With the economy in the doldrums, many people are wondering how next year will fare. Personal fortunes are fated to rise and fall. They can be great in bad times, and then bad in great times. A great fortune can turn sour overnight, and a bad one can turn beautific. This is why sages of all religions tell us to persevere, never to do wrong, and to always do good in order to avoid the creation of bad karmic returns and maximize our states of good fortune. Does next year hold good fortune or bad fortune in store, and how do you transform it? A Karma Calculator fortune can tell you. That’s why I bothered to bring this technique to America from Asia.

In fact, right now you can get several extra years of your life’s fortune prediction as a BONUS. Predictions for years 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013 – all for just $50. This is the best deal you’ll get at $10 a year of predictions.

I won’t be holding this special for long so do yourself a favor and see what life holds in store, and then you can act wisely to change things. Go right here while the SPECIAL lasts … and remember that for anyone ordering the $50 3-year fortune package, you’ll actually get the fortune for the years 2008-2013 sent back to you, not just three years. (after this special offer is over it reverts back to 3 years again). It should help you work through the year ahead to help avoid errors and make your fortune the best possible.

Where is the Special at?

http://www.karmacalculator.com/order.html

This video of a Japanese inventor shows how to convert plastic back into oil, and there is profit in it!

This makes me wonder whether the plastic floating in our oceans could be dredged and compacted and turned into oil. Then we might be able to clean up our oceans by eliminating some of that floating garbage patch, and actually make money at it.

http://www.flixxy.com/convert-plastic-to-oil.htm

I was going through the news website and found this video clip of paparazzi “photographing a woman and her child” at LAX, and the write up said this was indicative of our crazy consumer culture. I had to watch and was spellbound to see how people lost their minds. Now I know what they are talking about when they say this is a major problem.

I always wondered what the typical fate of a whistleblower was. Most of us have watched 60 Minutes on TV and know they get screwed royally. But I finally found a study quoted as to what normally happens, and thought it interesting:

A study of 233 whistleblowers was conducted years ago, to explore the effect on one who blows the whistle on a corporation. Their findings:

The average whistle blower is a man in his 40s with a strong conscience and high moral values. I was near the age of 40 when I became a whistle blower.

After blowing the whistle, 90 percent of whistle blowers were fired or demoted. 27 percent faced lawsuits themselves. 26 percent had to seek psychiatric or physical care. 25 percent suffered substance abuse. 17 percent lost their homes. 15 percent experienced divorce. 10 percent attempted suicide. 8 percent were bankrupt. But in spite of all of this, only 16 percent said they would not blow the whistle again.

Source: http://www.henrymakow.com/i_was_a_corporate_whistle_blow.html

I always love watching this video because his talk is very funny.

A quote from Understanding this Chinese Generation:

“Here is a serious issue to contemplate on. Most of the work you do are concerned with economic developments. This is a phenomenon common to both the East and West – everything is about the economy. I find it especially amusing that China is now putting all her energy on the economy. This is not the road to true prosperity. Historically China always subscribed to the doctrine that believes in having better culture and governance to resolve economic issues, to make even distribution of wealth and to maintain social stability. In the West, since the 16th century, the approach has been one attempting to resolve political and cultural issues by economic means alone, as expounded by the doctrines of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Keynes and their followers. These are two different approaches and one does not necessarily conflict with each other.

Ever since China subscribed to the Western doctrines, in particular the ideas of Keynes, the whole country is moving down the road of chasing money. Consumption is encouraged because it creates demand and employment. Therefore there is a good market for the management disciplines you teach. I always joked that the best way to accelerate consumption is to have wars everyday. War is the biggest of all consumptions.

What we lack today is a new school of thought that can assimilate both the Eastern and Western approaches in order to lead the world into a new era. If we continue the way it is there will be dire consequences.”

I always recommend the Tibetan 9-bottled wind practice for cultivators. It involves holding your breath for as long as possible and is an assist to cultivation in the early stages of the path.

Well the world record holder’s method for holding their breath — shown here doing so for nearly 17 minutes under water in front of Oprah — explains his method of khumbhaka to Oprah and the audience.

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2009/10/30/how-to-hold-your-breath/

Pay attention to the fact that at the end when he cannot hold any longer, he says he practices a type of emptiness meditation.

That’s the key — letting go of both mind and body. He looks extremely healthy and well balanced, just like a martial artist, because he has somewhat opened up his channels. Practicing emptiness meditation would in all likelihood change his appearance to an even lighter complexion over time.

Here are his steps though you can read more on the blog post.

The Steps:

1:30 deep breathing
1:15 purging (if you feel like you’re going to pass out, do it less intensely)

Hold breath for target 1:30, no more
After 1:30:
Take 3 semi-purge breaths

1:30 deep breathing
1:30 purging

Hold breath for target 2:30, no more
After 2:30
Take 3 semi-purge breaths

2:00 deep breathing
1:45 purging

Hold breath for as long as possible
After exhalation:
Take 3-10 hard semi-purge breaths until your recover

I always tell people to THINK. They want to succeed in meditation and spirituality, but the field has so many nebulous claims that you need logic to think things through. Thus I tell them to sharpen their wits on real world topics. That’s the reason I bring up real world politics all the time. THINK here, don’t put “love the whole way round” on issues and blind yourself to what’s going on.

If you fail at making the right conclusions on real world issues, then to me I give you little chance to really be able to differentiate so many claims in the spiritual field. You will just be captured by prejudices of your race, religion, country and so on.

So here’s something to think about — draw your own conclusions:

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/rust-discovered-bank-russia-issued-999-gold-coins

IF THE STORY IS TRUE, then the Russians are diluting their gold, plain and simple. They either want to make more money, or there is not enough gold to be put in the coins, or corruption is going on somewhere and higher ups didn’t know. There are a lot of possibilities, so drop the conformity view they teach kids in school today, QUESTION and THINK …

Could 100% pure gold rust? No! So the reason is due to something else. And if the Russians are doing this, are others?

There has been much writing over the last several years about central bank gold stocks dwindling, and this calls that to mind.

I’ve read many pundits and the conclusion is there’s a 50:50 chance we’ll have a double dip recession. I think it’s more like 60:40 because real jobs cannot come back. Furthermore, the housing stimulus is over.

The BP oil well will probably keep spilling for another few months simply because it happened before, and it took 8 months to fix the problem … in shallower water with the same techniques they’re trying today.

Don’t believe me? Watch this video …

The Times has just presented an article on the declining age of puberty:

Puberty Article

In the 1800’s puberty for girls and boys was around 15 and 17 years of age, respectively.

In the 1960’s, the ages were determined to be around 12 for girls and 14 for boys. These are the ages that girls first start getting their period, and the age when the voices of boys start to break and they experience a growth spurt.

The new findings are that girls are starting puberty, including breast development, at age 9 (9 years and 10 months on average, which is a full one year ealier than the last time the study was done about 15 years ago). Many boys drop out of choir in England because their voices are now breaking at around ages 11-12!

Some people say this is because of hormone-like substances in the food chain (I agree), and others simply because of a better diet.

It’s interesting to note that over 2,000 years Shakyamuni Buddha foretold, through samadhi insight, that the age of puberty for women would eventually drop to around 5 years of age for this world. He also said that in the far future the world would become so toxic and polluted that almost any item could be used to kill/harm another person, and the Gulf Oil spill illustrates how we are slowly heading in that direction. Amazing predictions from 2,000+ years ago, especially when you consider the environmental circumstances of that era.

This is just an interesting bit of science. What did the Big Bang sound like? Well, scientists have created a little bang, and here is a sound recording of the sound:

http://www.newscientist.com/articlevideo/dn18998/89322524001-what-does-the-hottest-matter-ever-made-sound-like.html

I first learned about the possibility of using nuclear bombs for underwater construction when I listened to one of the interviews of Edward Teller on Peoples Archive. He was talking about building harbors in Alaska using nuclear charges.

Well, it occurred to me that this is probably going to be the only way to close off the BP oil leak which is coming out of the ground with such pressure that nothing seems to thwart it. There’s even a second leak bigger than the first, or so this article says. Thus, this story doesn’t surprise me.

http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0529/energy-expert-nuke-oil-leak/

I’ve often sat in my room trying to brainstorm ways to get rid of that giant floating island of plastic the size of Texas that is now floating in the Pacific. Shakyamuni Buddha often said that the world would become toxic to an extreme degree and it’s no lie that our environmental ways are poisoning the planet. The BP spill is an example, but this one represents an even larger long term danger.

Forget all this emphasis on global warming — this is the problem we should be working on. Silly me, I kept envisoning ships sweeping the ocean with nets between them to corral the waste so that it could be compacted and towed somewhere, but also knew it wouldn’t work because people would have already suggested this methodology. Finally I found something that the billionaires of the world should finance as a try:

http://www.rense.com/general90/rid.htm

Start your ideas swirling after reading about the Thermal Conversion Process perfected by a New York company, Changing World Technologies.

And speaking about saving the oceans, Kevin Costner, the actor, has funded to the tune of over $20M the development of barges that suck up oil spills in water, spin the water in a centrifuge, and separate out the oil from the water for a 99% clean discharge … a way to help clean up ocean oil spills. This is exactly the type of free thinking, far thinking, important thinking that I always urge people to do, especially the superrich looking for ways to spend their monies on charity.

This is also where I get very disappointed because the people best positioned to invest in something like this are the oil companies themselves and the billionaires of the world and both did nothing. I’ve always been trying to figure out a way to clean oil spills from the ocean and here we have an actor spending his own funds to do so, which to me is an embarassment of the mega-rich:

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2011925837_oilkevin22.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/bp-calls-in-costners-26m-vacuum-cleaners-to-mop-up-huge-oil-spill-1979976.html

The growing disasters over the next few decades will not just be oil spills, but seed/crop disasters caused by unwise policies of Monsanto and other companies. These catastrophes are happening before our very eyes, just like the banking crisis, and when they occur it will be too late for legislation. “We didn’t know. The science said __” will be all the rage of officials trying to cover their butts. I warned you of the recession. Don’t say I didn’t wan you about this.

I like this quote I just read from Dr. Matt Ridley, ex-Economist editor and author of The Rational Optimist. In reviewing history, he wrote the following … which makes you once again realize that there is no yang, or good, without yin, or bad:

“Empires bought stability at the price of creating a parasitic court; monotheistic religions bought social cohesion at the expense of a parasitic priestly class; nationalism bought power at the expense of a parasitic military; socialism bought equality at the price of a parasitic bureaucracy; capitalism bought efficiency at the price of parasitic financiers.”