Money may not buy happiness but how we choose to spend the money we have can make a big difference. The dream of owning a big house in the ‘burbs and taking a trip to Disneyworld every year has lost its appeal to many people, or is simply out of reach for any number of reasons, but by reconsidering our priorities, the payoffs in happiness can be big ones, argues Laura Vanderkam, author of All the Money in the World: What the Happiest People Know About Getting and Spending.

Be more mindful about what your money could buy. Make purchases that improve your happiness. For many, that means spending on experiences, not things.

Using the example of the money we have traditionally paid for expensive engagement rings and weddings, Vanderkam calculates how many trips, periodic bouquets of flowers, date nights, babysitters, and hours of housecleaning that money could buy over the years. These are services and experiences that, in the long run, could bring more enjoyment to a couple than a big ring and wedding.

Don’t just scrimp and save. Find ways to increase your earnings.

Yes, the increased flexibility in work and careers can be scary and unsettling, but it also provides new, exciting opportunities to make more money. Vanderkam calls it the “1099 mindset.” Even if you have a more traditional job, think about work the way freelancers or contract workers–people who get 1099s–do. If you are a teacher, tutor. If you’re interested in a topic, start a blog that you monetize. Be creative.

Read Entire Article HERE

As a forward to this article Rogue media has found this tasty bit of info – InformationClearingHouse – A veteran Pentagon employee who was a key player in the effort to find links between Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida has been stripped of his security clearance, according to senior U.S. officials.

The employee, F. Michael Maloof, is associated with a Lebanese-American businessman who is under federal investigation for possible involvement in a gun-running scheme to Liberia, the West African nation embroiled in civil war. The businessman, Imad El Haje, approached Maloof on behalf of Syria to seek help in arranging a communications channel between Syria and the Defense Department.  ***  It would seem that the author has been part of a group of warhawks that have been trying to push for war in Iran for quite some time ***

WASHINGTON – Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta believes that Israel could attack Iran in an April-to-June timeframe, and there apparently has been a decision made for the U.S. to help in an assault on the radical Islamic nation’s nuclear facilities.

U.S. military sources tell WND that the Pentagon has begun preparations for “a number of operational plans and counter-operations,” with a Feb. 22 due date for submitting the plans.

There also is a request for identifying U.S. forces “by 1 March with a ‘through’ date of October.”

Read Entire Article HERE

The EPA announced that it has completed the first part of its study on dioxin, after more than 25 years of stonewalling.

Dioxin is the most caustic man-made chemical known.  Dioxin is a general term for hundreds of chemicals that are produced in industrial processes that use chlorine and burning. Disturbingly, it has a half-life of 100+ years when it is leached into soil or embedded in water systems. Dioxin was the most harmful component in Agent Orange (the recipe for Agent Orange is 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T herbicides).

The EPA says that air emissions of dioxin have decreased by 90% since the 1980′s, but dioxin is dangerous at any level.  The study appears to omit any analysis of dioxin transmission in water and land.  The danger is growing because Dow AgroScience has received preliminary USDA approval for its 2,4-D herbicide resistant GMO corn.  This means that dioxin contaminated 2,4-D herbicide will drench US farm land and pollute water supplies if the crops are widely planted.

EPA Dioxin Assessment Report

The EPA’s press release on dioxin’s health effects trumpeted the lie that current exposure rates “don’t pose significant health risks”. But the EPA does admit that there is a cancer risk, although they are not releasing their study on cancer at this time.  Perhaps the delay is due to the fact that 95% of Americans have measurable levels of dioxin in their bodies.

The EPA’s claim that current levels are not a health risk is contradicted by another webpage on the EPA’s own site says that dioxin accumulates over a lifetime, persists for years, is likely to lead to an increased risk of cancer, and that the current exposure levels are “uncomfortably” close to levels that can cause “subtle” non-cancer effects. These so-called subtle effects may include birth defects, reproductive problems and immunosuppression.

© Lorenz Kerscher

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Feeling “grounded” is an increasingly uncommon experience in this day and age, and it should be, considering we no longer regularly touch the ground with our bare feet, as nature intended.

It is no great mystery that the human foot was designed, over countless millenia, to be in direct contact with the Earth, the literal and symbolic ground of our being. And the Earth is no inert substance, but rather a living and breathing entity (of which we are but a mere part) capable of infusing us with its life, ‘singing the body electric,’ as Walt Whitman once mused.

Indeed, the Earth breathes life into us through a continual stream of free electrons…

It is well established, though not widely known, that the surface of the earth possesses a limitless and continuously renewed supply of free or mobile electrons as a consequence of a global atmospheric electron circuit. Wearing shoes with insulating soles and/or sleeping in beds that are isolated from the electrical ground plane of the earth have disconnected most people from the earth’s electrical rhythms and free electrons to flow from the earth to the body.
- James L Oschman, Can electrons act as antioxidants? A review and commentary.

The effects of which James Oschman speaks are not simply theoretical. There are a wide range of measurable changes in the body associated with this “grounding” including changes in pulse rate, respiratory rate, blood oxygenation, perfusion index, and skin conductance which have been clinically studied.

Read Entire Article HERE

Mad cow disease is a progressive brain-wasting disease. It is caused by a type of defective protein known as a prion and cannot be cured. The factory farming practices of feeding animals the nervous tissue of other animals first caused the ballooning spread of mad cow disease and created the current crisis. When it became clear what had happened, many countries banned feeding the tissue of ruminants (cows, sheep and goats) to other ruminants.

There’s just one problem: ruminant tissue (including nervous tissue) is still fed to everything else. That means that chicken, farmed fish, and any other kind of meat might contain mad cow prions.

To make matters worse, fish meal, chicken feces and the bodies of other animals can then be fed straight back to ruminants intended for human consumption. An extra step has been added, but the concentration of prions in animal flesh continues.

Prions are NOT destroyed by cooking

U.S. consumers are widely taught to “cook the meat” in order to sterilize it. But prions are not bacteria. They aren’t alive, and they remain completely unaffected by cooking. Even radiation cannot destroy prions. They can survive right through the meat packing process and wind up in your next hamburger.

Ultimately, the only way to reliably reduce your risk of mad cow disease is to avoid factory-farmed meat products altogether. Only organic beef from grass-fed cattle can be trusted. Any meat that comes from a typical feedlot operation may be infected with prions and could therefore be deadly to consume.

TheEconomicCollapse

The decay of society is so much harder to quantify than economic decline is.  The government keeps lots of statistics on things like unemployment and inflation, but it really does not keep track of how sick and twisted people are becoming.  Most of us recognize that the character of the American people has changed dramatically over the decades, but unlike the national debt, you can’t easily point to a chart or a graph to show exactly how bad things are getting.  In this article, my approach will be to point you to various “signs” of social decay.  Signs tell us where we are at now and where we are headed.  Some of the signs that I will use will be statistics while others will simply consist of anecdotal evidence.  Yes, anecdotal evidence is not perfect, but when you put enough of it together it starts to paint a pretty clear picture of what is going on out there.  America is becoming a truly frightening place.  Our cities our decaying, thieves are becoming bolder, you never know who you can trust and everyone seems depressed.  America is decomposing right in front of our eyes, and it is time that we all admitted it.

In the old days, if you met a stranger out on the streets you knew that you could almost certainly trust that person.  But these days if you let your child wander one aisle over while you are shopping at Wal-Mart there is a chance that someone will try to abduct her.

Something has changed.

In our major cities, if you walk up to someone at random there is a decent chance that person will be a pervert or a sicko, and most Americans know that this is true at a gut level.  Almost everyone is very leery of “strangers” these days.  It has gotten to the point where we are all afraid of one another.

Just try this some time….

In a major U.S. city, walk right up to people on the street, look them in the eyes and try to introduce yourself.

What will happen when you do that?

In many instances, people will literally run away from you.

We are scared to death to interact with people that we do not know, and the reality is that those fears are way too often justified.

The character of the American people is decaying at a rapid pace, and the evidence of this is all around us.

The following are 10 signs that America is decomposing right in front of our eyes….

#1 As the economy crumbles, in many U.S. cities desperate people are increasingly resorting to violent acts in an attempt to survive.  So far this year, violent crime in Washington D.C. has risen by 40 percent.  Robberies at gunpoint have more than doubled compared to the same time period last year.

And as I wrote about recently, justifiable homicide in Detroit rose by a staggering 79 percent during 2011, and the rate of self-defense killings in Detroit is now 2200% above the national average.

#2 But it is not just in the cities where you will find crazies.  A recent Daily Mail article described a very disturbing incident which took place recently in North Dakota.  Two crack-fueled perverts abducted and murdered a 43-year-old math teacher named Sherry Arnold….

Spell and Waters had left Colorado days before the crime claiming they wanted work in eastern Montana and western North Dakota’s oil fields.

After smoking crack cocaine over the entire trip, Waters allegedly told Spell the drug ‘brought the devil out in him’ and began talking about kidnapping and killing a female, AP reports.

After they spotted Arnold, Spell claims that Waters told him to ‘grab the lady’ and pull her into their Ford Explorer as she jogged by.

After they got Arnold into the car, they choked her to death and then buried her body in a shallow grave in North Dakota.

Why would anyone do something like that?

Read Entire Article HERE

Financial market cynics have assumed all along that Dodd-Frank did not end “too big to fail” but instead created a charmed circle of protected banks labeled “systemically important” that will not be allowed to fail, no matter how badly they behave.

That may be, but there is one bit of bad behavior that Uncle Sam himself does not have the funds to underwrite: the $32 trillion market in credit default swaps (CDS).  Thirty-two trillion dollars is more than twice the U.S. GDP and more than twice the national debt.

CDS are a form of derivative taken out by investors as insurance against default.  According to the Comptroller of the Currency, nearly 95% of the banking industry’s total exposure to derivatives contracts is held by the nation’s five largest banks: JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, HSBC, and Goldman Sachs.  The CDS market is unregulated, and there is no requirement that the “insurer” actually have the funds to pay up.  CDS are more like bets, and a massive loss at the casino could bring the house down.

It could, at least, unless the casino is rigged.  Whether a “credit event” is a “default” triggering a payout is determined by the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA), and it seems that the ISDA is owned by the world’s largest banks and hedge funds.  That means the house determines whether the house has to pay.

The Houses of Morgan, Goldman and the other Big Five are justifiably worried right now, because an “event of default” declared on European sovereign debt could jeopardize their $32 trillion derivatives scheme.  According to Rudy Avizius in an article on The Market Oracle (UK) on February 15th, that explains what happened at MF Global, and why the 50% Greek bond write-down was not declared an event of default.

If you paid only 50% of your mortgage every month, these same banks would quickly declare you in default.  But the rules are quite different when the banks are the insurers underwriting the deal.

MF Global: Canary in the Coal Mine?

MF Global was a major global financial derivatives broker until it met its unseemly demise on October 30, 2011, when it filed the eighth-largest U.S. bankruptcy after reporting a “material shortfall” of hundreds of millions of dollars in segregated customer funds.  The brokerage used a large number of complex and controversial repurchase agreements, or “repos,” for funding and for leveraging profit.  Among its losing bets was something described as a wrong-way $6.3 billion trade the brokerage made on its own behalf on bonds of some of Europe’s most indebted nations.

Read Entire Article HERE

NaturalNews

Most of the genetically-modified (GM) corn products forced on American consumers today are hidden in processed foods in the form of high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), corn oil, corn starch, and various other corn-based additives. But soon to be available at a Walmart near you is Monsanto’s Bt sweet corn, the agri-giant’s first ever GM corn product made available to consumers as whole ears right on the cob in the produce section– and like with all other GMOs, neither Walmart nor Monsanto has any intention of labeling this new “Frankencorn.”

Monsanto first unveiled this new variety of GM sweet corn back in August, which rivals Syngenta’s GM sweet corn that has already been on the market in limited form for the past ten years, claiming that it would be available to farmers for planting during Fall 2011. Now, the corn appears set to make its debut in Walmart stores across the country as early as Summer 2012, unless massive public outcry is able to convince the multinational retailer to scrap the corn, or at least voluntarily label it.

This disturbing development comes courtesy of both Food & Water Watch and Sum Of Us, which recently drew attention to the issue by creating petitions against Walmart’s potential sale of the corn. Though Monsanto’s GM sweet corn contains three genetically-engineered (GE) traits that have never been used in food eaten directly by people, and that have never been properly tested, Walmart still intends to quietly stock its produce shelves with this phony corn in the very near future.

Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s have rejected Monsanto’s Bt corn, how about Wal-Mart?

In a recent campaign alert (http://sumofus.org/campaigns/walmart-monsanto/), Sum Of Us explains that immense consumer pressure has already resulted in commitments from Whole Foods Market, Trader Joe’s, and General Mills not to use the new GM corn in any of their products. But as of the announcement, Walmart has made no such commitment, presumably because of the company’s close-knit relationship with Monsanto, a “match made in hell” that Food & Water Watch has humorously dubbed “Walsanto” (https://www.facebook.com/WalsantoWatch?sk=info).

Click here to view the embedded video.

This video was created as an example of the importance of filming the police. Video provides transparency, accountability, and an accurate account of incidents that occur. It is no secret that the United States has a serious problem with police abuse, brutality, and corruption. It is essential for civilians to document their encounters with police officers to ensure transparency, accountability, and safety to all of those involved.

Police departments have, for too long, tried to bully, intimidate, threaten, arrest, or otherwise harass law abiding citizens from recording the activities of law enforcement in public. Enough is enough! It is time for all of us to take a stand and expose police brutality when we witness it. Even if the officers behavior is correct, and justifiable, we still encourage the recording of the police activities for the transparency and accountability that is desperately needed in many departments.

If you see something, film something, the freedom of press begins with you!