Lofty Matters

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Interest rates have again been cut by the Fed by a 1/4 point. Is this a good thing? The Fed wants you to think so. In fact, they seem to be ratcheting up the “anti-inflation” propaganda.

Regardless of what they say, this is not a good move for the U.S. dollar.

To even touch the rising energy costs, the surging food prices and the ever-increasing import inflation, the Fed would have to raise rates above the level of inflation.

Right now, inflation is hovering at 4%. With today’s cut, the Fed funds rate is at 2%. Do you realize what this means??? It means that the real interest rate (adjusted for inflation) is two full percentage points below zero!

Lenders today are actually dishing out money. After adjusting for inflation, they are effectively paying their borrowers to take it off their hands.

This should reveal how far the Fed will go to drive rates down - and how little they have heeded the obvious warning signs of the potentially rampant inflation situation.

As long as the real interest rates in the US are below zero…as long as the Fed’s actions to defend the dollar are no more than talk…the dollar is doomed to much steeper decline.

Two large colliding galaxies are featured in this Hubble Space Telescope view. This is part of a series of cosmic snapshots released to celebrate the Hubble’s 18th anniversary. This pair of clusters lies some 450 million light-years away in the Hercules Galaxy Cluster. At that estimated distance, this picture spans over 150 thousand light-years. Although this scenario looks strage, galaxy collisions and their eventual mergers are common.

Software is expensive. I have found a reputable source for discounted Microsoft software such as Office 2007 Suite.

CostCaptain.com is a Microsoft Authorized Education Reseller. This means that they can offer 100% authentic microsoft products at academic discounts. This will benefit students and staff of schools, libraries, and research labs. Home schools can qualify for this as well. CostCaptain has served hundreds of schools, colleges and libraries as well as thousands of students and staff members over the course of their operation.

As an idea of what are for students, they have Microsoft Office 2007 being offered from $129. A Vista upgrade starts at $89.

All you need do as a buyer is provide academic eligibility and then your product is shipped directly to you. They offer friendly customer service and even have gift certificates available.

Democracy was the biggest loser in the Supreme Court on Monday. The court upheld the State of Indiana’s voter identification law. This serves to solve a nearly nonexistent problem by putting significant barriers between voters (particularly minorities) and the ballot box. Worse yet, the court presented a standard that paves the way for other states to adopt similar rules that discourage disadvantaged groups from voting. This is a huge reversal for a court that once considered itself a champion of voting rights.

In 2005, Indiana passed one of the nation’s toughest voter ID laws. It requires its voters to present government-issued photo identification at the polls. Private college IDs, employee ID cards and utility bills are not acceptable in Indiana. For people without a driver’s license (who are likely poor and likely minority) the burden is considerable and insurmountable. To get acceptable ID, people would be forced to pay fees for documents such as birth certificates.

This should not have been a difficult case for the Supreme Court. The court has long recognized that the right to vote is so fundamental that a state can’t restrict it unless it can show that the harm it is seeking to prevent outweighs the harm it imposes on the voters.

It is obvious that the Indiana law does not meet this test. The harm it imposes on voters is considerable. The state’s interest in the law is minimal. It was reportedly passed to prevent people from impersonating others at the polls. There is no evidence that this has ever happened in Indiana, however. It seems much more likely that the goal of the law’s Republican sponsors was to disenfranchise groups that have Democratic leanings.

Unfortunately, only three justices voted to hold the law unconstitutional. The other six fell into two groups. Three (Justices John Paul Stevens and Anthony Kennedy and Chief Justice John Roberts) signed a lead opinion that set a very low bar for what sort of interference with voting the Constitution permits. A second opinion (signed by Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito) was far worse. It argued for upholding all but the most severe burdens on voting.

A hovering specter over Monday’s decision was a case that was not mentioned: Bush v. Gore. In 2000, the Supreme Court took seriously the claims of one individual that his equal protection rights were being denied by a state election system. This individual was George W. Bush. The court had no hestitation about telling the state what to do.

There are many good reasons to remember Bush v. Gore. Monday’s ruling was a reminder of one of them. Seven years after it invoked the Constitution to vindicate Mr. Bush’s right to fair election procedures we are still waiting for the court to extend this guarantee to every American.

If you own and manage your own web site(s) no doubt you are very familiar with Web Analysis. This is an integral part of managing a web site.

Finding something affordable and yet high quality can be a task. There’s a lot out there. I have found something that I think bears a close inspection because it sounds like a very worthwhile solution.

iWebTrack’s has a hosted web analytics solution that is not only affordable, but also an effective and efficient web tracking tool that offers many interesting features.

Here are some of the things I think are worth mentioning and noting.

• iWebTrack uses javascript code to track site visitors. What does this mean to you? This means that your traffic is not underreported because it is estimated that about 35% of Internet surfers routinely block cookies while surfing.

• They also offer free website monitoring for no additional fees. You can’t be without site monitoring so WebTrack has included free web-site monitoring in all of their web analytics packages.

• iWebTrack also provides free traffic alerts. Be sure you enable this feature, and you will receive an alert whenever your traffic hits an uncharacteristic high or low.

• iWebTrack has one all-inclusive plan that gives you access to every feature regardless of your monthly rate. You can absolutely manage multiple web-sites under one iWebTrack account at no extra charge.

iWebTrack has recently launched iWebTrack Version 3-Beta. V3 offers improved site and server performance as well as many other new and improved features. You will find V3 to be a more efficient and effective web analytics tool that will give you the same great features as Version 2.0 but there are now additional help context menus and other new features.

The best part - there is a free 30 day trial period. Check this out to see what iWebTrack can do for your websites!!

I happened upon a very interesting blog post today about carbon footprints. This is something we are hearing a lot about today in the mainstream media. The thing about Emerging Tech’s blog post that was so intriguing to me was the fact that the carbon footprints we in America are leaving are at least twice as much as anyone else on earth.

“Even the people with the lowest incomes in the U.S. emit twice more carbon…”

The question begs asking. Why are both the rich and the poor in the US emitting such large amounts of carbon? This post goes into a lot of great detail about the study. It’s very interesting and I highly recommend it!

Who wouldn’t love a little help making over their home? I know I’d appreciate it! There are several things we’d love to do to our home that just aren’t at the top of the priority list. Especially as the economy dives and things become tighter and tighter. Things like home improvements get pushed way down on the list.

That doesn’t mean you wouldn’t love to have these things done though, right? Why not enter this contest and see if you can get some things done in spite of tight finances! Transform your home by entering the $20,000 Renuzit TriScents “Transform Your Home” contest.

If we won we would have a hard time choosing between the master bedroom and the kitchen. Maybe we’d split the winnings between the two rooms. I’d love some new flooring in both rooms and our kitchen counters have seen better days. New windows in the master bedroom would be sweet, too. It would be cool to transform the whole look and feel of these rooms. I’d even enjoy exploring the possibilities of trying out some new scents for our home. This might be particularly enjoyable in the master bedroom. We use candles right now because we love to relax with different scents. It’s amazing how a scent can change your whole mood and feeling. Smell has a powerful effect on how you feel, that is for sure.

To the right is a picture of my kitchen here and now today. It’s a well-used kitchen that has served us well, but it could do with a few updates. Nothing major, but there are some things that would be nice.

So! Let’s talk about how to Tranform Your Home! Go to their site and enter your home into the contest. Be careful…submissions are only eligible if they meet all of the following criteria. You must upload video or a photo and write a short essay and you must explain and demonstrate why your home needs a makeover. Be sure to explain how Renuzit TriScents can help you transform your home!

Be sure to follow the official rules!

Not enamored with Vista? Join the club! How about configuring your PC to “dual-boot” and choose between either XP or Vista for whatever your particular need at any given time. All you need are the operating system CDs and about an hour to get yourself set up.

Here are the step by step instructions:

• To install XP on a hard drive already running Vista you need to utilize Vista’s built-in partitioning tool to free up some space to dedicate to an XP partition. To do this, figure out how much free space you have and how much you want to allocate to your XP side. XP requires 1.5 G of space but you should allocate extra space for your XP applications and data . You can, of course, also store data on the Vista side.

• Right click your ‘computer’ icon and click ‘manage’. This loads Vista’s Computer Management tool. Next click ‘Disk Management’. This will give you your system’s available drives. Right click your C: drive and then choose ‘Shrink Volume’.

• The amount you choose to shrink directly correlates to the amount of space you’re giving XP. Don’t worry, Vista won’t let you take too much. For example, to shrink by 30G, you would enter ‘30000′ in the field and click ‘Shrink’. If you wanted to shrink by 15G you would enter ‘15000′.

• Before you turn your newly freed space into a partition for XP, you might give your CD or DVD drive(s) new letter(s). This is optional, yet worth considering if you like to keep your hard drive letters consecutive. If your optical drive currently occupies the ‘D’ spot then the new XP partition will become ‘E’ unless you reassign the optical drive.

This is easy to do. Make sure there is a disc in the drive. In the lower half of the center pane find the drive. Right click it and choose ‘Change Drive Letter and Paths’. Now click the ‘Change’ button. The next window will give you the drive-letter pulldowns. Choose your desired letter for the optical drive.

If this change interferes with games and other programs that rely on specific drive letters to run, you will have to reinstall these programs so that they will look for your new letter assignments.

• In the lower half of the center pane find a box with a black bar. It should show “X gigabytes Unallocated.” Obviously, the ‘X’ is the amount of space you allocated. Right click the box and choose ‘New Simple Volume.’ A wizard pops up to take you through the steps. Click ‘Next’ until you get to the ‘Format Partition’ section.

Don’t worry about the other settings but type something descriptive in the ‘Volume Label’ field. I would enter ‘XP’. Check the box marked ‘Perform a quick format.’ Click ‘Next’ and then click ‘Finish.’ This should take only about a minute. Once done exit the Computer Management utility and reboot.

• Reboot again and this time with your XP CD in the drive. Make sure nothing is plugged in to any USB ports. Follow the set up wizard as it takes you through installing XP. One thing to be aware of: When you get to the part where it says ‘choose your partition’ you may only see your C drive. Press Esc and you should see a full list of available partitions. Select your new XP partition, press ‘Enter’ and then choose ‘Leave the current file system intact (no changes).’

This installation process can take between 30 and 60 minutes. When you’re done you will probably be having to find a few drivers for the sound card, network adaptor, and your printer. I would do this now rather than save it for later as you won’t be able to boot back into Vista until you go on to the next step.

• When you’re finished getting XP squared away download and install the free utility VistaBootPro . This will help you to get all of the Vista boot settings set properly. You’ll also need to install Microsoft’s .NET Framework 2.0 and VistaBootPro will help you get that figured out, too.

Run the program, click the ‘System Bootloader’ button, and you’ll see 2 sections. Choose ‘Windows Vista Bootloader’ in the first and ‘All Drives’ in the second. Check ‘Force Bootloader Install’ and then click the ‘Install Bootloader’ button.

Then exit VistaBootPro and reboot again. You should see a new boot menu. Use the arrow keys to hightlight Vista or XP the hit Enter to load your chosen Operating System. If the menu doesn’t appear or you have other difficulties there is a support forum at VistaBootPro that is very helpful.

If you try this, I’d love to know how it works! Let me know!

What would you say if I told you that there is a fruit from West Africa that rivals the sweetest confection? This slightly tart red berry has a most unusual property: For about an hour after you eat it, anything sour tastes sweet.

After virtual obscurity since the 1970s this red berry (called Synsepalum dulcificum) is enjoying a small come-back. Informed food lovers are in pursuit of the berry as a culinary curiosity. In Japan it is freeze-dried and canned or sold in tablets. Some restaurants there feature it as an avant-garde dessert. The Four Seasons Resort in Palm Beach, Florida also features it because two miracle-fruit shrubs are planted in the hotel’s garden.

Scientists explain that a protein in the fruit works by binding to taste buds and altering the tongue’s so-called sweet receptors to activate when sour foods are eaten.

Because the fruit is so delicate, scientists have been trying for years to genetically engineer other organisms to produce miraculin (the active protein contained in the berry). This has failed every time. Last year, however, scientists finally had some success with lettuce. In a scientific report the researchers wrote that two grams produce roughly the same effect as one miracle fruit.

Think of the tart and sour foods this could alter! Lemons, limes, grapefruits, rhubarb, dill pickles, cheeses…the list goes on and on. It reportedly turns already sweet fruit into something almost too sweet.

Fasten your seatbelts…this is going to be a rocky ride and one many of us will not enjoy.

The unfolding economic picture is anything but pretty. We are staring down the barrel of inflation of anything solid and deflation of everything paper.

The bills are arriving to an unprepared public for years of poor policy decisions by public servants and central bankers. These bills are long overdue, actually. For thirty years our public servants have created and legislated the belief that you can have ?something for nothing.” This is a completely erroneous concept. Nature says you cannot consume more than you produce. To do so will result in your demise. The ?something for nothing? belief is now fully indoctrinated in most industrialized nations and is a core belief of those in charge and the people who elect them.

The public has been taught that they can believe in the tooth fairy and Santa Claus…that they can get something for nothing…and that the government will solve problems by simply writing a law and/or changing the laws of nature. In battles between nature and man you can only count on one thing: Nature will prevail.

It’s time to pay the piper

Inflation is a fact and the policies needed to address it are not being considered. Therefore, it is going to skyrocket. This will in turn create a wave of panicked policy responses by unwise public servants who are being counseled by economists who are ignorant of reality.

I’ve touched on the hot issue of biofuels before. They are at the root of the world famine we are now seeing the beginnings of. Biofuels are causing this crazy food inflation. The government has no intention of rescinding the subsidies and mandates that are currently in place. Shortages of wheat are now easing slightly but corn, rice and soybeans are going up at an alarming rate.

Municipal bankruptcies are just beginning. The city of Birmingham Alabama is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Expect some federal government bailouts here. You should also expect various taxes to rise sharply. Chicago just raised their sales tax to 10.5% and this is the highest municipal sales taxes in the nation.

So, to sum up:

Incomes are nose-diving from purchasing power losses across the board — individual, corporate, state, municipal and federal. Massive bailouts of states and municipalities will start to occur over the next year. Your taxes will go up to pay for these extravagant spending commitments. Also expect more bailouts of banks, brokers, and homeowners.

This all signals one thing: More credit creation to rescue irresponsible people from their own risky behavior. Everybody is going to be the victim and no one wants to take the responsibility. Responsibility is for those who live their lives without getting into these situations and who are going to have to ultimately pay for those that do. This is where these lovely entitlement mentalities bring us. Here we are back to the ?something for nothing? mentality.

So, shortages of just about everything are ahead for us. Combine this with incremental demand growth around the world, decreasing supply of everything, and increasing gluts of paper fiat currencies looking for safety from the printing press.

Time to start putting aside whatever you can afford in nonperishables and buckle up. Alas, most Americans seem sound asleep and it’s likely that the wake-up alarm is going to be a rude one. This is not going to be pretty.