out reform of the country’s banks.
The article's 471 comments speak volumes of course - best encompassed by the following ...
"I think that Angela Knight has shown herself and her organisation, the British Bankers Association, to be stunningly disinterested in the very customers she claims the banks are so concerned about. She stated that certain past 'mistakes' (rip offs by the major banks) were no longer businesses the banks were in and they were now looking to the future (I paraphrase) - that 'this was the right thing to do'. No Angela Knight, it is not the 'right thing to do', not until all ripped off customers have been recompensed and that is quite simply not happening. Most customers of banks are treated with total and utter contempt - the banks seem to spend their days dreaming up ways to rip us off - getting caught out - refusing to deal with the customers complaints, indifferent to their customers and finding 'moving on' a more profitable solution.I think the BBA should consider the havoc its members have wreaked, the thousands of hard working bank employees sacked while the 'money-go-round' people, responsible for bankrupting banks, take ridiculous bonuses. It is also not just the bank workers, it is all the other hard working people made redundant, through no fault of their own, as the result of the financial meltdown caused by the banks - whose money-go-round management have felt absolutely ZERO pain - at all.How about starting with a small 5 letter word that starts with 'S' and ends in 'Y' - and then putting things right, not by casting responsibility aside and 'moving on' but by putting things right for customers and staff - instead of pocketing the ridiculous bonuses?"
As Charles Moore recently concluded ... "In some ways, our banking problem is even worse than our trade union one 30 years ago, because of the lure of money. Most powerful people in the country – especially in London – have a strong motive to suck up to the big banks. If you work in the arts, if you are a politician, or a retiring permanent secretary, or a senior army officer, if you run a university, a charity or a political party, you will want bankers as your friends, and so you will blanch at Mr King's frankness. Well, a lot of my best friends are bankers (though possibly rather fewer if they have got to the end of this article), but I'm glad someone is speaking up against a world where morality has simply turned upside down."…
nt. They would go on to corner the world's multitrillion-dollar oil market, reaping unimaginable riches while bringing the economy to its knees. Meet the self-anointed kings of the New York Mercantile Exchange. In some ways, they are everything you would expect them to be: a secretive, members-only club of men and women who live lavish lifestyles; cavort with politicians, strippers, and celebrities; and blissfully jacked up oil prices to nearly $150 a barrel while profiting off the misery of the working class. In other ways, they are nothing you can imagine: many come from working-class families themselves. The progeny of Jewish, Irish, and Italian immigrants who escaped war-torn Europe, they take pride in flagrantly spurning Wall Street. Under the thumb of an all-powerful international oil cartel, the energy market had long eluded the grasp of America's hungry capitalists. Neither the oil royalty of Houston nor the titans of Wall Street had ever succeeded in fully wresting away control. But facing extinction, the rough-and-tumble traders of Nymex led by the reluctant son of a produce merchant went after this Goliath and won, creating the world's first free oil market and minting billions in the process. Their stunning journey from poverty to prosperity belies the brutal and violent history that is their legacy. For the first time, The Asylum unmasks the oil market's self-described "inmates" in all their unscripted and dysfunctional glory: the happily married father from Long Island whose lust for money and power was exceeded only by his taste for cruel pranks; the Italian kung fu fighting gasoline trader whose ferocity in the trading pits earned him countless millions; the cheerful Nazi hunter who traded quietly by day and ambushed Nazi sympathizers by night; and the Irish-born femme fatale who outsmarted all but one of the exchange's chairmen the Hungarian emigre who, try as he might, could do nothing to rein in the oil market's unruly inhabitants. From the treacherous boardroom schemes to the hookers and blow of the trading pits; from the repeat terrorist attacks and FBI stings to the grand alliances and outrageous fortunes that brought the global economy to the brink, The Asylum ventures deep into the belly of the beast, revealing how raw ambition and the endless quest for wealth can change the very nature of both man and market. Showcasing seven years of research and hundreds of hours of interviews, Leah McGrath Goodman reveals what really happened behind the scenes as oil prices topped out and what choice the traders ultimately made when forced to choose between their longtime brotherhood and their precious oil monopoly.…
an change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
As Elisabet Sahtouris has said in - Ecosophy: Nature’s Guide to a Better World
In this truly cosmic model, the Greeks believed that if we knew how
the greater cosmos was organized, we would know how to organize
our human cosmos. The greater cosmos came out of chaos, which was
not seen as the disorder for which we use the word chaos, but as the
unpatterned no-thing-ness of the universal source, the infinite
potential (chaos, more as in today’s chaos theory) within which all
arises. Thus, the matter of how cosmos-as-order arose and functions
is of supreme importance for human life.
Although ‘The Great Wave’ is often seen as typically Japanese, in fact
it mixes influences from both east and west. Hokusai’s imagination
had been captured in his youth by his discovery of European-style
perspective. Now, aged about seventy, he adapted European
perspective in a very inventive way, playing games in the image
between the relative sizes of the large storm wave in the foreground
and tiny Mount Fuji in the distance. Japanese prints such as 'The Great Wave' influenced Western artists
such as Whistler, van Gogh and Monet. During the 20th century and
beyond, the image has spread even more widely into popular culture
and has been frequently replicated and adapted. It is even painted as
a mural on a house in Camberwell, South London. This British
Museum Exhibit is a unique opportunity to delve into the story
behind this iconic work, learn how Hokusai made ‘The Great Wave’,
and discover how the print has become a truly global inspiration.
…
eel like giving up.
So, the question is, where are you in your spiritual growth process? Are you willing to put forth the effort to tighten up your life? Are you still attached to controlling the outcome? Do you meditate a little every day on your heart chakra in order to cultivate balance? Do you hassle the details?
If you want to become impeccable, you must clean and polish your being. Clean and polish. Clean and polish. Until it shines like a diamond.
And once it is perfect, you throw it away." - Luce Rene
PERCEPTION IS indeed THE MEDIUM
Bridget Riley is about the changes - progressive, sometimes abrupt, sometimes apparently disastrous - that can take place in a given situation.
The situation is presented in the simplest possible terms
John Russell - Sunday Times - September 1963
One of the most distinctive characteristics of Bridget Riley's art is that it "insists" with such concentration that it changes sensory response into something else. The experience which Riley offers is closely related to the expression of emotion or, more exactly, to the creation of visual analogues for sharply particularized states of mind. The very intensity of the assault which her painting makes on the eye drives it, as it were, past the point at which it is merely a matter of optical effect. It becomes acute physical sensation, apprehended kinesthetically as mental tension or mental release, anxiety or exhileration, heightened self-awareness or heightened awareness of unfamiliar or even alien states of being. Bridget Riley Catalogue introduction - David Thompson Venice Biennale, June 1968…
entury and one of the greatest thinkers of all time. The dramatic rethinking that Relativity Theory impelled in our understanding of the physical world - and its continuing influence on intellectual theorizing in many aspects of science - was no less INTEGRAL ART than the sheer breadth of talent that Leonardo da Vinci displayed.What may need to be emphasised here is the vital part played by visual-spatial thinking in his formulation of theories and his radical solutions to problems.As a child, however, Einstein was far from being regarded as specially gifted and reports of his early life and education give several strong indications of dyslexia. Einstein's memory for words was poor and throughout his life he frequently misspelled names of places and people. He also continued to make errors of simple calculation, while being able “to handle deftly the most difficult tensor calculus” as Hoffmann stated. Obviously this did not endear him to his teachers in youth - yet as Thomas West has said - in time Einstein became teacher to all his professors, making the lectures he did not attend outdated and the books he did not study obsolete.
…