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weather patterns & HAARP RealTime Network
Slew of Storms to Slam West Coast
http://weather.aol.com/2012/11/27/slew-of-storms-to-slam-west-coast/
HAARP STATUS JOINT NETWORK MAGNITUDE MAP
http://www.haarpstatus.com/haarpstatus/haarpmap.html
HaarpStatus.com is a real-time sensor network from over 28 sensors placed in rural areas across the United States. The sensors can detect the HAARP frequency on the ionosphere. Monitors plasma and ions in the atmosphere trying to predict extreme weather anomalies, and solar radiation effects
Wavelengths -
Shortwaves indicate near events, a high short spike usually means a short term major event is about to happen in that area.
Longwaves and steady increases usually mean a large scale change is developing in the area that will effect a large area's upper level jet stream.
Magnitude System -
This project has developed a way to measure the magnitude of change in the ionosphere due to HAARP. The scale is from 1 to 10. Zero to One magnitudes are pretty normal while anything over five would be considered moderate and possibly significant, which can alter a weather pattern.
M1 - M2 - Slight change is expected, but overall the weather pattern is not being affected.
M3 - M5 - Change is expected and the reading indicates between then and and a few days it will happen. This is considered a moderate reading, which if a short spike can be a nearby event such as severe weather, unexpected lightning, or a tornado.
M6 - M9 - Significant change is expected. Anything over M7 is rare and special attention must be directed when readings go seven and higher. Severe storms are associated with this reading, which if a short spike can be a nearby event and a long duration and slow build being a large scale change.
M10 - Associated with tornado outbreaks. This also can be strong hurricanes and blizzards.
The Measured Man
By Mark Bowden
July/August 2012
Atlantic Magazine
Larry Smarr, an astrophysicist turned computer scientist, has a new project: charting his every bodily function in minute detail. What he’s discovering may be the future of health care.
Like many people who are careful about their weight, Larry Smarr once spent two weeks measuring everything he put in his mouth. He charted each serving of food in grams or teaspoons, and broke it down into these categories: protein, carbohydrates, fat, sodium, sugar, and fiber.
Larry used the data to fine-tune his diet. With input nailed down, he turned to output. He started charting the calories he burns, in workouts on an elliptical trainer and in the steps he takes each day. If the number on his pedometer falls short of his prescribed daily 7,000, he will find an excuse to go for a walk. Picture a tall, slender man with the supple, slightly deflated look of someone who has lost a lot of weight, plodding purposefully in soft shoes along the sunny sidewalks of La Jolla, California.
Of course, where outputs are concerned, calories are only part of the story, and it is here that Larry begins to differ from your typical health nut. Because human beings also produce waste products, foremost among them … well, poop. Larry collects his and has it analyzed. He is deep into the biochemistry of his feces, keeping detailed charts of their microbial contents. Larry has even been known to haul carefully boxed samples out of his kitchen refrigerator to show incautious visitors. He is eloquent on the subject. He could sell the stuff.
“Have you ever figured how information-rich your stool is?,” Larry asks me with a wide smile, his gray-green eyes intent behind rimless glasses. “There are about 100 billion bacteria per gram. Each bacterium has DNA whose length is typically one to 10 megabases—call it 1 million bytes of information. This means human stool has a data capacity of 100,000 terabytes of information stored per gram. That’s many orders of magnitude more information density than, say, in a chip in your smartphone or your personal computer. So your stool is far more interesting than a computer.”
Larry’s fascination is less with feces themselves than with the data they yield. He is not a doctor or a biochemist, he’s a computer scientist—one of the early architects of the Internet, in fact. Today he directs a world-class research center on two University of California campuses, San Diego and Irvine, called the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, or “Calit2” (the 2 represents the repeated I and T initials). The future is arriving faster at Calit2 than it is in most places. Larry says his eyes are focused “10 years ahead,” which in computer terms is more like a century or two, given how rapidly the machines are transforming modern life. Intent on that technological horizon, Larry envisions a coming revolution in medicine, and he is bringing his intellect and his institute to bear on it.
At 63, he is engaged in a computer-aided study of the human body—specifically, his body. It’s the start of a process that he believes will help lead, within 10 years, to the development of “a distributed planetary computer of enormous power,” one that is composed of a billion processors and will enable scientists to create, among many other things, a working computational model of your body. Your particular body, mind you, not just some generalized atlas of the human frame, but a working model of your unique corpus, grounded in your own genome, and—using data collected by nanosensors and transmitted by smartphone—refreshed continually with measurements from your body’s insides. This information stream will be collated with similar readings from millions of other similarly monitored bodies all over the planet. Mining this enormous database, software will produce detailed guidance about diet, supplements, exercise, medication, or treatment—guidance based not on the current practice of lumping symptoms together into broad categories of disorders, but on a precise reading of your own body’s peculiarities and its status in real time.
“And at that point,” says Larry, in a typically bold pronouncement that would startle generations of white-coated researchers, “you now have, for the first time in history, a scientific basis for medicine.”
When Socrates exhorted his followers, “Know thyself,” he could not have imagined an acolyte so avid, or so literal, as Larry. You’ve heard of people who check their pulse every few minutes? Amateurs. When Larry works out, an armband records skin temperature, heat flux, galvanic skin response, and acceleration in three dimensions. When he sleeps, a headband monitors the patterns of his sleep every 30 seconds. He has his blood drawn as many as eight times a year, and regularly tracks 100 separate markers. He is on a first-name basis with his ultrasound and MRI technicians, who provide him with 3-D images of his body, head to toe. Regular colonoscopies record the texture and color of his innards. And then there are the stool samples—last year Larry sent specimens to a lab for analysis nine times.
Larry is a mild, gentle soul, someone generally more interested in talking about you than about himself. He does not go out of his way to get your attention, and nothing about him is remotely annoying or evangelical. But if you show an interest in his project and start asking questions—look out. Beneath the calm and the deference, Larry is an intellectual pitchman of the first order. His quest to know burns with the pure intellectual passion of a precocious 10-year-old. He visibly shudders with pleasure at a good, hard question; his shoulders subtly rise and square, and his forehead leans into the task. Because Larry is on a mission. He’s out to change the world and, along the way, defeat at least one incurable disease: his own. (More on this in a moment.)
Larry is in the vanguard of what some call the “quantified life,” which envisions replacing the guesswork and supposition presently guiding individual health decisions with specific guidance tailored to the particular details of each person’s body. Because of his accomplishments and stature in his field, Larry cannot easily be dismissed as a kook. He believes in immersing himself in his work. Years ago, at the University of Illinois, when he was taking part in an experiment to unravel complex environmental systems with supercomputers, Larry installed a coral-reef aquarium in his home, complete with shrimp and 16 other phyla of small marine critters. It was maddeningly fragile. The coral kept peeling off the rocks and dying. He eventually discovered that just five drops of molybdenum, a metallic element, in a 250-gallon tank once a week solved the problem. That such a tiny factor played so decisive a role helped him better grasp the complexity of the situation. And as he fought to sustain the delicate ecosystem in his tank, he developed a personal feel for the larger problem his team was trying to solve.
Today, he is preoccupied with his own ecosystem. The way a computer scientist tends to see it, a genome is a given individual’s basic program. Mapping one used to cost billions. Today it can be done for thousands, and soon the price will drop below $1,000. Once people know their genetic codes, and begin thoroughly monitoring their bodily systems, they will theoretically approach the point where computers can “know” a lot more about them than any doctor ever could. In such a world, people will spot disease long before they feel sick—as Larry did. They will regard the doctor as more consultant than oracle.
Not everyone sees this potential revolution as a good one. Do people really want or need to know this much about themselves? Is such a preoccupation with health even healthy? What if swimming in oceans of bio-data causes more harm than good?
“Frankly, I’d rather go river rafting,” says Dr. H. Gilbert Welch, a professor of medicine at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, and the author of Overdiagnosed: Making People Sick in the Pursuit of Health. “Data is not information. Information is not knowledge. And knowledge is certainly not wisdom.” Welch believes that individuals who monitor themselves as closely as Larry does are pretty much guaranteed to find something “wrong.” Contradictory as it sounds, he says abnormality is normal.
“It brings to mind the fad a few years ago with getting full-body CT scans,” Welch says. “Something like 80 percent of those who did it found something abnormal about themselves. The essence of life is variability. Constant monitoring is a recipe for all of us to be judged ‘sick.’ Judging ourselves sick, we seek intervention.” And intervention, usually with drugs or surgery, he warns, is never risk-free. Humbler medical practitioners, aware of the sordid history of some medical practices (see: bloodletting, lobotomy, trepanning), weigh the consequences of intervention carefully. Doing no harm often demands doing nothing. The human body is, after all, remarkably sturdy and self-healing. As Welch sees it, “Arming ourselves with more data is guaranteed to unleash a lot of intervention” on people who are basically healthy.
Not to mention creating an epidemic of anxiety. In other words, the “quantified life” might itself belong to the catalog of affliction, filed under Looking too closely, hazards of.
In that sense, the story of Larry Smarr might be less a pioneering saga than a cautionary tale.
Larry’s journey started with that most American of preoccupations, losing weight. Larry doesn’t update the photo each time he renews his California driver’s license, preferring to keep, as a reminder, the one taken soon after his arrival at UCSD 12 years ago, with his wife, Janet. It shows a 51-year-old Larry, one with more and longer hair, a wide, round face, and an ample second chin. Call him Jolly Larry. He had just arrived from Illinois, a place he now refers to as “the epicenter of the obesity epidemic,” and he had a girth to match his oversize professional reputation. (Deep-fried, sugarcoated pastries were a particular favorite of his back then.) Arriving in La Jolla, Jolly Larry found himself surrounded by jogging, hiking, biking, surfing, organic-vegetable-eating superhumans. It was enough to shame him into action. If he was going to fit in on this sunny new campus, he would have to shape up.
So Jolly Larry started working out, reading diet books, and stepping on the scale every day. At first, his charts were disappointing. Like countless strivers before him, he dropped some weight, but not much, and it kept wanting to come back. Three or four popular books on weight loss left him mostly confused, but they did convey a central truth: losing weight was only 20 percent about exercise. The other 80 percent was about what he put in his mouth. What triggered his breakthrough was the advice of Barry Sears, the biochemist who created the Zone Diet, which pressed Larry’s buttons precisely. Sears proposed that to diet more effectively, one needed to know more. Larry decided to study up on his body chemistry.
Few people in history have been better positioned to act on such advice. Larry had begun his professional life as an astrophysicist, trying to unravel the core puzzles of the universe. In 1975, when he was working toward his doctorate at the University of Texas, one of his advisers suggested that he get a top-secret government security clearance: behind the walls of America’s nuclear-weapons program were not only some of the nation’s premier physicists, but also the world’s first supercomputers, hundreds of times faster than anything available on any college campus. Larry got his clearance, and in the following years, while working as a fellow at Princeton and at Harvard, he would disappear during summers behind the classified walls of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in the San Francisco Bay Area. There he would work 16-hour shifts on some of the most difficult problems in his field—but with a crucial difference. Working with a computer at one of his universities, Larry might set it a task to compute overnight. He would go home, and when he returned the next morning, the task would be nearing completion. Working with the new Cray supercomputer at Livermore, he could get the same result in a minute and a half.
When he’d return to his university posts in the fall, and rejoin his colleagues working at a comparative snail’s pace, he’d tell them, “You know, guys, we could be using supercomputers to solve the laws of physics, instead of trying to do these closed-form static solutions that you do.” They would look at him as if he was crazy. “What are you talking about?” they’d ask. “That can’t be done.” To them, it seemed impossible. The supercomputer enabled not just faster work, but a different style and language of experimentation. But when he tried to explain to his colleagues, who were still working mostly with pencils and paper, they scratched their heads. “It was like I was living in two different worlds,” Larry says.
When one of the first Cray computers outside of secret nuclear programs was set up in Munich, Larry started spending his summers there. “And in about ’82, we were at a beer garden and it was probably my second glass of beer, and I was being hosted by a German astrophysicist, world-class,” Larry recalls. “He asks, ‘Tell me something. My father helped build the trains Germany relied on during the war. And here in our occupied country, you guys, you Americans, come over here and mooch off of our supercomputers because you don’t have the wit to put them in your universities where people can get access to them. Have I got that right?’ And I said, ‘Pretty much.’ And he asks, ‘How did you guys win the war?’”
Larry brought that question home with him to his perch at the University of Illinois. There, in 1983, he helped draft “The Black Proposal,” an unusually concise recommendation (in a black cover) for a $55 million National Science Foundation supercomputer center. When it was funded, along with four other NSF centers, Larry and others argued for using the protocols of the military’s ARPANET (the precursor to the Internet) to link the centers, so that civilian researchers across the nation could use the fastest computers in America for basic research. The linking proposal was controversial not only because it took on the cult of secrecy surrounding the most-advanced computers in America, but because it specifically recommended that the NSF include only computer networks using TCP/IP, a universal computer protocol designed to facilitate not secrecy, but collaboration. TCP/IP allowed different kinds of computers to exchange data seamlessly. At the time, the large computer companies—DEC, IBM, General Electric, etc.—preferred a market model where manufacturers competed to create large fiefdoms, networks that used only their own machines. By adopting Larry’s proposal, the NSF enabled computer networks to plug into the system, a critical step toward today’s Internet.
By the time, years later, that Larry heeded Barry Sears’s suggestion to learn more about his body’s chemistry, Larry had at his disposal at UCSD a supercomputer with a capacity many times greater than that of any he’d worked on at Livermore. His research interests had shifted from astrophysics to the impact computers were having on all kinds of fields, including medicine. Calit2 already had numerous grants to study “digitally enabled genomic medicine,” so in 2010 Larry signed himself up as a test subject. As his personal quest to lose weight evolved into an effort to understand human biochemistry, his own body became the equivalent of the coral-reef tank he’d once kept in his living room.
Larry had already radically changed his diet, breaking his intake into subcategories, aiming for a caloric split of 40 percent low-glycemic carbohydrates, 30 percent lean protein, and 30 percent omega-3–enriched fat. His meal portions were about half of ordinary restaurant portions. Following what was essentially Barry Sears’s Zone Diet, Larry had lost a pound every 10 weeks, dropping 20 pounds in four years.
Most people would have been happy with that. But his dieting taught Larry something. If he wanted good health, he could not simply trust how he felt and wing it. If he wanted to understand what was happening in his body, he had to examine the data. And despite his weight loss, the data were now telling him something that didn’t seem to make sense. By his calculations, the pounds should still have been falling off, but they weren’t.
According to his measurements, he had doubled his strength and tripled the number of steps he took each day. His REM periods, the most valuable periods of sleep, accounted for more than half the time he spent in the sack—twice the typical proportion for a man of his age. His weight was steady. But Larry wanted to know more. He had been getting blood tests once or twice a year as part of his normal health maintenance, but by the end of 2010 he was sending off blood samples more often and graphing dozens of markers, which enabled him to at least better define the mystery. The Zone Diet is designed to reduce inflammation, and because he followed it faithfully, Larry expected his blood-test inflammation score to be low. But the C-reactive protein (CRP), which rises in response to inflammation, was high.
“I had discovered that my body is chronically inflamed—just the opposite of what I expected!” he wrote in an account of his project published last year in a special issue of Strategic News Service, a computer/telecommunications newsletter. (The article was prefaced by an enthusiastic note from the publisher, Mark R. Anderson, who said that it “may be the most important Special Letter we have ever published. For many of you reading it, it may also save your lives, or extend them.”) Larry wrote:
"Even more intriguing: after I had been tracking my CRP for two years, I noticed that it had suddenly more than doubled in less than a year. Troubled, I showed my graphs to my doctors and suggested that something bad was about to happen."
Here you should try to imagine the average physician’s reaction when a patient, outwardly healthy, arrives with detailed graphs of his body chemistry, concerned that something evil is stalking his insides.
“Do you have a symptom?,” Larry was asked.
“No,” he answered. “I feel fine.”
He was assured that charts like his were “academic,” and not useful for clinical practice. The doctors told him to come back if and when he found something actually wrong with him, as opposed to finding anomalies in his charts.
I ask Larry a question his doctors might have been too polite to ask: “Are you a hypochondriac?”
“A hypochondriac is someone who imagines that they have things that are wrong with them and worries about that,” he says. “I am the opposite of a hypochondriac. I don’t make any assumptions about what might be right or wrong with me, and I don’t imagine it. I measure it.”
Larry was beginning to have serious doubts about the way medicine is practiced in this country. “Here’s the way I look at it; the average American has something like two 20-minute visits a year with a doctor,” he explains. “So you have 40 minutes a year that that doctor is going to help you make good decisions. You have 500,000 minutes a year on your own, and every one of those, you are making decisions. So we’re already in a situation where you are in charge of your ship—your body—and you are making a lot of pretty horrible decisions, or else two-thirds of the United States’ citizens wouldn’t be overweight or obese. You wouldn’t have the CDC saying that 42 percent of Americans may be obese by 2030, and a third of all Americans may develop diabetes by 2050. That’s the result of a lot of bad decisions that people are individually making on their own.”
A few weeks after his doctors dismissed his graphs as “academic,” Larry felt a severe pain in the left side of his abdomen. At his doctor’s office, he was diagnosed with an acute bout of diverticulitis, an intestinal disease caused by inflammation. He was put on a 10-day antibiotic program to treat the ailment. To Larry, this perfectly illustrated the problem. Doctors were ready, eager, and well-equipped to address a clinical symptom, but unwilling to wade with him into his charts, which, although undeniably abstract, had foretold the problem! It was at this point that Larry decided to take over his own health care.
He asked to see the written report from his last colonoscopy, and underwent another. He began testing his stool, recognizing that all of us are, in fact, “superorganisms,” that our gastrointestinal, or GI, tracts are a collaboration between human digestive cells and the trillions of bacteria that line our intestines. The stool samples provided detailed charts of the workings of these microorganisms, which is what Larry means when he calls his poop “data-rich.” He was learning more about the biochemistry of his own body than any patient had ever known, and the numbers continued to add up in an alarming way. They suggested that he was suffering not from diverticulitis, but from some kind of inflamed-bowel disease. He then went looking for an expert to help him interpret the data. He didn’t have to look far: Dr. William J. Sandborn had recently left the Mayo Clinic to take over the GI Division of UCSD’s School of Medicine.
“I think he felt like he wasn’t really being taken seriously,” says Sandborn. “So he came over and we looked, and we ended up finding some degree of inflammation that was pointing in the direction of Crohn’s disease, but he wasn’t really having many symptoms. So the question then became: Is this some kind of early subclinical Crohn’s disease? Should we even go as far as treating it, or just wait?”
Larry’s impressive quest to fine-tune his body had led him to this: an early diagnosis of Crohn’s disease, an incurable condition. It isn’t fatal, but it has a long list of uncomfortable and sometimes painful symptoms that tend to flare up from time to time; they center around the GI tract, but may include eye inflammation, swollen joints, fever, fatigue, and others. Apart from that one episode of abdominal pain, Larry was still feeling fine. But the graphs showed, and his new doctor more or less confirmed, that he was sick.
And that part about its being incurable? Let’s just say that in Larry, Crohn’s disease has encountered a very dedicated adversary.
If past thinkers leaned heavily on the steam engine as an all-purpose analogy—e.g., contents under pressure will explode (think Marx’s ideas on revolution or Freud’s about repressed desire)—today we prefer our metaphors to be electronic. We talk about neural “circuitry,” about “processing” information, or about how genes “encode” our physical essence. In this worldview, our bodies are computers, and DNA functions as our basic program, our “operating system.”
This is certainly how Larry, the computer scientist, talks about the human body. In this context, all of human history can be seen as a progression from a world that was data-poor to one that is data-rich. Starting with those early summers working in secrecy at Livermore, Larry has witnessed firsthand the exponential progress of computing power posited by Moore’s Law, which states that the computer-chip transistor count should double roughly every two years. So when Larry talks about the potential for computers to help us understand our bodies, he isn’t talking about their showing us more isolated details about an unfathomably complex system; he’s talking about knowing everything.
“We are going to know—once you know each of your cells’ 6 billion genome bases, with all the imaging down to the micron level, and when you know every damn gene and every bacterium—at a certain point, there is no more data to know,” he says. “So certainly by 2030, there is not going to be that much more to learn … I mean, you are going to get the wiring diagram, basically.” Once they are armed with the wiring diagram, Larry sees no reason why individuals cannot maintain their health the way modern car owners maintain their automobiles.
Larry actually concedes the point made by Dartmouth’s Welch—that presented with enough data, pretty much everyone is going to find something wrong with them. He just disputes that this would be a bad thing. “All of us do have something beginning to go wrong, but then, so do our automobiles,” Larry says. “In today’s world of automobile preventive maintenance, we don’t wait for our cars to break down and then go to the ‘car doctor.’ Every 10,000 or 20,000 miles, we go in and get an exhaustive look at all the key variables since the last check. If they find something wrong with my car—which will be different from what they find about yours—then they take appropriate action and I go back to driving a ‘healthy’ car. Occasionally, something is discovered that indicates a bunch of cars need to be called in and get a certain item replaced. I can imagine that occasionally, as a new DNA segment is related to some disease, people with that DNA signature will be called in for ‘preventive maintenance.’”
If Larry is right, then our descendants may view early-21st-century medical practices, which we consider a triumph of reason over superstition, in the same way we now view 18th- and 19th-century folk remedies. A particularly likely candidate for scorn in an age of “quantified” health care is our one-pill-fits-all approach to prescription drugs. In his book The Creative Destruction of Medicine, the physician-author Eric Topol cites such dosing as an example of medicine that is “population-based,” rather than “patient-centered.” He notes the widespread use of statins to lower LDL cholesterol, a factor in heart disease. Topol doesn’t deny the cholesterol-lowering effect of these drugs, but he argues that double-blind testing also shows that this effect benefits only a tiny fraction of those treated. One of the most effective statins, Crestor, has been found to reduce the incidence of stroke, heart attack, or death from 4 percent of patients in the placebo group to 2 percent of the group taking the statin. And yet these drugs are widely administered to patients considered at risk. Topol writes:
"Instead of identifying the 1 person or 2 people out of every 100 who would benefit, the whole population with the criteria that were tested is deemed treatable … What constitutes evidence-based medicine today is what is good for a large population, not for any particular individual."
Pharmaceutical companies don’t mind. And as long as the harmful side effects are within acceptable limits, the Food and Drug Administration doesn’t mind, either. Some patients will be helped. All of them will be buying the pills, and all will be subjected to follow-up tests, some of them uncomfortable and most of them unnecessary. What if there were a way, Topol asks, of knowing, before prescribing the drug, which 2 percent would be most likely to benefit from it? In an observation that Larry wholeheartedly endorses, Topol writes:
"Fortunately, our ability to get just that information is rapidly emerging, (and we are) beginning an era characterized by the right drug, the right dose, and the right screen for the right patients, with the right doctor, at the right cost."
Getting there will mean essentially dismantling the health-care industry as we know it. (Thus the creative destruction of Topol’s title.) Or, as Larry puts it: “A lot of enormously wealthy, established, powerful institutions in our society are going to be destroyed.” And why not? Over the past 20 years, computers have been toppling and rebuilding industries one by one, from retail sales (Walmart and Amazon), to banking (ATMs and online services), to finance (high-speed online investing), to entertainment (Web streaming, downloads, YouTube, etc.), to publishing (e-books and news aggregators). We’re just babes in this new digital era, and it will eventually upend almost every field of human endeavor.
Larry sees medicine as a stubborn holdout. Current efforts to reform the system—for instance, the Obama administration’s initiative to digitize all health records by 2014—are just toes in the water. Medicine has barely begun to take advantage of the million-fold increase in the amount of data available for the diagnosis and treatment of disease. Take the standard annual physical, with its weigh-in, blood-pressure check, and handful of numbers gleaned from select tests performed on a blood sample. To Larry, these data points give your doctor little more than a “cartoon” image of your body. Now imagine peering at the same image drawn from a galaxy of billions of data points. The cartoon becomes a high-definition, 3-D picture, with every system and organ in the body measured and mapped in real time.
Indeed, a very early prototype of this kind of high-definition image already exists at Calit2. It is, of course, of Larry.
Inside a “cave” fashioned from large HD screens (each with dual rear projectors) and linked to 18 gaming PCs to create a graphics supercomputer, Larry and I step into a stunning image assembled from an MRI scan of his torso. The room, the size of a walk-in closet, is lined with giant screens, front, sides, and back. More screens angle from these walls toward a floor that is illuminated from above. Two curved, waist-high metal railings offer support, because viewers at the center of this visual world can easily lose their balance. A sensor strapped to your forehead tells the computer where you are looking, so as you turn your head it smoothly blends the images on the screens to create a seamless 360-degree alternative world. (This is clearly the future of video games and cinema.) I had to lean on the metal bars to remind myself I was not someplace else. Once we were in position, Jürgen P. Schulze, a Calit2 research scientist, punched up a display of Larry’s own coiled, 63-year-old entrails. I felt as if I could reach out and touch the wrinkled contours of his intestines and arteries.
Larry’s inner 10-year-old rejoices. “Look!” he says, lifting and opening his hands. “This is me!”
He points to the source of his health concerns, the precise six-inch stretch of his sigmoid colon that is visibly distorted and inflamed. This is Larry’s discovery, and his enemy.
I note that the display breaks new ground in the annals of self-disclosure: Larry is literally turning himself inside-out for a journalist. He does worry a little about making public such intimate details, but this openness is part of how he believes medicine ought to be—and ultimately will be—practiced. The current consensus that medical records should be strictly private, subject to the scrutiny of only doctor and patient, will be yet another casualty if Larry’s health-care vision comes to pass. “A different way to organize society is to say it is human-focused, human-centered, patient-centered, and that there are no legal or financial repercussions from sharing data,” he says. “There is a huge societal benefit from sharing the data, getting it out from the firewalls, letting software look across millions of these things.”
The way the system works now, when a technician examines the MRI of a patient’s abdomen, in two dimensions, on a single screen, she compares and contrasts it with perhaps thousands or even tens of thousands of other images she has seen. She then writes a report to the physician explaining, on the basis of her memory and experience, what is normal or abnormal in what she sees.
But “software can go in, volumetrically, over, say, a million different abdomens,” says Larry, gesturing at the image of his own innards, “and come up with exquisite distribution functions of how things are arranged, what is abnormal or normal, on every little thing in there. In my case, what I have found is inflammation. Unaddressed, it may lead to structural damage and maybe eventually surgery, cutting that part out. So I am going to have another MRI in three months, and that will tell me whether the things I am doing have made it better, or if it is the same, or has gotten worse.”
It’s that sense of control that appeals to Larry as much as anything.
“The way we do things now,” he says, “the technician will examine it and write up a report, which goes to my doctor, and then he explains it all to me. So I am disembodied. Patients are completely severed from having any relationship with their body. You are helpless.”
Shedding that sense of disembodiment and helplessness is, in theory, one of the most attractive features of Larry Smarr’s quantified self. Individuals will understand their own bodies and take care of themselves; doctors will merely assist with the maintenance and fine-tuning. With that sense of personal ownership established, Larry believes, the average American won’t continue to drink 500 cans of soda a year, or ingest some 60 pounds of high-fructose corn syrup. After all, educational campaigns about cigarettes have helped lower the share of smokers in America to below 20 percent. If we made such inroads into the obesity epidemic, Larry says, “we would have a national celebration.”
For his part, Larry is no longer disembodied. He has had key snippets of his DNA sequenced, and will have the whole thing completely sequenced by the end of this year. In just what he has seen so far, he has discovered telltale markers linked with late-onset Crohn’s disease. He has developed his own theory of the disease, based on his reading of the most recent medical literature and his growing perception of himself as a superorganism. In a nutshell, he suspects that some of the essential bacteria that should line the walls of his intestine at the point where it is inflamed have been killed off, probably by some antibiotic regimen he underwent years ago. So he has begun charting, through stool samples, the bewilderingly complex microbial ecology of his intestines.
He showed me a detailed analysis of one such sample on his computer, drawing my attention to the word firmicute. “So, what the hell is a firmicute?” he asks rhetorically. “And in particular, it is in these two groups, Clostridium leptum and Clostridium coccoides. So I go back, and I go, ‘Clostri-Clostri-Clostri, that rings a bell. I had it in my last stool measurement.’” He pulls up an older chart on his screen. “Here is my stool measurement from January 1, 2012. And here are my bacteria. Lactobacillus and Bifidobacteria: that is what you get in, like, a yogurt and stuff like that, right? Clostridiums: you can have them from zero to four-plus. Four-plus is what they should be. And you can see I am deficient here on a number of them,” he says, pointing to low numbers on the chart. “So then I went back over time and got them plotted, and they never were above two, and now they are collapsed down to one. So it looks like I am losing. So what do Clostridia do? Because I am missing them—I am missing that service.”
You may note the Alice in Wonderland quality of all this. Every question Larry seeks to answer raises new questions, every door he opens leads to a level of more-bewildering complexity. One could easily conclude that these levels never bottom out, that the intricacy of the human body, composed of its trillions of cells—each dancing to the tune of a genetic program but also subject to random intersections with outside forces such as radiation, chemicals, and physical accidents—is for all practical purposes infinite, and hence permanently beyond our full comprehension. But Larry, with his astrophysics background, is utterly undaunted by complexity. This is the gift of the computer age: things once considered too numerous to count can now be counted. And Larry believes that questions about how the human body functions are ultimately finite.
In his own case, Larry has zeroed in on what he believes is the specific missing bacterial component behind the immune-system malfunction causing his bowel inflammation. He’s begun a regimen of supplements to replace that component. If it doesn’t work, he’ll devise a new plan. He isn’t aiming for immortality—not yet, although, as far as he is concerned, it’s not out of the question. As we develop our ability to replace broken-down body parts with bioengineered organs, and as we work toward a complete understanding of human systems and biochemistry … Why not?
Reflecting on Larry’s vision of a patient-centric, computer-assisted world of medical care, Dr. Welch allows: “I can conceive of this happening. But is this the model we want for good health? What does it mean to be healthy? Is it something we learn from a machine? Is it the absence of abnormality? Health is a state of mind. I don’t think constantly monitoring yourself is the right path to that state of mind. Data alone is not the answer. We went through all of this with the Human Genome Project. You heard it then: if we could just get all of this data, all of our problems would be solved. It turned out that the predictive power of mapping the genome wasn’t all that great, because there are other factors at play: the environment, behavior, and chance. Randomness has a lot to do with it.”
And these are not the only reasons to be skeptical of Larry’s vision. Researchers will certainly continue to map the human body in ever-greater detail, enabling doctors to spot emerging illness earlier and to design drug treatments with far more precision. But in the end, how many people will want to track their bodily functions the way Larry does, even if software greatly simplifies the task? Larry says the amount of time he has spent monitoring and studying himself has grown a lot, but that it still adds up to less time each day than most Americans spend watching television. But even if that time is radically reduced by software, how many of us, understanding that our decrypted genome may reveal terrible news about our future—Alzheimer’s, crippling neuromuscular diseases, schizophrenia, and so on—will even want to know?
When I ask Larry this question, he frowns and says, “I can’t understand that.” The very idea stumps him. To him, not wanting to know something—even bad news—just doesn’t compute. His whole life is about finding out. He’s a scientist to his core.
“I hear it a lot, but I don’t understand it. Because whatever it is, if you suspect that you are going to have, say, Alzheimer’s within five years or 10 years, then that should focus your mind on what it is you want to accomplish in the days that you have left.” Then, after a moment more thought, he adds, “And if you don’t know, those days are going to just slide by, in which you could have done something that you always meant to do.”
He knows that the way he lives and works might seem eccentric or even a little crazy to others. “Most of my life, people have thought I was crazy at any given point,” he says. “Maybe being crazy simply means you are clear-sighted and you are looking at the fact that you are in a period of rapid change. I see the world as it will be, and of course, that is a different world than the one we live in now.”
Larry is in a hurry to get there. He sees himself 10 years down the road as someone healthy and active and strong, instead of someone struggling to manage the increasingly uncomfortable and debilitating effects of Crohn’s. As he makes his way down the supplements aisle of his Whole Foods Market, looking for a very specific assortment of probiotics with which to mix his remedial cocktail, he’s not just trying to save himself. He’s trying to save you.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/07/the-measured-man/9018/?single_page=true
Particles Moved Faster Than Speed of Light?
Ker Than
National Geographic News
Published September 23, 2011
"Crazy" neutrino find has many physicists skeptical, still backing Einstein.
Neutrinos—ghostly subatomic particles—may have been observed traveling faster than the speed of light, scientists announced this week.
If confirmed, the astonishing claim would upend a cardinal rule of physics established by Albert Einstein nearly a century ago.
"Most theorists believe that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. So if this is true, it would rock the foundations of physics," said Stephen Parke, head of the theoretical physics department at the U.S. government-run Fermilab near Chicago, Illinois.
(Related: "Proton Smaller Than Thought—May Rewrite Laws of Physics.")
The existence of faster-than-light particles would also wreak havoc on scientific theories of cause and effect.
"If things travel faster than the speed of light, A can cause B, [but] B can also cause A," Parke said.
"If that happens, the concept of causality becomes ambiguous, and that would cause a great deal of trouble."
Don't Bet on Breaking Light Speed
Members of the Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus, or OPERA, at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) described the unusual neutrino detection in a paper published this week on the research website arXiv.org.
The team shot neutrinos out of a particle accelerator near Geneva, Switzerland, and measured how long it took the particles to travel to a neutrino detector in Gran Sasso, Italy, 450 miles (724 kilometers) away.
(See pictures of a neutrino detector 1.5 miles [2.4 kilometers] under Antarctic ice.)
Neutrinos are subatomic particles that have almost no mass and can zip through entire planets as if they are not there.
Being nearly massless, neutrinos should travel at nearly the speed of light, which is approximately 186,000 miles (299,338 kilometers) a second.
To the astonishment of the OPERA team, the particles appear to have reached their destination about 60 nanoseconds faster than expected.
A nanosecond may not sound like much, but "the effect is quite large," said Fermilab's Parke, who was not part of the CERN team.
The extra speed would mean that, over a distance of 621 miles (1,000 kilometers), neutrinos travel about 66 feet (20 meters) farther than light travels in the same amount of time.
The results would be "revolutionary" if true, Parke said, but he added that he highly doubts the findings will hold up under closer scrutiny.
"If I was a betting man, I would bet against it," he said. "Your first response is it can't possibly be true, that they must have made a mistake."
Neutrino Speed an Instrument Error?
Parke is not alone in his skepticism. Many physicists have speculated that the OPERA results are due to a measurement or instrument error.
It would not be the first time such an error occurred, said Louis Strigari, an astrophysicist at Stanford University also not on the CERN team.
"There have been several instances where, through no fault of the experimenters, the equipment was not understood as well as it needed to be," Strigari said.
"It just so happens that you learn more as you get more data and you understand the machinery a little better."
Even the OPERA team is cautious about its results and is welcoming other researchers to repeat the neutrino experiment.
"We want just to be helped by the community in understanding our crazy result—because it is crazy," Antonio Ereditato, coordinator of the OPERA collaboration, told the BBC.
Supernova Neutrinos Not So Speedy
Dave Goldberg, an astrophysicist at Philadelphia's Drexel University, said that if faster-than-light neutrinos did exist, they would likely have been observed in nature before now.
For example, in 1987 detectors on Earth identified neutrinos and photons—light particles—from an exploding star. Both types of particles reached our planet at almost exactly the same instance.
(Related: "Supernova Caught Starting to Explode for First Time.")
According to Goldberg's calculations, if neutrinos travel faster than light by the amount the OPERA team claims, then neutrinos from that supernova should have been detected in 1984—three years before the photons.
"It's possible, but unlikely," Goldberg said, that detectors active on Earth at the time would have missed such an obvious spike in cosmic neutrinos.
Goldberg concedes that supernova neutrinos are less energetic—and would thus be traveling slower—than the neutrinos from CERN's particle accelerator.
However, "assuming Einstein was correct, both types [of neutrinos] would be moving at something like 99.999999999 percent the speed of light," Goldberg said in an email.
"In other words, from a measurement point of view, they'd be going at essentially identical speeds."
(Also see "Einstein Theories Confirmed by NASA Gravity Probe.")
Relativity Still Very Close to Right
Even if the OPERA results are confirmed by other scientists, they wouldn't totally invalidate Einstein's theories of general and special relativity, Stanford University's Strigari stressed. Those theories still explain a remarkable range of observed phenomena in the universe.
"I think it's long been understood that the theories we have today aren't the full answers," Strigari said.
"If this observation holds up, then it's probably a good piece of evidence that the theories we currently have need to be reworked."
Drexel University's Goldberg agreed that physicists won't be discarding Einstein's theories anytime soon.
"Even if relativity turned out to be wrong," he said, "it's clearly very, very close to being right."
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/09/110923-neutrinos-speed-of-light-particles-cern-physics-einstein-science/
THE BEAST
By Nick Guarino
The most evil, fiendish machine of destruction ever created has been turned on. I call it The Beast.
The Beast is not an atomic bomb. It isn’t a missile or a deadly submarine with enough nukes to end life as we know it.
It is a computer. The fastest, most powerful ever made. Goldman Sachs owns and runs it. It is stealing your wealth day and night.
The Beast is so secret only a handful of people have actually seen it. The picture above is an educated guess of what it looks like. I based it on talks I’ve had with people who know some of the components of this market manipulation system from hell.
No one understands everything The Beast does. We do know it is connected, directly or indirectly, to every information system known to man. Every database. It is so fast, it runs circles around every other computer in the world. It has the power to manipulate (for a time) every market in the world.
Soon this system, or one like it, could be used to control most every aspect of your life.
Right now it is most dangerous for you, me and every American investor: because it is tied directly to the New York Stock Exchange computers. In fact, it is connected to every exchange computer in the world, be it stocks, commodities or bonds. It lets Goldman Sachs learn every stock order and commodity order that is placed on the NYSE or any other exchange – BEFORE the exchange executes it – and then jump in front of the market. This is called FRONT RUNNING.
Every time you, your mutual fund or retirement plan buys a stock, bond or commodity, you pay more than you should have. Goldman gets there first. Thanks to the power of The Beast. They bid up the price you paid. They gouge you.
In some cases, The Beast can freeze you out. Or worse, bust you out of your positions, a big loser. Many small investors learned this the hard way, in the May 6th “flash crash” bloodbath.
It’s legalized theft, on a mass scale. It is the reason Goldman made nearly $30 billion in their proprietary trading these past few years — while every one else lost money and the U.S. economy trashed around in the worst depression since the 1930s.
The Beast is located in a steel, nuclear-proof vault. Ten stories below street level. In the same room as the NYSE’s own computers. Wired directly into them, in fact. Most of the time this black box is a license for Goldman to print money. It never lost!
But on Thursday, May 6, the scheme backfired. Goldman’s super-computer – the Beast — turned the regional Greek downturn into a global freefall. The Dow plunged 1000 points in two hours.
It forced an emergency bailout by the U.S. and members of the European Union: $1 trillion for Greece. Something they all said they would never do.
And now Spain, Portugal, Italy and England are all waiting in the wings, panting for their own bailouts. These will be many, many times greater than Greece’s. The fallout will be many times worse, too…
.
What Really Happened on
Flash Crash Thursday, May 6
Thursday, May 6, an event took place that struck fear and terror in the hearts of everyone who understood what they saw.
U.S. stocks had their biggest one-day meltdown in history. 1000 points in two hours. Never had stocks fallen so far, so fast. Not even during the crash of 2008, which was the worst plunge since the Great Depression.
One major stock, Accenture, fell from $40 a share to 1 cent — in 30 minutes. Unprecedented. But it will not be the last of these meltdowns. This is the first of many crises we will soon see.
As usual, the sold-out Wall Street press went into overdrive. They quickly pooh-pooh’ed the stark warning of what’s to come.
Don’t let them fool you.
The Greek crisis is a relatively minor event, compared to what’s in store. But even little ole Greece sent the stock market into a tailspin. We warned about this, months ahead of time, in our “Dead Meat/PIGIES” special report.
Now the market is starting to catch up to the fact that the financial crisis is wiping out entire countries. Investors and traders saw the rioting in Greek streets. Panic struck the world’s markets.
Just days earlier, the S&P 500 was enjoying an 80% rally-back, from the lows last March. The Dow had soared from 6700 to 11,300. The biggest put-up, fixed market ever.
“Come on in, the water’s fine,” Wall Street promised the masses. “Happy days are here again.” So the suckers bought into another pre-planned, pre-packaged, computer-orchestrated disaster.
Flash Crash Thursday, every major exchange took catastrophic hits. Instantly, the media blamed it on a rookie trader’s typing mistake.
BULL. This was NOT a Fat-Fingers error. It was not an accident. It sure wasn’t a one-time event, either.
You saw Wall Street’s mindless computer programs backfire — and turn a regional downswing into a full-blown global panic.
You saw Wall Street’s biggest “screw-you” scam ever blow up in its face. You saw The Beast rear its ugly head, turn on its makers, and nearly cause a total meltdown in U.S. stocks. One that is still reverberating around the world.
Most of all, you saw a sneak preview of what’s coming. Because tiny Greece is not the only country that needs a bailout. Giants Spain and Italy also need bailouts. Portugal, Ireland and even England will need bailouts.
Imagine the market chaos when Italy and Spain come begging for ten trillion dollars (not a trillion like Greece). When the IMF cuts the pay of every Italian and Spaniard by 25%… slashes their retirements in half… and reduces their beloved cradle-to-grave government handouts overnight.
I’ll tell you what will happen. The riots in Greece will look like two school girls fighting over a Barbie doll. And I promise you, those wipe-outs are coming. Real soon now.
Markets around the world are starting to plunge. Soon they will crash at lightning computer speed. We are on the verge of the first computer-led stock market panic and sell-off.
But here’s something Wall Street doesn’t want you to know. There is a little-known “glitch” in their vast system of computerized thievery. This glitch could let small investors make literally MILLIONS of dollars — when markets tumble like they did on May 6.
And this glitch — this vulnerability — has the potential to make YOU very, very rich.
In effect, this glitch allows small investors to trade like billion-dollar international hedge funds — only with strictly limited risk.
This is a once-in-a-hundred-years opportunity to cash in on the sheer greed of Wall Street. To turn the tables on companies like Goldman, who have been robbing you for so many years.
Let me explain…
Wall Street and the U.S. government
tried to shut me up. They do NOT want
you to learn about this scam
My name is Nick Guarino. I’m the editor of the Wall Street Insiders. WSI is perhaps the most radical and contrarian financial newsletter now publishing. And, forgive me, the most right in predicting the mess we are in.
Perhaps you have heard of me. Wall Street hates my guts. So does the U.S. government.
Since 1992, they’ve done everything in their power to silence me. Including seizing my bank accounts, confiscating computer equipment, and getting a Federal judge to actually order me to stop publishing a financial newsletter. (In flagrant violation of the First Amendment. It has since been lifted.)
The reason they tried to silence me: I tell small investors like you the way Wall Street really works -– and how to use that knowledge to protect yourself and potentially make MILLIONS in profits.
While the regulators at the Securities & Exchange Commission were spending their days watching porn videos on the Internet, I accurately predicted…
… the 2008-2009 stock market wipeout that vaporized 50% or more of Americans’ life savings…
… the ongoing derivatives Ponzi scheme…
… the real estate crash that is still going on…
… the pullback in oil prices from $150 a barrel to below $80 a barrel…
… the 2000-2001 “tech wreck” and dot-com wipeout…
… the skyrocketing surge in gold prices from $260 an ounce to above $1,000 an ounce… and, incredibly,
… the impeachment of President Bill Clinton and the Whitewater fiasco…
… as well as dozens of other events…
After my last tussle with the U.S. government, in 2005, it took me four years and nearly $10 million in legal fees and fines to begin publishing again.
But now I’m back… and I am telling the world about another bombshell that will soon shock the world to its core…
The Beast: of Wall Street’s many crimes,
this one will enrage you the most
You’ve heard how brokers “churn” accounts, and push money-losing trades just for the commissions? Or get their customers to buy loser investments they are desperate to sell?
Well, Wall Street investment banks like Goldman Sachs take that to a whole new level.
In the first quarter of 2010, Goldman did not have a single losing trading day. Not one. This is unprecedented. In fact, it is impossible — if you are really trading. But Goldman is not trading.
They are playing a rigged game. They are the house. They get to see everyone else’s cards, before they bet. There is no way they can lose — until D day comes.
All because of The Beast and HFT (High Frequency or black-box Trading). It should be illegal. Instead, the exchanges have made special deals with Goldman Sachs and a few other mega-bankers, to give them the ultimate trading edge.
These deals are a license for Goldman to print money: by stealing from you and every other investor. i.e. anyone who trades or owns stocks, mutual funds, even futures and options.
You, your pension fund, your IRA — everyone who trades — has to go to the floor of the exchange to buy or sell stocks in the spreads. Not Goldman. They bypass all that. Their computer -– The Beast -– is connected directly to the NYSE computers. In fact, it is located in the same room with the NYSE’s tired, old, slow machine.
That means Goldman can make trades directly with the NYSE computer. Before everyone else. With zero delays. The computer can trade trillions of dollars and billions of positions in micro seconds. All at extreme discounts. Less than a penny a share.
Goldman pays hundreds of millions a year for this privilege. It allows them to make guaranteed billions, as they screw the market.
A few years ago, HFTs only accounted for one-third of trading. Now they make up 70%-to-80% of all trades on the exchanges. They are why the markets have soared these past two years.
Goldman and its billionaire hedge fund buddies say they are “giving liquidity to the market.” Bull!
The market had no liquidity problems back in the 1970s, when it traded 100 million shares a day. It sure doesn’t have liquidity problems now, when 3 billion shares a day are traded.
Can computers predict the future with 100%
accuracy? Goldman says yes. History says no
…and I believe history.
Reality is over two billion shares trade by the HFTs. Every day. They are executed with NO human supervision at all. None.
These super-computers use the same flawed economic models (known as Black-Scholes) that have wiped out everyone who has used them. The problem is simple.
Humans make the mathematical models. People program the computers. They try to think of every economic/financial event under the sun. They try to plan for every possible contingency. They play God with your money.
But they are not God. They can’t conceive of all the variables that enter the global financial equations. It’s impossible. No one can.
They ALWAYS miss the “unknown unknowns.” The freak events that make up real life. Terrorist strikes. Hurricanes. Rioting Greeks. Market downturns. Bank wipeouts. North Korea attacking South Korea. The endless bubbles bursting, in real estate and high tech.
That means their precious computer models go tragically, fatally wrong. They result in colossal wipeouts. They have proved this over and over.
One example: computer models brought on the huge U.S. real estate bubble. They said housing was the ideal long-term investment for the little guy. It would keep making profits for you, forever. WRONG.
They failed to take into account what happens when people can no longer pay their mortgages. Even with two incomes. This led to the housing crash. Trillions worth of derivatives went bust. Trillions more are still going bust.
All because they did not factor in a key fact of life. One I warned about for the last ten years.
They assumed real estate prices could never go down. Not for the entire real estate market. Remember the old cliché: “they aren’t making any more of the stuff.” So real estate will keep going up in price. Their back-dated models told them that.
Sure, they said, we have had real estate downturns. New York City in the 1970s. Texas in the 80s. Colorado and Florida in the 1990s.
But their models showed these wipeouts were regional only. They did not last long. I heard them call them “buying opportunities.” The national market, they said, still went up.
So their solution was simple. Spread the risk over all real estate markets. The rising markets would more than make up for the occasional, local down moves.
This is why institutions kept pouring money into real estate after 911. It’s why U.S. housing values soared, in the biggest bubble ever.
But God is God. People who think they are smarter than everyone are pompous pricks. God wins. Pompous pricks always lose big-time in the end.
The real estate wipeout — the financial collapse we are in — is based on three big mistakes.
One, the mathematical geniuses who think their computer programs perfectly model the future. They don’t.
Two, the greedy handlers who hired the mathematicians to justify their own crooked schemes. The masters of the universe who run Goldman and Wall Street. They play craps with the world’s money.
Three, the masses. Sadly, they are clueless. They trust Wall Street. They do anything the media and their brokers tell them. They risk everything, to chase slightly higher yields. Or get in on the latest bubble Wall Street is blowing.
Well, what do you know? The one thing took place, that Wall Street’s super-computers could never see. It turns out real estate doesn’t always go up. It can go down everywhere, all at the same time, and stay down for decades. Bubbles burst. In new, unexpected ways that catch the computers by surprise.
The models didn’t see any of that. They didn’t see that their trading made too many loans -– pumped too much money — into real estate. More money than the markets could efficiently use.
This created the bubble. People paid way, way too much for their houses. They borrowed far more than the houses were really worth. All because the computer models said real estate values always go up.
The models also said derivatives debt was safe. It would “manage risk.” Keep the economy growing and the bubbles blowing.
100% false. Derivatives collapsed. So did the real estate they financed. Bringing down the entire house of cards.
Everyone who bought into this b.s. is screwed to the wall. The biggest investment they will make in their lives -– their home -– is worth a fraction what it was.
Something even uglier and more diabolical
is at work in today’s stock market
Wall Street’s game is simple. Create off-exchange derivatives, that shift risk to the unknowing…hide losses…and show profits that are not really there. Institutionalized fraud at the highest level.
Derivatives are so complicated, few men alive understand them. Even fewer know how they work. This is not because people are stupid. It’s because by design derivatives are made to be too complicated to understand.
I am a simple man. So complicated things don’t befuddle me. I am befuddled already.
And because I have a simple mind, I reduce things to their simplest level. That’s where my fundamental analysis comes from. That has held me in good stead for 30 years.
Let me tell you what 99.9% of the players in the game don’t understand. And the 0.1% who do, will never tell you.
The Greek crisis is just one of many sovereign debt crises the world over. As our recent Wall Street Insider issues have shown, it will soon hit Italy, Spain, Portugal, England, China…and finally the U.S.
This is not complicated. Governments the world over went on a wild debt spree. For decades. They borrowed untold trillions. All to pay for programs that bought off the voters. That is how they stayed in power.
Now there is no money left to borrow. Their credit cards are maxed out. The bankers can’t scheme any more cash. The countries are broke. And the loan sharks are banging on their doors. It’s really as simple as that.
The U.S. and Europe cannot inflate
their way out of this crisis
This is not an inflationary, print-money crisis, like you have seen in the past. These crises are deflationary. For a simple reason. In modern times, currencies float freely. Markets set their values.
Not so in the past. Back then, currencies were fixed. Governments set the value. And they saw to it that their currencies did NOT lose value.
That let the governments print money and inflate their debts away. Without harming the value of their currency.
Greece used to do that. Today is a different story. Greece is a member (for now) of the EU. It can’t print its problems away. It is BORROWING money, not printing it. Greece is cutting pay, benefits, and retirements. It is DEFLATING.
In fact, it’s far worse. Greece is in a depression. As is most of the world.
Remember, currencies now change value every day. Every minute. And markets are mightier than government’s puny interventions. The days when government could pull its inflation fixes and print money are over.
News flash: the U.S. will not print money. It won’t inflate away its debt crisis. Neither will Europe, Japan or England.
They can’t. The minute they try that, their currencies get trashed. People won’t buy the mountain of debt these nations so desperately need. Worse, the world will dump their currencies. That will destroy their economies.
So how will America solve its debt crisis? Simple. It will get money the old-fashioned way. It will borrow more — and tax the hell out of its citizens!
The U.S. will go even deeper into debt, making whatever devil’s bargains it has to, to stay afloat. Obama has already begun this. He has raised taxes. He has sent the deficit soaring, from $162 billion in 2007 to $1.4 trillion in 2009 and 2010.
Folks, you ain’t seen nothing yet. As Obama likes to say, he is “just getting started.”
The U.S. government will drastically cut public services. It will impoverish the American middle class. Taxes will devastate you.
Other developed nations will do the same thing. They have no choice. They are just as trapped as we are.
Of course, cutting pay, service and benefits has a name. It’s called a depression. A deflation. The opposite of inflation.
The masses do not understand deflation. They have never lived through the ravages of a depression. All they have known, their whole lives, is growth and inflation. That is what they think is coming.
They are dead wrong. Deflation is coming. A deeper, darker depression is coming.
Why do you think the U.S. CPI just fell, year over year, for the first time since World War II?
Why is M3 -– the best gauge of money supply -– plunging at the same rate as during the 1930s depression?
I’ll tell you why: The world is in a deflation. It will wipe out the masses. They will never know what hit them.
And that brings me back to Goldman’s secret wealth-destroying weapon, The Beast…
On Thursday May 6, the markets
caught a glimpse of the future. They
felt the cold chill of what lies ahead
Sooner than anyone thought possible, investors started throwing in the towel. They realized the rally in stocks is just about over. There’s no recovery. The sovereign debt wipeout is beginning.
Before Flash Crash Thursday, the market had dropped 100-to-200 points every day that week. Thursday started as more of the same. Then Goldman Sachs’ high-frequency trading system from hell — The Beast — kicked in.
High-frequency trading is just a polite term for front-running. It lets Wall Street insiders trade before their customers do. Almost no one understands this. Anyone who did would never set foot in the Wall Street casino again, except in very smart, sophisticated ways.
Here’s how it works.
As I told you, Wall Street computers are directly connected to the exchanges’ computers. So firms like Goldman learn all orders that come into the NYSE and NASDAQ — all the exchanges — before they get executed. All buy orders. All sell orders.
That lets them place their own orders, for the same stocks (or options or commodities), ahead of their customers. They get there micro-seconds before everyone else. Which makes all the difference.
Say Goldman’s computer sees an order come in to the exchange, to sell a large block of IBM shares. Goldman rushes in a few micro-seconds ahead of time. Again, it can do this because it is hard wired directly into the exchange computers…and its computer is MUCH faster than anyone else’s.
Goldman sells that same stock first. Its selling takes the market lower. So the original seller gets a lower price. Goldman pockets the difference.
Same thing when Goldman sees buy orders come in. It buys ahead. That forces the market higher, before the legitimate trade is executed. Buyers must pay a higher price.
Each week, Goldman front-runs billions of shares. That is how they made nearly $30 billion in profits the past few years -– even though the U.S. economy is in a deep recession, and normal investment banking activities (IPOs, mergers & acquisitions) have fallen into the crapper.
It’s like playing poker, when you know the cards of all your opponents -– but they don’t know yours. Goldman knows the cards of every retirement fund…mutual fund…institution and individual who trades stocks, commodities and bonds.
Remember, everyone else is not connected to the exchange computers, with their own personal multi-billion dollar super computer. Their trading systems work slower. That puts them at a fatal disadvantage.
Goldman’s computer knows all trades, stops, buy and sell orders people are going to make — BEFORE THEY MAKE THEM. It jumps ahead of them, and “scalps” them. That is Wall Street’s own term.
And this computerized front-running, this “scalping,” led to the chaos on Flash Crash Thursday…
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How to turn a Greek riot
into a global stock crash
The Greek riots were broadcast around the world. Investors were scared witless. This is not what Wall Street told them would happen.
People started to figure out there is no recovery. Huge amounts of sell orders hit the exchanges, all at once.
Goldman Sachs’ brilliant computer models saw those sell orders. Its black box computers did their job. Without human knowledge or intervention. In microseconds they jumped in ahead of the market, and put in more sell orders. Goldman was making a killing.
But two problems came up. First, sell orders kept coming in. From all around the world. The sells greatly outweighed the buys.
The NYSE’s slow-moving computer saw this huge imbalance of sell orders. It delayed the processing of all trades. By 90 seconds. That is, every order was held up for 90 seconds.
This supposedly was to give the market makers time to check for errors. (In reality it’s to let insiders cover their asses — by dumping falling shares of stock first.)
The Beast and the other HFT computers could not place trades on the NYSE fast enough. Remember, they make decisions every micro-second. For them, a minute and a half is an eternity.
But even more selling pressure was building up: the sell orders kept pouring in. Goldman’s computer knew about these orders before the NYSE did. It is both connected to the exchange computers and far faster than they are.
So the computer did what it is programmed to do. It started selling on other stock exchanges. It sold on the futures and options markets as well.
These markets did not delay sales. They were deluged with orders to sell. Prices fell even faster than on the NYSE. This started the vicious round of selling world-wide. No exchange, no market, was immune.
A huge backlog of sell orders built up. It accelerated by the micro-second.
You literally saw stock market traders stampede for the burning exchange doors. The whole thing quickly got out of control. Because there were no buyers!
And the computer systems from hell did more of the unthinkable. Seeing prices fall, they kept selling more, bidding the market down. Down, down, down she goes. Where she stops, nobody knows.
Computers led the market meltdown. A meltdown like nothing seen before. But it is only the first. Soon the collapses will be too big to stop. Even temporary, partial reversals will not last.
Please understand. Wall Street has bet all your money -– our entire financial system -– on their computer models. On the bizarre belief that they can correctly predict the future, day in and day out, without error. Do you see how crazy this is?
Stop-loss orders screwed
the little guy even more
On Flash-Crash Thursday, things kept getting worse. Many people trade (foolishly) with stop-loss orders. Stops are supposed to limit losses. But in the new world of The Beast, they only make your losses bigger.
Why? Because The Beast is programmed to find the stops… and then bust the small trader out of the market. With massive losses.
Contrary to popular belief, stop-loss orders do not hold your broker to a set price. All he has to do is get the “best possible” price. That could be far lower than you expect.
In the market chaos, stocks crashed right through the stop prices. The usual Wall Street victims could not get out at their stop-loss prices. The little guy got screwed. Even more than usual.
Many people were forced out at the lows of the day. Yet the market closed well above the original stop price. In some cases, the average guy lost everything. This time by The Beast. Think of the flash crash as The Beast’s coming-out party.
One stock was selling for $42 a share early Thursday. It plunged straight down to $.04. That’s what the average guy, with stops, got. Four cents a share. He lost 99% of his money.
Later that same day, this stock bounced back. It closed over $41. Who do you think bought these shares at the ridiculously cheap price of a few pennies a share? And then watched it shoot back up to over $41? None other than Goldman Sachs’ HFT computer trader, The BEAST.
In essence, Goldman & Co stole these people’s stock. No humans involved in any way.
This is why trading with stops is a suckers’ game. When you need them the most, they will screw you to the wall. It is why you need to use carefully-selected trading instruments that are Beast-proof.
Not surprisingly, the regulators are still scratching their heads, looking for someone to blame. Of course, they are careful not to piss off their future bosses… the people they will work for when they leave government service. Do you know that many key financial/economic positions in government are held by “former” Goldman partners?
By day’s end of the Flash Crash, the market manipulators were able to regroup. They brought the market back up some. The Dow still lost nearly 350 points.
But here’s what you must understand. You just got a tiny, graphic, demonstration of what’s to come.
First, tiny Greece (population: 11.2 million) broke the back of the insane stock market rally. That led to the biggest stock market meltdown ever. And it is just the start. The first run at what will be the worst stock market crash in history.
As I told you, giants Spain and Italy owe hundreds of times more than Greece does. So do England and Portugal. They are too big to bail out. They will be the next to wipe out.
Their sovereign debt is tied to every economy the world over. And they are more broke than GM, Chrysler, AIG, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch were -– all put together.
What’s more, our major banks hold their bad paper. En masse. Their collapses will start a financial chain reaction, that cannot be stopped.
And then there’s the biggest debtor of all. The U.S. We will need more money than anyone. By huge amounts, for years to come.
Printing our way out of this is not an option. We are talking a depression, worse than any of modern times.
People will lose their savings. Their retirements. Their homes, work, and bank deposits. People who manage to hang onto their jobs will see their pay severely cut.
These are all deflationary phenomena. They are taking place in front of your eyes. God help the world.
May 6's mini-crash demonstrated a second thing. The one good thing to come from all this. The recommendations I made performed beautifully. Like clockwork, in fact.
They proved our trades work in a crash. Just like they were designed to do. They also showed our trades have the potential to make a big pot of money. Even while everyone else is wiping out.
Virtually every trade around the globe fell hard. But ours went straight up, other than a few gold ETF’s. (And they went up a few days later.) We are positioned perfectly for the next phase of this wipeout.
The special instruments I selected are relatively immune from The Beast. From high-frequency trading. You get great leverage, but no margin calls. No expiration dates or time limits. They do not trade like futures or options. Because they are stocks.
Our trades were completely liquid. No one got busted out. Just profits rolling in with every down tick. And it’s been a party nearly every day since flash-crash Thursday, as markets on balance continue to plunge….
We are sitting there now, getting even more moves in our favor. As the global market and sovereign debt wipeout continues. And the best is yet to come…
High-Frequency Trading:
How Wall Street Rigs the Stock Market Casino
I’ve said this for years, but no one ever believed me until recently.
The stock market is rigged. Crooked to the core. The big trading firms play with loaded dice.
But that does not mean you can’t beat them at their own game. If fact it is moments like these — with panic in the street and Wall Street in desperation, screwing everyone in sight – that the serious money can be made.
The stock market has always been a rigged game. But now a new super-computer has turned a sleazy criminal enterprise into global fraud. This doomsday device will end up destroying its own creators.
High-Frequency-Trading (HFT) super-computers, like the Beast, are able to find out the highest price traders will pay in a millisecond. They then extort that full amount millions of times over, to maximize profits. This has nothing to do with efficiency or innovation. It is about stealing as much of your money as they can.
The way they carry off this scam is beyond belief. The deep-pocket bank/brokerages actually pay the NYSE and the NASDAQ hundreds of millions of dollars each year. In return, the NYSE and NASDAQ connect them to their own computers ON THE FLOOR OF THE EXCHANGES. This lets them shave off critical milliseconds — after they’ve gotten a first peak at incoming trades.
It boils down to this. HFT lets Goldman see other people’s orders ahead of time. Before the NYSE or NASDAQ executes these trades. Goldman’s supercomputers are so fast, they can then trade in front of the rest of the market.
It’s called front-running. It goes on every day right under the nose of SEC head Mary Schapiro. They know it and they let it happen!
“Nearly everyone on Wall Street is wondering how hedge funds and large banks like Goldman Sachs are making so much money so soon after the financial system nearly collapsed,” said the New York Times. “High-frequency trading is one answer. High-frequency trading systems are so fast they can outsmart or outrun other investors, humans and computers alike.”
“This kind of unfair access seriously compromises the integrity of our markets and creates a two-tiered system where a privileged group of insiders receives preferential treatment, depriving others of a fair price for their transactions,” wrote Sen. Charles Schumer to the SEC.
HFT computers learn every sell order that comes in. Every buy order. Because they are faster than all other computers, they front-run the market.
Goldman Sachs disclosed recently that it had 46 “$100 million trading days” in the second quarter of 2009. A record number. No one has done so well in the history of trading. How is this possible?
The U.S. economy is in its biggest downturn since the Great Depression. Banks and brokers are hiding more losses than ever on their derivatives books. Merger and acquisition volume is way down. So are IPO’s. So it seems bizarre that investment banks like Goldman had record quarters.
Now you know the secret. They are skimming the cream off of U.S. trading activity. Billions of times each day.
Ordinarily, a buyer and a seller show up on the floor. A specialist determines a price that satisfies buyer and seller. That’s the market price. If there are too many sellers and not enough buyers, the specialist lowers the price until buyers and sellers agree.
Goldman throws a fatal monkey wrench into that. Before the market price can be made, Goldman electronically floods the specialist with thousands and thousands of orders. In essence, they commandeer the trade. That lets them siphon off nickels and dimes for themselves.
Until a few years ago, Goldman was just an investment bank. But in 2008 Goldman magically transformed itself into a bank holding company. One of the benefits of having ex-Goldman executives fill nearly every key economic/financial position in government. They wired the game with their own people in key government jobs. Yet Goldman still remained an investment bank.
Now Goldman can borrow massive amounts of money from the Fed -– at virtually 0% interest. The lowest rates in the world. With The Beast, it uses this money to front-run every stock that trades. Simply because it pays the exchanges to let it see everyone’s trades, before they can make them.
So you understand: Goldman gets to speculate with your tax money, and pay nothing for that money. They get to rig the game against you and steal from you. If, or better put when they lose, government will bail them out.
Front running with HFT has become Wall Street’s principal business. The primary force driving most volume on exchanges. They are losing their asses on their derivatives. But The Beast lets Wall Street manipulate markets – both for financial and political gain.
How? Because HFTs operate on a massive scale. They account for 70%-to-80% of all trades. THEY set the overall market direction. Without any fundamental or even technical reason. And they sucker retail investors into a rising market. Even though it has nothing to do with “green shoots” or the false “recovery.”
High-frequency trading explains why activity on the nation’s stock exchanges has exploded. Average daily volume has nearly tripled since 2005, according to data from the NYSE. A handful of high-frequency traders (Goldman Sachs) now account for well more than half of all trades.
“This is where all the money is getting made,” said William H. Donaldson, former chairman and chief executive of the New York Stock Exchange and today an adviser to a big hedge fund. “If an individual investor doesn’t have the means to keep up, they’re at a huge disadvantage.”
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IMF just trapped the Leopard (Greece)
Soon they will trap the Eagle (Italy)…the Grand Old Lion (England)…
…and finally their biggest prey of all.
The world’s formerly invincible 2-ton gorilla:
America…
The time I always knew was coming is finally upon us. The global depression has just taken its first victim, from among the world’s civilized countries:
Greece.
Greece, “the Leopard,” only makes up 2.16% of EU GDP. Yet the IMF just gave this tiny economy an emergency bailout of $1 trillion. The biggest bailout of any country in world history.
(Yes, they say the fund is for other nations, too. But who are they kidding? It’s barely enough for Greece this year. The others will need tens of trillions. More on this a bit later.)
To put Greece’s bailout in perspective, the old record was set in 1997, during the Asian crisis. South Korea then had over four times as many people as Greece does now. Nearly triple its GDP.
Yet S. Korea got a bailout of ‘just’ $57 billion. One seventeenth (1/17th) as much as Greece!
S. Korea’s bailout came with no strings attached. No tough terms. The Greek bailout is exactly the opposite.
Greece’s government had to give up all control — all sovereign decision-making — over its economy. Its nation is now run by a consortium of the world’s most powerful bankers.
(No, not the ones you see on TV biz shows. They are the real power-brokers, whose names you will never know, and whose faces you will never see. More on this in just a bit.)
As I’ll show you, that has earth-shattering consequences. Not just for Greece. But for you, me and every American.
Because Greece is not the only nation deep in debt. So is much of Europe… the Asian tigers… Latin America… Australia… and especially the U.S.
You just got a sneak preview of what awaits every big debtor country. Including Spain, that is next in line…and including us.
Yes, America. Our nation -– our lives -– are about to turn upside down. In some very ugly ways.
There are four key things you need to know about the Greek bailout, and what it really means for us…
Greece no longer runs itself. The EU, World
Bank, IMF and power brokers behind them do
To get their emergency bailout, the Greeks were forced to take a 25% cutback. Across the board, in every key economic measure.
Pay. Government services. Health care. Pensions. Vacations. Everything took a huge hit.
Actually, I take that back. One thing did not go down. Taxes. To pay for their new austerity program, Greek taxes will soar. Each person will have to give up to 50% of his pay. (America are you listening? You’re next.)
Big Brother (their socialist government) used to look after the Greeks. From cradle to grave. Overnight they were turned into wage slaves. They will live the rest of their lives in poverty.
Socialism will be replaced by economic totalitarianism. As always. Eventually Greece will be thrown out of the EU.
The Greek people sure aren’t getting any bailouts. They owe as much individually as before.
But now they will make far less money. Their retirements are a pittance. Their home values are crashing. Simply put, they will go from prosperous to poor.
From this moment on, Greece’s elected officials are powerless. Their government rules in name only. The world’s bankers call the shots. They run the show. As they are about to in every debt-ridden economy the world over.
No surprise that rioting has already started in the streets. But you ain’t seen anything yet. Greece is just the opening blow, in a bloodless coup that will soon take place the world over…
Part two: sovereign bailouts/IMF takeovers
will spread around the world
Greece was first. Soon Spain and Italy will come to the table, for their bailouts.
Spain and Italy are in far worse shape than Greece. They don’t just need hundreds of billions. They need many trillions.
They, too, will surrender their national sovereignty to the world’s secret bankers. Through the offices of the IMF.
England will follow shortly, hat in hand. It needs at least ten trillion.
The English will have no choice. The ultimate nanny state is dead broke. They will agree to the same terms Greece did. Their elected leaders will become mere figureheads. Their people, debt slaves.
China is a mess. Its economy is crashing. (Our 58-page April issue -– titled “China Doll” -– shows how the Chinese “miracle” is in fact the Chinese nightmare. We’ll be glad to send it to new subscribers free, with our compliments.) Without more bailouts, China cannot survive.
And then the truly big game will fall in the bankers’ sights. The country that owes vastly more money than any other in history. That has more assets, more wealth, than any other. The United States.
When I talk about “the world’s bankers,” I don’t mean Citigroup. Or Wells Fargo. Or even Goldman Sachs.
I’m talking about the real movers and shakers. The people behind the IMF and World Bank. The power brokers who control organizations like the UN and the EU. They will gain control of the world’s free nations, without firing a shot.
Yes, the EU is one of their key tools. Don’t let the screams about its supposed “breakup” fool you. The EU is in great shape. It has virtually no debt. It is playing this crisis like a fine Stradivarius.
The EU did not directly loan Greece one red cent. Germany loaned Greece money. Britain loaned them money. Even the U.S. loaned them money, through the IMF.
The EU did not put up a thing. Yet it still took control of Greece. Just like it will take control of Spain, Italy, Portugal and England.
The U.S. government and citizens have the biggest debt of any nation on the planet. Hundreds of trillions of dollars. We are the biggest fish on the IMF/EU/UN hook. Even America will have to come to the IMF, begging hat in hand for a massive bailout.
Won’t Americans be surprised. They are counting on government to turn on the printing presses. They expect inflation to bring back their home values. To make their mutual funds bounce back to new record highs, and save their asses.
Unfortunately, the guys who set this trap are much smarter than the average bear. The tune we are dancing to is no longer inflation. It’s the opposite. DEFLATION.
Greece proves it. Falling money supply in major nations around the globe (the U.S., Japan, Germany, England) proves it.
The EU, the World Bank, the IMF come in. They say, “You must bite the bullet. Everyone makes less. Everyone has less and pays more taxes. You can’t inflate. You will DEFLATE.”
Do you see? Americans will not get the inflationary reprieve they are dreaming of and planning for. Instead of the dollar falling, it will become worth more. That is already happening. For the past year, the dollar has soared against most major currencies.
Deflation, the scourge of our time, will plunge stocks to their lowest levels in 25 years. It will drive home prices down to values not seen since the last Great Depression.
It will raise U.S. unemployment to rates suffered by 3rd world countries. It will bring U.S. wages in line with the sweat shops of China and southeast Asia.
Never forget. The debtor is the slave of the creditor. And Americans are the biggest debtors of all. They bought everything on credit. From their SUVs to their swimming pools to their remodeled kitchens.
They thought inflation would let them pay back their debt with ever-cheaper dollars. Now they are learning the hard truth. They can’t pay it back at all. Deflation makes their dollars more dear and harder to come by.
This is the ultimate tragedy for America. Most Americans will end up paying a terrible price for their debt. They are becoming a nation of debt slaves.
For us, knowing the secret of this depression and deflation could mean a fortune. Because we have a way to potentially make a killing -– when and if the events we know are coming, actually do take place.
Which leads me to the next key point…
3rd problem with these bailouts: me
I have a pretty good record of seeing the economic future. But sometimes that is not all it’s cracked up to be.
The problem is timing. There’s no way to know exactly when events you see in the future will unfold.
In the past, that could be a titty twister. The wrecking ball of trading. We could be right. We could get there ahead of time. But time and the dreaded margin call was our enemy.
Not any more, though…
Number 4: the good news
You can turn this economic upheaval to your great benefit -– and you don’t have to worry about timing!
Here’s why. As I’ve shown you, a new world order is taking over. The EU, the IMF and the real power-brokers are running things. They are re-shaping the world into their deflationary vision.
Everyone will earn less. Have less. Pay more taxes, and still owe them more.
Huge financial institutions and corporations in America will be toppled. Nothing can stop that.
Folks, this is no longer a prediction. It’s already started. Think GM. Lehman Brothers. AIG. Merrill Lynch. Chrysler. Greece and now Spain.
All great icons from America’s and the world’s golden era. All wiped out, by the new world order.
The brand-new trading tool we use helps make sure that does NOT happen to you. This tool gives you two things.
One, a way you could protect your wealth. While our biggest companies and financial institutions fall apart -– as the IMF uses debt as a noose to strangle us and take our vast wealth -– you could keep your money safe and sound. You could escape the debt slave trap.
Two, you could make the most spectacular potential profits I have ever seen, or even heard of. Bar none. You have the realistic potential to make 100 for 1 profits. Maybe more.
This is not just wishful thinking. The trades I’m talking about have already done this!
In the last market downturn they proved themselves like no other. In fact, one of them soared to over $1000 a share, on a split-adjusted basis. That’s because these trades make money, as our biggest, dead-broke banks fall in value.
Make no mistake. Our banks are flat broke. Why do you think they have needed trillions in bailouts -– just to keep their doors open? Why have hundreds gone under…leaving the FDIC itself broke…with more than a thousand still on the federal bank problem list?
These banks are losing more money than ever before. But thanks to temporary bailouts -– thanks to the stock market rally-back -– their share prices have soared in value!
They have never been more over-valued. They are overdue for another huge wipeout. Look how much you could potentially make…
Say these special trades I’m telling you about just go back to where they were when the rally-back started. You could turn a thousand dollars into a hundred thousand. Ten thousand into a million.
Now suppose you have a bigger stake to speculate with. Say fifty grand. You could turn that into five million.
And here’s the best part. You never risk a penny of your money, other than your initial investment. You face no margin calls. No expiration dates.
You can wait till the cows come home, for the market to go our way. When it does, you could make the killing of killings. Time is no longer your enemy. It’s your ally.
My friend, I have never been more sure that the market WILL go our way. Of course I could be wrong. But the proof of the ugly new world order is everywhere.
You have seen the first domino fall. We are in a still spreading depression. Real estate is doomed. So are banks and commodities. And that presents some of the greatest trading opportunities we have ever seen.
Watch Greece, then Spain and England, over the coming days, weeks and months. Look at the impoverishment of their masses. The rioting in the streets.
A wild bucking bronco was just broken. It was made into a kids’ pony horse, that must work the rest of its life for food and a bed of hay. Rather than be a stud, running wild and free.
As you ponder the Greek and EU economic/sovereign debt wipeouts, think of America. We owe more debt than all of them put together. We are FAR more vulnerable than the Greeks, or Spaniards, or Italians, were.
Think of the tightening terms that can be forced on us. The impoverishment of the masses. No magic bullet can save us. No inflationary bailout.
We are facing a depression. It will impoverish the masses, who are hopelessly in debt.
Pretty soon now, you will make half what you used to. You will have half what you used to have. Your taxes will be double what they are now. The good life you have known is going bye-bye. Unless you embrace what I am telling you.
Dollars will be harder and harder to come by. Your debt burden will be bigger and harder to pay.
We know how you can avoid all this. We have the right conservative recommendations, that will help you save your wealth. We also have proven speculative trades. They could make you a fortune, as everyone else is losing theirs.
First the raging fire of deflation claimed the U.S. homeowner. Then it spread to the biggest American banks. Then our major corporations.
Now it is claiming entire countries. The depression it brings is changing the map of the earth. Just like every depression in history has.
The rules of making money -– of just keeping your wealth — have changed once again. Learn the new ways, learn the new world order, or get wiped out with everyone else.
Look around you. A whole lot of people have got it wrong. They are paying a terrible price.
That does not have to happen to you. But you must learn the new rules of the game. Before it’s too late.
Want to know who will rule the world? Who will decide what your house is worth? How much you make, and what you can spend it on?
The IMF and the EU will. The hidden bankers behind them will. They already are Greece’s masters. They will soon bring down Spain and Italy.
And the biggest prize of all is in their cross hairs. The USA. Obama is not our savior. He is the man selling us out to the global bankers.
They run every nation that falls into their debt trap. With an iron fist of austerity. I call it abject poverty.
They are doing what Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao dreamed of, but failed to achieve. They are taking over the world. And without firing a shot. They are using the world’s massive debt, to turn the world into their debt slaves.
Please don’t buy that b.s. about “making the world a better place.” The World Bank and IMF have run every nation they touch into the ground. Their job is to make sure their secret world banker owners are paid back every last dime. With compound interest.
They give local politicians the perfect excuse. The ideal cover. “You can throw me out of office. It won’t make any difference. We need money. The only place we can get it is the IMF and world bank. To do that, we must meet these conditions.”
Remember, the biggest debt slaves of all — who owe the most money — are Americans. The U.S. government. We dug this hole. Now we must lie in it.
Americans are about to become much poorer. For generations. We will struggle with this epic mountain of debt.
Remember, part of their plan is to use The Beast to cheat you out of your savings. (If you are lucky enough to have any left.) Having a pile of money will do you no good if you don’t know how to keep them away from it.
And they already have stolen a huge amount from you. Think about the value of your house. Your retirement plan. Your stock market investments.
You will not survive by jumping in on the latest fad bubble investments. Wall Street cooks up new ones for you every week. It uses every P.R. trick in the book to entice you into them.
This is your wakeup call. The debt trap has been set. The world’s most powerful people are springing it.
They are trapping your friends and neighbors. They are picking off nations around the world. Odds are they will trap you, too. Unless you understand the new rules of the game.
I only know one way to get out of this. The rest of this report tells you how. Consider it your get-out-of-debtor-prison free card. I hope you are smart enough to take it.
The markets are rigged – duhh!
So the markets are rigged! So the financial system is going to collapse!
What’s new? Why the shock? It’s not a new discovery.
Sooner or later, every financial system devised by man collapses. Usually a lot sooner than most people imagined.
Markets have been rigged since the beginning of time. Romans filled their “gold” coins with lead. They fooled people into believing they were solid gold.
The Dutch cheated the Indians out of Manhattan Island. For $24 worth of beads and cloth.
Then the English turned the tables, and conned the Dutch. They got Manhattan from Holland for some Caribbean sugar plantations -– right before the cane sugar market collapsed, because they started growing sugar beat in Europe. Europeans didn’t need high-priced cane sugar from the distant islands any more.
New Amsterdam was renamed New York by its new owners, the English. It became the world’s trading center. The former Caribbean sugar colonies became ever-loving hell holes. Their biggest deal of the week is when the cruise ships arrive. Talk about payback to the Dutch!
Rigging the stock and commodities markets is legendary. The little guy always trades at a huge disadvantage. That’s why most stock market Internet-Trader wanna-be’s, along with the “secret commodities trading systems” people use, never make money.
You got to change with the times. At one time, we included futures trades among our recommendations. With no buy or sell stops. We had some luck.
Now the world is different. Wall Street has gotten into the futures market big time. The Beast knows your trades. Your stops. It knows how much money you have to trade with.
Goldman and Wall Street have billion-dollar trading accounts. They can run your stops, empty your account, in minutes. If you don’t have millions to trade with, and a ton of staying power, you cannot compete. They will kill you.
But for every weapon made, someone comes up with a counter weapon. The Samurai spent a lifetime turning their bodies into lethal weapons. They were defeated by the black-powder pistol, that an 80-year old woman could fire.
Suits of armor protected brave knights against swords and axes. The cross-bow bolt defeated them. It sliced through their armor like a hot knife through butter. They never knew what hit them.
Castle walls were hundreds of feet high. They took years to build. The cannon turned them into a pile of rubble in minutes.
The low-flying helicopter gunship, a devastating weapon in Vietnam, was defeated by the shoulder-fired rocket. And on and on it goes.
Goldman’s high-frequency trading super computer (The Beast) is a devastating weapon of mass wealth destruction. It decimates day traders and fund holders.
Own or trade stocks, and Goldman will find you. They will blow you out of the market — if you do not have the right counter weapon. They sink unsuspecting traders, like a passenger ship hit by a German U-boat torpedo.
You have to adjust your trading strategies to the new realities. You must intelligently use new weapons.
Our trading strategy is simple, but Beast/HFT-smart. First, we make sure the vast bulk of your wealth -– 90% or more -– is completely safe and sound: in conservative investments designed to survive this depression and debt wipeout.
The Beast can’t touch you, when you invest this way. Neither can Wall Street, or the government, or Obama. You know your wealth will be there, whenever you want or need it. No matter what.
We cover all this in the Wall Street Insiders newsletter. You learn how to make your wealth invincible to real estate downturns. To stock crashes. To bank failures. It’s not hard, once you know how.
At the same time, we teach small investors how to make 30%, 50% or more returns from their conservative investments: with super-safe SPECIAL U.S. government bonds.
For example, in June 2007 I told Wall Street Insiders subscribers to buy a very specific, very special, non-traditional U.S. government bond. Interest rates at the time were 5.25%. I told my subscribers rates were headed lower.
A year or so later, the value of that bond more than doubled. Had you invested $100,000 in those bonds, you could have pocketed an extra $100K. Or you could have turned $500,000 into $1 million.
That’s from a conservative investment, 100% backed by the U.S. government. No matter what, the U.S. government guarantees to pay you back your principal and interest. No, it’s no longer just your grandpa’s sleepy old bond trade.
Of course, you can’t buy just any government security. You have to know exactly which one. There are hundreds of different types. They have different maturities. Different yields and structures.
But the ones I recommend to you are designed for maximum protection. They also give you the opportunity to make 30%, even 50% gains or more. Worst case, you still get all your money back – with interest!
Once you know your wealth is safe — in conservative investments like the ones I told you about above — you take a small portion of your liquid wealth. 10% or less. That 10% is all you need, to potentially make a killing.
Right now I have over 10 trades like this to give you. They exploit the fatal flaw in The Beast. You could make a fortune at the expense of Goldman and Wall Street. i.e. the very people who have been stealing from you all these years.
With our aggressive recommendations, we don’t play for pennies a share. Or dollars a move. We play for the home run, the big one. With the right instruments. That is one key to potential success.
These recommendations are designed to make money for you, as European debt wipes out. As the financial/economic crisis brings down the global economy, in a sea or red ink and debt.
We play for the big moves and let Wall Street have their daily scalps. The ones they use on retirement and fund investors. We do not day trade, like they do everything in their power to get you to do.
We don’t care if we want to buy an aggressive trade at $10, and Goldman floods the market so it costs $10.25. We are looking for that trade to go to $100. So Goldman’s manipulations don’t affect us.
And when (if!) that big day comes… when The Beast is smoking, like on “Beast Thursday” (May 6)… we are there to storm the castle walls and loot the Goldman treasury.
The secret is to hold your positions. That’s what our trades let you do – at no extra cost. Then you simply wait for the fundamentals to return. They always do. Ask the people who paid $400k for their $150k house — that they are now buried in — about market fundamentals. Ask them about bubbles bursting.
Our secret weapon: it lets
us kill The Beast
The economy is already perched on the edge of a cliff. The Beast -– along with more sovereign debt wipeouts -– could push it over the edge.
That’s why I think it’s essential that you subscribe immediately to my Wall Street Insiders monthly newsletter.
In WSI, you learn about special leveraged “niche” Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs). These ETFs let you, the little guy, trade in ways that used to be possible only for big-wallet hedge funds.
Let me tell you: these little-known ETFs are a gift from God for average investors. Especially in times like these.
They can do for you what the stinger missile did for the Afghans. They used that missile to destroy Russian helicopters and low-flying jets. They handed the USSR its grand defeat in Afghanistan.
ETFs let you tailor your investments to a particular market. They give you endless liquidity. Great leverage.
You have no risk of margin calls. No time limits. ETFs trade in the open, on the global stock markets. They are easy to understand. The likes of Goldman hate them like the plague.
Wall Street wants to make you a bubble trader. A day trader. They want you in their put-up markets and buy their bubbles. Then their computers can screw you to the wall.
They can manipulate you. They can blow your positions out of the water. Ask anyone who got killed by sell stops on BEAST Thursday.
We are in a banking/financial crisis. Obviously. Greece got another round of bailouts, that will ultimately fail. They keep telling us everything is fine. Yet the EU members & US have ponied up one trillion dollars to bail out Greece.
They say the bailout is for everyone. But we know better. Right now they barely have enough money to cover Greece. As we speak Portugal, Italy and Spain need trillions each to bail them out. Merry old England will need $10 trillion more. If it’s possible to save them at all.
Know this — know how the markets collapse when the truth comes out — and you can beat The Beast. Which we have every intention of doing.
My friend, please remember. They no longer must “merely” bail out banks or major companies. Now they must bail out sovereign states, entire nations, and their citizens. That is against EU rules. They swore it would never happen.
That should set off a siren in your brain. This global depression, is still with us. The EU weak sisters will be thrown out on their asses. This will make the EU stronger.
The rolling depression is claiming more victims by the day. Despite the sick spin about the “recovery,” that fewer and fewer people believe we are in.
We are about to see the real fundamentals come back, with a vengeance. Real soon now.
I can’t wait!
Suppose Obama’s bailouts don’t work
What happens to you?
For the past two years, two things have held together the global economy. Sweeping messes under the carpet… and government bailouts, paid for by some very pissed-off U.S. taxpayers.
Government spent trillions of your dollars, to give bailouts to our biggest banks. Citigroup, Bank America and Wells Fargo are a few examples.
We bailed out America’s biggest companies. Like AIG, General Motors and Chrysler. Our giant investment banks, like Merrill Lynch. We even bailed out Europe’s major banks and real estate companies. When does it all end?
Our leaders promised us the bailouts would stop the hemorrhaging. They would create jobs and put the economy back on track. They told us we are in a recovery.
Total lies. Today more Americans are out of work than at any time in history. Over 30 million. U.S. auto sales have nearly fallen in half. Foreclosures keep setting new records. And housing prices have dropped 40% or more, with no end in sight.
We were told the bailouts were short-term fixes. They would quickly come to an end. More bull. Now we don’t just bail out companies or banks. We are trying to bail out entire nations.
Welcome to the brave new world. Major countries are impossible to save. Wall Street’s brilliant “solution:” give them trillions more, OF OUR MONEY!
Yes, our money. As of now, America’s share of the Greek bailout is over $50 billion. Before our wonderful officials are done, it will end up much higher.
And that’s not all. America’s biggest states are also stone, cold broke. They too must soon come begging for even more bailouts.
California will need hundreds of billions of dollars. Maybe more. So will a number of other dead-broke states. Like New York, New Jersey, Illinois and Michigan, to name a few.
The spreading derivatives wipeout has bankrupted them. Just like it has bankrupted the overall U.S. economy and nations around the world.
By now it should be obvious to you. Things are getting worse by the day. Certainly not better.
So here’s the question you face. It’s a deal breaker. In fact, this one issue could decide if you die poor -– or live out the rest of your years in wealth and comfort.
Suppose the bailouts don’t work. Suppose the derivatives losses continue. What happens to you then?
Suppose Obama, Congress and Timothy Geithner, despite their superior wisdom, cannot reverse the laws of gravity. Suppose the bailouts fail.
What happens to your wealth?
What happens if the “recovery” fizzles out, and the U.S. and global economies continue their slow-motion train wreck?
Have you considered the possibility that the money in your bank could be lost –- remember, the FDIC also is broke -– or your account frozen for years?
How about your mutual fund, money market and retirement plan? What if your funds not only don’t recover: they begin another plunge to the ground?
What would you do if they wipe out and close down? How would you live? These are questions you have to ask yourself and be prepared for.
We just learned what Goldman Sachs did. Besides stealing from everyone, through The Beast, they blatantly traded AGAINST the so-called recovery. Against their own customers.
They told their clients to invest their future on the real estate “turnaround” -– while Goldman took the opposite side of those trades! They even did this on leverage!
This is how Goldman does business. Back-stabbing its own clients. It wiped out entire countries and governments. All by selling derivatives it knew would blow up in its clients’ faces.
And for its blatant theft of its clients’ assets, Goldman executives now face possible criminal indictments. As the Wall Street Journal reported:
Federal prosecutors are conducting a criminal investigation into whether Goldman Sachs Group Inc. or its employees committed securities fraud in connection with its mortgage trading, people familiar with the probe say.
The investigation from the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s Office stemmed from a referral from the Securities and Exchange Commission, these people say. The SEC recently filed civil securities-fraud charges against the big Wall Street firm and a trader in its mortgage group. Goldman and the trader say they have done nothing wrong and are fighting the civil charges.
Remember, 70% of the IMF’s money comes from the U.S. So again, when they talk about the IMF bailing out Greece, Spain Italy Portugal and the rest of them in reality Uncle Sam (you) are bailing them out.
Do you really want your money to go to Portugal, Spain, Italy, England and every other nation that has borrowed too much?
And that’s on top of bailing out the U.S. housing market… our biggest banks and companies… the consumer… the states… and every industry from autos to construction to insurance.
The day will soon come when the U.S. cannot beg, borrow, tax or even print enough money to continue the bailouts. What happens then?
What happens when the dead-broke, walking-dead-men banks and corporations are allowed to fail?
Somebody is going to lose one hell of a lot of money. Now guess who that somebody is? Everyone who buys into this recovery b.s.
If we were truly in a recovery, this would NOT be happening. You would see fewer bailouts. You wouldn’t be watching riot police bashing heads in Athens. You would not hear talk of the biggest economies on earth sputtering.
The masses put their faith in Wall Street. In the politicians. These people believe they don’t need to do a thing. Just sit back and wait for the happy days Obama and Nancy Pelosi promise.
But maybe, just maybe, things won’t turn out as they say. If you think that is a possibility, there is something you can do. You can get “wipeout insurance”* for yourself, against what we believe is the next phase of the economic wipeout.
*Let me explain what I mean by “wipeout insurance.” It’s not an insurance policy as such. It’s similar to what Wall Street calls “portfolio insurance.” That is where they buy instruments they hope makes them money, if the trades they hold go bad. In that case, the “portfolio insurance” offsets their losses.
Our “wipeout insurance” is based on the same principle. It’s a group of trades, rolled into several unique instruments. We believe these instruments will go up (make money) — if and when the stock market turns down again.
This special kind of “wipeout insurance” won’t cost you much. A tiny part of your wealth. But it could save you, if the unthinkable happens: another stock market wipeout and economic downturn. I believe with all my heart and soul that will happen.
Say Wall Street is right. Not a chance in hell, but let’s do the mental exercise anyway. Stocks keep marching up forever.
You’re only out a little: the small amount you put into your “wipeout insurance”/offset trades. The great economic boom, which they promise is right around the corner, will more than make up the difference for you. That’s if things go as they say.
Now suppose I have somehow guessed right again. Your “wipeout insurance” -– the specific trades I reveal in my monthly newsletter, the Wall Street Insiders — could well be worth their weight in gold, a thousand times over.
http://nickguarino.com/index.php/uncategorized/the-beast/
The Mayan Calendar - Carl Calleman
I was born in Stockholm, Sweden at noon May 15, 1950, which in the Sacred Calendar corresponds to the day 5 Jaguar. Curiously this is also the exact midpoint of the month dedicated to the Roman goddess Maia. Stockholm is fairly remote from the jungles of Guatemala, but these were some signs that maybe I had something to do there (although of course I was only appreciate the importance of these signs at a much later point).
I first became interested in the Maya and their calendar during a trip to Mexico and Guatemala in 1979. I fell in love with this people, and also had a feeling that this was my spiritual home on earth. Somehow it seemed that the purpose of my life was linked to this people and their calendar, that I had become fascinated by.
This was long before the Mayan calendar had become a matter of widespread and as I read in Michael Coe’s book about the Maya that their calendar would come to an end in the year 2011 it sparked a deep wonder in me.”Why would a calendar end?” I asked myself although 2011 then seemed a long time into the future.
I was then a graduate student in toxicology at the University of Stockholm and the idea of an end of ”time” was certainly not something that had been part of my education. I started to wonder if there indeed existed a higher purpose to life and felt that the native cultures of Mexico was pointing me in that direction.
Nonetheless, it took me a few more years until I started noticing that there was a steady stream of synchronicities guiding me to do explore this culture more deeply. In 1986 I took up work at the Department of Environmental Health at the University of Washington in Seattle, which brought me closer to the Mayan area with possibilities of frequent visits to their area. More importantly, through the experience of the Harmonic Convergence I realized that I was not the only one to believe that there was a truth to the Mayan calendar. Nonetheless, most of my energy was put into my professional life as a cancer researcher, where I focused on developing means for identifying toxic substances in the environment and especially such that could be cancer causing. Research that I performed in China came to have wide ranging consequences and I was among other things asked to serve as an expert for the branch of the World Health Organization that focuses on cancer.
My parallel interest in the Mayan calendar was however growing stronger and as I returned to Sweden from the United States in 1993, I decided to start working full time to solve these age old thought structures and to understand what they were really all about. After twenty years in the laboratory this was obviously not the best way of having job security, but it seemed to me that it would be of greater value to humanity if I could solve the Mayan calendar than if I could solve the riddle of cancer. Given my scientific background I then set out to find proofs of real events that matched the energy shifts of this calendar. Hence, my approach became different from the more newagy students who approached the calendar through channeling information. My first inroad to some tangible link with the Mayan calendar was really provided by my knowledge of Swedish history, which turned out to match certain baktun shifts extremely well. I then self-published a short book in Swedish, Mayahypotesen (1994), which already discussed the importance of the upcoming Venus Transits that I had been called to bring to the world at Orcas Island a few years earlier.
Following these first real observations I studied vaster and vaster areas of cosmic life that was found to fit into the framework of the Mayan calendar and I spent a few years, 1993-1996, essentially researching all fields of science from its perspective. This was a very exciting and intellectually stimulating time when one thing would lead to another at a very high pace and it was probably the most creative time in my life. Yet, I could not find a publisher for my initial manuscript, the Theory of Everything, that summarized all my findings and it has been on my shelf ever since providing myself with the source material for my later books.
Meanwhile, I started to lecture and publish articles in a number of languages about the Mayan calendar essentially only in Sweden and some other Nordic countries. In 1998 Hunbatz Men invited me to be one of the main speakers at a conference about the Mayan calendar in Merida, Yucatan, and the ceremonies and a trip into Honduras inspired me to start writing a new, more widely accessible book, The Mayan calendar, as I got back, which was eventually published by Garev in 2001.
Having completed this book my interest in Eastern philosophies increased and I went to Golden City in India to see Sri Bhagavan the first time in the year 2002. In 2004 Bear and Co published a new book, The Mayan Calendar and the Transformation of Consciousness just in the nick of time for the Oneness Celebration, June 6-8, 2004 which was the first celebration in a very long time that based on the traditional Mayan calendar brought together a world wide participation of spiritual people seeking a deeper guidance into the time ahead.
Following this I began lecturing and having courses on a larger international scale, especially as the book wasw now being translated to several other languages, and by now I have visited some twenty countries with my message. Recently, I filmed some interviews with Don Alejandro Oxlaj, head of the council of elders of the Maya, together with a team in India and I can see a wider unity and consensus coming about based on the true Mayan calendar than has been the case previously. I still live in Orsa, Sweden, at the edge of the wilderness, but I never seem to know where I will be called next.
Carl Johan Calleman
cjcalleman@swipnet.se
Orsa, Sweden,
9 Eb, 7.11.12 of the Galactic Underworld,
(July 18, 2006)
http://www.calleman.com/
Guide to the Nuclear Wall Chart
http://www.lbl.gov/abc/wallchart/outline.html
Aliens? Brand New Lifeform? Scientists Debate Odd Finding
Published May 27, 2011
Associated Press
A scientific tiff went public Friday as the journal Science took the unusual step of publishing challenges to a report about a strange, arsenic-eating bacteria.
The authors of the study stood their ground, saying they still consider their interpretation of the research viable.
In the report published in Science last year, researchers led by Felisa Wolfe-Simon of NASA's Astrobiology Institute said they discovered bacteria that can substitute arsenic for some of the phosphorous in its diet. While the discovery was made on Earth, they said it shows that life has possibilities beyond the major elements that have been considered essential.
Six major elements have long been considered essential for life: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. Arsenic is toxic mainly because its chemical behavior is so similar to that of phosphorus and some organisms have a hard time telling these elements apart. But once ingested, arsenic is different enough that it can disrupt the body's chemistry.
The bacteria were discovered in a California lake where there is a high concentration of arsenic and the researchers concluded that while it grows better with phosphorous it was able to substitute some arsenic successfully.
In one challenge, Patricia Foster of Indiana University pointed out that bacteria have two systems for assimilating phosphorous. Foster said the researchers inadvertently shut off one system when they grew bacteria in high-arsenic concentrations, increasing the capacity of the other.
Wolfe-Simon and colleagues responded that, in that case, a modified form of arsenic would appear and that did not happen.
In another challenge, James B. Cotner of the University of Minnesota and Edward K. Hall of the University of Vienna, Austria, argued that the microbes might simply have been able to live on very low levels of phosphorous. But Wolfe-Simon responded that the particular cells Cotner and Hall referred to actually had relatively high phosphorous levels.
Overall, Wolfe-Simon and colleagues said they "welcome the opportunity to better explain our methods and results and to consider alternative explanations."
Other newly published challenges came from Steven A. Benner of the Westheimer Institute for Science and Technology in Gainesville, Florida; Istvan Casbai of Johns Hopkins University and Eors Szathmary of the University of Budapest, Hungary; Rosemary Redfield of the University of British Columbia; David w. Borhani of Hartsdale, NewYork; Barbara Schoepp-Cothenet of the National Center for Scientific Research in Marseille, France; and Stefan Oehler of the Biomedical Sciences Research Center in Vari, Greece.
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/05/27/aliens-brand-new-lifeform-scientists-debate-odd-finding/
News With Views
http://www.newswithviews.com/
Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness and Health (LACH)
http://www.lach.web.arizona.edu/
Forbidden Gate
http://www.forbiddengate.com/
Daniel Pinchbeck
http://www.realitysandwich.com/blog/daniel_pinchbeck
Nasdaq Hackers Target Service For Corporate Boards
Peter Svensson
AP Technology Writer
Sat Feb 5, 2011
Hackers broke into a Nasdaq service that handles confidential communications for some 300 corporations, the company said Saturday — the latest vulnerability exposed in the computer systems Wall Street depends on.
The intrusions did not affect Nasdaq's stock trading systems and no customer data was compromised, Nasdaq OMX Group Inc. said. Nasdaq is the largest electronic securities trading market in the U.S., with more than 2,800 listed companies.
A federal official told The Associated Press that the hackers broke into the service repeatedly over more than a year. Investigators are trying to identify the hackers, the official said. The motive is unknown. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the inquiry by the FBI and Secret Service is continuing.
The targeted service, Directors Desk, helps companies share documents with directors between scheduled board meetings. It also allows online discussions and Web conferencing within a board. Since board directors have access to information at the highest level of a company, penetrating the service could be of great value for insider trading.
Nasdaq OMX spokesman Frank DeMaria said the Justice Department had requested that the company keep silent about the intrusion until at least Feb. 14. However, The Wall Street Journal reported the investigation on its website late Friday, prompting Nasdaq to issue a statement and notify its customers.
DeMaria said Nasdaq OMX detected "suspicious files" during a regular security scan on U.S. servers unrelated to its trading systems and determined that Directors Desk was potentially affected. It pulled in forensic firms and federal law enforcement for an investigation. They found no evidence that customer information was accessed by hackers.
Rich Mogull, an analyst and CEO with the security research firm Securosis, said Web-accessible services like Directors Desk are a prime target for hackers, and have sometimes been a back door for systems that aren't directly connected to the Web. The presence of files on the Directors Desk system and the claim that no customer information was compromised could indicate that hackers were able to get in but not complete their attack, he said.
Computer security experts have long warned that many companies aren't doing enough to protect sensitive data, and recent events have underlined the point. The secret-spilling organization WikiLeaks has published confidential documents from banks in Switzerland and Iceland and claims to have incriminating documents from a major U.S. bank, possibly Bank of America.
In 1999, hackers infiltrated the websites of Nasdaq and the American Stock Exchange leaving taunting messages, but Nasdaq officials said then that there was no evidence the break-ins affected financial data.
Nasdaq OMX CEO Bob Greifeld said in a statement that cyber attacks against corporations and government are constant and the company is vigilant in maintaining security.
"We continue to evaluate and enhance our advanced security controls to respond to the ever increasing global cyber threat and continue to devote extensive resources to further secure our systems," he said.
Some of the Wall Street's technological scares have been unrelated to hackers. In June 2009, a computer glitch knocked out trading in 242 stocks on the New York Stock Exchange for several hours.
More recently, high-speed trading software precipitated a "flash crash" on May 6. One trade worth $4.1 billion touched off a chain of events that ended with 30 stocks listed in the S&P 500 index falling at least 10 percent within five minutes. The drop briefly wiped out $1 trillion in market value as some stocks traded as low as a penny.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110205/ap_on_hi_te/us_nasdaq_hackers
================================================================
Hackers Penetrate Nasdaq Computers
Devlin Barrett
WSJ.com
Feb. 5, 2011
Hackers have repeatedly penetrated the computer network of the company that runs the Nasdaq Stock Market during the past year, and federal investigators are trying to identify the perpetrators and their purpose, according to people familiar with the matter.
The exchange's trading platform—the part of the system that executes trades—wasn't compromised, these people said. However, it couldn't be determined which other parts of Nasdaq's computer network were accessed.
Investigators are considering a range of possible motives, including unlawful financial gain, theft of trade secrets and a national-security threat designed to damage the exchange.
The Nasdaq situation has set off alarms within the government because of the exchange's critical role, which officials put right up with power companies and air-traffic-control operations, all part of the nation's basic infrastructure. Other infrastructure components have been compromised in the past, including a case in which hackers planted potentially disruptive software programs in the U.S. electrical grid, according to current and former national-security officials.
"So far, [the perpetrators] appear to have just been looking around," said one person involved in the Nasdaq matter. Another person familiar with the case said the incidents were, for a computer network, the equivalent of someone sneaking into a house and walking around but—apparently, so far—not taking or tampering with anything.
A spokesman for Nasdaq declined to comment.
A probe into the matter was initiated by the Secret Service and now includes the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The mystery surrounding the hackers and their motives is worrying investigators, who remain unsure whether they have been able to plug all potential security gaps—especially since invaders typically seek new ways to breach systems.
The case involving New York-based Nasdaq OMX Group Inc. is part of what cyber-crime authorities see as a broader problem of hackers nosing around corporate computer networks, with varying degrees of success.
U.S. companies are a continual target, and sometimes their public websites are vandalized. It is rarer for perpetrators to penetrate internal systems. Such breaches rarely come to light because companies fear that acknowledging them would alarm customers or encourage copycats.
Tom Kellermann, a former computer security official at the World Bank who now works at a firm called Core Security Technologies, said the most advanced hackers in the world are increasingly targeting financial institutions, particularly those involved in trading.
"Many sophisticated hackers don't immediately try to monetize the situation; they oftentimes do what's called local information gathering, almost like collecting intelligence, to ascertain what would be the best way in the long term to monetize their presence,'' he said.
People familiar with the Nasdaq matter said the Secret Service first began investigating last year. Investigators have informed White House officials of the case, according to the people familiar with the situation, who said that such a move is typical in hacking investigations, particularly in the early stages of the probes.
Authorities haven't yet been able to follow the trail to any specific individual or country. Those familiar with the case said that some evidence points toward Russia, but the person or people responsible could be almost anywhere, perhaps using computers in Russia merely as a conduit.
The case poses two concerns for authorities: preserving the stability and reliability of computerized trading, and ensuring that investors have full faith in that system.
Stock exchanges know they are frequently targets for hackers.
"We take any potential threat seriously and we are continually working to ensure that our systems operate at the highest levels of security and integrity," said Ray Pellecchia, a spokesman for NYSE Euronext, which operates the New York Stock Exchange.
He declined to discuss any specific instances of computer-hacking attempts against that exchange.
In 1999, hackers vandalized Nasdaq's publicly accessible website. In that incident, a group of hackers quickly claimed responsibility for defacing the site, as well as major media websites. Nasdaq officials at that time said the company's internal network wasn't affected.
Computer hacking is a problem for many countries. In recent years, U.S. authorities have dealt with cyberattacks linked to computers in Russia, China and Eastern Europe.
Hackers can use geography as a foil. Prosecutors said Albert Gonzalez, perhaps the most renowned hacker, perpetrated his biggest theft with help from computers in Eastern Europe even though he lived in Miami.
According to a 2009 federal indictment, he used computers located in the U.S., Latvia and Estonia, in a conspiracy that netted more than 100 million stolen credit-card numbers.
The case is considered the largest hacking crime in U.S. history. Mr. Gonzalez eventually pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704709304576124502351634690.html
NASA Spots 54 Potentially Life-Friendly Planets
Seth Borenstein, Ap Science Writer
Wed Feb 2, 8:25 pm ET
WASHINGTON – An orbiting NASA telescope is finding whole new worlds of possibilities in the search for alien life, spotting more than 50 potential planets that appear to be in the habitable zone.
In just a year of peering out at a small slice of the galaxy, the Kepler telescope has discovered 1,235 possible planets outside our solar system. Amazingly, 54 of them are seemingly in the zone that could be hospitable to life — that is, not too hot or too cold, Kepler chief scientist William Borucki said.
Until now, only two planets outside our solar system were even thought to be in the "Goldilocks zone." And both those discoveries are highly disputed.
Fifty-four possibilities is "an enormous amount, an inconceivable amount," Borucki said. "It's amazing to see this huge number because up to now, we've had zero."
The more than 1,200 newfound celestial bodies are not confirmed as planets yet, but Borucki estimates 80 percent of them will eventually be verified. At least one other astronomer believes Kepler could be 90 percent accurate.
After that, it's another big step in proving that a confirmed planet has some of the basic conditions needed to support life, such as the proper size, composition, temperature and distance from its star. More advanced aspects of habitability such as atmospheric conditions and the presence of water and carbon require telescopes that aren't built yet.
Just because a planet is in the habitable zone doesn't mean it has life. Mars is a good example of that. And even if some these planets are found to contain life, it may not be intelligent life; it could be bacteria or mold or some kind of life form people can't even imagine.
All the celestial bodies Kepler looks at are in our Milky Way galaxy, but they are so far away that traveling there is not a realistic option. In some cases it would take many millions of years with current technology.
But what Kepler is finding in distant parts of the galaxy could be applied to exploring closer stars, astronomers say.
"Our grandchildren will have to decide what's the next step," Borucki said at a NASA news conference. "Do they want to go there? Do they want to send a robot?"
Before Wednesday, the count of confirmed planets outside the solar system stood at 519. That means Kepler could triple the number. And those findings are from Kepler's scanning of just one four-hundredth of the night sky, so the actual number of planets out there is presumably hundreds of times greater, Borucki said.
That is exciting to astronomers, since the more planets there are, the greater the odds that life exists elsewhere in the universe.
Yale University astronomer Debra Fischer, who wasn't part of the Kepler team but serves as an outside expert for NASA, said the new information "gives us a much firmer footing" to hope for worlds that could harbor life.
"I feel different today, knowing these new Kepler results, than I did a week ago," Fischer said. She said Kepler "has blown the lid off of everything we know about extrasolar planets."
Another outside astronomer, Lisa Kaltenegger of Harvard University, called the findings "exciting good news."
Kepler also found that there are many more relatively small planets than there are giant planets. That is encouraging, too: Astronomers think a planet needs to be solid — rocky like Earth or Mars — for life to develop. And very large planets are unlikely to be solid; they are more prone to be gas behemoths like Jupiter.
Sixty-eight of the planet candidates Kepler found are considered Earth-sized, including the first ones ever discovered to be smaller than Earth. An additional 288 planets were less than twice the size of Earth, which is still in that optimum zone for life.
Only five of the 54 potentially habitable celestial bodies are close to the size of Earth, while the rest approach the gassy girths of Neptune or Jupiter, Borucki said.
To be in the habitable zone, a planet has to be the proper distance from its star so that it could have liquid water on its surface, at least sometimes. NASA considers habitable-zone temperatures to be roughly between 0 degrees and 200 degrees Fahrenheit. The proper distance varies by star; smaller, weaker stars, for example, would require planets to be closer to be habitable.
Because of the various factors that could make planets more prone to life, University of California Santa Cruz astronomer Greg Laughlin created a formula that puts a dollar value on these far-off planets with the idea that the first planet that is incredibly similar to Earth would have a value of $1 million.
Until Wednesday, the highest value Laughlin assigned to an exoplanet, which is what astronomers call a planet outside our solar system, was a measly $158. One of Kepler's new discoveries is worth nearly a quarter-million dollars, Laughlin figures.
Kepler was launched in 2009 and orbits the sun between Earth and Mars. It needs time to find planets, identifying them by watching them repeatedly move past the star they orbit.
Kepler scientists are strict about calling candidate planets confirmed. Of 400 candidate planets announced last year, only nine of Kepler's discoveries had been confirmed before Wednesday.
Of the more than 800 new candidates, both in and out of the habitable zone, only six are confirmed, all way too hot for life. And they are strange — all densely packed and circling a single star. Five of them are closer to their star than Mercury is to our sun, and they move in precise circular and stable orbits.
That strange star system is 2,000 light years from Earth, according to a separate study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. A light year is nearly 6 trillion miles.
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Online:
NASA's Kepler mission: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/main/index.html
Nature: http://www.nature.com/nature
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110203/ap_on_sc/us_sci_alien_planets%3B_ylt%3DAnhi5pj7G9Cwp_V6h_zYRJ6s0NUE%3B_ylu%3DX3oDMTFlc21qbmtlBHBvcwMxMTQEc2VjA2FjY29yZGlvbl9zY2llbmNlBHNsawNuYXNhc3BvdHM1NHA-
White House Insider: Obama is Clueless. Totally Clueless
Published by Ulsterman on February 4, 2011 in World Politics
A surprise message from our D.C. Insider reveals an Obama White House completely unprepared for the events in Egypt, and increasingly fearful of Obama’s chances for re-election in 2012.
Author’s Note: While not expecting this email from Insider, we are very thankful to have received it. Here is that email in its entirety.
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Had to send you this quick message. Feel free to publish all of it if you wish. First, I am so disappointed in the response by Obama White House to the crisis in Egypt. White House was caught completely off guard on this one despite indications they were informed of just such a scenario a number of times over the past year or so. They ignored the warnings. When the protests started did you notice the confused messaging from the administration? Hillary says one thing. Biden says another thing. Obama says basically nothing.
These are the situations where an American president can either rise to the occasion and show strength and wisdom or where they appear weak and uncertain. I don’t need to explain to you what our current president did. If this goes badly, and it appears it very well could, American interests in the region will be placed in very grave danger. The parallels to Carter are stunning. Oh how I miss the days when the party was led by the likes of Scoop. I fear the mishandling of the Egypt situation is going to result in a total chaos in that country soon.
Obama is clueless. Totally clueless. I am not talking a little out of step here. I am talking the man has no idea what is going on around him. This is not coming from me. I am relaying it from some still around him on a regular basis. These people are getting increasingly concerned over just how “out of it”, that is the phrase repeated to me, Obama has become.
His primary focus is now getting elected in ‘12. Everything else has been given over to Jarrett and her group. Everything. The president has no interest in policy. None. No interest in working legislation. None. No interest in forging a specific agenda. None. He is being told what he needs to say and that is it. That is the extent of his interest. “Just make it look good.” Exact words right there. President Obama is obsessed 24/7 with just “looking good”. If something goes well, he gets happy and outgoing. If something makes him look badly, he lashes out and pouts. The man is bouncing off both of those extremes even more now than he used to and it appears to be getting worse and worse. The word “manic” is being used more and more regarding his moods these days.
FYI there was a closed door meeting recently under the guise of discussions on Egypt. That meeting did not involve Egypt much if at all. This information is relayed second hand but I believe it to be completely reliable. Source told that meeting was run by Jarrett from start to end. Obama said very little. Asked no questions.
The primary focus was how to protect Obamacare so it was not a “liability” in 2012 campaign. White House already spending significant time/resources preparing legal argument for the Supreme Court case that is coming. Second focus was apparently “birther” related. Jarrett expressed concern over possible newly passed eligibility requirements in states. If only one or two states clarify eligibility in order to run for office, White House will simply use those states as examples of “anti-Obama racism”. They would likely not win the electorals in those states regardless, but could use the scenario to gain sympathy and support over the challenge from other moderate states.
This is the tactic Jarrett and crew have prepared. She is worried though that if more than one or two states challenge the president’s eligibility, the issue would turn against them. Measures are being taken to make certain that does not happen. What those measures are, I don’t know at this point.
Oh, and while discussion over eligibility was underway, Obama sat motionless. He said nothing. That strikes me as pretty damn odd don’t you think? People are discussing whether or not you are actually eligible to run for re-election in 2012 and you don’t say a word on the subject? “He just sat there with a weird little smile and didn’t say anything.” Go ahead and print that quote word for word. Others are now willing to let their observations be more known. Concern for the country is now winning over concern for their own political interests. Finally.
As stated before, Geithner is leaving. That was repeated to me again this past week.
More to come soon.
http://newsflavor.com/politics/world-politics/white-house-insider-obama-is-clueless-totally-clueless/#ixzz1D6cjbhZE
Super-volcano watch: Heightened seismic activity seen at Yellowstone
The Extinction Protocol
February 5, 2011
Back-to-back quakes rattle Yellowstone – A 2.7 magnitude earthquake at a depth of 20.9 km and a much stronger 3.4 quake erupted at a much shallower depth of 12.4 km. Both of today’s quakes erupted on the western rim of the caldera.
http://theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com/2011/02/05/super-volcano-watch-heightened-seismic-activity-seen-at-yellowstone/
More Signs of Magnetic Field Weakening and Disarray
The Extinction Protocol
February 5, 2011
More evidence of magnetic field disarray in the onslaught of a speedy solar wind stream. This latest image was captured on February 5, 2011 when the solar winds accelerated to 608.1 km/sec conveying a proton density of 3.2 protons/cm3. The spectral pattern appears chaotic and disorganized and shows symmetry disparity.
http://theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com/2011/02/05/more-signs-of-magnetic-field-weakening-and-disarray/
Untold Thousands of Marine Animals Float Dead in Amazon River & Florida
The Extinction Protocol
Posted on February 4, 2011
MATO GROSSO DO SUL/AMAZON Region – At Aquidauana, pantanal region of the Mato Grosso do Sul state, shoals of painteds, pacus, golden fishes, cacharas – and even stingrays, are floating dead in Rio Negro, one of the largest in the Amazon River basin. The estimated Environmental Policy is of that several tons of fishes died, adding that the authorities and experts, they still do not have the scale of the ecological disaster. Biologist of the State Institute of the Environment, Robert Gill Machado, noted the phenomenon, considered of great proportion, after flying over the region of sub-basin of Rio Negro. At this place fishing is banned. The area is considered one of the nurseries of fish breeding of the Pantanal. According to the technicians of the Institute the symptoms that occur in this case are the same symptoms of other instances of the genre. The fish are dying putting their heads out of water trying to obtain air, due to lack of oxygen in the water. This deficiency is due to the large volume of ash produced by burned, which is carried by runoff along riverbeds of the wetland. However, the idea of blaming the ashes of forest burn has no rationale. The residents of the region, they don’t believe in this theory. -BWN
Florida – SEBASTIAN, Fla. — Thousands of dead fish have washed up at Sebastian Inlet State Park according to WPBF u local user jhazel. Jhazel uploaded the photos Friday morning. In them, Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission officials said they believe a lack of oxygen is what killed the bait fish. “Just because there’s such a large school of them, they use up the oxygen really quickly, and because they are coming closer to shore, there’s not as high of a water turnover rate sometimes when you’re in an area with not as much tidal flow,” said Kelli O’Donnell with FWC. “I saw the fish jumping out there and I thought it was going to be a really good day for fishing, and then I noticed over here in the surf that they’re all dead,” fisherman Jeff Johnson told WPBF 25 News. FWC biologists arrived to assess the situation and take water samples as people watched. “It’s a little shocking, yes,” Johnson said. “I don’t know if there’s chemicals in the water or the temperatures that caused this.” -MSNBC
http://theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com/2011/02/04/untold-thousands-of-marine-animals-float-dead-in-amazon-river-flordia/
Just One Stock: The Biopharma Veteran Facing a Landmark Stem Cell Trial
Robert Lawton
January 28, 2011
If you could only hold one stock position in your portfolio (long or short), what would it be?
Long, Geron Corp. (GERN).
Tell us more about the company behind the stock.
Geron is a small-cap (currently around $500 million) biotech with two primary focuses: oncology and Human Embryonic Stem Cell (HESC)-based therapies.
In oncology, Geron has a broad IP portfolio which include a large number of patents targeting what may prove to be a worthy area of pursuit in the fight against cancer: telomerase. Telomerase was discovered by two early Geron collaborators who were awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine in 2009 for their discovery. Geron currently holds over 300 domestic and international patents related to telomerase as a potential cancer target.
Geron's other, slightly less crowded, and certainly more controversial focus relates to Human Embryonic Stem Cells (HESCs) as a potential remedy for a myriad of maladies, from Alzheimer's to paralysis. They have first mover advantage in the field and the benefit of being unreliant on the federal government for research dollars toward their pursuit, thereby sidestepping to some degree the controversy surrounding federal funds supporting this research.
In 2010, the FDA allowed Geron to proceed with the first ever clinical trials of HESCs in humans. I can't possibly overemphasize the importance of this historic trial. The primary endpoint of the Phase I is safety, although the secondary endpoint will be to determine efficacy. If safety is demonstrated along with even a modicum of efficacy? In my view, it will be considered one of the biggest scientific breakthroughs in the history of medicine.
How does your choice reflect your fund's investment approach?
We are a long/short hedge fund focusing primarily on domestic equities in all range of capitalization and sectors. We try to isolate situations where there is likely to be a relatively near-term catalyst to propel the shares in either direction.
I prefer to invest on the long side in companies with strong balance sheets, first mover advantage and/or dominant positions among their peers, and management I'm comfortable with. In the case of Geron, it's a $5 stock with a strong cash position, no debt, and are in the midst of a very high-profile clinical testing phase.
How much is your selection based on Geron's industry, as opposed to a pure bottom-up pick?
The biotech field, as you probably know, is littered with the wreckage of considerably more failures than successes. For every Dendreon (DNDN) or HGSI there are infinitely more Medivations (MDVN) or deCODE genetics. The potential to cure illnesses or alleviate suffering, coupled with the resulting "blockbuster" revenue streams accompanying such a success, can be quite seductive.
What I like about Geron is they have a very broad and deep IP/patent portfolio, strong cash position and, as excruciatingly slow as it has been waiting for results, I believe they are in the home stretch, at least regarding the HESC component of their business. If successful? I think the long-term upside is incalculable.
How is Geron positioned with regard to competitors?
Geron has been referred to - in a really fascinating 60 Minutes piece which I encourage any potential investor to watch - as "the Microsoft (MSFT) of the stem cell industry."
They are the 600-pound gorilla in the space, for now, conducting the first in-man, very high profile clinical trial. It's really somewhat of a binary event for the science, in my view. They will likely succeed or fail in a very big way, and advance or set back the science of HESCs forever.
The good news, from an investment standpoint, is that in the event the HESC side of their business fails spectacularly, they still have a formidable oncology department.
How does the stock's valuation compare to its competitors?
The market cap is around $500 million, nearly half of which is cash, with zero debt. Their burn rate is around $50 million a year, so they are pretty well funded for the near term, having recently completed a $100 million secondary.
The stock has largely been dead money for the past 12 months, with a tight trading range between roughly $4.50 & $6.50/share. I expect that range will end this year, somewhat dramatically.
In terms of other peers in the area, what do you think about competition from bigger companies like Cephalon (CEPH) - which like GERN does oncology work along with recent agreements to develop stem-cell therapeutics? Or smaller StemCells Inc. (STEM)? Is it about first-mover advantage in this area?
I think with regard to HESCs, they are peerless due to their IP and first-mover advantage in the field. Remember, they have been at this since the beginning and were early to finance and capture IP rights.
Regarding oncology... they are no match for deeper pocketed big pharma but, again, their telomerase focus, if successful, separates them from the pack, due to their broad patent portfolio associated with it.
Does your view differ from the consensus sentiment on GERN?
Geron has no shortage of critics, myself occasionally included among them. Investors and the few analysts who do cover the stock seem to be (understandably) frustrated.
The company recently completed a secondary priced well below the market at the time. I must confess I was gobsmacked by both the timing and pricing of the offering, but the old adage in the biotech space is "raise money when you can, not when you need to." Overall, I think most investors are frustrated with the arguably "glacial" pace of Geron's journey from lab to clinic to market.
Worth noting, however: It was only in 1998 that stem cells were first discovered. Today they are being tested in humans with "Patient A" receiving an injection in October. In the broader view of time, a few quarters or years is insignificant in light of the larger backdrop of history and what is at stake.
Simply put: Imagine if a previously hopelessly paralyzed individual has any mobility restored? In addition to providing hope to millions, I believe it will go a long way toward silencing the critics of this controversial endeavor. Regardless of where you sit on the political or ethical debate, it's hard to argue with someone confined to a wheelchair for life that HESCs which were previously destined for a dumpster shouldn't be used to restore their mobility because of the Bible.
Separately, regarding analyst coverage: Thanks to the Internet and the laws of the land, huge quantities of information are easily accessible to anyone who seeks it and are in no way proprietary to the landscape of Wall Street anymore. Point being? In my view, the vast majority of "Wall Street Analysts" are worthless at best and dangerous at worst. The stock is largely uncovered - for now - and that's fine by me. My experience has been that the analysts usually pile on well after the smart money has taken a position (or exited).
Does the company's management play a role in your selection?
Always. I'm comforted by the fact that the CEO of Geron, Dr. Thomas Okarma, holds both an M.D. & a Ph.D. from Stanford and is a graduate of the executive program of the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He appears to be a scientist first and a businessman second. I'm fine with that. Even the company's director of investor relations has a Ph.D. in the field.
What catalysts, near-term or long-term, could move the stock significantly?
As discussed, the first ever in-man HESC trial is likely to be a closely watched major catalyst for the shares. If there have been no major safety issues along with even a minor improvement? The stock should move both abruptly and significantly.
What could go wrong with your pick?
If safety issues arise leading to a halting of the trial? The stock will likely get clobbered, at least initially. If it shows negligible efficacy but is generally well tolerated? I think the stock gets clipped pretty hard there as well.
The same is true if their oncology pursuit fails miserably (safety issues) or simply shows no efficacy, but this is likely years away and they have a pretty deep bench in that regard.
Frankly, I think the company is likely be acquired long before any phase IIIs are completed. I consider the risk/reward at around $5/share to be roughly 2 points downside vs. 5 to 10 points upside. I'll take those odds any day of the week.
This patience issue seems to be a key one for Geron. It's come under fire in the past for heavily diluting shareholders on positive results; what's the risk that continues even in the case of a successful trial - since that would bear heavily on the stock price?
Dilution has been frustrating but I'm still in the "raise money when you can, not when you need to" camp. The bottom line is: If they produce substantive results in the clinics? The stock goes much higher and they are welcome to come back to us for further R&D funding (and therefore dilution).
Failing that? They better not come back, hat in hand, anytime soon or I'd view that as troubling.
Thanks, Robert, for sharing your choice with us.
Thank you.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/249488-just-one-stock-the-biopharma-veteran-facing-a-landmark-stem-cell-trial?source=hp_mostpopular
The Wizard of OZ...whats behind the Curtain ?
we all now about Dorothy's journey on the yellow brick road to meet with the Wizard. we all know when Dorothy finally got to OZ and met the Wizard what happened. little Toto pulled back the curtain to reveal who the Wizard really was. The grand Illusion in play. smoke and mirrors bee bop deluxe. !
the purpose of this forum is for posting articles, books, perspectives, theory's, speculations, etc.
that purpose can cover many and various agendas.
this agenda does not have to be proven or supported by the person presenting the post to the forum. all the person posting needs to do is just give the information on the selected topic. they don't even have to believe what they are posting as fact or truth. it could be just something they found of interest. please supply links if possible so others desiring to conduct due diligence or more investigative research into something that is posted can do so.
the categories can be, but not limited to;
- the economy,
- conspiracy theories,
- banking fraud,
- the real estate and mortgage fraud,
- stock market manipulation,
- government corruption,
- the Fed,
- the Bilderberg Group,
- books that would be of interest for the forum readers to become aware of on a certain topic,
- companys and products that seek to use technology to control the masses,
- the Food Crisis,
- the Water Crisis
- u.f.o.'s
- etc.
additionally the WOZ seeks to have its visitors to *get it out of their system*...spew out your venom, get that anger out. just be in line with iHub TOS. we all can make our views heard without name calling or suggesting someone is less than human. name calling and such only proves that the argument has been lost so lets get passionate but intelligent. bottom line is, sometimes we all will have to agree to disagree.
forum rules
there will be no deletions of posted content what so ever ! unless the individual is in violation of iHub TOS rules and guidelines all posts will remain. for clarity, these are the iHub guidelines. http://ihwiki.advfn.com/index.php?title=Handbook
those being;
there is NO Off Topic guideline in affect. infact the WOZ asks that any and all content that you are interested in share and post it for others to view. who knows, you might be the one who gives someone an AH-HA moment.
from the iHub handbook;
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Vulgarity – profanity of any kind is unacceptable on the stock boards, even when punctuation characters are used to "fill in the blanks" or letters are changed (f**k, azzh*le, etc.). The PG13 rule is loosely used as a guideline to what is/isn't acceptable. The theory is that if society has deemed it appropriate for a 13 year old to hear, it is unlikely that it will be offensive to the majority of Users. Any form of vulgarity directed at another User is unacceptable and should be removed (i.e. "you're a sh*thead", "being an a** doesn't help your case").
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ready for the Curtain to be pulled back ?
go for it !
