socially responsible investing

ABC News

By DAVID McPHERSON
Oct. 24, 2007

 

By one estimate from the Social Investment Forum, socially responsible funds held about $179 billion as of 2005. That was up more than tenfold from a decade earlier, according to the organization. But still it represents a sliver of the $9 trillion overall held in mutual funds at that time.

The socially responsible investing segment includes more than 200 mutual funds, the Social Investment Forum says, and it continues to expand with the introduction of exchange traded funds geared toward this investing audience.

Typically, socially responsible investing has been associated with liberal causes, such as human rights and the environment. But it also includes religious-oriented funds, many of which feature a conservative focus. These are sometimes referred to as examples of morally responsible investing, or MRI.

The LKCM Aquinas Funds, for example, seek to promote Catholic values by following investment guidelines set by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The Aquinas Funds screen investments for policies on issues such as abortion, contraceptives, human rights, gender and race discrimination and fair employment practices. The fund managers say they will try to influence a company's practices to reflect the bishops' guidelines, and if unsuccessful they may sell the investment.

[ ... ]

Once a person has settled on general principles to follow, an investor should not get too hung up on exact screening procedures for broadly screened social mutual funds.

"They're all a little bit different in their criteria. It's not that big a deal unless you have some belief you want to be strict about," Wheat said.

Once done with that process, Wheat says they should consider the same factors as with other mutual funds, such as performance.

In general, socially responsible funds are higher cost than otherwise comparable funds, according to Morningstar. That is partly because of the expenses associated with the screening process and partly because many of the funds are run by smaller investment firms.

As a whole, such funds do just as well as other mutual funds over the long term, says Morningstar.

Full article >>

Energy Futures Jump After the Government Reports Surprise Drop in Crude, Gasoline Supplies

Oil Prices Surge on Inventory Report
Wednesday October 24, 6:08 pm ET
By John Wilen, AP Business Writer

NEW YORK (AP) -- Oil futures surged Wednesday after the government's latest inventory report revealed large and unexpected declines in crude and gasoline inventories.

Crude supplies fell last week by 5.3 million barrels, the Energy Department's Energy Information Administration said. Analysts surveyed by Dow Jones Newswires, on average, had been expecting supplies to increase by 300,000 barrels.

"We haven't missed like this in a long time," said James Cordier, president of Liberty Treading Group in Tampa, Fla.

Analysts said the decline was particularly surprising because refineries are shutting down for seasonal maintenance, processing less crude. Refinery activity fell during the week ended Oct. 19 by 0.2 percentage point to 87.1 percent of capacity. Analysts had expected an increase of 0.3 percentage point...   Full article >>

Merrill Lynch posted losses are its largest on record

chicagotribune.com
EARNINGS
Merrill's loss its biggest ever

October 25, 2007

Merrill Lynch & Co. on Wednesday reported its first quarterly loss in
six years and the biggest in its 93-year history after the summer's
credit crisis triggered a larger-than-expected $8.4 billion in write-
downs.

The report sent the company's shares skidding $3.90, or 5.8 percent,
to $63.22, on the New York Stock Exchange.

The world's largest brokerage reported a third-quarter loss after
paying preferred dividends of $2.31 billion, or $2.82 a share,
compared with a profit of $3 billion, or $3.50 a share, a year
earlier. Wall Street expected a loss of 45 cents a share, according to
Thomson Financial, and the results were worse than the loss of 50
cents a share Merrill forecast earlier this month.

Merrill's write-down exceeded Citigroup Inc.'s $6.5 billion, and
increased to more than $30 billion the total third-quarter cost for
bad loans and trading losses reported by the world's biggest
securities firms and banks.

"It's safe to say this is the largest write-down" by a U.S. securities
firm, said Charles Geisst, a finance professor at Manhattan College in
Riverdale, N.Y., and author of "100 Years of Wall Street."

"The only other time we had such big losses was the Third World debt
crisis in the 1980s. Even then, the losses didn't match this one." ...

 

Read full article >>

Russian nuclear dump could rival Chernobyl

The Independent

10 June 2007

 

Worse than Chernobyl: 'dirty timebomb' ticking in a rusting Russian nuclear dump threatens Europe

20,000 discarded uranium fuel rods stored in the Arctic Circle are corroding. The possible result? Detonation of a massive radioactive bomb experts say could rival the 1986 disaster. By Rachel Shields

A decaying Russian nuclear dump inside the Arctic Circle is threatening to catch fire or explode, turning it into a "dirty bomb" that could impact the whole of northern Europe, including the British Isles.

Experts are warning that sea water and intense cold are corroding a storage facility at Andreeva Bay, on the Kola Peninsula near Murmansk. It contains more than 20,000 discarded fuel rods from nuclear submarines and some nuclear-powered icebreakers. A Norwegian environmental group, Bellona, says it has obtained a copy of a secret report by the Russian nuclear agency, Rosatom, which speaks of an "uncontrolled nuclear reaction".

John Large, an independent British nuclear consultant who has visited the site, told The Independent on Sunday: "The nuclear rods are fixed to the roof and encased in metal to keep them apart and prevent any reactions from occurring. However, sea water has eroded them at their base, and they are falling to the floor of the tanks, where inches of saltwater have collected.

"This water will begin to corrode the rods, a reaction that releases hydrogen, a gas that is highly explosive and could be ignited by any spark. When another rod falls to the floor and generates such a spark, an enormous explosion could occur, scattering radioactive material for hundreds of kilometres."

Mr Large, who was decorated by Russia's President Vladimir Putin for his role in the salvage operation that retrieved nuclear material from the Kursk submarine in 2000, added: "This wouldn't be a thermonuclear or atomic explosion, as in a bomb, but the outcome is just as bad. Remember Chernobyl? If you had the right weather conditions and wind pattern, this would mean a radioactive cloud drifting over the UK."

The three storage tanks contain more than 32 tons of radioactive material. But the Kola Peninsula is littered with relics of Soviet nuclear facilities, housing more than 100 tons of nuclear waste - the largest concentration in the world.

Experts predict that a major explosion at Andreeva Bay could destroy all life in a 32-mile radius, including Murmansk and a sliver of Norway, whose border is only 28 miles away. But a much wider area of Norway, north-west Russia and Finland would be rendered uninhabitable for at least 20 years, and huge quantities of radioactive material would be dumped into the Barents Sea...  Full article >>

cool link

http://www.soilandhealth.org/index.html

Cure for dengue fever

Cure for Dengue - Papaya Juice

" ... I would like to share this interesting discovery from a classmate's son who has just recovered from dengue fever. Apparently, his son was in the critical stage when his pallet counts dropped to 15 after15 liters of blood transfusion.

 

His father was so worried that he sought another friend's recommendation which saved the life of his son. He told that he gave his son raw juice of the papaya leaves. From a pallet count of 45 after 20 liters of blood transfusion, and after drinking the raw papaya leaf juice, his pallet count jumps instantly to 135. Even the doctors were surprised. After the second day he was discharged. He asked me to pass this good news around.

Take tow pieces of raw papaya leaves (no stem or sap), clean, pound and squeeze them with filter cloth getting just about one tablespoon per leaf. Serve two tablespoon once a day. Do not boil, cook or rinse with hot water as it may lose its strength.

It is very bitter and you have to swallow it like Won Low Kat. But it works.

You may have heard this elsewhere but if not I am glad to inform you that papaya juice is a natural cure for dengue fever that is rampant these days and reported death toll is rising in Lahore after Karachi and Peshawar. ... "

 

~ Link ~

back to the future all over again (2)

An interesting post at the Controversies in History blog:

 

Myth of Ancient Nuclear War

Was the ancient indian war of mahabharatha a nuclear war?? Did ancient indians use weapons if mass destruction (WMD) while in the west humans were still in their primitive settlements?

Oppenheimer

The architect of modern atomic bomb who was in charge of the manhattan project was asked by a student after the manhattan explosion, “How do you feel after having exploded the first atomic bomb on earth”. Oppenheimer’s reply for the question was , “not first atomic bomb, but first atomic bomb in modern times”. He strongly believed that nukes were used in ancient india. what made oppenheimer believe that it was a nuclear war was the accurate descriptions of the weapons used in the mahabharatha war in the epic which match with that of modern nuclear weapons. Video

Mohenjadaro and Harappa

Scientists Davenport and Vincenti put forward a theory saying the ruins were of a nuclear blast as they found big stratums of clay and green glass. High temperature melted clay and sand and they hardened immediately afterwards. Similar stratums of green glass can also found in Nevada deserts after every nuclear explosion.

Radio Active Ash

A layer of radioactive ash was found in Rajasthan, India. It covered a three-square mile area, ten miles west of Jodhpur. The research occurred after a very high rate of birth defects and cancer was discovered in the area. The levels of radiation registered so high on investigators’ gauges that the Indian government cordoned off the region. Scientists then apparently unearthed an ancient city where they found evidence of an atomic blast dating back thousands of years: from 8,000 to 12,000 years.

The blast was said to have destroyed most of the buildings and probably a half-million people.
Archeologist Francis Taylor stated that etchings in some nearby temples he translated suggested that they prayed to be spared from the great light that was coming to lay ruin to the city.

 

Crater Near Bombay

Another curious sign of an ancient nuclear war in India is a giant crater near Bombay. The nearly circular 2,154-metre-diameter Lonar crater (left image), located 400 kilometers northeast of Bombay and aged at less than 50,000 years old, could be related to nuclear warfare of antiquity. No trace of any meteoric material, etc., has been found at the site or in the vicinity, and this is the world’s only known “impact” crater in basalt...  Full post >>  

back to the future all over again

Precession and the Golden Age: How Much Did the Ancients Know?

By: WALTER CRUTTENDEN
By: Archaeoastronomer and Author

 

    In 1901, divers working off the Greek island of Antikythera found the remains of a 2,000-year-old clocklike mechanism. Now in the Greek National Archaeological Museum, the extraordinary find is a complex assembly of twenty or more precision gears designed to compute the motions of the Sun, Moon and planets. Nothing comparable is known from ancient scientific texts, and from a traditional historic point of view, such a mechanism should not have existed for at least another thousand years. The discovery of the Antikythera Device is equivalent to finding a supercomputer on a farm in the 18th century.

    Archaeological finds that upset our current understanding of history are growing increasingly common. The incredible discovery of six pyramids in Caral, Peru, is a case in point. These structures that surround a huge plaza and circular kivas (no one knows what they were used for) have been reliably dated to 4,700 B.C. That is 400 years before the accepted date of the Great pyramid at Giza. Like the Greek computing device, they are out of place and out of time sequence with our current understanding of history. It was not expected that ancient people in South America built pyramids before the Egyptians.

    The Antikythera device, ancient pyramids, astronomically aligned megaliths and similar structures found around the world were apparently built to monitor the movement of the heavens – at least that could be one of their uses. The vast majority of Neolithic tombs built prior to about 1000 B.C. in Europe and North Africa; ziggurats of the Middle East; henges and great stone markers in Britain and around the world, appear to be oriented toward the equinox, solstices or four cardinal points. With this preponderance of evidence it now seems likely these ancient builders not only understood the motions of the heavens but most likely tracked the precession of the equinox as well.

Precession of the Equinox

The “precession of the equinox” is the slow movement of the equinox (that point in time each Spring and Fall when night and day are of equal length – and the Earth’s axis sits at an exact ninety degree angle to the Sun) against the background constellations.

    Today, on the first day of spring––the Vernal Equinox– if you look due east at sunrise, you can see the constellation Pisces is fading from view and Aquarius is rising to take its place. This is what is meant by the “dawning of the age of Aquarius”. It is not just an astrological colloquialism but a convenient way for layman or astronomer alike to note the rough position of the equinox relative to the twelve constellations of the zodiac.

    The equinox moves slowly taking about 24,000 years, more or less, to precess through all twelve signs and return to its starting position. Plato called this cyclical time period the “Great Year”. The motion of the equinox is how one tells the time within this great cycle.

    Although most historians and scientists still teach that the precession of the equinox was not discovered until about 150 B.C. by Hipparcus, that is now being questioned. Giorgio de Santillana, the late professor of the history of science at MIT, documented in his book, Hamlet’s Mill, that this cycle was well known to dozens of ancient cultures around the world. In fact he tells us the Great Year is one of the most prevalent myths of all time, as popular as the great flood myth.

Dark and Golden Ages

 

Ancestral people acknowledged the precession of the equinox and believed the Great Year had its seasons. Similar to yet different than the seasons of spring, summer, fall and winter in the solar year - the Great Year was thought to be punctuated with a Golden Age of incredible beauty at one end, and a Dark Age of misery at the other. The Vedic Indians and early Mediterranean cultures had different names for these periods of the Great Year, and the Greeks simply called them the Iron, Bronze, Silver and Golden Ages. Thus, there was a valid reason why we find ancient cultures so intent on tracking the precession of the equinox.

    Just as we want to know our place in the solar year with its changing conditions, ancient people wanted to know their place in the Great Year. Many of the ancient myths, before the last Dark Age, spoke of a long lost Golden Age and lamented the coming of the Dark Age and its pending loss of culture and knowledge.

    And this is what an examination of the archaeological record shows. Around 4,000 to 5,000 years ago Mohenjodaro and the Indus Valley were in full bloom; the megaliths of Britain and the great pyramids in Caral, Peru, and Giza were newly constructed; the ziggurats, gardens, dams and great water systems of Mesopotamia were fully functioning. A vast agricultural civilization also existed within the Amazon and much of the Americas, and the amazing fifty-ton, carved architectural columns of Gobekli, Turkey , were already 5,000 years old! ... Read full article >>