The only way to fix GM is to close it down...

The news is that Canadian GM management has decided to increased salaries for non-unionized white collar (read - management) employees. A few months ago all the employees "white" and "blue" took up to 10% pay cut, now it seems they are restoring only the white collar salaries, but not the blue-collar hourly wages! The original pay cut for everyone saved the company 50M$ a few months ago. This pay restoration now will cost the company similar amount of 50M$ dollar. The ratio of white collar (=management) to workers in Canadian GM is 1700:7500. Those numbers indicate that the "pay restoration" will actually amount to a significant pay increase for the management, probably four times their original pay cut. It is also possible to calculate the average manager's salary...

Source: Peterborough Examiner 19-Sep-2009

Living to 115 on crispy bacon

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-gertrude-baines12-2009sep12,0,6915924.story

Quote:

Gertrude Baines dies at 115; the world's oldest person
...
All the while, Baines slept away in her robe, now and then breaking from her routine of crispy bacon, Jerry Springer and church services to take interviews.

What did really cause the crash?

Just a speculative thought:

- could the drop in the Asian stock markets in 2008 preceding the banking crisis of September 2008, have been the real main cause of the crash rather than the American property decline?

US property is only about ~30% down from the peak where as many Chinese companies and the stocks are down way more than that!
Since the US financial oligarchy decided to pump virtually all of the new investment into Asia, since mid 1990-ties and especially after the dot com crash in 2000, the US industry has been totally starved of investment. Yet the US dollar is strong since the banking hub is in the US thus the system works exactly as in the past, generating enough profit to compensate. The manufacturing industries that backs the financial sector and the dollar, are still there owned by the financial elite the same way as before, except that the new factories have been now relocated outside of the US borders.

This situation seems very similar to the British Empire days when before the WWI Britain was investing ~100Bstg a year abroad, while the paper assets were held in London. Around early 1900-eds British pound was the world universal currency and London was the world financial hub generating enough profit to keep the pound strong, and they did not have to produce anything since they could buy everything cheaply abroad. During that time British manufacturing industry experienced its deepest decline in history, and British investors experienced some difficulties in repatriating Indian Railways and Suez Canal back to London, after 1945. They didn't have any "greenshoots" until 1980.

-------
09/09/2009

I should have titled it "What will really cause the crash?"

Any major natural disaster in China may now push the Chinese stock into a crash and consequently the US financial system over the edge. One (my) prediction of an upcoming gigantic wind damage and flooding in the Pearl River Delta, Hong Kong - Shenzhen - Guangzhou area springs to mind.

-------
What was the primary cause?

I have a theory: - US government was giving huge quantity of TBonds in return for foreign currency loans that they then used to sell off on the Forex market, to weaken other currencies and thus strengthen the US $. I think it is very plausible! It explains for example why does European Central bank and BOE hold huge TBonds reserves in spite of a relatively small size of their trade with the US!

I believe that this currency manipulation was the PRIMARY cause and the trade imbalance with China and Japan was just a SECONDARY consequence of the weakened currencies.

Most experts postulate that the trade imbalances happened first and the TBonds were exchanged as the result of those imbalances. I think it was the other way around! Trade imbalances do not appear by themselves, rather international trade of goods and services tends to balance itself out automatically, if left free.

Managed health "care" ...

.. or social engineering + eugenics + population control?

You listen, then decide:

Jim Puplava's Financial Sense Newshour scroll down to 1 august 2009, 3-rd hour part 2, or:
media player stream
mp3
pdf by Mathew Staver

Dairy cuts mortality by 25% and strokes by 60%

BBC Health: Dairy for children 'extends life'

Quotes:

Some 4,374 UK children from a 1930s study were traced 65 years later by researchers in Bristol and Queensland.
...
Despite dairy containing artery furring fat and cholesterol, high consumption did not raise the heart disease risk.
...
The study looked at family diets and found higher intakes of both calcium and dairy, predominantly from milk, cut mortality by a quarter.
...
A higher daily intake of calcium, of at least 400mg as found in just over half a pint of milk, cut the chance of dying from stroke by as much as 60%.
...
Joanne Murphy of The Stroke Association said: [...] "In the meantime, we advise parents to opt for a diet rich in fruit and vegetables and low in saturated fat and salt for the overall health of their children."

Vitamin K2 halves the risk of all-cause mortality and aortic calcification!

... with the relative risk reduction factors in the highest vitamin K2 tertile of 0.42 and 0.48, respectively.

Dietary Intake of Menaquinone Is Associated with a Reduced Risk of Coronary Heart Disease: The Rotterdam Study

(after Richards' blog - thanks!)

Does vegan diet weaken bones?

A recently published pre-anounced study report postulated that vegans have somewhat (marginally) lower bone density than non-vegans.

I just noticed Dr. McDougall's response to it that totally cracked me up! Basically he is saying that a paper by the same author that he previously quoted, has shown no difference in bone density among vegan nuns vs non-vegans (which Dr.McDougall calls "favorable"!!!) therefore it has to be right whereas the present pre-announced paper by the same author now does show some differences unfavorable to the vegans, therefore the author must have been corrupted by some Malaysian dairy corporation. I am not making that up, you can read his response yourself here.

If a plant based nutrition is supposed to be good for the bones, according to Dr.McDougall, how come that his own staff lecturer should wear a weighted vest or backpack to maintain his bone mass?

A digression: that study states as a side note that 5% of the Western population are vegetarian, which makes me wonder how come that there is no mention of vegetarians among centenarians here or mention only a tiny 0.35% fraction in that study - perhaps they don't live very long?

--- updated 23/09/2009 ---
Another interesting study (thanks JC):
"Effect of vegetarian diets on bone mineral density: a Bayesian meta-analysis"

Fuhrman's diet - repeat of the Natural Hygienist's dead end

I thought of rehashing this issue on behalf of my friends and fans (just kidding) from the WebMD forum, especially one person who seems to be doing much better on Dr. Fuhrman's diet and his IMT scan as a measure of arteriosclerotic progression started even reversing as opposed to his previous 30 years on a Pritikin vegan/vegetarian diet. Even though the following text is addressed to EngineerGuy of the webmd forum, I hope that more people will benefit reading it. I am encouraging everyone to read and add comments.

All Dr. Fuhrman did was reintroducing blended salads and added a little bit of meat or fish plus liberal amounts of nuts which are still in severe anathema pronounced by other vegan propagators. One can consider Fuhrman's diet to have 90% in common with the purist vegans like Drs McDougall or Ornish but that 10% difference has made ALL THE DIFFERENCE! What is happening here is that it seems that the 90% compliant vegans seem to be doing better than the 100% compliant vegans!

I think that this little addition of animal produce and nuts has made a huge difference by addressing some of the vitamin deficiencies inherent in the plant-only diets.

That deficiency is not only in B12. I was surprised to find out that some vegans suffer from obvious and easily measurable vitamin deficiencies, even vitamin A in spite of consuming massive amounts of beta carotene! Many seem to suffer from tooth decay, low bone density and/or osteoporosis which would point towards deficiencies of D3,K2 or some other factor. Neurological problems (mood disorders, depression, panic attacks) seem to be associated with the deficiencies of DHA and EPA (fatty acids) in my opinion (this is only my speculative guess, I have no proof).

There is also a possibility that the malnutrition symptoms among some vegans may be caused not only by their deficient diet (note: vitamin D2 and K1 can be obtained from plants, but their proper human forms D3 and K2 cannot!) but also by some intestinal digestive disruption. That possibility was first discovered and proposed as a possible explanation by Natural Hygienists. See Dr. Stanley Bass and read "With Three Generations of Vegetarian Hygienists" by Dr. Gian-Cursio. After suffering many health setbacks on their pure raw food vegan diets, including death of Dr. Cursio's son, they treated them with fasts every few months, followed by some special recovery diet that involved unpasteurized goat's cheese and eggs yolks. Dr. Cursio also introduced (and perhaps invented) the blended salads. (Note: Dr. Bass no longer recommends vegetarian diets, for which he was kicked out of the Natural Hygiene movement, after his life long participation). I am inclined to believe that their recovery approach and explanation may be correct, given the intestinal-disruptive properties of many plants. I think that the absorption problems are related to some plant phyto-toxins from wheat family (I suspect gluten and agluttins like WGA) and the cabbage family of plants (digestive enzyme inhibitors and thyroid hormone disruptors). Fasting would allow the intestinal lining tissue to regenerate itself and recover after excessive raw consumption of those plants.

I am bringing the Natural Hygienist's article to illustrate that Dr. Fuhrman is following in the footsteps of the people who tried that all before him and eventually had to abandon that approach, after many years of trials tribulations and errors. I recommend to learn from their mistakes. Dr. Bass wasted probably ~60 years of his life along this path and is kind enough to inform us of his experience. I am grateful to him since I don't have to go though all this!

Neither should you, after already wasting 30 years of your life on some vegetarianism, you don't need to waste another 30 years on some slightly less harmful variation of the same thing.

P.S. (2/07)

Dr. Bass describes how his fruitarian dietary experiment destroyed his teeth. It turns out that the damage might not be limited to fruitarian diets:

Vegetarian diet 'weakens bones'

Are Saudis evacuating their money? Is a new war imminent?

I will make exception and post this comment on the recent news:

Suitcase With $134 Billion Puts Dollar on Edge: William Pesek (Bloomberg)

I consider it to be too bizarre to be false. I totally do not buy the "mafia forgery" theory. I also doubt that it has anything to do with Japan but of course have absolutely no proof whatsoever.
I think its time to buy some more oil...

Can ketogenic diet cure cancer?

(Fatty pork with curry veggies in butter and 'matoes)

There is very little data but what is available, so far is quite encouraging. Strangely enough most medical research institutions do not seem to think so or there would be a mad rush to study it on thousands of patients.

References:

"Effects of a ketogenic diet on tumor metabolism and nutritional status in pediatric oncology patients: two case reports." Nebeling LC, Miraldi F, Shurin SB, Lerner E.

"Targeting energy metabolism in brain cancer: review and hypothesis", Thomas N Seyfried and Purna Mukherjee, Nutrition & Metabolism 2005,2:30

"Can a High-Fat Diet Beat Cancer?"
By Richard Friebe Monday, Sep. 17, 2007

And finally a paper from my favored scientific publisher specializing in printing fake peer-review journals:

"Tumor growth in patients with tuberous sclerosis complex on the ketogenic diet" Catherine J. Chu-Shore, Elizabeth A. Thiele

Quote:

Three out of five patients, all children, had progression of a known tumor or tumors or the development of a new tumor while on the ketogenic diet. Conclusion: In this limited case series of five TSC patients, the ketogenic diet did not induce tumor regression or suppress the growth of TSC-related tumors.

I am curious, if they emphasize that it didn't help the 3 out of 5, should we interpret it as stating that it did help the other 2 out of 5? (I do not have the access to the full paper to check it).

--------------

Footnote (for an oncologist with a PhD's)

No, it does not work (if it works) by starving a cancer through lowering serum glucose level down to zero. Yes it would of course have killed a patient together with a tumor.

What the ketogenic diet does do is it totally alters a body's predominant metabolic mode shifting it from glucose to ketone bodies and lipids. One side effect of ketogenic diets is the enhancement of the immune system (we all heard of course, I presume of the standard pre-penicillin therapy against TB...)

Another effect is reduction of glucose uptake by the healthy cells that are not yet cancerous and the protective effect resulting from much lower insulin production (and insulin tissue uptake) on the true ketogenic diet versus a low fat high carbohydrate diet. Another and probably even more important effects are those that we do not yet fully understand due to a curious lack of curiosity or competence of some oncologists with the PhD who do not seem to want to pursue any investigation that might actually work...

Based on my mom's experience, the best survival strategy is to listen carefully to the oncologists, write thoroughly down everything they have to say - and do the opposite! It has worked well for my mom since her close encounter with the disease in 1998 when she refused a friendly "slash-burn-and-poison" therapy offer from her local hospital. Eleven years later, so far so good...

Be free and prosper,
Heretic

------ (added later) ----

More references (thanks Cynthia):
"Acetoacetate reduces growth and ATP concentration in cancer cell lines which over-express uncoupling protein 2."
Fine EJ, Miller A, Quadros EV, Sequeira JM, Feinman RD.

CONCLUSION: Seven human cancer cell lines grown in glucose plus acetoacetate medium showed tightly coupled reduction of growth and ATP concentration. The findings were not observed in control fibroblasts. The observed over-expression of UCP2 in cancer lines, but not in controls, provides a plausible molecular mechanism by which acetoacetate spares normal cells but suppresses growth in cancer lines. The results bear on the hypothesized potential for ketogenic diets as therapeutic strategies.

------------------------

Added 12-Nov-2009

Yes!

Read Peter's post: Methylglyoxal on Atkins...

The story can be compressed into two titles:

Ketosis leads to increased methylglyoxal production on the Atkins diet.

A brief critical overview of the biological effects of methylglyoxal and further evaluation of a methylglyoxal-based anticancer formulation in treating cancer patients.

----

Added 15/04/2012
Carbohydrates and the Risk of Breast Cancer among Mexican Women

Starch Intake May Influence Risk for Breast Cancer Recurrence, Jennifer A. Emond, M.S.
Abstract Number: P3-09-01, San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, 2011, Title: Change in Carbohydrate Intake and Breast Cancer Prognosis.

Is there a role for carbohydrate restriction in the treatment and prevention of cancer?
Rainer J Klement and Ulrike Kämmerer
.

Does high carbohydrate diet cause cataracts?

"Carbohydrate intake and glycemic index in relation to the odds of
early cortical and nuclear lens opacities"

Quote:

Results: After multivariate adjustment, the odds of cortical opacities (LOCSIII ">=" 1.0) among women in the highest tertile of carbohydrate intake (">=" 200 g/d) was 2.46 times (95% CI: 1.30, 4.64; P for trend = 0.005) that among women in the lowest tertile ( "<"185 g/d).
(thanks JC)

"Lipid Levels in Patients Hospitalized with CAD"

"Lipid Levels in Patients Hospitalized with CAD: An Analysis of 136,905 Hospitalizations in GWTG-CAD"

(link posted by Ricardo, on Hyperlipid blog. Thanks!)

Corrupt Irish government cheating their citizens on pay cuts!

Interesting story.

After several months of negotiations with trade unions, the private and public sector workers agreed to cut their salaries by 10%. The private sector promptly implemented the cuts. Now, it turns out that the Irish government did indeed cut wages by 10%, but also moved 340,000 of their civil servants (probably a majority of the employed) up the pay scale ladder on the basis of time served. Not only it cancelled out the pay cuts but resulted in the overall payroll increase by 250million eu or ~735 eu MORE per employee!

Letter to Mr. Anti-Nuclear Environmentalist

Dear Mr. "Anti-Nuclear Environmentalist",

Your article in the Peterborough Examiner of 6-May-2009 ("Darlington Nuclear Plan...") seems highly biased. You seemed to have picked up and quoted only the anti-nuclear voices while totally missing other views.

People who state opinions such as quote: "I'm against nuclear. I'm trying to think ahead seven generations,..." are misled, mistaken and most often incompetent on the subject they speak about! Not only they may be jeopardizing their own future "seven" generations through their misguided anti-nuclear energy politics, but they may be closer to a personal disaster even within their own life time due to the imminent shortage of oil and natural gas and their inevitable skyrocketing prices, the example of which we have just witnessed last year! This will happen sooner than Ms Langley or you may think. I can picture people like her sitting in unheated houses unable to travel except on foot and unable to find work due to business failures.

If you advocate turning the society back into 18-th century life style, you may have to face some tough choices. If the rampant anti-technology anti-science environmentalism takes an even bigger hold on people's mind driving our politics to the dead end, then the same enthusiasts of wildlife protection at any cost may eventually have to resort to hunt those animal for food and furs just to survive!

Sincerely,
Stan (Heretic)
 
URANIUM POWER - POWER TO THE PEOPLE!
 

Vitamin A,D3,K2 - toxicity levels

This is a short comment to summarize the situation, based on information gathered from the most recent nutrition studies as well as some of the most useful nutrition blogs (Stephan's, Peter's and Chris Masterjohn's - see the links on the left margin).

The issue of supposed toxicity level of D3 is being slowly unraveled in recent research. It turns out that A,D3 and (probably) K2 must come together in balanced proportions, thus some studies that were increasing D3 alone without A reported toxicity of D3 at a lower level than other studies where D3 may have come from natural produce (like fish oil) thus came together with vitamin A! A and D3 always seem to come together in animal food (any exceptions?). The same story repeats with studies analyzing toxicity of vitamin A. Again, the toxic A levels come out lower when only A is being increased on it's own, versus if it comes with natural fats like fish oil, butter, liver, yolks etc. Also, it appears that the body's synthesis of A out of carrotenoids from vegetables (or absorption) is impaired without sufficient level of fat in food. Subsequently, the sunlight-induced synthesis of D3 out of cholesterol, or the utilization of D3 seem to be deficient when not enough vitamin A is present in the system.

All of the above is absolutely consistent and may explain why do low fat vegetarians, even in sunny places like Arizona or Florida may and often do get deficient in both A and D3.

Merck paid Elsevier to publish a fake "peer review" medical journal

Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine

Read the story on this blog

New accounting-"What would you like it to be, sir?"

Banks Won Concessions on Tests, Fed Cut Billions Off Some Initial Capital-Shortfall Estimates

I used to think that accounting were just some boring arithmetics. Not anymore, I am really impressed by the approach taken by Mr. US President.

On his other notable achievement in just his first 100 days in the office, I would like to congratulate him on the first in US history successful transfer of wealth from the poor population (see examples like this or that ) who most likely voted him, to the wealthy financial elite who most likely did not!

Strange thing about Marshall Protocol

About MP

One aspect is particularly interesting:

It causes some initial side effects in the first few months, occurring in occasional bursts, such as tachycardia, hypo-tension, hyper-adrenal episodes, among others.

Marshall claims says these are caused by unblocking of the VDR (Vitamin D Receptor) and other receptor sites that used to be previously blocked by bacteria for the purpose of paralyzing and disabling the human immune system.

Those were the same symptoms that I had in the first 3 months of the high fat low carb Optimal Diet, in 1999/2000!

Sudden release of the immune blockage and unblocking of various hormonal receptors, may lead to various often dangerous side effects and symptoms, the more so the more colonized was the body by bacterial parasites and thus the bigger the change. This is also what Dr. J. Kwasniewski and Dr. W. Lutz wrote! The initial side effects of the high fat low carb nutrition are proportional to the degree of prior body damage. Lutz specifically says that the problem is caused by the overactive immune system that "kicks in" the moment one goes high fat and low carb.

Kwasniewski says that when a chronically sick patient starts high fat low carb nutrition, a disease may starts fighting back as if it were a wild animal fighting for it's own survival. It may occur in fits and occasional bursts every few weeks, then months, weaker and weaker and rarer and rarer.

I think Dr. Kwasniewski was probably more right about it in a factual (not figurative) way, than I originally thought!

Stan (Heretic)

Playing the almost expired put options

Did anyone notice how cheap are some put options a few days from expiry? I don't think their price truly reflects the volatility, which makes them a viable game.

For example, 10$ strike put options against GE could have been bought for 0.14$ last week, at the time when GE stock price was 10.5-11$.

Interestingly, GE stock went down to 9.3$ on the day of expiry (last Friday) which made this a very lucrative play. This is not the first time that I noticed this phenomenon: in almost every case of my last 12 months option trading, the underlying stock almost always seemed to have experienced an unusually steep drop on the option expiry date (third Friday of a months, every third months for a given stock). Accidental?

As my friend Dozent says: every single conspiracy theory that we discussed in the past (except reptilian aliens 8-:) ) proved to be correct! I am curious!

US TBonds crashing?

What makes me think of that possibility?

Fekete's article:

... U.S. debt [1T$ in TBonds] in Chinese hands has no definable value: any time the Chinese want to sell a sizeable amount, all bids are withdrawn. The Chinese are stuck with it. They have to wait for their money until maturity. But who knows what the purchasing power of the dollar will then be? The best the Chinese can do is to “grin and bear it.” They can’t even say “ouch”, because this would further hasten the deterioration of marketability of their paper. The periodic warnings from China that the U.S. government should display greater fiscal responsibility and it should follow a stricter monetary regimen sound like whistling in the dark. ...

And this:

Fed to buy up to $300B long-term Treasury bonds

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Federal Reserve announced Wednesday it will spend up to $300 billion over the next six months to buy long-term government bonds, a new step aimed at lifting the country out of recession by lowering rates on mortgages and other consumer debt. ...

Let me review some of the relevant events of the last months, chronologically:

1) Chinese gov is declaring a 600B$ stimulus for Chinese infrastructure

2) Chinese central bank is (probably) trying to sell some of their US TBonds discovering (probably) that they either cannot sell or that they have to discount them.

3) Chinese government officials complain to the US government and criticize US in public on the subject of the integrity of the foreign held paper assets issued by the US Treasury.

4) For the first time since the financial crisis begun, Federal Reserve is printing very large amount of cash (300B$) to buy TBonds on the market.

Why do I have a nagging suspicion that the events 2 and 4 may be somehow related? Is the Federal Reserve buying up the US TBonds that the Chinese bank was trying to sell on the market but couldn't? Note that buying TBond by Fed is equivalent of printing cash! 300B$ is probably 20-30% of the existing money (M1) in circulation.

Conclusions:

- this is highly inflationary, and is likely to counteract the current bank-bailout engineered deflationary credit squeeze.

- the old rule that the pre-mature resale value of the long bonds (but not short term bills) is supposed to be inversely proportional to the yield, no longer seems to apply or requires a large correction factor in the zero yield limit.

I suspect that the long term fixed income assets become illiquid or may even lose value once the yield goes below about 3% or so (at present). It's a case of a theory stretched and extrapolated beyond it's proven domain. Everyone assumed that since lowering the yields from 12% to 6% increased the money velocity in the past and increased credit supply, then lowering it from 3% down to 1.5% or from 0.5% to 0.25% is going to have a similar effect. I think what the present events have demonstrated is that the system is non-linear and that the money supply versus yield curve reverses below a certain yield threshold such as 6% (not sure of the exact figure, read also this - scroll down to the entry on Wed 2 July 2003 titled "What exactly is the relation between interest rates and inflation?" ). The result seems to be the opposite to the expected: forcing the Treasury yields below 3% seemed to have REDUCED the credit supply on the market and led to deflation!

Since everybody loves predictions, I have to finish on this note:

- if China could not easely sell their TBonds so will the US gov not be able to do so either, in the nearest future, forcing the US gov to print even more money than today's 300B$, counteracting deflation and eventually (probably) causing inflation.

- falling TBond resale prices on the open market will increase inflationary expectations and will force all the other new bonds to carry higher yields - despite the government's central banks declarations.

- large players, such as sovereign funds are likely to question the role of the dollar as the universal currency, to renumerate their assets in. The death of the US TBonds (if that happens) means also a death of the dollar!

P.S. (21/03)

I wrote it in the morning, later it was announced that the total sum is 1.2T$: 300B$ of new cash to buy US TBonds on the market and the rest to buy some other dodgy paper assets. That move is effectively doubling the money supply. I have seen that kind of economics in the People's Republic of Poland in the 1970-ties. I have seen the "future" and it did not work! Ask any Pole who lived through this period what a "virtual coal" was. 8-)