Jewish Wealth by the Numbers

 

Jewish Wealth by the Numbers
by Steve Sailer

May 01, 2013

Americans can learn much from Israel. It’s an increasingly prosperous nation that grapples manfully with its problems. For example, when the Israelis put up a fence along the border to keep out illegal aliens (or “illegal infiltrators,” as the Israeli government calls them), they put up a fence.

 

I especially admire how Israelis enjoy what might be called “effective freedom of speech.” While I treasure the legal protections provided by the First Amendment, the increasing tendency of Americans to pass up moneymaking opportunities that might be deemed “controversial” makes America duller and dumber.

In contrast to America, in Israel you can, say, go see the latest Mel Gibson action flick in a movie theater.

Why? Don’t Israelis know that Gibson is controversial?

The Israeli attitude, however, is: Why not? If some people in Tel Aviv will pay good shekels to see Gibson’s Get the Gringo, then somebody else in Tel Aviv will charge them to show it.

Similarly, in Israel, you can write openly about one of the more interesting and important subjects of our era: Jewish wealth. For instance, the Israeli-American centrist think tank Jewish People Policy Institute reported in 2010: “World Jewry today is at a historical zenith of absolute wealth creation.”

Forbes Israel, the Tel Aviv offshoot of the American business magazine, has a cover story on Jewish billionaires. The Israeli edition has made up a list, drawn from Forbes‘s overall ranking of the world’s 1,426 billionaires, of the 165 richest Jews in the world.

“Per capita, Jews are a little over 100 times more likely to become billionaires than the rest of the human race.”

The billionaire on the cover is cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress. His $3.6 billion makes him, according to Forbes Israel, the world’s 69th richest Jew. (By the way, Lauder has one of those rare New York City concealed-carry permits.)

In America, this just isn’t done in the mainstream media, even though it’s obvious and fairly easy to do.

Sure, Forbes has been publishing its rankings of rich people for three decades.

Moreover, counting by ethnicity is something that the government, corporations, and foundations have been doing assiduously since the late 1960s.

And these days, it’s easy to look up most well-known individuals’ ethnicity on the Internet. Wikipedia, for example, usually states the subject’s ancestry immediately after the table of contents. (That reflects a major change in our culture’s emphasis. At bedtime, I often browse in my 1971 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Biographical entries back then were quite reticent about ethnic backgrounds.)

Still, there’s one ethnicity that’s never counted in polite circles in America…except by other Jews, who do it constantly.

You can use Google Translate to convert the Forbes Israel richest Jews ranking from Hebrew into awkward-but-adequate English. Thus, “165 billionaires [sic] Jews constitute 11% of global billionaires list, and common wealth reaches $812 billion,” or an average of $4.9 billion per Jewish billionaire.

Jews are usually said to comprise about 0.2% of the world’s population, so 11% of the world’s billionaires means they’re doing pretty well.

Here’s my count of Forbes Israel‘s list, with Jewish billionaires as a fraction of the country’s total number of billionaires:

US 105/442 = 24% 
Israel 16/16 = 100% 
Russia 12/99 = 12% 
Canada 6/29 = 21% 
Brazil 6/45 = 13% 
UK 5/37 = 14% 
Ukraine 3/10 = 30% 
Monaco 3/3 = 100% 
Australia 3/22 = 14% 
Spain 2/20 = 10% 
France 2/24 = 8% 
Germany 1/58 = 2% 
Hong Kong 1/39 = 3%

According to Forbes Israel, the ten richest Jews are Oracle magnate Larry Ellison, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, casino king Sheldon Adelson, Russian-American Google guy Sergey Brin, other Google guy Larry Page, corporate raider Carl Icahn, Hungarian-American money trader George Soros, Russian oligarchMikhail Fridman, Russian-American tycoon Len Blavatnik, and Lebanese-Brazilian banker Joseph Safra.

Page’s conclusion brings up an obvious question: Who is a Jew? Generally, non-rabbinical Jewish organizations, such as Forbes Israel, tend to attribute Jewishness generously to individuals perceived as good guys, such as the popular Page. In turn, it’s common to quibble when the topic is anybody who isn’t popular. (Thus, you’ll often see it argued that, say, Einstein was obviously Jewish despite not being religious, while Trotsky can’t be considered Jewish because he was not religious.)

In the odd case of Page, we know that his mother came from a Zionist household and had moved to Israel, but the background of his father, the late computer-science professor Carl Victor Page, is obscure. A Google search reveals only that his paternal grandfather had been an autoworker and labor activist, and that his father despised religion.

The Page family seemed to have cherished an old-fashioned socialist belief that in the future, ancestry would no longer matter. Ironically, the wife of Page’s partner Brin, Anne Wojcicki, cofounded that quintessential 21st-century company 23andMe, which offers DNA testing for genealogy enthusiasts.

The true problem with Forbes Israel‘s list is neither ideological nor ethical. Instead, it’s a slapdash affair with poor quality control. Forbes Israel palpably undercounts the number of American Jews on the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans. (In 2012, it took a minimum net worth of $1.1 billion to make the 400, so everyone on the Forbes 400 is a billionaire, but a few hard-up billionaires with only $1.0 billion didn’t make the Forbes 400.)

The highest quality analysis of the Forbes 400 list by ethnicity is the one updated periodically by human-sciences blogger n/a at his race/history/evolution notes website.

To check which of the competing lists is more accurate, I’ve searched the first 21 names on which n/a and Forbes Israel disagree.

In one case, Forbes Israel categorizes as Jewish a man who appears to be a WASP, cable TV sultan Amos Barr Hostetter Jr., while n/a rightly classifies him as Northwestern European.

The other 20 disagreements consist of Forbes billionaires left off the Forbes Israel list that n/a denotes as Jewish.

I rapidly found that for 16 of those 20, n/a has a slam-dunk case based on readily accessible online evidence. For example, the Wikipedia article on former American Enterprise Institute chairman Bruce Kovner ($4.3 billion) states: “Kovner was born into a Russian Jewish family.…”

Two of the disputed 20, Orange County real-estate baron Donald Bren and Indianapolis Colts owner James Irsay, are the product of mixed marriages.

That leaves only two of n/a‘s 20 whom I couldn’t easily document: banker Bernard Saul II and Miami TV station owner Edmund Ansin. The first has a stereotypical Jewish name, while the second is a relatively rare name that has left me stumped. Ansin’s father is said to be an immigrant from Ukraine who opened a shoe factory in Worcester, MA.

In general, I found that n/a‘s accuracy is better by far.

Overall, n/a states that 140 of the Forbes 400 rankings of richest Americans, or 35 percent, are Jewish.

Perhaps that 35 percent figure is slightly overstated by fully counting individuals of mixed backgrounds, such as Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. Then again, n/a may be missing a roughly similar number of non-Jewish names of billionaires who are a half or a quarter Jewish in their mother’s lines, so it may all balance out.

In general, however, the question of how to count people of partial Jewish ancestry is, no matter how fascinating in theory, still difficult at present. The current denizens of the Forbes 400 (average age 66) largely come from generations when mixed marriages were fairly rare, so solving this methodological issue can reasonably be deferred for a few more years.

Jews are usually said to make up about two percent of the US population and perhaps three percent of the older generation that dominates the Forbes 400. Therefore, Jews are roughly 17 times more likely per capita to make the Forbes 400 than is the rest of the American population.

This 35 percent Jewish figure has been fairly stable since n/a started his analyses in 2009. The first careful analysis of the Forbes 400 was performed by Nathaniel Weyl back in 1987, when he found 23 percent were Jewish. That suggests a sizable increase in Jewish representation among plutocrats over the last generation. Yet bear in mind that’s only one data point from the past. I’ve been casually following the Forbes 400 for 30 years, and membership shifts frequently due to various bubbles.

n/a has also done a quick and dirty look at Forbes‘s global list of 1,426 billionaires (#1, by the way, is Lebanese-Mexican Carlos Slim). Unlike Forbes Israel‘s estimate of 11 percent Jewish, n/a comes up with over 17 percent. Note that this is pretty much of a SWAG for Eastern Europe, where it’s harder for an Anglophone to look up biographical information. Still, this estimate would mean that per capita, Jews are a little over 100 times more likely to become billionaires than the rest of the human race.

In summary, as an Israeli might tell you, an informed opinion is better than an uninformed one.

Taki's magazine:-

 http://takimag.com/article/jewish_wealth_by_the_numbers_steve_sailer/print#ixzz2Tjd8mA1P

Is War With North Korea Inevitable?

Pat Buchanan - April 2013
 
"If you see 10 troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you," said Calvin Coolidge, who ever counseled patience over the rash response.

Unfortunately, the troubles presented by North Korea's Kim Jong Un seem unlikely to run into a ditch before they reach us.

For Kim has crawled out on a limb. He has threatened to attack U.S. forces in Korea and bases in Asia, even U.S. cities. He has declared the truce that ended the Korean War dead and that "a state of war" exists with the South. All ties to the South have been cut.

The United States has sent B-52s and stealth fighters to Korea and anti-missile warships to the Sea of Japan. Two B-2 bombers flew from Missouri to Korea and back in a provocative fly-by of the Hermit Kingdom. And both South Korea and we have warned that, should the North attack, swift retribution will follow.

Kim Jong Un is in a box. If he launches an attack, he risks escalation into war. But if his bluster about battling the United States turns out to be all bluff, he risks becoming an object of ridicule in Asia and at home.

Why is he playing with fire? Because his father and grandfather did, and got away with murder.

In 1968, Kim Il Sung hijacked the U.S. intelligence ship Pueblo and held its crew hostage. America, tied down in Vietnam, did nothing. In 1976, North Koreans ax-murdered two U.S. officers in the DMZ. In 1983, Pyongyang tried to assassinate South Korea's president in Burma and blew up three members of his cabinet. In 1987, North Koreans blew up a South Korean airliner.

These unpunished atrocities all occurred during the rule of Kim Il Sung.

Under Kim Jong Il, Pyongyang torpedoed a South Korean patrol boat, killing 47, and shelled a South Korean island, killing four. Neither Washington nor Seoul retaliated.

The danger is that Kim Jong Un believes he, too, can get away with murder and he, too, will be appeased with aid and investments.

Yet neither President Obama nor President Park Geun Hye — whose father, President Park Chung Hee, was the target of assassination attempts and whose mother died in one — can be seen as tolerating another North Korean outrage.

To avoid a collision, a diplomatic path will have to be opened for Kim to back away from the confrontation he has provoked.

But, in the longer term, America has to ask herself:
What are we doing, 20 years after the end of the Cold War, with 28,000 troops in Korea and thousands on the DMZ facing the North?

What are we doing there that South Korean soldiers could not do for themselves? Why is South Korea's defense our responsibility, 60 years after President Eisenhower ended the Korean War?

For over a decade, some of us have urged the United States to pull all U.S. troops off the peninsula.

Had we done so, we would not be in the middle of this crisis now.

South Korea is not inherently weaker than the North. It has twice the population, and its economy is 40 times as large. And the South has access to U.S. weapons superior to anything the North can acquire.

After Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, as Robert Gates said, any defense secretary who recommends that America fight a new land war in Asia ought to have his head examined.

Why, then, are we still on the DMZ?

The long-run danger that has to be addressed is this: Kim Jong Un is about 30, and his life expectancy, absent a coup, is 40 or 50 years. Yet, within a few years, if he persists as he promises to do, he could have dozens of nuclear-armed missiles pointed at South Korea, Japan and Okinawa.

And if Pyongyang becomes a nuclear weapons state, it is difficult to see how Seoul and Tokyo will not be required to match its nuclear arsenal, as Pakistan felt compelled to match India's.

And a nuclear-armed South Korea or Japan would hardly be welcomed in Beijing.

What would China do? Some Chinese are urging Beijing to dump North Korea as an unreliable and uncontrollable ally that could drag them into war. Hard-liners are said to be urging China to stand by her longtime ally and buffer state.

Whatever comes of this crisis, U.S. policy, seemingly frozen in the 1950s, is in need of review. We cannot indefinitely be responsible for the defense of South Korea from an erratic dictator hell-bent on acquiring nuclear missiles.

In the near-term, even a conventional war on that most heavily armed border on earth, between South and North Korea, would be a calamity. To avert it, if necessary, Obama should pick up the phone, call North Korea and talk directly to Kim.

In a far graver crisis, perpetrated by Nikita Khrushchev in 1962, John F. Kennedy did not hesitate to communicate with the culprit.

https://www.creators.com/opinion/pat-buchanan/is-war-with-north-korea-inevitable.html

The Cyprus Money Grab Coming To A Bank Near You?

March 17th,

Cyprus is a beta test.  The banksters are trying to commit bank robbery in broad daylight, and they are eager to see if the rest of the world will let them get away with it.  Cyprus was probably chosen because it is very small (therefore nobody will care too much about it) and because there is a lot of foreign (i.e. Russian) money parked there.  The IMF and the EU could have easily bailed out Cyprus without any trouble whatsoever, but they purposely decided not to do that.  Instead, they decided that this would be a great time to test the idea of a “wealth tax”.  The government of Cyprus was given two options by the IMF and the EU – either they could confiscate money from private bank accounts or they could leave the eurozone.  Apparently this was presented as a “take it or leave it” proposition, and many are using the world “blackmail” to describe what has happened.  Sadly, this decision is going to set a very ominous precedent for the future and it is going to have ripple effects far beyond Cyprus.  After the banksters steal money from bank accounts in Cyprus they will start doing it everywhere.  If this “bank robbery” goes well, it will only be a matter of time before depositors in nations such as Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal are asked to take “haircuts” as well.  And what will happen one day when the U.S. financial system collapses?  Will U.S. bank accounts also be hit with a “one time” wealth tax?  That is very frightening to think about.
Cyprus is a very small nation, so it is not the amount of money involved that is such a big deal.  Rather, the reason why this is all so troubling is that this “wealth tax” is shattering confidence in the European banking system.  Never before have the banksters come directly after bank accounts.
If everything goes according to plan, every bank account in Cyprus will be hit with a “one time fee” this week.  Accounts with less than 100,000 euros will be hit with a 6.75% tax, and accounts with more than 100,000 euros will be hit with a 9.9% tax.
Have you ever wondered how billionaires continue to get RICHER, while the rest of the world is struggling?
"I study billionaires for a living. To be more specific, I study how these investors generate such huge and consistent profits in the stock markets -- year-in and year-out."
CLICK HERE to get your Free E-Book, “The Little Black Book Of Billionaires Secrets”
How would you feel if something like this happened where you live?
How would you feel if the banksters suddenly demanded that you hand over 10 percent of all the money that you had in the bank?
And why would anyone want to still put money into the bank in nations such as Greece, Italy, Spain or Portugal after all of this?
One writer for Forbes has called this “probably the single most inexplicably irresponsible decision in banking supervision in the advanced world since the 1930s.“  And I would agree with that statement.  I certainly did not expect to see anything like this in Europe.  This is going to cause people to pull money out of banks all over the continent.  If I was living in Europe (and especially if I was living in one of the more financially-troubled countries) that is exactly what I would be doing.
The bank runs that we witnessed in Cyprus over the weekend may just be a preview of what is coming.  When this “wealth tax” was announced, it triggered a run on the ATMs and many of them ran out of cash very rapidly.  A bank holiday was declared for Monday, and all electronic transfers of money were banned.
Needless to say, the people of Cyprus were not too pleased about all of this.  In fact, one very angry man actually parked his bulldozer outside of one bank branch and threatened to physically bulldoze his way inside.
But this robbery by the banksters has not been completed yet.  First, the Cypriot Parliament must approve the new law authorizing this wealth confiscation on Monday.  If it is approved, then the actually wealth confiscation will take place on Tuesday morning.
According to Reuters, the new president of Cyprus is warning that if the bank account tax is not approved the two largest banks in Cyprus will collapse and there will be complete and total financial chaos in his country…
President Nicos Anastasiades, elected three weeks ago with a pledge to negotiate a swift bailout, said refusal to agree to terms would have led to the collapse of the two largest banks.
“On Tuesday … We would either choose the catastrophic scenario of disorderly bankruptcy or the scenario of a painful but controlled management of the crisis,” Anastasiades said in written statement.
In several statements since his election, he had previously categorically ruled out a deposit haircut.
The fact that the new president had previously ruled out any kind of a wealth tax has a lot of people very, very upset.  They feel like they were flat out lied to…
“I’m furious,” said Chris Drake, a former Middle East correspondent for the BBC who lives in Cyprus. “There were plenty of opportunities to take our money out; we didn’t because we were promised it was a red line which would not be crossed.”
But apparently the wealth confiscation could actually have been far worse.  According to one report, the IMF and the EU were originally demanding a 40% wealth tax on bank account holders in Cyprus…
As the President of Cyprus proclaims  to his people that “we’ should all take responsibility as his historic decision will “lead to the permanent rescue of the economy,” it appears that the settled-upon 9.9% haircut is a ‘good deal’ compared to the stunning 40% of total deposits that Germany’s FinMin Schaeuble and the IMF demanded.
Could you imagine?
How would you feel if you woke up someday and 40% of all your money had been taken out of your bank accounts?
At this point, there is still some doubt about whether this plan will actually be adopted or not.
Right now the new president of Cyprus does not have the votes that he needs, but you can be sure that there is some high level arm twisting going on.
Originally the vote was supposed to happen on Sunday, but it was delayed until Monday to allow for some extra “persuading” to be done.
And of course the people of Cyprus are overwhelmingly against this wealth tax.  In fact, one poll found that 71 percent of the entire population of Cyprus wants this plan to be voted down.
The funny thing is that Cyprus is not even in that bad of shape.
The unemployment rate is around 12 percent, but in other European nations such as Greece and Spain the unemployment rate is more than double that.
Cyprus has a debt to GDP ratio of about 87 percent, but the United States has a debt to GDP ratio of well over 100 percent.
So if they will go directly after bank accounts in Cyprus, what will stop them from going after bank accounts in larger nations when the time comes?
In the final analysis, this is a game changer.  No longer will any bank account in the western world be considered to be 100 percent safe.
Trust is a funny thing.  It takes a long time to build, but it can be destroyed in a single moment.
Trust in European banks has now been severely damaged, and that damage is not going to be undone any time soon.
A recent blog post by the CEO of Saxo Bank, Lars Christensen, did a great job of explaining how incredibly damaging this move by the IMF and the EU truly is…
This is a breach of fundamental property rights, dictated to a small country by foreign powers and it must make every bank depositor in Europe shiver. Although the representatives at the bailout press conference tried to present this as a one-off, they were not willing to rule out similar measures elsewhere – not that it would have mattered much as the trust is gone anyway. It is now difficult to expect any kind of limitation to what measures the Troika and EU might take when the crisis really starts to bite.
if you can do this once, you can do it again. if you can confiscate 10 percent of a bank customer’s money, you can confiscate 25, 50 or even 100 percent. I now believe we will see worse as the panic increases, with politicians desperately trying to keep the EUR alive.
Depositors in other prospective bailout countries must be running scared – is it safe to keep money in an Italian, Spanish or Greek bank any more? I dont know, must be the answer. Is it prudent to take the risk? You decide. I fear this will lead to massive capital outflows from weak Eurozone countries, just about the last thing they need right now.
This is the biggest moment that we have witnessed since the beginning of the European financial crisis.
Financial authorities in Europe could try to calm nerves by at least pretending that this will never happen again in any other country, but so far  they are refusing to do that…
Jeroen Dijsselbloem, president of the group of euro-area ministers, on Saturday declined to rule out taxes on depositors in countries beyond Cyprus, although he said such a measure was not currently being considered.
Such a measure is “not currently being considered” for other members of the eurozone?
Yeah, that sure is going to make people feel a lot more confident in what is coming next.
I have insisted over and over that the next wave of the economic collapse would originate in Europe, and we may have just witnessed the decision that will cause the dominoes to start to fall.
The banksters have sent a very clear message.  When the chips are down, they are going to come after YOUR money.
ETF Daily News
So what do you think about the bank robbery that is taking place in Cyprus?  Please feel free to post a comment with your thoughts below…
This article is brought to you courtesy of Michael Snyder from The Economic Collapse Blog.

Did God Discover the God Particle?

By Deepak Chopra, M.D., FACP, Rudolph Tanzi, Ph.D., Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology, Harvard Medical School, and Menas Kafatos, Ph.D., Fletcher Jones Endowed Professor in Computational Physics, Chapman University

The possible discovery of the Higgs boson would not have been splashed across every major media if the tag "God particle" weren't attached to it. Physicists hate the term, but they love the publicity. There are huge government grants at stake as well as the prestige of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland. After you read the headline, however, there's little doubt that a general reader cannot actually grasp what a Higgs boson is (or a large hadron accelerator, either).

If you watch enough PBS programs and listen to a few physicists, some clarity emerges that a non-physicist can understand. The Higgs boson discovery adds validation to a mathematical model of force fields in the universe. It attaches a real particle to an expectation, the expectation that buried inside force fields was the key to why subatomic particles have mass. Mass would be acquired as a particle meets with resistance when it moves through the vacuum of space, a kind of "molasses" that slows it down.

This molasses is very elusive. It took many billions of colliding protons in the huge CERN accelerator, backed up by 100,000 computers around the world, to analyze the data before the discovery seemed real. Even then, most physicists are guarded about whether this new particle actually is a Higgs boson. They are equally guarded about whether its properties will uphold the Standard Model of force fields or in fact create more problems.

But behind all the hoopla and uncertainty, the news flew around the world that a basic building block of the universe has been uncovered, bringing quantum physics closer to its triumphant goal of explaining creation -- hence the inflated and rather silly label of God particle. Yet from another perspective, nothing like an explanation of the universe is emerging at all. Physics may be getting closer to the day, in fact, when the way it views the universe classically reaches a dead end.

Here we will refer to some technical matters, but stick with us. The preliminary discovery comes as a culmination of many years of both theoretical and experimental work, since 1964 when the British physicist Peter Higgs, along with Robert Brout, François Englert, Gerald Guralnik, C. R. Hagen, and Tom Kibble, hypothesized the existence of a field, filling all vacuum. They used symmetry breaking (which would allow particles to acquire their masses without violating other aspects of theory that were correct). This ubiquitous Higgs field would allow all particles in the universe to acquire mass through interactions with it, through a kind of dragging as they move in space. High energy proton collisions at the LHC should, in principle, reveal the elusive Higgs. The Higgs, unlike the photon, has a mass, expected to be in the approximate range of 125 (or more) times the mass of the proton.

The Higgs boson is the last, missing link in the highly successful quantum theory of particles, called the Standard Model. It is also highly unstable, very elusive. To detect it, one has to observe many, many high energy collisions of protons and build up the statistics. In the LHC collider, particles are accelerated through a tunnel, brought together at speeds close to the speed of light, producing showers of particles, with high energies, capable of generating the Higgs particle. It exists for only a tiny fraction of a second before breaking up into many other particles and can be detected only indirectly by identifying the results of its immediate decay and analyzing them to show they were probably produced from a Higgs boson.

Even in its lowest energy state, the Higgs field filling all vacuum has non-zero values everywhere. In fact, ripples or waves in the quantum Higgs field, create for fleeting moments the Higgs particles. The Higgs boson is itself very massive, and it must interact with itself. It itself mediates interactions with the Higgs field and is itself an excitation of the Higgs field.

The full properties of the Higgs (or whatever was observed by the teams) are not yet known. In fact, the signature of what they observed may be multiple Higgs bosons with the properties required by the next theory that the Standard Model would extend into supersymmetry.

Particle physicists are not the only ones excited by the prospect of finding the missing link in the theory: Cosmologists seem to agree that all the luminous matter in the universe makes up only 4 percent of whatever there is in the universe. All the hundreds of billions of galaxies composed of many billions of stars make up just 4 percent of everything! The rest of it may be in the form of dark matter and even more exotic (but unknown) dark energy. So if the "Higgs-like" particle discovered at CERN turns out to be more exotic form, it could help us understand at least dark energy.

These possible future developments could get us closer to what particle physicists call the Theory of Everything, a rather particle-centered view of the cosmos, because their theory of everything, as envisaged, says nothing and in fact cannot say anything about life, evolution and the phenomena of mind and awareness. It is not even clear how gravity, the last of the four forces of nature, will fit into Standard Model, developing into supersymmetry and perhaps developing into superstring theory. But it would be a start.

With no lucrative grants but a lot of far-reaching thought, a band of cosmologists and other physicists sees that the materialist view of the universe doesn't hold water. It hasn't for quite a long time, because quantum theory demolished the solid, reassuring physical universe almost a century ago. Once it was discovered that matter is made up of invisible clouds of energy, once photons were found to behave like particles in one mode and energy waves in another, once the Uncertainty Principle turned actual existence into virtual existence, the blows to materialism became decisive. The great quantum pioneers noted definitively that all other fundamental particles have no fixed physical attributes at all. Instead, particles are pure potential existing in a quantum force field, and they collapse into being a particle you can see and measure only when observed by the scientist who is measuring them.

None of that is in dispute. In fact, more demolition work to the physicalist view of the universe has been done since then (physicalist seems to be the preferred replacement for materialist). We now know, again without dispute, that two particles can be entangled, which means that when one displays a certain value, its partner will instantaneously display a complementary value, even if the two are separated by billions of light years. This simultaneous linkage defies the speed of light. Another crack in the physicalist model is called reverse causation, in which an event can create effects on particles that appear to be going backward instead of forward in time -- thus the common-sense notion of cause and effect is undermined.

With all this demolition work at hand, why do the vast majority of physicists hold on to any kind of physicalist explanations? First, because the mathematics works. Second, because the alternative isn't taught in grad school. The alternative is to include consciousness in the mix. If the observer makes the difference between a wave and a particle, and if the universe displays itself to us as matter (which is all particles), then perhaps the observer is needed to make the universe appear as we see it. This possibility is logical and by no means outlandish. It occurred to some quantum pioneers (although not Einstein) almost a century ago, because in some ways consciousness is inescapable.

The universe does need molasses, or even glue, as forces holding protons together are sometimes called. There are huge complexities and mysteries that we are skipping over, yet the existence of the universe isn't a technical question open only to specialists with advanced scientific degrees. "Why are we here?" is a universal question, and to answer it, you must ask "Why are we conscious? Where did mind come from?" After all, if the observer plays such a key role in turning waves into particles, you can't get very far if you don't know what the observer is actually doing.

In the alternative explanation, the entire universe is imbued with consciousness. Just as there are force fields, invisible but all-pervasive, a consciousness field can exist to uphold the activity we call "mind." The universe evolves, regulates itself, takes creative leaps, and exhibits exquisite mathematical rigor and beauty. The hallmarks of intelligence are there, waiting for the next paradigm shift. At the moment, the word "intelligence" brings up the red herring of intelligent design, which no one except religious fundamentalists wants to be associated with. "Consciousness" gives us a less-tainted word, and there is a growing community of theorists seriously thinking about a conscious universe.

If it exists, then you and I are embedded in the consciousness field. It is the source of our own consciousness. Which means that we are not alone. As one physicist said, "The universe knew that we were coming." An infinite consciousness that spans all of creation sounds like a new definition of God. If so, then we are part of God's mind, and that includes science. The whole argument leads to a wild conclusion by most people's standards: It is God who is discovering the God particle. Infinite consciousness has created individual consciousness to go out into creation and look around. As it does, individual consciousness -- meaning you and I -- has been given free will and choice. We don't have to see our link to the infinite consciousness field. We can take our time discovering who we are and where we come from. But the day seems very near when it will seem quite real and quite natural to say that the conscious universe saw us coming.
Source: Huffinton Post - God Particle

I’ll make 'damn sure' big companies pay their tax, says David Cameron

Cameron says he will use his G8 presidency to seek collective backing to tackle corporate abuses

The world’s most powerful leaders must mount a concerted effort to prevent multinational companies such as Starbucks and Amazon legally avoid large corporation tax bills, David Cameron will urge in his role as president of the G8.

  

The Prime Minister vowed to make “damn sure” that multinational firms paid their fair share of tax on their UK operations.

He is to use Britain’s presidency of the G8 group of the most industrialised nations, which began this week, to discuss ways of stopping global companies moving their money through different jurisdictions to minimise tax payments.

HM Revenue & Customs has been accused of being “too lenient” towards big businesses that indulge in aggressive tax planning. The credibility of HMRC and the tax system rests on it becoming “more aggressive and assertive in confronting corporate tax avoidance”, the chair of the Public Accounts Committee, Margaret Hodge, said last month.

Mr Cameron says a crackdown can only be effective if countries around the world act collectively to tackle abuses. Britain, along with Germany and France, has asked the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development to investigate whether tax loopholes can be closed.

He signalled his determination to confront global corporations during an appearance in Lancashire before business leaders and entrepreneurs. Asked why “Starbucks and Amazon” were allowed to avoid paying large corporation tax bills despite their extensive British presence, he replied: “We have got to crack that, you’re absolutely right.

“This is a really important issue. I think we’re offering actually a fair deal to businesses. We’re saying, ‘Look, we’re going to have a really low rate of corporation tax’ but I want to make damn sure that those companies pay it.

“It’s simply not fair and not right what some of them are doing by saying, ‘I’ve got lots of sales here in the UK but I’m going to pay a sort of royalty fee to another company that I own in another country that has some special tax dispensation’.”

Mr Cameron said he wanted to start a debate in the UK about “really aggressive tax avoidance”.

He said: “We do need a debate in this country, not only what is against the law – that’s tax evasion, that is against the law, that’s illegal and if you do that the Inland Revenue will come down on you like a ton of bricks – but what is unacceptable in terms of really aggressive tax avoidance.

Mr Cameron added: “We’ve got a low top rate of income tax now; we’ve got a low rate of corporation tax now; we are a fair tax country. But I think it’s fair then to say to business, you know, we’re playing fair by you; you’ve got to play fair by us.

Mr Cameron said he had put the issue “right at the top of the agenda” for the G8 this year as well as tackling it nationally.

“It’s simply not fair and not right what some of them are doing by saying, I’ve got lots of sales here in the UK but I’m going to pay a sort of royalty fee to another company that I own in another country that has some special tax dispensation.”

The Commons Public Accounts Committee last month condemned the “unconvincing, and, in some cases, evasive” evidence it had received from representatives of Starbucks, Google and Amazon who were called in front of it to defend their tax affairs.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/ill-make-damn-sure-big-companies-pay-their-tax-says-david-cameron-8439137.html

With Autonomy, H-P Bought An Old-Fashioned Accounting Scandal. Here's How It Worked.

HP Shares Plunge After A $8.8 Billion Writedown Of Accounting Problems At Autonomy- Abram Brown 11/20/2012

Whitman: $8.8 billion worth of vaporware:-

The story was first told to me late last year, and like a lot of stories of financial impropriety inside a huge company, it was almost impossible to nail down. Hewlett-Packard‘s Autonomy division, my source told me, was vaporware writ large: A $10 billion software company with an overhyped flagship product that was literally being given away because customers didn’t have a use for it.

Today, Meg Whitman admitted as much. H-P announced it was writing off 88% of the purchase price for Autonomy and accused “some former members of Autonomy’s management team” of using “accounting improprieties, misrepresentations and disclosure failures” to hide the software company’s true performance and value.

In the release, H-P identified one of the oldest accounting tricks in the book, a variation on the one “Chainsaw Al” Dunlap used to accelerate revenue at Sunbeam — by getting customers to “buy” products now, under terms that really just borrowed from the future.

I spoke to my source again this morning and he detailed what he saw at H-P, from his position deep within the 300,000-employee company.

“What I saw was exactly what Meg Whitman wrote in her internal memo to employees,” my source said. “There was really sketchy accounting going on.”

Autonomy was founded as Cambridge Neurodynamics in 1991 by Michael Lynch, a Cambridge-educated computer scientist, according to this flattering profile by the Guardian after he left H-P in May. The company was based on the then-hot concept of Bayesian search, named after 18th-century mathematician Thomas Bayes, and ultimately developed an all-encompassing software package it called IDOL — Intelligent Data Operating Layer.

H-P today said it stands behind IDOL and well it should. Otherwise it would have to write off the entire $10 billion it paid for Autonomy. But my source doesn’t think much of the product, which is supposed to find all of a company’s data, wherever it resides, and whether or not it can be identified by specific words. (Typical example: Finding documents that contain the phrase “flightless bird” when you’re looking for “penguin.”)

“It’s the primary smoke and mirrors that Autonomy has used to make people think they’ve got something very impressive,” he told me. “It’s a fancy search engine.”
I attempted to reach Lynch this morning, unsuccessfully. His spokeswoman told Reuters he is still  reviewing H-P’s allegations. H-P said it has referred the information it uncovered in a forensic accounting to fraud officials in the U.S. and the U.K.

Here’s what my source observed personally. Autonomy grew through acquisitions, buying everything from storage companies like Iron Mountain to enterprise software firms like Interwoven. They’d then go to customers and offer them a deal they couldn’t refuse. Say a customer had $5 million and four years left on a data-storage contract, or “disk,” in the trade. Autonomy would offer them, say, the same amount of storage for $4 million but structure it as a $3 million purchase of IDOL software, paid for up front, and $1 million worth of disk. The software sales dropped to the bottom line and burnished Autonomy’s reputation for being a fast-growing, cutting-edge software company a la Oracle, while the revenue actually came from the low-margin, commodity storage business.

“They would basically give them software for free but shift the costs around to make it look like they got $3 million in software sales,” said my source, who directly observed such deals.

Lynch’s management team also was practiced at the art of wringing attractive-looking growth out of a string of ho-hum acquisitions. The typical strategy was to bolt IDOL and other software onto a company’s existing products and try and convince customers to pay more for the “new” products. If that failed, they’d milk the existing customer base by halting development and outsourcing support, my source says, using the cash from the runoff business to fund more acquisitions.

“Mike Lynch was famous for saying Autonomy never put an end of life on any product,” said my source. “But the customers were screaming.”

Now, my source has never been a Mike Lynch fan. In sales meetings, he says, Lynch “loved to do vague and theoretical academic-type presentations to show what a visionary he was.”

And Autonomy may have some powerful features my source didn’t appreciate. The Defense Department reportedly is a customer. But from his perch within the company, it looked like a lot of vaporware wrapped up in fancy Cambridge talk and the kind of accounting tricks managers have engaged in since the dawn of publicly traded stock.

With its announcement today, H-P seems to agree. The company accused former managers of “a willful effort” “to inflate the underlying financial metrics of the company in order to mislead investors and potential buyers. These misrepresentations and lack of disclosure severely impacted HP management’s ability to fairly value Autonomy at the time of the deal.”

Calling customers wouldn’t necessarily have uncovered the problem, my source says.

“I think these companies are embarrassed to admit they spent $10 million on software that doesn’t actually work,” he said.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielfisher/2012/11/20/with-autonomy-h-p-bought-an-old-fashioned-accounting-scandal/