Posts

Posted on

First the Bombshell: Wikileaks Unveils 'Vault 7': "The Largest Ever Publication Of Confidential CIA Documents"; Another Snowden Emerges

You Can Trust The Government
If you had any doubt whatsoever that the US Government is a terrorist organisation, this dhould utterly dispel that fairy tale.
“Year Zero” introduces the scope and direction of the CIA’s global covert hacking program, its malware arsenal and dozens of “zero day” weaponized exploits against a wide range of U.S. and European company products, include Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows and even Samsung TVs, which are turned into covert microphones.
Wikileaks claims that the CIA lost control of the majority of its hacking arsenal including malware, viruses, trojans, weaponized “zero day” exploits, malware remote control systems and associated documentation. This extraordinary collection, which amounts to more than several hundred million lines of code, gives its possessor the entire hacking capacity of the CIA. The archive appears to have been circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive.
By the end of 2016, the CIA’s hacking division, which formally falls under the agency’s Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI), had over 5000 registered users and had produced more than a thousand hacking systems, trojans, viruses, and other “weaponized” malware. Such is the scale of the CIA’s undertaking that by 2016, its hackers had utilized more code than that used to run Facebook.
The CIA had created, in effect, its “own NSA” with even less accountability and without publicly answering the question as to whether such a massive budgetary spend on duplicating the capacities of a rival agency could be justified.
Once a single cyber ‘weapon’ is ‘loose’ it can spread around the world in seconds, to be used by rival states, cyber mafia and teenage hackers alike.
http://www.ronpaullibertyreport.com/archives/wikileaks-unveils-vault-7-the-largest-ever-publication-of-confidential-cia-documents-another-snowden-emerges

Posted on

Surging house prices are pressurised air, not wealth

Sydney’s housing market is 18 per cent closer to a crash than at the beginning of 2016. This is the inescapable conclusion from the latest figures that show an 18.4 per cent surge in house prices for the year 2016, the fastest annual increase since 2002. Million-dollar-plus median house prices are spreading across Sydney’s suburbs like a deadly infection, while Melbourne is not far behind.
The comparison between 2016 and 2002 should be terrifying to all Sydney homeowners. 2002 was the year after John Howard and Peter Costello doubled their First Home Owner Grant for new housing purchases. Combined with Costello’s 50 per cent capital gains tax discount that incentivised investors to also buy properties, the grant pumped enormous amounts of money into the property market. At the time, house prices were much lower than today, and prices in relation to household incomes were also much lower—the average Sydney house was around 7-8 times average household income. That was still too expensive, but there was room for the market to move.
The difference in 2016 is that there was no room for Sydney’s housing market to move, but it did anyway. The average price was 10-12 times household income, which is way beyond what is affordable. Today, 21.78 per cent of Australian households are in some degree of mortgage stress, meaning they are cutting their budgets and/or increasing their credit-card debt in order to make mortgage payments—and this at a time of record low interest rates! In January 2017 the Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey, which surveys more than 400 cities in nine countries including the USA, UK and Canada, ranked Sydney as the second most unaffordable city in the world after Hong Kong. The report’s author Hugh Pavletich said: “What housing should be in normal markets is at or below three times household earnings, so Sydney is four times what it should be.”
The 18.4 per cent average price rise in 2016 has just increased the pressure in the already-stretched bubble.
The rise wasn’t fuelled by a rush of first homebuyers, or even other owner-occupiers, as the latest APRA figures show a collapse in bank loans to owner-occupiers in 2016. The growth in bank lending went to property investors, who are engaging in a short-term feeding frenzy. Investors are taking advantage of record low interest rates to load up on debt, gambling that the low rates will be permanent. However, the types of loans that banks are making are a dead giveaway that investors are over-extending: 40 per cent of all mortgage loans are interest-only, and 49 per cent of all loans are being made through mortgage brokers. The latter is especially suspicious, as prior to the 2008 financial crash, the banks used mortgage brokers to make loans to borrowers who couldn’t afford them, many of which involved outright fraud, as documented by Denise Brailey’s Banking and Finance Consumers Support Association. A 1 March promotional article on real estate website Domain casually referenced a Sydney mortgage broker with a portfolio of 19 investment properties.
What will an Australian property crash look like?
To know what Australia is in for when the property market crashes, look at what happened in the USA, Ireland, Spain and many other countries when their property markets crashed in 2007-08. Then, understand this: Australia’s bubble is bigger than theirs were when they crashed!
Of most concern is the Australian banks, especially the Big Four, which have increasingly directed their business into the property market. Joe Hildebrand reported on news.com.au on 18 February, the warning of former government economic adviser John Adams that the Australian housing bubble is one of the “seven signs Australians are facing economic Armageddon”. Bank lending into housing has risen from 21 per cent of GDP in 1991, to more than 95 per cent of a much bigger GDP in June 2016. The banks won’t survive the crash, and, like Ireland and Spain, will take the rest of the economy down with them.
Solution
At the time of the 2008 GFC, the CEC proposed a Homeowners and Bank Protection Bill, modelled on a proposal by American physical economist Lyndon LaRouche, to manage the fallout of a housing crash and banking collapse. The law would have ensured Australians kept their homes, but not their investment properties, and that the banks stayed in business, but under strict government control while they were reorganised. This type of approach wasn’t followed in the USA and Europe, and consequently hundreds of banks collapsed and millions of families were forced from their homes.
A more pre-emptive solution is to implement a full Glass-Steagall separation of the banking system. This means breaking up the Big Four banks and Macquarie, and any other “vertically-integrated” banks that mix commercial banking, which is taking deposits and making loans, with investment banking, which involves speculating in securities, including dangerous derivatives. Australia’s banks justify the risks they are taking from lending into the housing bubble, by speculating in derivatives, which they claim “hedge” the risks. Coinciding with the doubling of the housing bubble since 2008, Australian banks’ derivatives exposure has risen by 163 per cent, from $14 trillion to $36 trillion! The two biggest banks, CBA and NAB, have stopped disclosing their true derivatives exposure. Glass-Steagall will split the banks into separate commercial and investment banking entities, and as the commercial banks which make housing loans will not be allowed to gamble on derivatives, they will be forced to assess their lending risks directly, which will stop the flood of reckless lending to investors that is driving prices through the roof. Glass-Steagall will also protect the real economy when the property bubble bursts.
https://www.change.org/p/break-up-the-big-banks-now-pass-glass-steagall

Posted on

Hold Your Enthusiasm

Hold Your Enthusiasm
For a great many people who have no means of discharging the accumulated pain from life’s losses, retaining or recovering their enthusiasm is a very hard thing to do. Here are some things you can do to stay or rise further up the scale than sinking lower:
1. Take a daily walk. At least 20 minutes. While you are walking, don’t think, just look. Don’t get any more significanty than that. Just look. Looking creates space for a being and brings you into present time and sheds the impact from past emotional traumas.
2. Get a good night’s sleep each day. If something prevents you from doing that, FIX IT as a matter of high priority.
3. Hydrate the body throughout the day. Most people find water easier than doing fresh vegetable juices but the latter hydrates AND nourishes.
4. Eat well. Mostly plant based and no processed foods. Do a meal plan for the week and purchase accordingly. Have healthy snacks for when you need a blood sugar boost in a hurry and you would normally resort to less than optimum nutrition.
5. If you have anything wrong with your body, get it fixed. Find what caused it and change your operating basis so that is not repeated. Most GPs are reasonable at diagnosing the easier ails but they are not allowed to cure anything. Sound too strong a statement? It is actually illegal for anyone to claim they can cure a bunch of illnesses.
6. Handle or eschew people who are toxic to your well being. Sadly, there are some people whose joy in life is other people’s pain. No matter who they are you are better off without them.
7. Discover what your basic purpose is in life and start learning about it (you never stop learning) and working on it. When you do, progress through life will gradually transform from like walking through molasses in the middle of winter to like a hot knife cutting through warm butter. If you cannot figure out your basic purpose, call me. I have some techniques that can help you uncover it.
8. Finish those incomplete tasks you have on your plate. They occupy attention units for which you have far better use.
9. Repair any upsets you are holding on to, especially with people close to you.
10. Increase the quality and quantity of your communication with those around you.
11. Listen to music. Music not only has the power to soothe the savage beast it can lift the soul to new heights.
12. Read. You can’t live long enough to make all the mistakes and learn all the lessons yourself. Read and learn and be inspired.
13. Help someone. It takes your attention off yourself and makes you feel good. Every person’s basic purpose is a specialisation or focus of the desire to help.
14. If you can, travel. Experiencing other lands and cultures really does broaden one’s horizons.
15. Improve your ability to be there with the person in front of you and communicate to them as they are, here and now. Not who they were. Not who you think they should be or who you want them to be but the person they actually are, right here and now.
16. Allow the person originating to you to finish what they are saying without interrupting them or prematurely acknowledging them. Only when they are done, acknowledge them, fully.
17. Hold to your personal integrity. Don’t do anything, say anything or be anywhere you are not comfortable with. Don’t allow anything to occur in your zone with which you disagree without saying or doing something about it. Live the sort of life you would feel comfortable sharing with your parents and others would like to emulate.