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Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
8/9/2015 10:19:18 AM

Longest Streak of Triple-Digit Heat Since 2013 Forecast in Dallas

By , Senior Meteorologist
August 8, 2015; 2:39 AM ET



An unrelenting and dangerous heat wave will expand across the South Central United States through this weekend and retain a firm grip on a part of the region well into late August.

An increasing number of communities will endure triple-digit heat through this weekend across the southern Plains and lower Mississippi Valley as a strong ridge of high pressure builds eastward.

Oklahoma City will record another 100-degree high, while Dallas will endure its first stretch of triple-digit heat in excess of five days since August 2013.

Shreveport and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Jackson, Mississippi, will be among the communities that challenge record highs this weekend.

"This heat wave will be relentless day after day [across the South Central U.S.]," stated AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Brett Anderson.

The worst of the heat wave, in terms of both high temperatures and humidity, will focus on the zone from eastern Texas and eastern Oklahoma to Mississippi, according to Anderson.

"It will certainly be a dangerous situation with very high RealFeel® temperatures approaching 115 degrees on a daily basis," he added.

"The one thing is that it will not be quite as humid as recent heat waves since it has been dry recently, but many places will endure their hottest actual temperatures so far this year," continued Anderson.

Residents should still take the necessary precautions to protect themselves from suffering from heat exhaustion or a heat-related death. Remember never to leave a child or pet in a sealed vehicle when it is hot.

RELATED:
Heat-Related Advisories, Warnings
Forecast Temperature Maps
South Central US Interactive Radar

While complexes of thunderstorms led to a wetter-than-normal July to the north, most communities south of I-40 have had less than 50 percent of normal rainfall since July 10. Some places, including San Antonio, Texas, and Shreveport, Louisiana, have failed to record any measurable rain during that time.

"The soil moisture in Texas has dissipated since the late spring rain, and that is only amplifying the heat," stated AccuWeather Meteorologist Ben Noll.

Without needing to evaporate any moisture, all of the sun's energy goes to heating the surface.

There are signs that the ridge will ease its grip on the lower Mississippi Valley next week, while building to the north across the Plains, according to Noll.

"The heat will make it into the northern Plains and even the Canadian Prairie Provinces next week, which will be a marked contrast to the severe weather and cooler temperatures from this week," stated Noll.

The ridge, however, will maintain a firm hold on the southern Plains well into late August, causing the hot, dry weather pattern to persist.

WATCH: Refugees in Jordan Fry Egg in Seconds to Show Intensity of Heat Wave

"The ridge will continue to put a lid on thunderstorms and block tropical systems from attempting to track into the western Gulf Coast," added Anderson.

"That is not to say that there will not be a few complexes of thunderstorms in Oklahoma and Kansas, but compared to earlier in the month, the thunderstorm activity will back off for the middle to latter part of August," continued Noll.

The dry spell will lead to lawns drying up and dying, added stress on crops and lowering water levels. However, Noll does not anticipate that a prolonged drought is settling in with the return of wetter weather expected this fall.


"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)

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Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
8/9/2015 10:44:49 AM

FBI says that citizens should have no secrets that the government can't access: the Orwellian cyber police state has arrived

Wednesday, August 05, 2015 by: J. D. Heyes





(NaturalNews) The police and surveillance state predicted in the forward-looking 1940s classic "1984" by George Orwell, has slowly, but steadily, come to fruition. However, like a frog sitting idly in a pan of steadily-warming water, too many Americans still seem unaware that the slow boil of big government is killing their constitutional liberties.

The latest sign of this stealth takeover of civil rights and freedom was epitomized in recent Senate testimony by FBI Director James Comey, who voiced his objections to civilian use of encryption to protect personal data – information the government has no automatic right to obtain.

As reported by The New American, Comey testified that he believes the government's spy and law enforcement agencies should have unfettered access to everything Americans may store or send in electronic format: On computer hard drives, in so-called i-clouds, in email and in text messaging – for our own safety and protection. Like many in government today, Comey believes that national security is more important than constitutional privacy protections or, apparently, due process. After all, aren't criminals the only ones who really have anything to hide?

In testimony before a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee entitled "Going Dark: Encryption, Technology, and the Balance Between Public Safety and Privacy" Comey said that in order to stay one step ahead of terrorists, as well as international and domestic criminals, Uncle Sam's various spy and law enforcement agencies should have access to available technology used to de-encrypt protected data. Also, he believes the governmentshould be the final arbiter deciding when decryption is necessary.

What could go wrong there?

Find more articles on the police state at PoliceState.news

Government, at all levels, is responsible

During the hearing, TNA reported, technology experts warned the panel that giving the FBI limitless access to the personal electronic data of Americans would open it up to exploitation by "bad actors." But Comey was having none of that.

"It is clear that governments across the world, including those of our closest allies, recognize the serious public safety risks if criminals can plan and undertake illegal acts without fear of detection," he told the committee.

"Are we comfortable with technical design decisions that result in barriers to obtaining evidence of a crime?"
So, in essence, Comey like many before him, especially since the global war on terror was launched – believes that, in the name of national security Americans ought to give up more of their individual and constitutional rights because that's the only way we can be adequately protected.

Perhaps realizing that his Senate hearing testimony was public, Comey gave the Constitution a passing glance, noting that the government should respect the "requirements and safeguards of the laws" and the country's founding document. However, as Americans now know, spy agencies during the past two presidential administrations have been tasked increasingly with conducting warrantless, unchecked surveillance of Americans' electronic data and communications.

But all of this is not on men like Comey and Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Congress bears its share of responsibility, too.

This is the way it is – shut up and take it

When such activities of the National Security Agency were exposed in 2013 by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, many in the media and among the American electorate were quick to blame the agency, as if it was somehow acting out of rogue instinct.

The reality is, however, that the agency is tasked to perform its duties either by statutory law (think the USA Patriot Act) or by presidential directive (think Bush's order after 9/11 to conduct warrantless surveillance).

"We are not asking to expand the government's surveillance authority, but rather we are asking to ensure that we can continue to obtain electronic information and evidence pursuant to the legal authority that Congress has provided to us to keep America safe," Comey said during the Senate hearing.

What does all this mean? It simply means that at every level, government considers its own citizens hostile.

Oh, and there's nothing we can do about it.

Sources:

thenewamerican.com

nytimes.com

naturalnews.com


"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)

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Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
8/9/2015 11:12:43 AM

Record 93,770,000 Americans Not In Labor Force; Participation Rate Matches 38-Year Low

Published August 7, 2015


By Susan Jones, CNS News

(CNSNews.com) - A record 93,770,000 Americans were not in the American labor force last month, and the labor force participation rate remained at 62.6 percent, exactly where it was in June -- a 38-year low, the Labor Department reported on Friday.

In 1975, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics began keeping such records, 58,627,000 Americans were not in the labor force, and the number has grown steadily since then, breaking the 80-million mark at the end of George W. Bush's presidency; and the 90-million mark in July 2013, during Barack Obama's second term. The number of Americans not in the labor force has continued to rise since then.

According to the Congressional Budget Office's 2015 long-term outlook, the number of working Americans is expected to increase more slowly in coming decades, as more workers exit the labor force, many of them retiring baby-boomers; and fewer workers enter it -- given declining birth rates and a levelling-off of women in the labor force.

In July, according to BLS, the nation’s civilian noninstitutional population, consisting of all people 16 or older who were not in the military or an institution, reached 250,876,000. Of those, 157,106,000 participated in the labor force by either holding a job or actively seeking one.

The 157,106,000 who participated in the labor force equaled only 62.6 percent of the 250,876,000 civilian noninstitutional population -- the same as it was in June. Not since October 1977, when the participation rate dropped to 62.4, has the percentage been this low.

Other notes from Friday's jobs report:

-- The economy added an estimated 215,000 jobs in July, in line with economists' expectations, but not enough to change the nation's civilian unemploymet rate, which remained at 5.3 percent.

-- Among the major demographic groups, the unemployment rate for adult men (4.8 percent), adult women (4.9 percent), whites (4.6 percent), blacks (9.1 percent), Asians (4.0 percent), and Hispanics(6.8 percent) showed little or no change.

-- 6,325,000 million people were employed part time for economic reasons (involuntary part-time workers) in July, These individuals, who would have preferred full-time employment, were working part-time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job.

-- The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more) was little changed at 2,180,000 in July (up from 2,121,000 in June). These individuals accounted for 26.9 percent of the unemployed.

"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)

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Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
8/9/2015 5:45:23 PM

Chinese Trade Crashes, And Why A Yuan Devaluation Is Now Just A Matter Of Time

Tyler Durden's picture
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 08/08/2015 15:59 -0400


Two weeks ago we showed something very disturbing (something even the IMF is now figuring out): global trade is grinding to a halt...

... and in a dollar-denominated cases, has even gone into reverse.

World-Trade-Monitor-Unit-Price-2012-2015_05

Nowhere has this trend been more visible than in the IMF's own admission that global trade, growing at 7% in 2011, has nearly halved its growth rate, and in 2016 global commerce is expected to rise at the slowest pace since the financial crisis.

Overnight we got another acute reminder of just who is lying hunched over, comatose in the driver's seat of global commerce: the country whose July exports just crashed by 8.3% Y/Y (and down 3.6% from the month before) far greater than the consensus estimate of only a 1.5% drop, and the biggest drop in four months following the modest June rebound by 2.8%:China.

It wasn't just exports, imports tumbled as well by 8.1%, fractionally worse than the -8.0% consensus, and down from the -6.1% in June as China's commodity tolling operations are suddenly mothballed.

Goldman breaks down the geographic slowdown:

    • Exports to the US contracted 1.3% yoy, down from the +12.0% yoy in June.
    • Exports to Japan fell 13.0% yoy in July, vs -6.0%yoy in June
    • Exports to the Euro area went down 12.3% yoy, vs -3.4% yoy in June.
    • Exports to ASEAN grew 1.4% yoy, vs +8.4% yoy in June
    • Exports to Hong Kong declined 14.9% yoy, vs -0.5% yoy in June.


Slower sequential export growth likely contributed to the slowdown in industrial production growth in July. Weaker export growth is likely putting more downward pressure on the currency, though whether the government will allow some modest depreciation to happen remains to be seen.


As CA's Valentin Marinov summarizes:

"the collapse in exports seems to be driven by renewed weakness in the EU demand. Not great overall and highlights one distinct risk for the global asset markets we have been highlighting repeatedly of late. In particular, we were stressing the link between slowing global trade (both in manufacturing goods as well as commodities) and the recent sharp drop in central bank FX reserves. That drop should over time erode the sovereign demand for stocks and bonds. The resulting imbalance between supply and demand for global stock and bonds is still not fully reflected in equity risk premia (VIX is still quite law) as well as bond term premia (these are still low for the UST). A correction higher, presumably on the back of Fed liftoff, should weigh on a broad range of risk-correlated currencies."


All of the above, of course, is something Zero Headers have known since last November when we wrote "How The Petrodollar Quietly Died, And Nobody Noticed." More are starting to notice.

And while the above should not be news, neither should anyone be surprised that such ongoing trade collapse for the world's largest mercantilist, spells doom for the Politburo's 7% GDP target. From Bloomberg:


Along with weak domestic investment, subdued global demand is putting China’s 2015 growth target of about 7 percent at risk. The government has rolled out fresh pro-expansion measures, including special bond sales to finance construction, but has held off weakening the yuan as China seeks reserve- currency status.

Exports are no longer an engine for China growth -- no matter what the government does, it’s just impossible to see strong export growth as in the past,” said Bank of Communications economist Liu Xuezhi. “It means additional slowdown pressure, and it requires the government to be more aggressive in the domestic market.”


So while one can repeat that the PBOC will have to lower rates again until one is blue in the face (even as out of control soaring pork prices make it virtually impossible for the local authorities to ease any more), the realty is that, as we warned in March, a
Chinese QE is now inevitable. Why? Because while the government is already clearly buying stocks thereby validating the "other" transmission mechanism, the only thing the PBOC still hasn't tried is to devalue the Yuan. As global trade continues to disintegrate, and as a desperate China finally joins the global currency war, it will have no choice but to devalued next.


"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)

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Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
8/9/2015 6:15:05 PM

When a Train Wreck Is No Accident



“In spite of all the rhetoric, we will go deeper in debt, the Fed will print more money, and the value of the dollar will continue to plummet.” - Ron Paul


Never in history have the economic and political structures been so manipulated by those who are responsible for their safekeeping; never has so much been at stake, in so many countries, and facing collapse,
all at the same time.

The great majority of people in the First World recognise that the world is passing through an economic crisis. However, most are under the impression that there are some pretty smart fellows running the show and all they need to do is tweak the system a bit more and we’ll return to happy days.

Not so. The “smart fellows” who are in charge of fixing the problem are in fact the very same people who created it.

Understandably, this a hard concept for most people to even consider, let alone accept, as the very idea that those in charge of the system might consciously collapse it seems preposterous. So, we might wish to back up a bit here and present a very brief history of the system itself, in order to understand that the eventual collapse of the economic system was baked in the cake from the very beginning.

Creating a Central Bank

From the very earliest days of the formation of the American republic, bankers (along with inside help from George Washington’s secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton) sought to create a banking monopoly that would create the country’s currency and become the central banking system.

The first attempt at a central bank was a failure, and strong opponents, including Thomas Jefferson, prevented a second central bank for a time. Later, further attempts were made by bankers and their political cronies, and each central bank was either short-lived or defeated in its planning stages.

Then, in 1913, the heads of the largest banks met clandestinely on Jekyll Island, Georgia, to make another try. Having recently lost yet another bid to create a central bank, due to the public’s understandable concern that the big bankers were already too powerful, a new spin was placed on the idea. This time, they decided to present the idea as a government body that would be decentralised and would have the responsibility of restricting the power of the banks.

However, the new bill was in fact the same old bill, with a new title and some minor changes in wording. But this time, it would be presented by the new president, who was a liberal.

The president, Woodrow Wilson, had in fact been handpicked by the banks. The banks then scuttled their own conservative party’s candidate, got the Democrat Wilson elected, then installed a secretary of the Treasury whose job it would be to ensure that the Federal Reserve was created.

The bill was widely supported by the public, even though, in truth, it was not a federal agency, but a privately owned conglomerate, controlled by the banks. Neither was it a reserve. It was never intended to store money; it was intended to give the biggest bankers control of the economy. They followed the central principle of uber-banker Mayer Rothschild: “Let me issue and control a nation’s money and I care not who writes the laws.”

From the start, the new institution peddled itself as the protector of the people’s interests, but it was quite the opposite. Its purpose from its inception was to control the economy and the government by controlling the issuance of the currency. In addition, it was to be a system of taxation.

Typically, a population accepts a certain amount of direct taxation but has its limits of tolerance. Yet, the bankers understood that a less direct method of taxation was infinitely more profitable and infinitely safer from criticism.

Inflation as a Profit System

Inflation was not always the norm. At one time, prices were relatively static from one generation to the next. But the Federal Reserve touted the idea that “controlled” inflation was in fact necessary for a prosperous economy.

Of course, the greater the debasement of the currency through inflation, the more the central bankers profited. But at some point, the currency would have lost virtually all its value and it would be time for a reset. The currency would need to collapse and a new one created.

And so, the Fed set about its hundred-year programme of continuous inflation. Although there have been periods of lower inflation (and even deflation), the programme stayed more or less on course, and now, its hundred-year life has all but ended: the dollar has been devalued almost 100%.

And so, we find ourselves at the day of reckoning. The economic crisis we are now facing (not only in the US; it will be felt, to a greater or lesser extent, worldwide) is not a mere anomaly that we need to “push past”. It’s a systemic crisis. It’s been created by design and the system must collapse.

Of course, the central banks are in the process of protecting their interests, to make sure that, whilst this will be a major economic calamity, they themselves will continue to profit. The damage will be borne by the general public.

This began in earnest in 1999, with the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, allowing banks to create a massive, reckless mortgage spree. It was backed by the government’s “too big to fail” policy that guaranteed that, when the banks predictably became insolvent as a result of the loans, government would bail them out. (And by “government” we mean “the taxpayer”; it was he who picked up the bill for the banks’ recklessness.)

The End Game

The next step in getting ready for the collapse is an all-out effort to confiscate the wealth of the public. This can be seen in the effort to push investors away from solid forms of wealth protection such as gold and silver and into stocks, bonds and bank deposits. More recently, we’ve seen the emergence of an effort to end the use of safe deposit boxes and a push to end the use of paper currency in making transactions.

The end objective is to force as much money as possible into deposits in banks, then take it. The US, EU and a few other countries have passed confiscation legislation, allowing the banks carte blanche to confiscate and/or refuse to release deposits.

Of course a reset of these proportions will not be without its fallout. The public will be horrified at the outcome, at the realisation that the very institutions they thought had been created to protect them had never been intended to serve their interests at all.

Once they realise that the world’s greatest Ponzi scheme has been foisted on them, they will be hopping mad and justifiably so. Those who had not had the foresight to internationalise themselves, to remove themselves as much as possible from the system, will most certainly want to get even in some way.

And this makes clear why governments, particularly that of the US, are working so hard to create a police state. Unless a totalitarian state can be created, those who are presently taking the wealth may not be able to fully realise their objectives.

The coming train wreck is no accident. It has long been planned. That the “smart fellows in charge” will somehow save the day is therefore a vain hope indeed.

It’s still possible to back out of the system, but it’s getting more difficult every day. The window is closing, and the time to internationalise is now.

Editor’s Note: A big part of any strategy to reduce your political risk is to place some of your savings outside the immediate reach of the thieving bureaucrats in your home country. Obtaining an offshore bank account is a convenient way to do just that.

That way your savings cannot be easily confiscated, frozen, or devalued at the drop of a hat or with a couple of taps on the keyboard. In the event capital controls are imposed, an offshore bank account will help ensure that you have access to your money when you need it the most.

In short, your savings in an offshore bank will largely be safe from any madness in your home country.

Despite what you may hear, offshore banking is completely legal and is not about tax evasion or other illegal activities. It’s simply about legally diversifying your political risk by putting your money in sound, well-capitalized institutions where it’s treated best.

(www.internationalman.com)

"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)

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