want to stop using the dollar as the world currency and most of all, don't want to keep supporting the failed US consuming economy, will pour down through the rest of the world.
Now that the US agreed to back out of Afghanistan, they are preparing a new 'intervention' in Asia. China will have to respond to the entering of a aircraft carrier in the Yellow sea.

But the US could, diplomatically, also mention to China that if they don't back up the US currency they will turn up the heat on North Korea, with the result that China will have to take in refugees. Something they are not willing to do. Because it will mean a collapse of North Korea.
Having the vultures of the IMF getting a grip on Ireland and having them slowly destroy the Euro, as Max Keiser suggests, will have an interesting effect on the world currencies.
I don't think the US wants to create a new Korean war. But having announced to wind down the Afghan mission and now showing their muscles in Korea is a nice way of keeping the dollars floating into the coffers of the defence industry.
Something that we all know is a bottomless pit that burdens the world economy. The only way to keep the US afloat is by printing more dollars, making the currency worth less and less or by increasing the inflation. Conspiracy theorists will see all of this as a marking to a new world currency and the new world order.
This is an older report from 2008 about the beginning of the crisis where a couple of points are made:

(1) I am doubtful of the Fed's ability to alter interest rate spreads through the kinds of compositional changes in its balance sheet implemented over the last two years. Whatever your prior ideas were about this, surely it's time to revise those in light of incoming data-- if the first trillion dollars didn't do the job, how much do you think it would take to accomplish the task?
(2) I think the Fed's goal should be a 3% inflation rate. Paying interest on reserves and encouraging banks to hoard them is inconsistent with that objective, as would be a new trillion dollars in money creation.

As we can see point one was taken and ended up in an influx in dollars on the market. Devaluing the dollar rapidity:

The full article behind this graph is interesting as well.

So what we have is an interesting mix that could not only bring the end to the Euro but also the dollar, that in it current form, is becoming increasingly unstable.
China will be the only country that could make a change and in that light the Korean conflict brings an interesting extra dimension.
Of course we can also follow Cantona's proposal on the 7th of December:



This article keeps bugging me, as I can't find any sources that back that story up. And if there are, it's hidden in heavy economic or lawyer lingo I can't seem to fully grasp.
And when pseudo economic analysts start stirring things up, we could be in for a roller-coaster ride. Especially if we follow that seigniorage link and Cantona mentioned above.

Maybe I'm the only one that likes those rides, because the alternative: walking slowly towards the end of a cliff sounds less interesting.
In the end we will always keep two things: Labour and resources. And as long as there are people on this planet those things will not disappear. With or without economics, with or without money, those things will keep existing. Maybe it's time for a revolution like a resource based economy and stepping away from greed and capitalism.
Let me finish of with a few words from my hero Bill Hicks:

Here's what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money we spend on weapons and defenses each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would pay for many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace.

Hold on! What's going on here?

The banking crisis is getting better and better.
Let's put things on a timeline here.
- Banks are lowering interest on loans and lowering the requirements for people to loan money.
- People borrow more and more money without being able to pay back.
- Banks sell those bad loans of, against higher speculation prices until someone figures out what they really are.
- Banks go bust.
- Governments bail out the banks.
- Now the EU says all countries that are over the 3% GDP eurozone limit will need to borrow from the banks. If not, austerity measures need to be taken. And this is where the protests begin...
Only because the national governments are not allowed to raise taxes because that would bring the EU's competition level in danger on the world markets.

Now hold on a second. Governments choose to bail out the banks, using taxpayers money. Banks are happy again and as a result taxpayers are now taken hostage by the EU for the bailout in the first place. Talking about being bent over and taken it in the arse twice!

So in response the EU Commission President said the following:

"Governments are not always right. If governments were always right we would not have the situation that we have today."  

"Decisions taken by the most democratic institutions in the world are very often, or can be, wrong."

(source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/spain/8032851/Europe-on-strike-over-austerity-measures.html)

So that's why we needed a stronger EU with the Lisbon Treaty? EU has more to say undemocratically than the democratically chosen leaders of national parliaments.

I found this article that digs a little deeper into the source of this all.
Basically what the article says is that the IMF is planning all this. The problem is that the countries most steeped in public debt also have the largest voting power within the IMF:

(source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_public_debt)

Now lets look at what the US calls the Axis of Evil. Officially it's Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Further more there is: Cuba, Libya and Syria. Numerous sources do mention Russia (after paying a large amount of foreign debt back in 2005) and Venezuela as part of the Axis of Evil too. Not only by the US but also the NATO.
Funny thing is that most of these countries are not in public debt or have a far lower percentage of public debt against their GDP than the world average. Of course North Korea is not mentioned because it's not in the IMF and the known atrocities against their own people are known. That country must be in serious debt, despite what the leaders are saying.

By the looks of it, the western world (Europe and the US) are now ready to be swept up by IMF policies. Can't be too bad you say? We'll have to see about that...



Well they do want to help out, most of all because they see that countries are potting up and building up the reserves. Making it likely to pay off their debts all of the sudden! Like Russia did in 2005. This was a blow in the face of the IMF. About a $12 billion interest slap in the face for a period from 2005-2020. That was just interest on a $45 billion loan back in the '90ties...
Now, to see how beneficial this payback was...
Russia is doing quite well without debts from the IMF or other countries and is building a nice reserve system on top of that.
So that all needs a change. Welcome to reserve accumulation and a stable monetary system. The Bancor! A new global monetary unit.

 (click for a larger picture)
They know it's going to have a lot of resistance. So the current demonstrations in Spain and Brussels are just a test balloon, seeing how much we resist. If we don't resist too much, they will push it a notch upwards.

Years ago I said the following, when there was a bit of a stir in NL about some measures. They where talking about going to The Hague to demonstrate.

Nowadays we rather sit behind our computer and protest, than go out on the streets. Maybe there will be riot police. And maybe they will use their batons. Before you know it, you have a bruise on your head, or worse, end up in the hospital. On Monday you can't come to work and have to explain to your boss what you where doing on Saturday. They will call it irresponsible and your own fault. Company medical policies will not pay out and you could loose your job, or be passed over a promotion. And most of us will not like that. So we stay put, behind our computer screens and protest in silence.

The longer we keep doing this, the less resilience we will show. Until we're completely one world order with one political system and one monetary system. Because it seems that's what we wanted. Watch that IMF video again... It's not what we want.
Some go even further and predict a world war III And that is definitely not what we want. I know, it's a long read. Roadmaps are never short and snappy.

iFocus and ManicTime revisited

A while back, I downloaded two programs to help me work. Both have different functions and I wanted to see what worked best for me.

iFocus
With iFocus you can block different websites and programs based on the name in the title bar of the window. Downside is that this program needs to be downloaded every time you start your computer. It's a bit invasive and I would prefer a normal executable. So I tweaked it a bit so it won't download unless I want it to, just to be on the save side.
So how does it work? 
It tracks all programs (executables) and lists them as a total usage per day. It watches what the titlebar of all the programs say and blocks it according to some rules you set.
It works well, either notifying you or blocking the screen all together if you spend too much time on the build-in lists or your own items you've put in.
Can I do without it?
Sure. But if you start spending a lot of time on Facebook or even worse, Mafia Wars. It's sure is handy to have to make sure you stay focussed on what you have to do. It even tells you to take a break, so now and then.
Conclusion
Overall it's a good program. I removed it once as it wasn't really what I was looking for in tracking. But realising that I spend time on other things besides work it came back. It's a small program, doesn't eat a lot of resources at all and does what it says it does.
Download it from: http://www.ifocusonwork.com

ManicTime Tracker
Now here's a nifty program to keep track of what you've done. It's a must have for all freelancers. It keeps track of all programs and websites you've visited and how long you've spent your time on it. It does this with a few different graphs and timebars.
If you need to bill clients based on time, or wonder what the heck you where doing today, this is a must have program.
So how does it work?
ManicTime shows a timeline for the day, giving different colours to each application and document you've used. Different websites are under documents as well. Giving the opportunity to track the time usage for each individual website or program.
Can I do without it?
I could, of course. But if I want to know how long I've worked on a project, this is the program to use.
Conclusion
ManicTime just sits in my notifications and runs. It's there when I need to keep track of what I've done and just works. It does take a bit of memory but it's a program I don't want to miss out on.
Download it from: http://www.manictime.com