Category Archives: News you can use

The Empowering Internet Safety Guide for Women

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Thank you, Jane for the pointer:

Have you ever been harassed in the street? Received a crass message on a dating app? Had a coworker make a comment about your appearance that just didn’t sit right?

You’re not alone.

With the #MeToo movement, it’s easy to log onto Twitter or Facebook and see just how many women are victims of sexual harassment. Whether in person or online, women everywhere have experienced it in one way or another. And with all the new ways the internet has opened avenues of communication, online harassment is more prevalent than ever.

According to a study by the Pew Research Center, most online abuse takes place on social media. Although men are also subject to online harassment – which includes name calling, derision, and physical threats – the study found that online, women are more than twice as likely as men to experience sexual harassment.

In addition, more than half of women ages 18-29 report having been sent sexually explicit images without their consent.

This number is only growing, and while 70% of women believe online harassment to be a major problem, not many know how to prevent it.

Women are often targeted simply because they are women. Attacks are often sexualized or misogynistic, and rhetoric tends to focus on their bodies and sexual violence. This is both physically and emotionally damaging, and women are often intimidated into silence, preferring to disengage rather than put themselves at risk.

However, there are ways we can protect ourselves.

This guide was written with the intention of empowering women to navigate the internet without fear. We discuss common occurrences in which women are subject to harassment in their daily lives – on social media, at work, while dating, and more – and give tips and advice on how women can take control.

It is important for us to note that some of the advice given here encourages anonymity, rather than risking being targeted. While this may seem to run counter to the idea of encouraging self-expression, we believe that every woman should be empowered to make that choice for herself.

Our job is to give you the tools you need to do that.

We hope this guide encourages women everywhere to defend and protect themselves, and to stand up to sexual harassment, both on and off the web.

Read the rest at the link below

Source: The Empowering Internet Safety Guide for Women

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Gold & Basel 3: A Revolution That Once Again No One Noticed | Zero Hedge

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A very important read. This is what is coming and what we’ve been working on for the last six years without pay. -ed

BCBS is the Politburo of the world, whose Secretary General, according to rumours, is comrade Baruch, and the underground structure of the Central Committee is even more secret. It has many euphemisms, the most adequate of which is “Zurich gnomes”. This is what Swiss bankers are called. Not even owners of commercial banks, but namely those ordinary-looking men sitting in the Swiss city of Basel who Hitler – who tried to attach the whole world to the Third Reich, and who preserved neutrality with Switzerland during all the war – didn’t dare to attack. And, as is known, in Switzerland, besides Swiss rifleman, in reality there isn’t even an army. So who was the frenzied Fuhrer afraid of?

Nevertheless, the “recommendations” that were made by BCBS on March 29th 2019 were immediately, at the snap of the fingers, accepted for execution by all the central banks of the world. And our Russian Central Bank is not an exception. There is even the statement of the press service of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation posted on the official website of the Central Bank. It is called “Concerning the terms of implementation of Basel III”. The planned world revolution was in 2017 (magic of dates and digits or just a coincidence [a reference to 1917 – ed]?), but it has started only now.

Its essence is simple.

Read to the end from the link below and buckle up, especially you in the USA and vassal states (like Canada). -ed

Source: Gold & Basel 3: A Revolution That Once Again No One Noticed | Zero Hedge

Category: economics, History, News you can use | Tags: , ,

Patrick Hampton: Hip-Hop: The Cancer of American Culture — The Patriot Post

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“some good truth here on how hip-hop and rap are NOT music. -ed

Hip-Hop: The Cancer of American Culture

It’s reached a level of moral rot that Americans have not seen in any subculture or genre of music.

Patrick Hampton · Apr. 8, 2019

Let me be clear: I am in no way diminishing cancer and the effect it has on American families. I simply want to draw attention to the similarities of how cancer cells destroy their host and how hip-hop culture is destroying America. Since its inception, America has been the birthplace of many subcultures, industries, and genres of music. Americans have always believed in freedom of expression and free markets, so long as it is not antithetical to American values.

Hip-hop culture and its music has reached a level of moral rot that Americans have not seen in any subculture or genre of music in a long time. Some may claim that it’s just art no different than a painting. I would argue that even art begins with drawing a line. Those lines represents boundaries. When we examine hip-hop today, we can observe that it has no boundaries or lines of morality. Hip-hop culture and music over the years has become more aggressively violent, misogynistic toward women, and now anti-American. Hip-hop artists like KRS-ONE, who is considered a religious teacher and author of The Gospel of HipHop, declares, “Hip-Hop culture is a rebellious response to white American capitalism.” Africa Bambaataa, the godfather of hip-hop, teaches that the black man is “God” and the white man is “the devil.” How are these statements art?

In America, we measure the benefit of subcultures by how they add value to the dominant American culture. Hip-hop at every turn attempts to diminish American culture with the promotion of rebellion, rants against police, racist overtones, and radical religious ideology. This type of behavior and rhetoric by hip-hop artists is why I consider hip-hop to be a cancer to America.

Cancer changes the way our cells function. Normal cells divide and grow to form new cells. When older cells die, new cells are formed to replace the dying cells. This process enables the body to continue to grow and function in a healthy capacity. Cancer is a breakdown of this orderly process. As cells become abnormal or damaged, instead of dying, they continue to survive. They will divide and continue to grow rapidly and form tumors. Those malignant tumors then aggressively spread into nearby tissues and organs and become invasive. Cancer cells ignore signals to stop dividing and even attempt to change how normal cells function — they convince normal cells to feed them oxygen to grow the tumor.

This is exactly how hip-hop is functioning in American culture. Hip-hop culture has invaded every walk of life posing as a genre of music when it is, at its core, a radical religious subculture that is designed to destroy the host. When we look at hip-hop “cells” that we call artists, they have called for the death of America and its institutions that make us great. In the ‘90s you had gangster rappers like N.W.A. (N*&&@$ With Attitudes) that had songs entitled “F—k the police,” that inspired the L.A. riots. In the 2000s you had rappers like Jay-Z rapping, “Jesus can’t save you. Life begins when the Church ends.”

In 2018, Snoop Dog recently created a video where he depicted President Trump being assassinated and the album cover had the president dead in a morgue with a toe tag labeled “Trump.” In the same year, he released a Christian gospel album. Just this month, rapper Nipsey Hussle, who was featured in a song called “F—k Trump,” was killed violently in LA by an associate gang member of the Rollin 60’s Neighborhood Crips. Nipsey’s influence even reached NBA player Russell Westbrook, who after scoring 20 points, 20 rebounds, and 20 assists against the Los Angeles Lakers, told the interviewer, “This was for Nipsey! 20-20-20 they know what this means!” The player was referring to a shout to the Rollin 60’s Neighborhood Crips gang that Nipsey Hussle was affiliated with. In plain sight, an NBA player was able to use his NBA platform to support gang activity. This proves how the cancer can spread from industry to industry or organ to organ.

The hip-hop cancer has invaded almost every aspect of American culture. It has metastasized in a generation and promotes everything from gang violence and selling drugs to killing police officers and calling for the end of the Christian church. My hope is that Americans will begin to wake up and seek aggressive treatment against this cancerous culture, or better than that, have it removed from their family and life in hopes of saving future American generations.

Source: Patrick Hampton: Hip-Hop: The Cancer of American Culture — The Patriot Post

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“Decentralized Finance” – Welcome To The World’s First Fully-Transparent Bank | Zero Hedge

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Authored by Omid Malekan via Medium.com,

Maker Shows The Way

The 2008 financial crisis had no single cause, and instead resulted from an amalgamation of factors that built up over time into one terrifying crescendo. They ranged from financial engineering to government policy, along with the twin tendencies of greed and fear. Many of those issues have been addressed since, but the opacity of the banking system remains, partly because there is no way get rid of it.

It’s hard for big companies to be transparent about their health because even insiders sometimes don’t know. The most terrifying moments of the crisis revolved around this hard truth. Banks have always had strict reporting requirements, and are even more closely watched today. But consolidation and the ancient systems most financial institutions still use make it hard to gauge their exact health  –  with one exception.

Welcome to the the world’s first fully transparent bank.

MakerDao is a blockchain project where users put up an asset as collateral and borrow money against it.It’s a decentralized bank that utilizes modern technology to replicate the oldest financial transaction in history — borrowing cash against an existing asset, an activity anyone who’s taken out a mortgage or bought stocks on margin is familiar with.

The project currently only accepts the native currency of the Ethereum blockchain as collateral, and lends a digital currency pegged to the dollar called Dai. Since it resides on a public blockchain, everyone can watch in real time as users all over the world put up collateral, borrow money, repay their loan with interest or, should the value of their collateral fall too much, get liquidated. Bankers and underwriters are replaced with smart contracts executing known rules. While every other bank in the world tells you what their lending practices are, Maker will show you.

Despite the negative associations of blockchain technology in regulatory circles, it offers a form of radical transparency that doesn’t exist elsewhere. The public knows more about the status of Maker than your typical CEO may about his own company. Despite having no official regulator, Maker is arguably the most regulated financial entity on earth, as anyone can scrutinize every loan. So while traditional banks require an army of employees, auditors and regulators to estimate a figure like their collateral ratio, Maker yields the exact number as of the next block. (398% as of block #7507738.) You can’t make this stuff up. Literally.

For now, MakerDao is relatively tiny, warehousing $356m in collateral and lending $89m against it. The projects rapid growth has led to more borrowing and stablecoin generation than there is currently demand for, leading to Dai occasionally breaking below the $1 soft peg. The community has tried to resolve this situation by raising the system’s interest rate — in the same fashion that a central bank might raise rates to defend its currency. Unlike a simpler fiat-backed stablecion, Dai is prone to drifting from its peg due to liquidity flows. But also unlike a fiat-backed stablecoin, Dai is truly decentralized and totally uncensorable.

In lieu of executives, Maker’s governance is handled through a digital token called MKR, a pseudo-equity stake in the success of the project. Ownership of that token gives anyone the right to vote on decisions like changing the interest rate. To incentivize responsible banking, MKR owners get to collect the interest payments the system generates. But to make sure that they don’t suffer from the same greed-fueled lowering of lending standards that contributed to the financial crisis, MKR owners are also buyers of last resort should the collateral backing the loans prove insufficient.

Just imagine: a bank where executive compensation, and not taxpayer funds, is used for a bailout.

Although legacy banks talk about inclusion and reaching the unbanked, they are limited by the laws of physics. The manual work of determining credit worthiness and issuing a loan has a minimal cost that makes the activity unprofitable for smaller loans. Maker’s automated processes on the other hand are value agnostic. Smart contracts don’t care if you want to borrow one dollar or one million dollars. They also don’t care, and don’t even know, about your age, gender or race. To the blockchain, we are all just numbers.

For all the controversy surrounding blockchain and its ill-begotten reputation as appealing primarily to criminals, it is in many ways a regulator’s dream come true. It replaces regulations written in thousand page bills and enforced by underpaid bureaucrats with elegant code. Although there is an open question of whether Maker’s governance token violated securities laws when it was issued, there is no doubt that its banking features are more compliant than any legacy bank can be — so much so that even regulators are starting to take notice. Just recently, the Chairman of the CFTC speculated that had this technology been around during the 2008 crisis, the government could have had a more effective response.

Maker is just one of a brand new class of “decentralized finance” projects that are starting to sprout on public blockchains. They include lending, money markets and even market making. Most are predicated on a simple question: other than being a trusted middleman, is there anything special about the services provided by a bank? If the answer is no, then the service can — and probably will — be disintermediated, with the key requirements of trust and liquidity being provided by a public ledger.

The basic human needs of trading value for time or security for profit has not changed for thousands of years, but how institutions go about providing them has. Blockchain enabled decentralized finance is the cutting edge of that evolution. It is unlikely that the transition will be as smooth as the faithful would like to believe, but the potential is large enough that even the biggest skeptics should pay attention.

Source: “Decentralized Finance” – Welcome To The World’s First Fully-Transparent Bank | Zero Hedge

Category: economics, News you can use | Tags: , ,

Amish Money: 10 Frugal Lessons from the Amish :: The JB Bardot Archives

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Sometimes “Need” Really Means “Want”Most people cultivate a sense of need for things they could live without. Since most aren’t driven by a culture that abhors amenities, it can take a financial crisis to help a person realize what he or she can give up. How many times have you said, or heard said something like, “A person has to have some comforts.” to justify that second television, or a luxury car, or something similar? If saving money is your goal, take a look around and figure out what the real…

Sometimes “Need” Really Means “Want”

Most people cultivate a sense of need for things they could live without. Since most aren’t driven by a culture that abhors amenities, it can take a financial crisis to help a person realize what he or she can give up. How many times have you said, or heard said something like, “A person has to have some comforts.” to justify that second television, or a luxury car, or something similar? If saving money is your goal, take a look around and figure out what the real necessities are.

Simple is Good

In many ways, the things we spend extra money on either complicate our lives or end up costing more in the long run. A self-propelled lawnmower doesn’t cut grass any better; it’s just easier and has more moving parts to replace. A brisk hike in the fresh air is just as effective as that 30 minute stroll on an expensive treadmill and you’ll enjoy it more. Manual hedge clippers are half as expensive as electric, less noisy and give your arms some exercise.

Grow Your Own

I know, not everyone can raise livestock or big crops, but most of us can grow a few vegetables or herbs, even if they’re of the miniature, indoor variety. You’ll save some money and get better tasting, healthier produce, too.

Many Hands Make Light Work – and Less Expense

When big projects arise in an Amish community, family and neighbors pitch in to get it done. Granted, if you live in the city, a barn raising is pretty much out of the question, but that doesn’t mean that family and friends can’t pitch in to mend that back fence or build a deck. Building codes in most cities will allow a homeowner to do their own home improvements and “employ” someone to help. You’ll need a permit for most work, and there will be inspections, but if you can’t afford a contractor, some free meals and maybe a case of beer might go a long way toward paying your friends.

Craftsmanship Isn’t About Expensive Tools

The reputation of Amish woodworkers is based on attention to detail, patience and secrets handed down through generations. Many of their tools are hand-made. You’re probably wondering what that has to do with saving money. It’s simple. Photographers can create awesome images without the top-of-the-line DSLR. Web developers can create great sites without owning the latest computer or software. Whatever you do, don’t get caught up in needing the biggest and best. Be the master of the tools you own and save some money.

Take Care of Your Tools

Keeping the tools of your trade longer doesn’t mean letting them fall apart. Any skilled craftsman knows that without proper maintenance, tools fail. Keeping your equipment in shape means it will perform better, longer. Having to replace them because of premature failure isn’t cost-effective.

Quality is Worth the Investment

One of the reasons Amish furniture is in such high demand is that it lasts. Because of the meticulous construction methods and hand-selected materials, many Amish pieces become heirlooms. Sometimes saving money means paying a little more for something that you’re not going to be throwing away soon. Naturally, this applies to much more than furniture.

Make the Most of Resources

To an Amish farmer, a cow is a source of dairy products and fertilizer. A grove of trees can provide building materials, but needs to be managed well, because it also produces game for the dinner table, as well as other natural foods. Crops are rotated carefully to optimize soil condition and help control crop disease. Careful resource management helps Amish communities sustain themselves with little help from the outside. We can all save money by learning to manage, recycle and repurpose what we have.

Get the Most Out of What You Have

Those horse-drawn prams the Amish are so well known for are also handed down, and repaired or reconditioned many times over. So it is with their other possessions. The basic principle is that if something serves its purpose, it doesn’t need to be replaced. Imagine how much money you can save by keeping your car a few years after it’s paid off. How about refinishing the dining table instead of replacing it? Make what you own last a little longer and you’ll save.

Gifts Don’t Have to Break the Bank

Traditional Amish gifts for birthdays, etc. are simple, practical items and usually singular. A tool or an item of clothing is typical. While there’s no need to adjust your gift giving quite that radically, it wouldn’t hurt to consider buying one very thoughtful gift instead of a dozen expensive ones.

When it comes to surviving hard times, the Amish have sustained their culture and communities in North America for centuries, while relying mostly on themselves. What better example for those of us trying to provide for ourselves and our families in today’s economy?

 Source: SavingAdvice.com — http://www.savingadvice.com/articles/2012/06/12/1010910_amish-money-10-frugal-lessons-from-the-amish.html

Source: Amish Money: 10 Frugal Lessons from the Amish :: The JB Bardot Archives

Category: economics, News you can use | Tags: ,
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