Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Mac vs. PC
Mac or PC? Who is winning the battle? We gathered as much information as we could, assembled that data in an objective infographic, and are now asking you to make a call – Mac or PC? We’d love to hear your comments!
Friday, July 27, 2012
BREAKING: COLORADO MASSACRE LINKED TO HISTORIC BANK FRAUD?
By: Ground Zero Media
Just when you think this story can’t get any crazier… We may have a primary MOTIVE for the “inside job” theory. Disrupt and silence James Holmes father. The rest just seems to be ancillary and falls perfectly in place via “cost benefit analysis” (benefit on multiple levels).
Robert Holmes is currently the senior lead scientist with the American credit score company FICO….and will testify soon, to Senate, on LIBOR scandal. Robert Holmes algorithms were said used to discover this massive fraud scheme.
Via Ground Zero Media.
According to his LinkedIn profile, James Holmes’s father, Dr. Robert Holmes, who received a PhD in Statistics in 1981 from the University of California at Berkeley, worked for San Diego-based HNC Software, Inc. from 2000 to 2002. HNC, known as a “neural network” company, and DARPA, beginning in 1998, have worked on developing “cortronic neural networks,” which would allow machines to interpret aural and visual stimuli to think like humans. The cortronic concept was developed by HNC Software’s chief scientist and co-founder, Robert Hecht-Nielsen. HNC merged with the Minneapolis-based Fair Isaac Corporation (FICO), a computer analysis and decision-making company. Robert Holmes continues to work at FICO.
Source: http://www.groundzeromedia.org/the-storm-is-coming/
Just when you think this story can’t get any crazier… We may have a primary MOTIVE for the “inside job” theory. Disrupt and silence James Holmes father. The rest just seems to be ancillary and falls perfectly in place via “cost benefit analysis” (benefit on multiple levels).
Robert Holmes is currently the senior lead scientist with the American credit score company FICO….and will testify soon, to Senate, on LIBOR scandal. Robert Holmes algorithms were said used to discover this massive fraud scheme.
Via Ground Zero Media.
Saturday, July 21, 2012
Flight 93 & WTC 7
On September 11, 2001 United Airlines 93 was scheduled to fly to San Francisco International Airport in San Mateo County. The mainstream media claimed that "Ziad Jarrah" had taken control of the cockpit about 46 minutes after takeoff.
The mainstream media claims that cell phone calls were made at 30,000 feet, which in the year 2001, was not possible for cellular phone technology. Look it up. However, telephone calls made on telephones from the plane could have occurred. Next, the mainstream media also claims that the crew and passengers heroically attempted to regain control of the aircraft. No evidence at all exists for this claim. Where did the pilots or those remote controlling the plane want UA93 to wind up? The ultimate destination is not known.
Barry Chamish, a guest from Global Opposition to New Order Bolsheviks (GONOB) Radio, claimed that flight UA93 was intended to crash in New York, at WTC 7. However, the mainstream media speculates that the plane was intended to crash somewhere in Washington D.C., perhaps even at the Whitehouse.
On Global Opposition to New Order Bolsheviks (GONOB) Radio, guest Barry Chamish claims that flight United Airlines 93 was suppose to fly into the World Trade Center 7. Listen above @ 15:55 "One of the planes was suppose to hit Building 7 but instead it crashed in Pennsylvania, so they were stuck with a building full of explosions and fire marshals snooping..." so at 5:20 p.m "they brought down Building 7."
Ryan Dawson, the director of "War by Deception" in this video claims that it is possible that UA93 intended to fly into WTC 7. Dawson, makes an interesting point that if the plane was traveling at its average rate of speed, and heading towards WTC 7, it would have hit the building between 10:43 to 10:46 A.M. Many eyewitnesses heard sounds of explosions near WTC 7 at approximately 10:45A.M. Proving the personnel on board the planes is extremely difficult but to look at the sequence of media reports. WTC 7 seems like an awfully small target to hit, especially considering it's proximity to the WTC towers themselves. World Trade Center, was 47 stories tall, at 570 feet in height, it was less than half as high as the towers. The building was already pre-planted with controlled demolition that was set off after the twin towers completely collapsed. When Larry Silverstein, received a call from the fire department commander, and said "the smartest thing they could do is pull it" that means that the building was already pre-wired for demolition, weeks, months, or years in advance. What I like to do is apply the Socratic or Scientific Method to determine if claims like this are true. These are the steps you go through to know:
(Warning: This flightpath is not known)
The mainstream media claims that cell phone calls were made at 30,000 feet, which in the year 2001, was not possible for cellular phone technology. Look it up. However, telephone calls made on telephones from the plane could have occurred. Next, the mainstream media also claims that the crew and passengers heroically attempted to regain control of the aircraft. No evidence at all exists for this claim. Where did the pilots or those remote controlling the plane want UA93 to wind up? The ultimate destination is not known.
Barry Chamish, a guest from Global Opposition to New Order Bolsheviks (GONOB) Radio, claimed that flight UA93 was intended to crash in New York, at WTC 7. However, the mainstream media speculates that the plane was intended to crash somewhere in Washington D.C., perhaps even at the Whitehouse.
Ryan Dawson, the director of "War by Deception" in this video claims that it is possible that UA93 intended to fly into WTC 7. Dawson, makes an interesting point that if the plane was traveling at its average rate of speed, and heading towards WTC 7, it would have hit the building between 10:43 to 10:46 A.M. Many eyewitnesses heard sounds of explosions near WTC 7 at approximately 10:45A.M. Proving the personnel on board the planes is extremely difficult but to look at the sequence of media reports. WTC 7 seems like an awfully small target to hit, especially considering it's proximity to the WTC towers themselves. World Trade Center, was 47 stories tall, at 570 feet in height, it was less than half as high as the towers. The building was already pre-planted with controlled demolition that was set off after the twin towers completely collapsed. When Larry Silverstein, received a call from the fire department commander, and said "the smartest thing they could do is pull it" that means that the building was already pre-wired for demolition, weeks, months, or years in advance. What I like to do is apply the Socratic or Scientific Method to determine if claims like this are true. These are the steps you go through to know:
- Observation - What was actually observed with UA 93, we see crash wreckage in photographs.
- Question - Was flight UA93 heading towards New York, Washington D.C., or neither?
- Hypothesis - Chamish claims this ; Mainstream media claims that.
- Experiment - Test claims.
- Conclusion - Results.
Consider war game operation Amalgam Virgo, had the picture of Osama bin Laden on the front page of the war game exercise!, It may have been the original plan to crash UA93 into WTC 7 at around 10:45 A.M., because communications may have been more heavily disrupted. With events at Pentagon and UA93 much more evidence is needed to prove these claims. The most evidence we currently have that indicates massive fraud and murder is the events at the Twin Towers, key data include: collapse time, symmetry of collapse, and acquisition of previously molten metal microspherules from Janette McKinlay and other survivors. Although it is a compelling claim that United Airlines 93 had intended to fly into the WTC 7, this is still a hypothesis.
Multiple news outlets reported explosions at WTC 7, compare eyewitness information by WTC Eyewitness that claimed "A bomb went off in the Lobby First and then a plane hit."
Did Flight 93 Crash in a field in Shanksville?
This still does not indicate whether or not Flight 93 was aiming for WTC 7. This does change Ryan Dawson's estimated fly-path prediction, and the map of UA93 flightpath on Wikipedia. Nonetheless, when there are so many mainstream radio reports that a fourth explosion was observed at 10:45AM, it would make sense that this could have coincided with third intended plane crash in the WTC location. I believe this is still a plausible theory, however, the presence of this crater was detected by United States Geological Survey (USGS) in 1994!
More reports on this to come.
Colorado Theater Shooting Leaves Alex Sullivan Dead on Birthday
Alex Sullivan began his 27th birthday with a huge celebration going to see the midnight screening of the new Batman Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado. After an agonizing day, the man's family has learned that their son and husband was a victim of suspected shooter James Holmes in the theater shooting.
Just before the movie, Alex Sullivan sent out his last tweet that said, "Oh man one hour till the movie and its going to be the best BIRTHDAY ever." Unfortunately, what could have and should have been the best birthday ever turned out to be this young man's last day ever, and it is absolutely unbelievable.
Throughout this terrible day, Sullivan's family never gave up hope, searching for him everywhere. Unfortunately, it turns out that the birthday boy was one of the ten victims who remained inside the theater as police investigated the horrific theater shooting near Denver.
What terrible news at the end of a terrible day. Sullivan is one of at least 12 people who were simply out for a memorable movie experience who were gunned down in cold blood by someone who seems nearly inhuman at this point in the day. Who, what could do this? Why? Why? WHY? All these questions and more are being asked by Alex Sullivan's grieving family, the families of the other victims, the injured and their families, Aurora, Colorado, the U.S., and the world. The fact of the matter is that these questions will never be fully answered. What is even worse is that these incidents continue happening, and people continue dying senselessly.
Just before the movie, Alex Sullivan sent out his last tweet that said, "Oh man one hour till the movie and its going to be the best BIRTHDAY ever." Unfortunately, what could have and should have been the best birthday ever turned out to be this young man's last day ever, and it is absolutely unbelievable.
Throughout this terrible day, Sullivan's family never gave up hope, searching for him everywhere. Unfortunately, it turns out that the birthday boy was one of the ten victims who remained inside the theater as police investigated the horrific theater shooting near Denver.
What terrible news at the end of a terrible day. Sullivan is one of at least 12 people who were simply out for a memorable movie experience who were gunned down in cold blood by someone who seems nearly inhuman at this point in the day. Who, what could do this? Why? Why? WHY? All these questions and more are being asked by Alex Sullivan's grieving family, the families of the other victims, the injured and their families, Aurora, Colorado, the U.S., and the world. The fact of the matter is that these questions will never be fully answered. What is even worse is that these incidents continue happening, and people continue dying senselessly.
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
Physical Inactivity Kills 5 Million a Year
PARIS — A third of the world’s adults are physically inactive, and the couch potato lifestyle kills about five million people every year, experts said in the medical journal The Lancet on Wednesday.
“Roughly three of every 10 individuals aged 15 years or older — about 1.5 billion people — do not reach present physical activity recommendations,” they said in a report that described the problem as a “pandemic.”
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The picture for adolescents is even more worrying, with four out of five 13- to 15-year-olds not moving enough, it said.
Physical inactivity was described for the study as failing to do 30 minutes of moderate physical activity five times a week, 20 minutes of vigorous activity three times a week, or a combination of the two.
Inactivity increases with age, is higher in women than in men, and more prevalent in high-income countries, the researchers found.
A second study, comparing physical activity levels with population statistics on diseases like diabetes, heart problems and cancer, said lack of exercise claimed more than 5.3 million of the 57 million deaths worldwide in 2008.
It said inactivity was a risk factor comparable to smoking or obesity.
Lack of exercise causes an estimated six percent of coronary heart disease cases, seven percent of type 2 diabetes (the most common form) and 10 percent of breast and colon cancers, it said.
Reducing inactivity by 10 percent could eliminate more than half a million deaths every year, the report said, adding that the estimates were conservative.
The human body needs exercise to help the bones, muscles, heart and other organs function optimally, but populations are walking, running and cycling less and less as they spend more time in cars and in front of computers, the investigators said.
The Lancet series called for global efforts to promote physical exercise by improving pedestrian and cyclist safety on city roads, for example, more physical education at school or promoting access to free public exercise spaces.
By: Agence France-Presse
“Roughly three of every 10 individuals aged 15 years or older — about 1.5 billion people — do not reach present physical activity recommendations,” they said in a report that described the problem as a “pandemic.”
.jpg)
The picture for adolescents is even more worrying, with four out of five 13- to 15-year-olds not moving enough, it said.
Physical inactivity was described for the study as failing to do 30 minutes of moderate physical activity five times a week, 20 minutes of vigorous activity three times a week, or a combination of the two.
Inactivity increases with age, is higher in women than in men, and more prevalent in high-income countries, the researchers found.
A second study, comparing physical activity levels with population statistics on diseases like diabetes, heart problems and cancer, said lack of exercise claimed more than 5.3 million of the 57 million deaths worldwide in 2008.
It said inactivity was a risk factor comparable to smoking or obesity.
Lack of exercise causes an estimated six percent of coronary heart disease cases, seven percent of type 2 diabetes (the most common form) and 10 percent of breast and colon cancers, it said.
Reducing inactivity by 10 percent could eliminate more than half a million deaths every year, the report said, adding that the estimates were conservative.
The human body needs exercise to help the bones, muscles, heart and other organs function optimally, but populations are walking, running and cycling less and less as they spend more time in cars and in front of computers, the investigators said.
The Lancet series called for global efforts to promote physical exercise by improving pedestrian and cyclist safety on city roads, for example, more physical education at school or promoting access to free public exercise spaces.
By: Agence France-Presse
Senators blast HSBC over lack of Laundering Controls
By: http://rawstory.com
WASHINGTON — US lawmakers accused the global bank HSBC on Monday of opening the doors of the financial system to terrorists, drug dealers and money launderers in a hard-hitting report.
Senators found the London-based lender allowed affiliates in countries such as Mexico, Saudi Arabia and Bangladesh to move billions of dollars in suspect funds into the United States without adequate controls.
At a time when the banking sector is already under fire for manipulating interest rates and the reckless trades that led to the 2008 financial crisis, HSBC moved quickly to apologize and promised to improve its procedures.
In future, all HSBC banks around the world would apply “a single standard globally determined by the highest regulatory standard we must apply anywhere.”
Under the slogan “The World’s Local Bank”, the network that began life as the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation provides US dollars to HSBC banks in many countries under a procedure known as “correspondent banking.”
According to the US Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, the firm’s US unit HBUS allowed partner HSBC banks in countries with weak fraud and laundering controls to move billions of dollars through its books.
“The Mexican affiliate transported $7 billion in physical US dollars to HBUS from 2007 to 2008… raising red flags that the volume of dollars included proceeds from illegal drug sales in the United States,” the report says.
“In an age of international terrorism, drug violence in our streets… and organized crime, stopping illicit money flows that support those atrocities is a national security imperative,” said Senator Carl Levin.
“HSBC used its US bank as a gateway into the US financial system for some HSBC affiliates around the world to provide US dollar services to clients while playing fast and loose with US banking rules,” his statement said.
“If an international bank won’t police its own affiliates to stop illicit money, the regulatory agencies should consider whether to revoke the charter of the US bank being used to aid and abet that illicit money,” he warned.
HSBC said it would attend a Senate hearing on Tuesday and promise to create a new simpler-to-manage global structure for its operations while doubling the budget of the compliance wing charged with applying anti-laundering rules.
“We will acknowledge that, in the past, we have sometimes failed to meet the standards that regulators and customers expect,” HSBC said in a statement.
“We will apologize, acknowledge these mistakes, answer for our actions and give our absolute commitment to fixing what went wrong,” it added.
“HBUS provided US dollars and banking services to some banks in Saudi Arabia and Bangladesh despite links to terrorist financing,” says the 330-page document, to be formally released on Tuesday.
“In less than four years, HSBC cleared $290 million in obviously suspicious US travelers checks for a Japanese bank, benefiting Russians who claimed to be in the used car business,” it adds, according to a news release.
In a statement released ahead of Tuesday’s hearing, Levin demanded that the US federal regulator, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, do more to keep an eye on HSBC and other banks and take action against abuses.
He also called on HSBC to deal with its own “pervasively polluted” culture.
WASHINGTON — US lawmakers accused the global bank HSBC on Monday of opening the doors of the financial system to terrorists, drug dealers and money launderers in a hard-hitting report.
Senators found the London-based lender allowed affiliates in countries such as Mexico, Saudi Arabia and Bangladesh to move billions of dollars in suspect funds into the United States without adequate controls.
At a time when the banking sector is already under fire for manipulating interest rates and the reckless trades that led to the 2008 financial crisis, HSBC moved quickly to apologize and promised to improve its procedures.
In future, all HSBC banks around the world would apply “a single standard globally determined by the highest regulatory standard we must apply anywhere.”
Under the slogan “The World’s Local Bank”, the network that began life as the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation provides US dollars to HSBC banks in many countries under a procedure known as “correspondent banking.”
According to the US Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, the firm’s US unit HBUS allowed partner HSBC banks in countries with weak fraud and laundering controls to move billions of dollars through its books.
“The Mexican affiliate transported $7 billion in physical US dollars to HBUS from 2007 to 2008… raising red flags that the volume of dollars included proceeds from illegal drug sales in the United States,” the report says.
“In an age of international terrorism, drug violence in our streets… and organized crime, stopping illicit money flows that support those atrocities is a national security imperative,” said Senator Carl Levin.
“HSBC used its US bank as a gateway into the US financial system for some HSBC affiliates around the world to provide US dollar services to clients while playing fast and loose with US banking rules,” his statement said.
“If an international bank won’t police its own affiliates to stop illicit money, the regulatory agencies should consider whether to revoke the charter of the US bank being used to aid and abet that illicit money,” he warned.
HSBC said it would attend a Senate hearing on Tuesday and promise to create a new simpler-to-manage global structure for its operations while doubling the budget of the compliance wing charged with applying anti-laundering rules.
“We will acknowledge that, in the past, we have sometimes failed to meet the standards that regulators and customers expect,” HSBC said in a statement.
“We will apologize, acknowledge these mistakes, answer for our actions and give our absolute commitment to fixing what went wrong,” it added.
“HBUS provided US dollars and banking services to some banks in Saudi Arabia and Bangladesh despite links to terrorist financing,” says the 330-page document, to be formally released on Tuesday.
“In less than four years, HSBC cleared $290 million in obviously suspicious US travelers checks for a Japanese bank, benefiting Russians who claimed to be in the used car business,” it adds, according to a news release.
In a statement released ahead of Tuesday’s hearing, Levin demanded that the US federal regulator, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, do more to keep an eye on HSBC and other banks and take action against abuses.
He also called on HSBC to deal with its own “pervasively polluted” culture.
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
C# Hourly Payrate Program
The if Selection Structure
Here is a useful program I wrote in C#, remember to save the file extension as .CS, and download the free trial version of Microsoft C# 2010, although all you really need is notepad. Just remember to save the file as .CS not as .TXT.
1) Compile (write this down in notepad)
2) Example, if problem: Error code (3, 27), in this example, the number "3" indicates error is line 3, this will save you lots of time trying to find out where the error is, since Microsoft FAQ descriptions are useless.
3) Run
After you run, this useful program will automatically calculate, for user on ReadLine(), how to estimate their weekly salary forever in DOS (C prompt). Here you go.
---------------------------------------------------------------
using System;
class SelectionExample
{
public static void Main( )
{
string strHours, strRate, strAnswer;
double hours, rate, pay;
char answer;
Console.Out.Write("How many hours did you work last week? ");
strHours = Console.ReadLine();
hours = Convert.ToDouble(strHours);
Console.Out.WriteLine();
Console.Out.Write("What is your hourly rate? ");
strRate = Console.ReadLine();
rate = Convert.ToDouble(strRate);
if(hours<=40.0)
pay = hours * rate;
else
{
pay = hours * rate;
//Calculate overtime pay as time
//and a half for all
//hours over 40
pay = pay + ((hours -40) * (rate/2.0));
}
Console.Out.WriteLine();
Console.Out.WriteLine("Your weekly pay is: " + pay);
Console.Out.WriteLine();
Console.Out.WriteLine("Your weekly pay is: " + pay);
Console.Out.WriteLine();
Console.Out.WriteLine("Are you happy with your pay? ");
strAnswer = Console.ReadLine();
answer = Convert.ToChar(strAnswer);
if(answer=='y'||answer=='Y')
Console.Out.WriteLine("I'm glad that you are happy!");
else
Console.Out.WriteLine("Maybe next week you can work more hours");
}
}
You have to type "Y" or "N" not characters more than one, like "Yes" (3 characters). If you type 2 or more characters DOS says "Unhandled Exception: System.FormatException: String must be exactly one character r long."
Here is a useful program I wrote in C#, remember to save the file extension as .CS, and download the free trial version of Microsoft C# 2010, although all you really need is notepad. Just remember to save the file as .CS not as .TXT.
1) Compile (write this down in notepad)
2) Example, if problem: Error code (3, 27), in this example, the number "3" indicates error is line 3, this will save you lots of time trying to find out where the error is, since Microsoft FAQ descriptions are useless.
3) Run
After you run, this useful program will automatically calculate, for user on ReadLine(), how to estimate their weekly salary forever in DOS (C prompt). Here you go.
---------------------------------------------------------------
using System;
class SelectionExample
{
public static void Main( )
{
string strHours, strRate, strAnswer;
double hours, rate, pay;
char answer;
Console.Out.Write("How many hours did you work last week? ");
strHours = Console.ReadLine();
hours = Convert.ToDouble(strHours);
Console.Out.WriteLine();
Console.Out.Write("What is your hourly rate? ");
strRate = Console.ReadLine();
rate = Convert.ToDouble(strRate);
if(hours<=40.0)
pay = hours * rate;
else
{
pay = hours * rate;
//Calculate overtime pay as time
//and a half for all
//hours over 40
pay = pay + ((hours -40) * (rate/2.0));
}
Console.Out.WriteLine();
Console.Out.WriteLine("Your weekly pay is: " + pay);
Console.Out.WriteLine();
Console.Out.WriteLine("Your weekly pay is: " + pay);
Console.Out.WriteLine();
Console.Out.WriteLine("Are you happy with your pay? ");
strAnswer = Console.ReadLine();
answer = Convert.ToChar(strAnswer);
if(answer=='y'||answer=='Y')
Console.Out.WriteLine("I'm glad that you are happy!");
else
Console.Out.WriteLine("Maybe next week you can work more hours");
}
}
You have to type "Y" or "N" not characters more than one, like "Yes" (3 characters). If you type 2 or more characters DOS says "Unhandled Exception: System.FormatException: String must be exactly one character r long."
Tuesday, July 10, 2012
Monday, July 9, 2012
Amazon Cloud Outage Causes Customers to Leave
By: Informationweek.com
Amazon Cloud Outage Causes Customer To Leave
Online dating site Whatsyourprice.com dumps EC2 following June outages, but other customers say they can architect against failure in the Amazon infrastructure.
In the aftermath of the outage, Whatsyourprice.com, an online dating service, also pondered those words. It had tried to build its application right, using two availability zones as Amazon advised, and it still faced an onslaught of customer complaints in the midst of the outage. "We received nearly a thousand complaints," a level of disruption that Whatsyourprice.com had never seen before, said CEO Brandon Wade in an interview.
Instagram, Quora, Heroku, Pinterest, Hootsuite, and Netflix customers also complained of their service not being available in Twitter posts and online forums.
[ Learn more about Amazon Web Services' June 29 outage. See Amazon Outage Hits Netflix, Heroku, Pinterest, Instagram.
For Whatsyourprice.com, the two hours of downtime proved to be the last straw. It had just experienced two hours of downtime in a preceding AWS outage June 14. The two hours that Whatsyourprice.com lost during the latter Friday evening event was during a normal period of strong user activity.
Singles that frequent the site were setting up dates for the weekend. In many cases, they needed to access a phone number that becomes available when two parties agree to meet--and that crucial information disappeared at the worst possible time.
Wade didn't wait for Amazon's post mortem or an in-depth analysis from consultants. He moved his systems, running on 10 virtual servers in Amazon's infrastructure, onto equipment his firm bought and installed at a co-location service in the firm's hometown of Las Vegas.
"Amazon is a very reputable company ... But we can't have all of these outages. For us, it's a big deal."
Wade will seek a second co-lo site in Las Vegas so that the loss of his servers at one site will not result in his website going off the air. It's a physical implementation of the logical architecture he tried to achieve on Amazon.
His firm used two availability zones in the Ashburn data center. Amazon is terse in its definition of an availability zone, but users understand them as distinct, logical data centers. Each zone has its own communications and power supply. One zone can go down and the others are supposed to continue operating.
Wade doesn't have a technical explanation for what happened to his website. Part of it depended on Zone 1B, and Cedexis, a cloud monitoring service, identified 1B as the zone that suffered the outage as a result of violent electrical storms in the northern Virginia area. But his operations were also in a second zone, and he knows they became inoperative as zone 1B went down.
"During the outage, my IT manager was not able to launch new instances in the availability zone that was supposedly not affected by the outage. Also, during the outage, he was unable to move any of the read-replicas of the master database ... So while only one zone may have been impacted, it appears other issues related to the AWS software led to our entire website being offline for the duration," said Wade in an email responding to follow up questions from InformationWeek.
Both June outages "rendered a total blackout of our website," he wrote.
This experience can be contrasted with Okta's, which continued running through Amazon's June 14 and 29 outages. It advertises that its online identity management service is continuously available through what it calls its zero downtime architecture.
Eric Berg, Okta's VP of products, says in a blog that it's architected so that "any individual component can fail at any time and will simply be routed around to one of several other active systems."'
That's necessary, Berg said in his blog post, Own Your Own Availability, because "downtime for our customers is unacceptable. As a result, we have made the software and operational investments necessary to provide a reliable service on top of AWS," he wrote.
It's not that Amazon's infrastructure is foolproof. It can and will fail, he warned. "Service providers need to make software and operational investments that allow their services to continue to run. Those investments are the responsibility of the vendor," Berg lectured in the blog.
Wade, who earned his bachelor's degree and MBA at MIT and once served as a Booz Allen consultant, uses the same reasoning to reach a different conclusion.
"While you can watch a movie tomorrow if you miss it today, dating is all about the serendipity of meeting the right person at the right time. If an online dating service is not available, a user may lose the chance to meet his or her soulmate forever."
Whatsyourprice.com will no longer use EC2 because of "Amazon's unpredictable data center issues," he said.
Amazon Cloud Outage Causes Customer To Leave
Online dating site Whatsyourprice.com dumps EC2 following June outages, but other customers say they can architect against failure in the Amazon infrastructure.
In the aftermath of the outage, Whatsyourprice.com, an online dating service, also pondered those words. It had tried to build its application right, using two availability zones as Amazon advised, and it still faced an onslaught of customer complaints in the midst of the outage. "We received nearly a thousand complaints," a level of disruption that Whatsyourprice.com had never seen before, said CEO Brandon Wade in an interview.
Instagram, Quora, Heroku, Pinterest, Hootsuite, and Netflix customers also complained of their service not being available in Twitter posts and online forums.
[ Learn more about Amazon Web Services' June 29 outage. See Amazon Outage Hits Netflix, Heroku, Pinterest, Instagram.
For Whatsyourprice.com, the two hours of downtime proved to be the last straw. It had just experienced two hours of downtime in a preceding AWS outage June 14. The two hours that Whatsyourprice.com lost during the latter Friday evening event was during a normal period of strong user activity.
Singles that frequent the site were setting up dates for the weekend. In many cases, they needed to access a phone number that becomes available when two parties agree to meet--and that crucial information disappeared at the worst possible time.
Wade didn't wait for Amazon's post mortem or an in-depth analysis from consultants. He moved his systems, running on 10 virtual servers in Amazon's infrastructure, onto equipment his firm bought and installed at a co-location service in the firm's hometown of Las Vegas.
"Amazon is a very reputable company ... But we can't have all of these outages. For us, it's a big deal."
Wade will seek a second co-lo site in Las Vegas so that the loss of his servers at one site will not result in his website going off the air. It's a physical implementation of the logical architecture he tried to achieve on Amazon.
His firm used two availability zones in the Ashburn data center. Amazon is terse in its definition of an availability zone, but users understand them as distinct, logical data centers. Each zone has its own communications and power supply. One zone can go down and the others are supposed to continue operating.
Wade doesn't have a technical explanation for what happened to his website. Part of it depended on Zone 1B, and Cedexis, a cloud monitoring service, identified 1B as the zone that suffered the outage as a result of violent electrical storms in the northern Virginia area. But his operations were also in a second zone, and he knows they became inoperative as zone 1B went down.
"During the outage, my IT manager was not able to launch new instances in the availability zone that was supposedly not affected by the outage. Also, during the outage, he was unable to move any of the read-replicas of the master database ... So while only one zone may have been impacted, it appears other issues related to the AWS software led to our entire website being offline for the duration," said Wade in an email responding to follow up questions from InformationWeek.
Both June outages "rendered a total blackout of our website," he wrote.
This experience can be contrasted with Okta's, which continued running through Amazon's June 14 and 29 outages. It advertises that its online identity management service is continuously available through what it calls its zero downtime architecture.
Eric Berg, Okta's VP of products, says in a blog that it's architected so that "any individual component can fail at any time and will simply be routed around to one of several other active systems."'
That's necessary, Berg said in his blog post, Own Your Own Availability, because "downtime for our customers is unacceptable. As a result, we have made the software and operational investments necessary to provide a reliable service on top of AWS," he wrote.
It's not that Amazon's infrastructure is foolproof. It can and will fail, he warned. "Service providers need to make software and operational investments that allow their services to continue to run. Those investments are the responsibility of the vendor," Berg lectured in the blog.
Wade, who earned his bachelor's degree and MBA at MIT and once served as a Booz Allen consultant, uses the same reasoning to reach a different conclusion.
"While you can watch a movie tomorrow if you miss it today, dating is all about the serendipity of meeting the right person at the right time. If an online dating service is not available, a user may lose the chance to meet his or her soulmate forever."
Whatsyourprice.com will no longer use EC2 because of "Amazon's unpredictable data center issues," he said.
Saturday, July 7, 2012
7/7 London Bombing Survivor Fears Olympic Attack
A London bombing survivor has revealed her fear of a terror attack during the Olympic Games seven years on from the devastating 7/7 atrocities.
Beverli Rhodes, from Kennington in Ashford, was one of the hundreds caught up in the tube and bus blasts on July 7, 2005.
Ironically she was on her way to a meeting about anti-terrorism and security at the Olympics, the day after London was announced as the host of the 2012 Games.
The 52-year-old, who was a senior project consultant in anti-terrorism at the time, was on the tube travelling between King’s Cross and Russell Square when it was blown up by suicide bomber Germaine Lindsay.
She was thrown forward and knocked unconscious and suffered serious chest, leg and facial injuries.
She continues to suffer from severe post traumatic stress disorder, which forced her to give up her career in security.
Ms Rhodes said had she not been caught up in the blasts, she would have been working for the upcoming Olympics.
“I would have been part of the main team delivering security infrastructure. This is still very close to my heart,” she said.
“I’m worried about the Games and I hope to God that nothing happens.
“I know my former colleagues will have been working hard to thwart any attempts, but it’s the rogue terrorists working alone that are not under any direction that I worry about. (IDIOT?)
“Security will have been watching all the right people but it’s the rogue ones that slip through the net, that’s the concern. You can’t make a situation 100 per cent safe.”
Ms Rhodes said on July 7, which falls this weekend, she will relive each moment of terror experienced seven years ago.
“It’ll run through in my head what was happening at that specific time,” she said.
“I do have flash backs. I’m off medication now after six and a half years and I’m learning to cope without it. It was for my walking and balance and also for post traumatic stress disorder, which is an ongoing thing.
“I used to have horrific nightmares and awful outbursts of being upset. I came off the medication cold turkey in January, I needed to know that I could cope without it.”
Ms Rhodes said while she will travel in London, she is still unable to use the underground and recently found herself having to quickly exit a train when she realised it would be going to Kings Cross.
She now holds workshops for people suffering post traumatic stress disorder, such as soldiers and rape victims, and helps them create survival strategies.
“I can take something worthwhile from what happened by helping others,” she said.
Another Kent victim was 28-year-old Philip Russell, from East Peckham in Tonbridge, who died following the explosion on the number 30 bus at Tavistock Square.
He had been on his way to work at JP Morgan Asset Management in the city.
His parents Grahame and Veronica have since set up a scholarship fund in his name at Kingston University where their son spent four years.
Beverli Rhodes, from Kennington in Ashford, was one of the hundreds caught up in the tube and bus blasts on July 7, 2005.
Ironically she was on her way to a meeting about anti-terrorism and security at the Olympics, the day after London was announced as the host of the 2012 Games.
The 52-year-old, who was a senior project consultant in anti-terrorism at the time, was on the tube travelling between King’s Cross and Russell Square when it was blown up by suicide bomber Germaine Lindsay.
She was thrown forward and knocked unconscious and suffered serious chest, leg and facial injuries.
She continues to suffer from severe post traumatic stress disorder, which forced her to give up her career in security.
Ms Rhodes said had she not been caught up in the blasts, she would have been working for the upcoming Olympics.
“I would have been part of the main team delivering security infrastructure. This is still very close to my heart,” she said.
“I’m worried about the Games and I hope to God that nothing happens.
“I know my former colleagues will have been working hard to thwart any attempts, but it’s the rogue terrorists working alone that are not under any direction that I worry about. (IDIOT?)
“Security will have been watching all the right people but it’s the rogue ones that slip through the net, that’s the concern. You can’t make a situation 100 per cent safe.”
Ms Rhodes said on July 7, which falls this weekend, she will relive each moment of terror experienced seven years ago.
“It’ll run through in my head what was happening at that specific time,” she said.
“I do have flash backs. I’m off medication now after six and a half years and I’m learning to cope without it. It was for my walking and balance and also for post traumatic stress disorder, which is an ongoing thing.
“I used to have horrific nightmares and awful outbursts of being upset. I came off the medication cold turkey in January, I needed to know that I could cope without it.”
Ms Rhodes said while she will travel in London, she is still unable to use the underground and recently found herself having to quickly exit a train when she realised it would be going to Kings Cross.
She now holds workshops for people suffering post traumatic stress disorder, such as soldiers and rape victims, and helps them create survival strategies.
“I can take something worthwhile from what happened by helping others,” she said.
Another Kent victim was 28-year-old Philip Russell, from East Peckham in Tonbridge, who died following the explosion on the number 30 bus at Tavistock Square.
He had been on his way to work at JP Morgan Asset Management in the city.
His parents Grahame and Veronica have since set up a scholarship fund in his name at Kingston University where their son spent four years.
Thursday, July 5, 2012
LIBOR: "A Mega-Scandal"
By: Madison Ruppert
Website: http://endthelie.com
The London Interbank Offered Rate, or LIBOR, scandal is growing by the minute and is shaping up to be one of the largest, if not the single largest, financial scandals of all time. This has the potential to make the massive conflicts of interest at the Federal Reserve and the $16 trillion in “emergency loans” given out by the Federal Reserve look reasonable.
For the uninitiated, as it were, the scandal centers on British financial institution Barclays, the former CEO of which testified yesterday before the British Parliament.
Bob Diamond’s testimony on July 4, 2012 was almost painful. Diamond fell back on the incredibly tired excuses used by the criminals in the financial sector which were accurately summed up as “a long version of ‘It was awful, but don’t blame me.’”
LIBOR is, to put it in a crudely simple fashion, is the fluctuating rate at which banks can borrow from each other. However, this isn’t just a rate which affects UK banks.
Indeed, the LIBOR is used as an indicator for many of the world’s various fluctuating rates spanning a wide range of so-called “financial products.”
This is because the LIBOR is used as a rough indication of the level of confidence between one bank and another, with high rates indicating a low level of confidence and uncertain financial stability.
One of the most important, although hardly surprising, aspects of the scandal surrounds an email from October 29, 2008 written by Diamond to then-CEO John Varley
The email allegedly details a conversation between Diamond and deputy governor of the Bank of England, Paul Tucker, held just earlier that day in which Tucker actually encouraged Diamond to artificially lower LIBOR rates.
A Barclays’ memo to the Treasury Select Committee released by the Telegraph on July 3 also reveals, “Subsequent to the call, Bob Diamond relayed the contents of the conversation to Jerry del Missier [then head of markets at BarCap].”
However, the memo also claims, “Bob Diamond did not believe he received an instruction from Paul Tucker or that he gave an instruction to Jerry del Missier. However, Jerry del Missier concluded that an instruction had been passed down from the Bank of England not to keep Libors so high and he therefore passed down a direction to that effect to the submitters.”
This is just the beginning. As Matt Taibbi (watch the below video for more great comments from Taibbi on this scandal) correctly points out in his blog for Rolling Stone, “What’s even worse is that Diamond’s email suggests that Tucker was only following orders, i.e. that Tucker had received phone calls from ‘a number of senior figures within Whitehall’ – that is, the British government – expressing concern about Barclays’ high Libor rates.”
If true, this would mean that Tucker was essentially playing the messenger for the British government in instructing Diamond to create a false sense of financial stability by the manipulation of borrowing rates.
In the email, Diamond actually says that the problem with Barclays was that they were actually reporting the real lending numbers, not ones artificially deflated before release.
“I asked [Tucker] if he could relay the reality, that not all banks were providing quotes at the levels that represented real transaction,” wrote Diamond in the email.
Tucker then slyly instructed Diamond to fudge the numbers in what Taibbi characterizes as “the painfully oblique manner of an English gentleman trying to engage a prostitute without using any dirty words.”
Tucker first said to Diamond that “while he was certain [Barclays] did not need advice,” Barclays need not report the high (read: true) rates that they had been reporting.
Diamond then relates that Tucker said, “It did not always need to be the case that [Barclays] appeared as high as [it has] recently.”
The attempts by Barclays to downplay the email and push blame away from Diamond and del Messier in the passage of the memo quoted above are just plain laughable.
Barlcays admits, “Certain traders sought to manipulate Barclays Libor submissions by sending requests to submitters,” and that, “The majority of these were sent during 2005 to Sept 2007 and sporadically in 2008/2009. There were no further requests to submitters after May 2009.”
However, they claim, “There was no knowledge by anyone in the bank above desk supervisor level of this conduct at the time. Senior management were not aware.”
This, I believe, is a laughable assertion when one actually looks at the facts. One would have to play quite fast and loose with the interpreting the quite clear wordage of the Diamond email in order to support such a position.
Taibbi, for one, suspects that the Diamond email’s mention of figures from Whitehall could be, if nothing else, “an awesome piece of political jungle defense by Diamond, tossing a hand-grenade into the seat of Her Majesty’s government minutes before he’s supposed to be grilled by parliament.”
Taibbi notes that unfortunately (at least for now) the only evidence we have regarding the mention of Whitehall is Diamond, “and under normal circumstances his word should mean less than nothing.”
This is especially true coming from a man who actually claimed in 2011 that it was time for banks to stop apologizing for what they had done.
Yet, we do, in fact, know that the conversation between Diamond in Tucker did occur and we know that they did discuss LIBOR. The only problem is that we don’t know how far this chain of damnation really goes.
Did I forget anything or miss any errors? Would you like to make me aware of a story or subject to cover? Or perhaps you want to bring your writing to a wider audience? Feel free to contact me at admin@EndtheLie.com with your concerns, tips, questions, original writings, insults or just about anything that may strike your fancy.
More at EndtheLie.com - http://EndtheLie.com/2012/07/05/libor-the-mega-scandal-of-all-mega-scandals-is-upon-us/#ixzz1zp3XvDiK
Website: http://endthelie.com
The London Interbank Offered Rate, or LIBOR, scandal is growing by the minute and is shaping up to be one of the largest, if not the single largest, financial scandals of all time. This has the potential to make the massive conflicts of interest at the Federal Reserve and the $16 trillion in “emergency loans” given out by the Federal Reserve look reasonable.
For the uninitiated, as it were, the scandal centers on British financial institution Barclays, the former CEO of which testified yesterday before the British Parliament.
Bob Diamond’s testimony on July 4, 2012 was almost painful. Diamond fell back on the incredibly tired excuses used by the criminals in the financial sector which were accurately summed up as “a long version of ‘It was awful, but don’t blame me.’”
LIBOR is, to put it in a crudely simple fashion, is the fluctuating rate at which banks can borrow from each other. However, this isn’t just a rate which affects UK banks.
Indeed, the LIBOR is used as an indicator for many of the world’s various fluctuating rates spanning a wide range of so-called “financial products.”
This is because the LIBOR is used as a rough indication of the level of confidence between one bank and another, with high rates indicating a low level of confidence and uncertain financial stability.
One of the most important, although hardly surprising, aspects of the scandal surrounds an email from October 29, 2008 written by Diamond to then-CEO John Varley
The email allegedly details a conversation between Diamond and deputy governor of the Bank of England, Paul Tucker, held just earlier that day in which Tucker actually encouraged Diamond to artificially lower LIBOR rates.
A Barclays’ memo to the Treasury Select Committee released by the Telegraph on July 3 also reveals, “Subsequent to the call, Bob Diamond relayed the contents of the conversation to Jerry del Missier [then head of markets at BarCap].”
However, the memo also claims, “Bob Diamond did not believe he received an instruction from Paul Tucker or that he gave an instruction to Jerry del Missier. However, Jerry del Missier concluded that an instruction had been passed down from the Bank of England not to keep Libors so high and he therefore passed down a direction to that effect to the submitters.”
This is just the beginning. As Matt Taibbi (watch the below video for more great comments from Taibbi on this scandal) correctly points out in his blog for Rolling Stone, “What’s even worse is that Diamond’s email suggests that Tucker was only following orders, i.e. that Tucker had received phone calls from ‘a number of senior figures within Whitehall’ – that is, the British government – expressing concern about Barclays’ high Libor rates.”
If true, this would mean that Tucker was essentially playing the messenger for the British government in instructing Diamond to create a false sense of financial stability by the manipulation of borrowing rates.
In the email, Diamond actually says that the problem with Barclays was that they were actually reporting the real lending numbers, not ones artificially deflated before release.
“I asked [Tucker] if he could relay the reality, that not all banks were providing quotes at the levels that represented real transaction,” wrote Diamond in the email.
Tucker then slyly instructed Diamond to fudge the numbers in what Taibbi characterizes as “the painfully oblique manner of an English gentleman trying to engage a prostitute without using any dirty words.”
Tucker first said to Diamond that “while he was certain [Barclays] did not need advice,” Barclays need not report the high (read: true) rates that they had been reporting.
Diamond then relates that Tucker said, “It did not always need to be the case that [Barclays] appeared as high as [it has] recently.”
The attempts by Barclays to downplay the email and push blame away from Diamond and del Messier in the passage of the memo quoted above are just plain laughable.
Barlcays admits, “Certain traders sought to manipulate Barclays Libor submissions by sending requests to submitters,” and that, “The majority of these were sent during 2005 to Sept 2007 and sporadically in 2008/2009. There were no further requests to submitters after May 2009.”
However, they claim, “There was no knowledge by anyone in the bank above desk supervisor level of this conduct at the time. Senior management were not aware.”
This, I believe, is a laughable assertion when one actually looks at the facts. One would have to play quite fast and loose with the interpreting the quite clear wordage of the Diamond email in order to support such a position.
Taibbi, for one, suspects that the Diamond email’s mention of figures from Whitehall could be, if nothing else, “an awesome piece of political jungle defense by Diamond, tossing a hand-grenade into the seat of Her Majesty’s government minutes before he’s supposed to be grilled by parliament.”
Taibbi notes that unfortunately (at least for now) the only evidence we have regarding the mention of Whitehall is Diamond, “and under normal circumstances his word should mean less than nothing.”
This is especially true coming from a man who actually claimed in 2011 that it was time for banks to stop apologizing for what they had done.
Yet, we do, in fact, know that the conversation between Diamond in Tucker did occur and we know that they did discuss LIBOR. The only problem is that we don’t know how far this chain of damnation really goes.
Did I forget anything or miss any errors? Would you like to make me aware of a story or subject to cover? Or perhaps you want to bring your writing to a wider audience? Feel free to contact me at admin@EndtheLie.com with your concerns, tips, questions, original writings, insults or just about anything that may strike your fancy.
More at EndtheLie.com - http://EndtheLie.com/2012/07/05/libor-the-mega-scandal-of-all-mega-scandals-is-upon-us/#ixzz1zp3XvDiK
Wednesday, July 4, 2012
July 7, 2012 False Flag?
UPDATE: Alright we have one more day to see if the illuminati are going to pull this off. If I was them, I wouldn't do it because it would be so obvious that there is a massive conspiracy at this point.
Madrid, Spain bombings ---> Blamed on Al-Qaeda --> Occurred 11th day, in March, 2004
7 year difference
London, England bombings --> Blamed on Al-Qaeda --> Occurred 7th day, in July, 2005
7 year difference
Future City, Future Country --> Undefined Event --> Occurring 7th day, in July 2012
Madrid, Spain bombings ---> Blamed on Al-Qaeda --> Occurred 11th day, in March, 2004
Fukushima, Japan meltdown --> Radiation Release --> Occurred 11th day, in March, 2011
7 year difference
London, England bombings --> Blamed on Al-Qaeda --> Occurred 7th day, in July, 2005
7 year difference
Future City, Future Country --> Undefined Event --> Occurring 7th day, in July 2012
Occult simply means hidden.
2012 - Sony Pictures
C# Method Calls & Variable Scope
Above my C# "public class" code line I wrote "Using System";
I received DOS Compiler Error CS0116, so I went to the Microsoft website to receive help at the MSDN, developer library.
Compiler Error CS0116 = "A namespace does not directly contain members such as fields or methods." Inside a namespace, the compiler only accepts classes, structs, unions, enums, interfaces, and delegates.
MSDN answer, highlighted in red, does not help, and is confusing and useless.
Compiler Error CS0116 = Don't capitalize "Using."
This answer, highlighted blue, was what they should have said.
I received DOS Compiler Error CS0116, so I went to the Microsoft website to receive help at the MSDN, developer library.
Compiler Error CS0116 = "A namespace does not directly contain members such as fields or methods." Inside a namespace, the compiler only accepts classes, structs, unions, enums, interfaces, and delegates.
MSDN answer, highlighted in red, does not help, and is confusing and useless.
Compiler Error CS0116 = Don't capitalize "Using."
This answer, highlighted blue, was what they should have said.
Monday, July 2, 2012
Psychotronic Weapons
Psychotronic Weapons
I have just started a petition on the White House web site in order to investigate misuse of Psychotronic (mind control) weapons and ask for your support. You will have to open your accounts on White House web site to sign the Petition, but do not write any comments or bad words. Recruit other people older than 14 to sign it as well. You can view and sign the petition here
http://wh.gov/lF0B
https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions/!/petition/investigate-misuse-psychotronic-mind-control-weapons/nCWzx3hD
Thank you ,
Sincerely,
Galina Kurdina
I have just started a petition on the White House web site in order to investigate misuse of Psychotronic (mind control) weapons and ask for your support. You will have to open your accounts on White House web site to sign the Petition, but do not write any comments or bad words. Recruit other people older than 14 to sign it as well. You can view and sign the petition here
http://wh.gov/lF0B
https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions/!/petition/investigate-misuse-psychotronic-mind-control-weapons/nCWzx3hD
Thank you ,
Sincerely,
Galina Kurdina
Sunday, July 1, 2012
JP Morgan (Chase) Mauled by Derivatives
By: Jack Blood
There are news reports that now suggest that JP Morgan’s derivatives losses are not $2 billion, they are likely to be $8 billion or perhaps as high as $9 billion dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/06/28/jpmorgan-trading-loss-may-reach-9-billion/.
The JP Morgan losses resulted from derivatives called Credit Default Swaps.
But the danger to the global economy isn’t Credit Default Swaps, it is a world mired in a vast interconnected Ponzi scheme of more than a $1.1 Quadrillion dollars of derivatives, more than half of which are bets on the direction of interest rates. These are called interest rate swaps.
In fact, an estimated six hundred trillion dollars of these derivatives are interest rate swaps – a casino that is so vast, even the people who built it have lost control.
Interest rate swaps are bets on whether interest will rise or fall. An investment bank thinks rates will go up. Another bank thinks they will go down.
And they bet.
Here’s an example: the City of Houston raises $100,000,000 by selling municipal bonds to build a new sports stadium. The bonds are sold with a floating interest rate, which is tied to a rate controlled by the Fed called the federal funds rate (FFR) – say, FFR + 2% – and is at the closing of the bond issue, let’s say, 4%.
But the city’s budget is extraordinarily upside down and if rates go up, they’ll never be able to handle the interest payments. What to do? In the distance we hear a bugle signaling a cavalry charge. This is followed by the sound of screeching tires as a Humvee stretch-limo the size of the Hindenburg squeals around the corner, roars up the street and pulls to a stop in front of the mayor’s office.
The chauffeur exits the driver’s side and walks briskly around the car and opens the rear door. The first person out is a Julia Roberts look-alike in a Valentino pantsuit. She is wearing designer shades and is carrying a Prada briefcase. She is followed by an unusually tall man wearing a midnight blue Armani suit with teal pinstripes. He is ostrich egg bald, is wearing granny glasses and has a Tumi laptop bag slung over his shoulder. He is furiously working the keys of a Blackberry while talking on a Bluetooth headset.
Goldman Sachs has arrived.
The City of Houston and Goldman strike a deal.
The City will pay Goldman a fixed rate of 4% so their interest expense is guaranteed not to rise. Goldman, in turn will pay the city the floating rate – the fed funds rate +2%, so they can pay their bondholders per the terms of the bond purchases.
That is an interest rate swap: the city “swaps” its floating rate for a fixed rate. If the Fed Funds Rate goes up, Goldman loses; if it goes down, they win.
But that transaction doesn’t end there. There are bets on this swap and bets on those bets and then bets on the bets of the bets and… stay with me …a $600,000,000,000 – six hundred TRILLION house of cards.
This is a colossal global casino, built on hot air and greed.
Which brings us back to what is truly driving the actions of the Fed, the International Monetary Fund and the Bank for International Settlements.
Goldman Sachs Tower at 30 Hudson Street, in Jersey City
Perhaps you have noticed that the Federal Reserve (which we remind you, is owned by Goldman Sachs and other major New York banks, not the U.S. government) has kept interest rates at zero for the last three and a half years.
What happened to the banks that bet on low interest rates using interest rate swaps? They made billions in profit. Why? Because they arranged to receive fixed rates from borrowers (cities, states, universities) in exchange for floating rates. The floating rates were tied to the Federal Reserve’s Fed Funds rate, which was lowered to zero during to the “financial crisis” by Helicopter Ben and have remained there.
Consider the fact that the financial crisis seems to have missed JPMorgan, who made about $5 billion in profit on interest rate swaps during the first 9 months of 2008, the very heart of the crisis.
Goldman Sachs made similar profits on these swaps, as did Wells Fargo, to name a few. Of course, the cities, counties and states that took the other side of these bets on the advice of investment bankers to protect their bonds, got slaughtered. But let’s not be too harsh on them. According to Goldman Sachs’ CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, following his testimony before Congress, he’s just a banker “doing God’s work.”We love you, Lloyd. But here’s the problem.
The majority of the more than a half quadrillion dollars in interest rate swaps are held mainly by banks. As we documented above, the 9 biggest U.S. banks hold a quarter of a quadrillion in derivatives. An estimated $136 trillion are interest rate swaps (the U.S. Gross Domestic Product, basically the value of our annual production of goods and services is $15 trillion).
Stay with me here.
With rates at zero, what’s the only way they can go? That’s right, up.
And what will happen to those banks with trillions of dollars of interest rate swaps in their portfolios when rates start to climb? The planet is drowning in a multi-trillion dollar game of interest rate roulette, whose players will suffer massive losses when rates reverse. And at this point, this isn’t entirely up to Bennie and the Jets. The U.S. Government went $1.4 trillion in debt last year and recorded a $1.3 trillion deficit this year.
Which means?
Which means that, at some point for China, Japan or the tooth fairy to buy our Treasury Bills, rates will have to rise. China is not drinking Tim Geithner’s Kool Aid. And the U.S. government will have to raise rates at some point to entice others to buy our fiscal waste. If we don’t raise them, the market will force them up.
Not, says Helicopter Ben, on my watch. The Bald One bought $600 billion dollar’s worth of U.S. Treasury last year. Ben calls the Alice in Wonderland money injection, “Quantitative Easing.” That was the second round of quantitative easing – the first one was an unqualified disaster – this one has been the same. According to reports, QE 3 is being discussed.
Ben is nothing if not brilliant. If he takes to the presses and buys Timmy Geithner’s debt he doesn’t have to rely on his comrades in the People’s Republic of China to buy it. Rates will stay low. And the trillions of dollars of interest rate swaps – which are owned by the same people who own his bank – will be safe.
There are news reports that now suggest that JP Morgan’s derivatives losses are not $2 billion, they are likely to be $8 billion or perhaps as high as $9 billion dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/06/28/jpmorgan-trading-loss-may-reach-9-billion/.
The JP Morgan losses resulted from derivatives called Credit Default Swaps.
But the danger to the global economy isn’t Credit Default Swaps, it is a world mired in a vast interconnected Ponzi scheme of more than a $1.1 Quadrillion dollars of derivatives, more than half of which are bets on the direction of interest rates. These are called interest rate swaps.
In fact, an estimated six hundred trillion dollars of these derivatives are interest rate swaps – a casino that is so vast, even the people who built it have lost control.
Interest rate swaps are bets on whether interest will rise or fall. An investment bank thinks rates will go up. Another bank thinks they will go down.
And they bet.
Here’s an example: the City of Houston raises $100,000,000 by selling municipal bonds to build a new sports stadium. The bonds are sold with a floating interest rate, which is tied to a rate controlled by the Fed called the federal funds rate (FFR) – say, FFR + 2% – and is at the closing of the bond issue, let’s say, 4%.
But the city’s budget is extraordinarily upside down and if rates go up, they’ll never be able to handle the interest payments. What to do? In the distance we hear a bugle signaling a cavalry charge. This is followed by the sound of screeching tires as a Humvee stretch-limo the size of the Hindenburg squeals around the corner, roars up the street and pulls to a stop in front of the mayor’s office.
The chauffeur exits the driver’s side and walks briskly around the car and opens the rear door. The first person out is a Julia Roberts look-alike in a Valentino pantsuit. She is wearing designer shades and is carrying a Prada briefcase. She is followed by an unusually tall man wearing a midnight blue Armani suit with teal pinstripes. He is ostrich egg bald, is wearing granny glasses and has a Tumi laptop bag slung over his shoulder. He is furiously working the keys of a Blackberry while talking on a Bluetooth headset.
Goldman Sachs has arrived.
The City of Houston and Goldman strike a deal.
The City will pay Goldman a fixed rate of 4% so their interest expense is guaranteed not to rise. Goldman, in turn will pay the city the floating rate – the fed funds rate +2%, so they can pay their bondholders per the terms of the bond purchases.
That is an interest rate swap: the city “swaps” its floating rate for a fixed rate. If the Fed Funds Rate goes up, Goldman loses; if it goes down, they win.
But that transaction doesn’t end there. There are bets on this swap and bets on those bets and then bets on the bets of the bets and… stay with me …a $600,000,000,000 – six hundred TRILLION house of cards.
This is a colossal global casino, built on hot air and greed.
Which brings us back to what is truly driving the actions of the Fed, the International Monetary Fund and the Bank for International Settlements.
Goldman Sachs Tower at 30 Hudson Street, in Jersey City
Perhaps you have noticed that the Federal Reserve (which we remind you, is owned by Goldman Sachs and other major New York banks, not the U.S. government) has kept interest rates at zero for the last three and a half years.
What happened to the banks that bet on low interest rates using interest rate swaps? They made billions in profit. Why? Because they arranged to receive fixed rates from borrowers (cities, states, universities) in exchange for floating rates. The floating rates were tied to the Federal Reserve’s Fed Funds rate, which was lowered to zero during to the “financial crisis” by Helicopter Ben and have remained there.
Consider the fact that the financial crisis seems to have missed JPMorgan, who made about $5 billion in profit on interest rate swaps during the first 9 months of 2008, the very heart of the crisis.
Goldman Sachs made similar profits on these swaps, as did Wells Fargo, to name a few. Of course, the cities, counties and states that took the other side of these bets on the advice of investment bankers to protect their bonds, got slaughtered. But let’s not be too harsh on them. According to Goldman Sachs’ CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, following his testimony before Congress, he’s just a banker “doing God’s work.”We love you, Lloyd. But here’s the problem.
The majority of the more than a half quadrillion dollars in interest rate swaps are held mainly by banks. As we documented above, the 9 biggest U.S. banks hold a quarter of a quadrillion in derivatives. An estimated $136 trillion are interest rate swaps (the U.S. Gross Domestic Product, basically the value of our annual production of goods and services is $15 trillion).
Stay with me here.
With rates at zero, what’s the only way they can go? That’s right, up.
And what will happen to those banks with trillions of dollars of interest rate swaps in their portfolios when rates start to climb? The planet is drowning in a multi-trillion dollar game of interest rate roulette, whose players will suffer massive losses when rates reverse. And at this point, this isn’t entirely up to Bennie and the Jets. The U.S. Government went $1.4 trillion in debt last year and recorded a $1.3 trillion deficit this year.
Which means?
Which means that, at some point for China, Japan or the tooth fairy to buy our Treasury Bills, rates will have to rise. China is not drinking Tim Geithner’s Kool Aid. And the U.S. government will have to raise rates at some point to entice others to buy our fiscal waste. If we don’t raise them, the market will force them up.
Not, says Helicopter Ben, on my watch. The Bald One bought $600 billion dollar’s worth of U.S. Treasury last year. Ben calls the Alice in Wonderland money injection, “Quantitative Easing.” That was the second round of quantitative easing – the first one was an unqualified disaster – this one has been the same. According to reports, QE 3 is being discussed.
Ben is nothing if not brilliant. If he takes to the presses and buys Timmy Geithner’s debt he doesn’t have to rely on his comrades in the People’s Republic of China to buy it. Rates will stay low. And the trillions of dollars of interest rate swaps – which are owned by the same people who own his bank – will be safe.
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