Wednesday 7th December 2016

Remember this my daughter...

I love this one!

And this is just so, so true!

Wonderful and unique. And the saner you are the more unique you are. The more insane you are, the more like matter you are. So be sane and relish your unique nature.

If you don't know about them, the Darwin Awards are given out each year to people who die doing stupid things, thus removing themselves from the gene pool.

If you know about them, you've been waiting for them with baited breath, so without further ado, here are the 2016 Darwin Awards:

Eighth Place

In Detroit, a 41-year-old man got stuck and drowned in two feet of water after squeezing head first through an 18-inch-wide sewer grate to retrieve his car keys.

Seventh Place

A 49-year-old San Francisco stockbroker, who "totally zoned when he ran", accidentally jogged off a 100-foot high cliff on his daily run.

Sixth Place

While at the beach, Daniel Jones, 21, dug an 8 foot hole for protection from the wind and had been sitting in a beach chair at the bottom, when it collapsed, burying him beneath 5 feet of sand. People on the beach used their hands and shovels trying to get him out but could not reach him. It took rescue workers using heavy equipment almost an hour to free him. Jones was pronounced dead at a hospital.

Fifth Place

Santiago Alvarado, 24, was killed as he fell through the ceiling of a bicycle shop he was burglarizing. Death was caused when the long flashlight he had placed in his mouth to keep his hands free rammed into the base of his skull as he hit the floor.

Fourth Place

Sylvester Briddell, Jr., 26, was killed as he won a bet with friends who said he would not put a revolver loaded with four bullets into his mouth and pull the trigger.

Third Place

After stepping around a marked police patrol car parked at the front door, a man walked into H&J Leather & Firearms intent on robbing the store. The shop was full of customers and a uniformed officer was standing at the counter. Upon seeing the officer, the would-be robber announced a hold-up and fired a few wild shots from a target pistol. The officer and a clerk promptly returned fire, and several customers also drew their guns and fired. The robber was pronounced dead at the scene by paramedics. Crime scene investigators located 47 expended cartridge cases in the shop. The subsequent autopsy revealed 23 gunshot wounds. Ballistics identified rounds from 7 different weapons. No one else was hurt.

HONORABLE MENTION

Paul Stiller, 47, and his wife Bonnie were bored just driving around at 2 A.M. so they lit a quarter stick of dynamite to toss out the window to see what would happen. Apparently they failed to notice that the window was closed.

RUNNER UP

Kerry Bingham had been drinking with several friends when one of them said they knew a person who had bungee-jumped from a local bridge in the middle of traffic. The conversation grew more excited, and at least 10 men trooped along the walkway of the bridge at 4:30 AM. Upon arrival at the midpoint of the bridge, they discovered that no one had brought a bungee rope. Bingham, who had continued drinking, volunteered and pointed out that a coil of lineman's cable lay nearby. They secured one end around Bingham's leg and then tied the other to the bridge. His fall lasted 40 feet before the cable tightened and tore his foot off at the ankle. He miraculously survived his fall into the icy water and was rescued by two nearby fishermen. Bingham's foot was never located.

AND THE WINNER IS

Zookeeper Friedrich Riesfeldt (Paderborn, Germany) fed his constipated elephant 22 doses of animal laxative and more than a bushel of berries, figs and prunes before the plugged-up pachyderm finally got relief. Investigators say ill-fated Friedrich, 46, was attempting to give the ailing elephant an olive oil enema when the relieved beast unloaded. The sheer force of the elephant's unexpected defecation knocked Mr. Riesfeldt to the ground where he struck his head on a rock as the elephant continued to evacuate 200 pounds of dung on top of him. It seems to be just one of those freak accidents that proves... 'Sh*t happens'.

So now you know the sort of things NOT to do if you want to live to a ripe old age!

It's all very well to "go for gold" to attain your targets, and many people do. But just be mindful too of how others are affected by your actions.

I heard a great line many years ago now. There are two points on which to evaluate a life: Did the person accomplish what he set out to do and were people happy he/she lived?

One Genghis Khan migh have accomplished what he set out to do but there were a very large number of people very unhappy he ever drew breath.

Italy is the latest nation to join the global voter revolt against the City of London and Wall Street banking interests. On 4 December an emphatic 60 per cent of Italians voted to reject constitutional changes that would have concentrated power in the prime minister and elevated EU law to the same level as Italian constitutional law. The changes, intended to give Prime Minister Matteo Renzi the power to enforce EU plans to prop up Europe’s Too-Big-To-Fail (TBTF) banks, were explicitly fascist—in 2013 TBTF megabank JPMorgan had complained that the anti-fascist measures in Italy’s post-war constitution were the obstacle to centralised EU control of Europe’s financial system. The “no” vote is therefore a smashing defeat of this EU fascism, which has forced Renzi to resign and leaves the TBTF banks facing oblivion.

The vote is especially a defeat for the British Crown and City of London, the original masterminds of the EU. In 1992 Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip set Italy’s present crisis in train when they hosted top figures from the Italian government and elite financiers from the City of London at an exclusive function on their Royal Yacht Britannia off Italy’s west coast. This event finalised plans to mass-privatise Italy’s state-owned industries, and enforce the new Maastricht Treaty’s rules for adoption of the euro single currency. Italy was the world’s sixth-largest industrial economy, and a premier producer of machine tools. The radical privatisation of the Italian economy in the decade following that function on the Britannia resulted in the greatest destruction of real wealth in the country’s history.

Like Brexit and the blue collar vote for Trump, it was the victims of Italy’s deindustrialisation who turned out in droves to vote down the EU-banker agenda. The highest percentage of “no” votes came from the southern regions with the highest unemployment and poverty levels, and the northern regions that have lost the most industries.

The deindustrialisation is also the root cause of the crisis in Italy’s banks, which hold more than €360 billion in non-performing loans—more than their combined capital. With a market value of just 20 per cent of their face value, if these loans were “marked to market”, all Italian banks would collapse overnight. To prop up some of the banks, last December the Italian government complied with EU rules and “bailed in” their bondholders, converting their bonds into worthless shares. Most Italian bank bonds are held by ordinary pensioners—the rage that this bail-in provoked in the population fuelled the voter revolt.

The referendum result leaves the next Italian government at an impasse. To comply with the EU’s bail-in rules would be political suicide; however, it must address the banking crisis, which threatens financial contagion across the world (especially through Deutsche Bank, which is heavily exposed to Italy’s banks and is a derivatives counterparty to all other TBTF banks worldwide).

The only solution for Italy lies outside of the EU and its euro straitjacket. It begins with a Glass-Steagall separation of commercial banking from investment banking and all forms of financial speculation. This separation will be a firewall to protect the banks that serve the real economy from the inevitable meltdown of unpayable debts and bad derivatives bets. It must coincide with massive public investment in infrastructure, both in domestic projects and in cooperation with the One Belt, One Road vision China has initiated to connect Asia with Europe.

This is a national solution, but the Italian crisis, which threatens the entire world, puts a fine point on the need for all nations to agree to implement Glass-Steagall. The last such international agreement, reached at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, established the regulated system of fixed exchange rates and capital controls that underpinned the post-WWII era of unprecedented economic growth and prosperity. Bretton Woods defined the alternative to the fascism then being fought in the war; Glass-Steagall is the alternative to financial fascism today.

Click the read more button to sign the petition: Break up the big banks now—pass Glass-Steagall!

Until next time,
dream big dreams,
plan out how to achieve them,
be continually executing your plans,
enlist people to your causes,
travel and/or read widely, preferably both,
all the while observing what you observe
rather than thinking what you are told to think,
think well of your fellow man,
take time to help your fellow man,
he sorely needs it and it will help you too,
eat food that is good for your body,
exercise your body,
take time to destress,
and do the important things
that make a difference -
they are rarely the urgent ones!

Most of the content herein has been copied from someone else. Especially the images. My goodness some people are talented at creating aesthetics! The small bits that are of my creation are Copyright 2014-2016 © by Tom Grimshaw - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Back Issues | Feedback | Subscribe | Unsubscribe

Software Development
Festival Management Software
Healthy Snacks
How to Live The Healthiest Life