Monday, March 09, 2009

FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION

"If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours." - Henry David Thoreau
"The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it intuition or what you will, and the solution comes to you and you don't know how or why. - Albert Einstein "
Science proves God... I say. God is the consciousness of love. There is no anthropomorphic god of course.

BREAKING NEWS:

1. WALL STREET JOURNAL STORY AN ADMITTED FAKE, a 'PLANT" BY THE RIGHT WING! (more details coming)

2. JIM CRAMER ADMITS TO ILLEGAL MARKET MANIPULATION, SHORTING STOCKS! (see video below)

3. FOX ADMITS TO PLANTING POLITICAL BRAINWASHING IN TV SHOWS

4. TURNING LEFT PAYS OFF FOR MSNBC, NBC News (GE)


5. 41,000 NEW GOVERNMENT JOBS AVAILABLE in every business and district. Need a job? Check out USA.gov

Here are the stories:

WATCH: In Shocking Interview, Jim Cramer Admits To Market Manipulation, Touts Illegal Activity



From HuffPo: In light of the current economic crisis, and with the hullabaloo ignited recently by Jon Stewart over the accuracy of CNBC's reporting, we thought it might be useful to revisit this shocking 2006 interview Jim Cramer gave to TheStreet.com's Aaron Task.

In it, the host of Mad Money says he regularly manipulated the market when he ran his hedge fund. He calls it "a fun game, and it's a lucrative game." He suggests all hedge fund managers do the same. "No one else in the world would ever admit that, but I could care. I am not going to say it on TV," he quips in the video.

He also calls Wall Street Journal reporters "bozos" and says behaving illegally is okay because the SEC doesn't understand it anyway.

Here are some gems:

-On manipulating the market: "A lot of times when I was short at my hedge fund, and I was positioned short, meaning I needed it down, I would create a level of activity before hand that could drive the futures,"

-On falsely creating the impression a stock is down (what he calls "fomenting"): "You can't foment. That's a violation... But you do it anyway because the SEC doesn't understand it." He adds, "When you have six days and your company may be in doubt because you are down, I think it is really important to foment."

-On the truth: "What's important when you are in that hedge fund mode is to not be doing anything that is remotely truthful, because the truth is so against your view - it is important to create a new truth to develop a fiction," Cramer advises. "You can't take any chances."

Special thanks to our tipster Henry Chukuka at Huffington Post! Keep those tips coming team!
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WHERE IS STIMULUS MONEY GOING?

Go to Recovery.gov for specifics on where every penny of the Stimulus money is going to help our nation in this crisis.


Turning Left Pays Off For MSNBC, NBC News (GE)


Nicholas Carlson|Mar. 9, 2009, 1:25 PM|11
Tags: TV, NBC, CNBC

GE Mar 9 2009, 07:42 PM EDT
7.41 Change % Change
+0.35 +4.96%
Two years ago, MSNBC execs decided to turn the network more opinionated and politically leftward. It's paying off.
MSNBC is up from 341,000 daily viewers in February 2007 to 471,000 last month.

With MSNBC making up the biggest chunk, NBC News accounted for 13% of NBC Universal's profits, or $400 million in 2008.

MSNBC's success was just part of a very flattering overview of NBC's news business in today's New York Times.
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FOX ADMITS TO PLANTING POLITICAL BRAINWASHING IN TV SHOWS

Paul Joseph Watson | PrisonPlanet.tv

Rupert Murdoch’s Twentieth Century Fox corporation has admitted to planting political brainwashing within its globally popular TV shows and indeed boasts that it is proud of the fact.

A corporate video currently being showcased on another part of Murdoch’s media empire, MySpace.com, shows Fox executives and stars of its universally recognized shows bragging about how they use the platform of hit shows that are broadcast globally to implant messages about the supposed threat of global warming.

This is not the first time Fox have been enthusiastic in propagandizing for the establishment. In 2003, Rupert Murdoch himself admitted that the corporation had “tried” to help the Bush administration sell the war in Iraq.

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And by the way, JIM "MAD MONEY" CRAMER IS WRONG!!

Here's what the Fox Business Network commercial says:

That last thing you need is bad advice.

The last thing you need is Jim Cramer.

Barron's said Cramer's [stock] picks consistently underperform.

Cramer said buy Wachovia, and it tanked.

And, when things got rough, Cramer said, dump your stocks and hide your money!

CBNC says Cramer is their financial guru.

That's just plain crazy.
Cramer: Creating diversions to hide his failures as a stock analyst.
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A LOOK AT THE BRIGHT SIDE
If there is one pattern I've seen in almost 20 years of corporate consulting, it's that no matter what the dilemma there is always a positive lesson or outcome. The only difference between a 'good' or 'bad' situation is how it's perceived. When it comes to your job, you are not a powerless pawn in a corporate game. And when it comes to money, your level of attraction is equal to your positive focus. Everything you experience, positive or negative, is simply the law of attraction at work.

Let's consider how the law of attraction affects two workplace scenarios: jobs and money.

"I'm going to lose my job"

I wasn't one of the those people that started work in the affluent 80's, by the time I entered the workforce words like 'retrenchment', 'outplacement' and 'downsizing' were commonplace. Yet no matter what the economic climate I always managed to find a job where I was mostly valued for my contribution, well paid and departed of my own accord.

My friends, on the other hand, were being retrenched all around me.

I later realized that they got what they focused on. They would say things like, "I'm really worried about my job", "I think my boss is out to get me and my job is on the line" and "I knew that was going to happen" when they finally did get the heave-ho.

Failure is Not an Option: Apollo 13 Creativity
by Margaret J. King, Ph.D.

Failure is not an option," Gene Kranz, lead flight director for Mission Control, announced to the ground crew in Houston as Apollo 13 approached the critical earth-to-moon decision loop. Did he mean that failure had been an option at one time, but wasn't now? Perhaps that was why things weren't working the way they should have.

The mission went beyond testing physical limits, which the space program had been doing from the beginning. It was far more than a contest of athletic, technological, or engineering prowess. This was something more: a case study in problem-solving, a drama of solution-finding played out with limited resources against unknown odds, using the wits of two teams: the three-man flight crew in open space and the computer operators on earth.

Creativity need not begin with inspiration. It sometimes is a reactive force, triggered when all else fails. It’s a response to a new order of things. We experience our highest creativity not in doing business as usual, but when there is the most at stake and failure is a possibility but not an option. When our fixed assumptions about how things operate won't do, a new mission must be launched. "Forget the flight plan," ordered Kranz. "From this moment on we are improvising a new mission. How do we get our men home?"

It’s Often Easier to Quit... BUT WE SHOULDN'T

What can be gleaned from examining this episode of space exploration for application to business, research, or relationships—the whole gamut of problems and problem solving?

1. First, sudden and severe limitations can evoke the highest order of creativity, but only if they are not allowed to “abort the mission.”
2. Second, the automatic reflex when situations go bad is to get out rather than to make them better or turn them around.
3. Third, the knee-jerk answer to loss or failure is to minimize trauma through damage control rather than in creative thinking.

One example of an “aborted mission” is downsizing just to save face for the near-term bottom line. The consequences to morale, productivity, security, and opportunity are an array of self-reinforcing negative forces, social, economic, and psychological. These forces, of course, don’t solve the underlying problems, which don’t go away. The worst effect is that this policy of “containment,” layoffs followed by piling work on the remaining staff, which threatens their security—all lower creativity, dulling incentive to solve problems innovatively rather than reactively.

The alternative, following the astronaut’s example, is to drive the crisis through the “burn” to a creative solution: new products, better methods, refined targets, improved quality, conversion of failed solutions to one problem into effective solutions to another.

In order to convert chaos and crisis into opportunity, however, failure must first be precluded as an option. Once that hatch is closed, solution-finding can begin in earnest as a serious venture, not as just another human-resource excursion.

Closing off failure also constructs a tighter box of opportunity. When there is really no available fix-it kit, solutions must be devised that no one has dreamed of.

In this sense, thinking “inside the box,” rather than outside it, is the more creative act.

The human values mobilized in the problem-solving process are the catalysts to innovation. Creativity isn’t simply applying the tools of science to the job at hand. It involves the culture of creativity, the human mindset, the “deep structures” that tell us what is important.
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UPDATE:
In our interview with iconic White House correspondent Helen Thomas on Monday, she started out by saying, "Im a liberal, proud to be a liberal and always have been." Later, when I said to her: "The truth has a liberal bias," she laughed as if it was a revelation and said, "That is a GREAT point!"

I guess the truth can finally get ratings too! Maybe they can't keep the truth out of the media, though we know how hard Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Glen Beck, Praeger, Ingraham, Savage and all the rest of them have tried.