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“Banking secrecy has its roots in Calvinism”
 Calvin's influence spread well beyond Geneva RDB
Today's Switzerland - and its cherished bank secrecy - still reflect the influence of church reformer Jean Calvin, an economic think tank director tells swissinfo.
This content was published onApril 26, 2009 - 10:21
6 minutes
Xavier Comtesse, who heads the western Swiss branch of Avenir Suisse, says Calvin stood for morality in the granting of credit, but also for protection of the personal sphere.
This year marks the 500th birthday of the religious reformer whose ideas shaped the Protestant Church. In his honour Protestant denominations have designated 2009 Calvin Year.
Calvin, who spent much of his time working in Geneva, not only influenced democracy in Switzerland but modern-day thinking on both moral and financial matters, Comtesse believes.
swissinfo: What is the basis of Calvin’s Protestantism?
Xavier Comtesse: It is based on the Bible written in the language of the people, on the separation of church and state, and on the understanding that the grassroots faithful – who fund the community – choose their own priests.
This Calvinist form of institutional organisation has also over time had an influence on non-religious areas of the Swiss mentality. All state institutions remain separate from religious ones, and bottom up participation in political decisions continues from communal to national level.
Both lead to an emancipation of the people, an ’empowerment’, as we say today.
swissinfo: What would Switzerland look like today without Calvin?
X.C.: I don’t think we’d have direct democracy without this popular emancipation that was spurred on by Calvin. We would probably be a republic [with an elected president], like our neighbours. Of course when talking about German-speaking Switzerland we should mention [Zurich reformer Huldrych] Zwingli just as much as Calvin.
This communication from community organisations up to the highest state level is typical for us Swiss.
swissinfo: To what extent was Geneva more significant than Zurich?
X.C.: In those days French-speaking Switzerland did not exist. Geneva was the place to be – across the whole country. Basel was worth considering, but Zurich wasn’t. Neither was Bern nor Lausanne.
That is also why Calvin is rated so much more important internationally than Zwingli. Even in the post-Napoleonic period Zurich was smaller than Geneva both in the number of inhabitants and economically.
swissinfo: How did Calvin stamp the mark of the Reformation and the image of Switzerland on the world?
X.C.: I know most about his influence on the United States. There Calvinism is very pronounced with around 15 million Calvinists – called Presbyterians in Anglo-Saxon countries.
There are also communities in Scotland and South Korea. Worldwide there are said to be around 50 million Presbyterians. But there are very few of them in Switzerland.
swissinfo: What was Calvin’s influence on the economy and banking?
X.C.: As a reaction to the papal selling of indulgences as a mean of raising money for Rome, Calvin was one of the first church leaders to permit the granting of loans with interest – albeit tied to high moral standards.
That forged a link with the present: extortionate interest didn’t come into question, therefore the loans had to be cheap. As in religion and politics, the thinking behind this banking was to protect the citizen through high moral standards.
Also considered worth protecting by Protestantism was the personal sphere. Add this to being able to bank and you get banking secrecy.
swissinfo: Historically banking secrecy was meant to protect citizens from state interference.
X.C.: Exactly. And that’s why there are many misunderstandings concerning the term. The description ‘banking secrecy’ is actually incorrect – ‘protection of the private sphere by the bank’ would be more appropriate.
Such legal protection is not unique to Switzerland. In France for example a wife has no right to any information about her husband’s bank account – French legal law considers that his private sphere.
We Swiss simply go one step further. We protect against any state despotism. This way of thinking has historical roots in Protestantism, which in Calvin’s time sought to protect the people against the despotism of the powerful Catholic Church.
swissinfo: What remains from these Calvinist ethics today – bearing in mind the drama playing out in the world of banking and finance?
X.C.: At the moment we’re in a moral crisis. As a result we’ll soon have to grapple more with social responsibility.
That will be a form of secular Calvinism with new, still moral, but no longer religious characteristics. Regarding quality for example – new ISO standards in the area of quality attempt to rectify deficits in the area of responsibility.
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is based in Geneva – like many other international institutions. This is also part of Calvin’s legacy.
Another ‘Geneva’ institution is the World Wide Web – invented at Cern. This also works ‘Calvinistically’ insofar as it enables direct access to information to the population, or rather the user.
Until now, powerful intermediaries were needed for this access. The internet has reformed access to the markets – similar to Calvin’s reformation of direct access to God.
swissinfo-interview: Alexander Künzle
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Swatch Internet Time
 Swatch .beat time logo
Swatch Internet Time (or .beat time) is a decimal time system introduced in 1998 by the Swatch corporation as part of the marketing campaign for their line of ".beat" watches. Those without a watch could use the Internet to view the current time on the watchmaker's website, but now a dedicated wiki serves the purpose.[1] The concept of .beat time is similar to decimal minutes in French Revolutionary decimal time.[2]
Instead of hours and minutes, in Swatch Time the mean solar day is divided into 1,000 equal parts called .beats, meaning each .beat lasts 86.4 seconds (1.440 minutes) in standard time, and an hour lasts for approximately 42 .beats. The time of day always references the amount of time that has passed since midnight (standard time) in Biel, Switzerland, where Swatch's headquarters is located. For example, @248 BEATS indicates a time 248 .beats after midnight, or 248⁄1000 of a day (just over 5 hours and 57 minutes; or 5:57 AM UTC+1).
There are no time zones in Swatch Internet Time; it is a globally unified timekeeping system based on what Swatch calls "Biel Mean Time" (BMT), the time zone conventionally known as Central European Time or West Africa Time. Note that it is based on the time zone and not the actual mean solar time measured in Biel. Also, unlike civil time in Switzerland and many other countries, Swatch Internet Time has never observed daylight saving time (DST), even prior to more recent decisions to abandon DST in certain locales.[3]
Swatch Internet Time was announced on 23 October 1998, in a ceremony at the Junior Summit '98,[4] attended by Nicolas G. Hayek, president and CEO of the Swatch Group, G.N. Hayek, president of Swatch Ltd., and Nicholas Negroponte, founder and then director of the MIT Media Lab. During the summit, Swatch Internet Time became the official time system for Nation.1, an online country (supposedly) created and run by children.
 A Swatch watch showing .beat time in the bottom part of the display
During 1999, Swatch produced several models of watch, branded "Swatch .beat", that displayed Swatch Internet Time as well as standard time, and even convinced a few websites (such as CNN.com) to use the new format.[5] PHP's date() function has a format specifier, 'B', which returns the Swatch Internet Time notation for a given time stamp.[6] It was also used as a time reference on ICQ, and the online role-playing game Phantasy Star Online used it since its launch on the Dreamcast in 2000 to try to facilitate cross-continent gaming (as the game allowed Japanese, American and European players to mingle on the same servers). In March 2001, Ericsson released the T20e, a mobile phone which gave the user the option of displaying Internet Time. Outside these areas, it is infrequently used. While Swatch still offers the concept on its website, it no longer markets Beat watches.[citation needed] In July 2016, Swatch released Touch Zero Two, its second wirelessly connected watch, with Swatch Internet Time function.
Beatnik satellite controversy
[edit]
In early 1999, Swatch began a marketing campaign about the launch of their Beatnik satellite, intended to service a set of Internet Time watches. They were criticized for planning to use an amateur radio frequency for broadcasting a commercial message (an act banned by international treaties). The satellite was intended to be deployed by hand from the Mir space station. Swatch instead donated the transmitter batteries for use in normal Mir functions, and the satellite never broadcast.[7]
The concept was touted as an alternative, decimal measure of time. One of the supposed goals was to simplify the way people in different time zones communicate about time, mostly by eliminating time zones altogether. It also does away with the division of the day into 12 or 24 parts (hours), then 60 parts (minutes), then 60 parts (seconds), then 1000 parts (milliseconds). Furthermore, there is no confusion between the AM/PM system and 24-hour time.
Instead of hours and minutes, the mean solar day is divided into 1,000 parts called .beats. Each .beat lasts 1 minute and 26.4 seconds. One .beat is equal to one decimal minute in French decimal time.
Although Swatch does not specify units smaller than one .beat, third party implementations have extended the standard by adding "centibeats" or "sub-beats", for extended precision: @248.00. Each "centibeat" is a hundredth of a .beat and is therefore equal to one French decimal second (0.864 seconds).[8][9]
There are no time zones; instead, the new time scale of Biel Mean Time (BMT) is used, based on the company's headquarters in Biel, Switzerland. Despite the name, BMT does not refer to mean solar time at the Biel meridian (7°15′E), but to the standard time there. It is equivalent to Central European Time and West Africa Time, or UTC+1.
Like UTC, Swatch Internet Time is the same throughout the world. For example, when the time is 875 .beats, or @875, in New York, it is also @875 in Tokyo. Unlike civil time in most European countries, Internet Time does not observe daylight saving time, and thus it matches Central European Time during (European) winter and Western European Summer Time, which is observed by the United Kingdom, Ireland, Portugal and Spain's Canary Islands during summer.
The most distinctive aspect of Swatch Internet Time is its notation; as an example, "@248" would indicate a time 248 .beats after midnight, equivalent to a fractional day of 0.248 CET, or 04:57:07.2 UTC. No explicit format was provided for dates, although the Swatch website formerly displayed the Gregorian calendar date in the order day-month-year, separated by periods and prefixed by the letter d (e.g. d31.01.99).[citation needed]
Calculation from UTC+1
[edit]
The formula for calculating the time in .beats from UTC+1 is:
⌊3600ℎ+60�+�86.4⌋,
Where h is UTC+1 hours and m is UTC+1 minutes. The result is rounded down.[10]
When does the day begin?
[edit]
Example cities across the globe @000 BEATS midnight:
@000 BEATS
| City | Time | Time zone | UTC offset |
| San Francisco |
03:00 PM |
PST |
UTC-8 |
| New York |
06:00 PM |
EST |
UTC-5 |
| London |
11:00 PM |
BST |
UTC |
| Biel |
12:00 midnight |
CET |
UTC+1 |
| Tokyo |
08:00 AM |
JST |
UTC+9 |
| Sydney |
09:00 AM |
AEST |
UTC+10 |
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BIENVENUE
AVANT TOUTE CHOSE …
Nous sommes heureux de partager avec vous, amis pèlerins, la joie de la rencontre fraternelle ! Ce chemin se veut être une démarche de pèlerinage dans l’esprit de Saint François.
Accueillir la fraternité comme un cadeau, rechercher la simplicité et même la sobriété, vivre l’instant présent sans se soucier, c’est s’imprégner petit à petit de l’esprit de l’évangile tel que St François a choisi de le vivre. Le chemin est ouvert à toutes et tous et il apportera une joie authentique à celles et ceux qui auront au plus vrai d’eux-mêmes la paix du cœur.
Chemins de foi, chemins pour tous
Depuis de nombreux siècles, des pèlerins ont traversé l’Europe pour se rendre en Terre Sainte, à St Jacques de Compostelle, à Rome … pour des raisons spirituelles essentiellement mais ensuite aussi pour des raisons économiques et, plus récemment, pour goûter aux plaisirs de la marche, des paysages, du silence et de la solitude …
Aujourd’hui, de plus en plus de personnes, croyantes ou non, empruntent ces chemins tracés par les premiers pèlerins.
Un peu partout, des associations se sont créées pour redonner vie à ces itinéraires, notamment ceux vers Compostelle, mais aussi celui de Canterbury à Rome (« via francigena »), le Chemin de St-Michel, et bien d’autres. C’est aussi le cas pour ce « récent » chemin de 1500 km vers Assise.
Ainsi, elles témoignent d’un intérêt renouvelé pour la découverte du patrimoine culturel et artistique et pour une autre forme de ressourcement personnel ou de recherche d’épanouissement par un nouveau style de loisirs.
https://chemindassise.org/fr/accueil/ |
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The result:
The orbit of Venus narrowly misses the center of the SPS.
Everything does click, however, when we…
- Rotate LHC/SPS diagram ~3.4 degrees counterclockwise
- Use the (slightly larger) Moon size instead of the SPS
Now the orbit of Venus passes right through the center of the lunar SPS…
And it is no random point on Venus's orbit: The lunar SPS center is specifically pinpointing Venus's "ascending node". That's where Venus crosses northward the plane of Earth's orbit (i.e. the ecliptic or the plane of the solar system)!
The ~3.4 degrees rotation actually makes perfect sense here because:
- The ascending node is all about the inclination of the orbit relative to the ecliptic or Earth's orbital plane…
- In the case of Venus, the orbital inclination is 3.4 degrees, matching the ~3.4 degree rotation required to bring the (lunar) SPS center to the Venus ascending node
Ascending nodes will play a critical role later on as well so we can be certain this is no coincidence.
The curious position of the SPS has now been perfectly explained.
Line of Nodes & Transit of Venus
The ascending node of Venus is aligned with the Galactic Meridian or "longitude 0" of the Milky Way (which passes through the Galactic Center and is perpendicular to the Milky Way/Galactic Equator).
The line is also heliocentrically aligned with Earth around June 8 and December 9 every year right when Earth's orbital position coincides with the LHC's ATLAS and CMS detectors.
From Earth's perspective, the Sun is at the Galactic Meridian on ~June 8 and ~December 9.
It's right there at the Sun's ~June 8 position that what astronomers call the Transit of Venus takes place, which is a very rare celestial event when Venus passes right in front of the Sun due to a very precise Earth-Venus-Sun alignment (accurate in 3D):
The most recent transit pair (they come in pairs) was in 2004 and 2012 (June 8 & June 6 respectively). The LHC went live in 2008 which was right at the halfway point, i.e. 4 years after the 1st Venus Transit and 4 years before the 2nd Venus Transit. (The previous Venus Transit pair was December 1874 and December 1882; the next pair will be December 10–11, 2117, and December 8, 2125.)
Jun 8, 2004 Planet Venus completes transit
That's enough evidence for us to safely conclude that the LHC was fully cognizant of what was happening in the sky.
Secret Design #3 - Mars-Mercury-Earth Orbital Interaction
Let us go deeper into the rabbit hole through… Mars. It is through Mars that we will finally flesh out the "Orion Stargate.
 
What we'll do now is, instead of Earth's orbit, we'll use Mars' orbit as the celestial analogue of the LHC like this:
[Note: The LHC/SPS is still in its 3.4 deg.-rotated orientation]
While nothing seems to stand out initially, we do get our first confirmation after rotating the LHC so that the SPS would "kiss" Mars' perihelion i.e. Mars' closest point to the Sun (and to Earth's orbit), like this:
- Earth's orbit (green) passes right through the center of the SPS
- Earth's equinoctial axis (horizontal) is tangential to the SPS
Now we are ready for the main revelation which commences with the following observation…
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As we noted back then, Kylie is also striking an " Atlas pose"...
...supported by the fact that "Atlas" (atl) can mean "elevator" as researcher Andrew Collins writes in Gateway To Atlantis:
...in addition to meaning 'exalted', the Hebrew word atl, and indeed its variations, can also mean 'elevated'...
Since we know that Mount Atlas was deemed to be the petrified Titan supporting the heavens on his shoulders, Atlas' name is therefore intrinsically linked with his action of having elevated or raised up these misty heights. Clearly, then, this connection strongly suggests that the name Atlas does not derive from the Indo-European language of the Greeks but from the Punic language of the Carthaginians - furthermore, that the word root atl does not mean 'to bear' but 'to elevate' or 'to raise'... If this was the case, it tells us that, as a noun, Atlas, and indeed ATLA, might well translate as 'the elevator', 'the exalter', or indeed 'the exalted one'. (Andrew Collins, Gateway to Atlantis, p.200)
This is highly significant in our current context as the Atlas-Venus-elevator combination is exactly what was part of our decoding of CERN's LHC, as I noted in my article CERN's Orion Stargate (Oct 8, 2015):
- The LHC experiment installation ATLAS is right at the contact point of the SPS and LCH loops (which are geometrically tangent circles)
- The SPS's center pinpoints Venus at its ascending node (i.e. where Venus crosses the ecliptic plane northward)
- "Ascending" can imply "elevating/elevator"
Venus will be right there on June 6-7, 2016 - Prince's birthday - precisely at the time of its heliocentric alignment with Earth (superior conjunction)!
In addition to his birthday being a key clue, Prince from 1993 through 2000 was known as "The Artist Formerly Known As Prince" identified only with what came to be known as the " Love Symbol". Venus is the goddess of love and Prince's Love Symbol is based on the astrological Venus symbol.
Not only that, Kylie Minogue (= Aphrodite/Venus) revealed shortly after Prince's death via Instagram that she and Prince recorded an (as yet unreleased) "secret song" together back in the '90s:
The Devil is whispering...
To be continued.
[End of "Prince of Darkness - Part 1"]
So those are some of the more visually engaging clues pertaining to the upcoming window of late May-early June 2016. Let me go ahead and introduce one more big piece of the puzzle. This one ominously having to do with... "Deep Impact".
 
NASA's Deep Impact mission was all about smacking a comet near the orbital path of Mars and it was successfully accomplished on July 4th, 2005. As shown below, Comet Tempel-1 "kisses" Mars' orbit (i.e. tangent), and it was right there that the comet's encounter with Deep Impact took place, almost exactly where the two orbital paths converge. In this way the mission was implicitly a "Martian Deep Impact".
...right at the time of the dramatic Chilean mine rescue on October 9-13, 2010, (yet another event/clue from 2010 - aka "The Year We Make Contact"), featuring a lot of inverted pentagrams...
  [Kylie Minogue is from Down Under (Australia) or "Underworld"]
...and an elevator!
 
It was named Fenix/Phoenix...
...resonating again with Mars via NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander (2008):
 * * *
It will be fascinating to see what happens. Will it be subtle, as per "the devil's in the details", or a bona-fide "Deep Impact" event? We'll find out soon enough. There are other significant windows coming up later this year, notably one around early August. We've already looked into that one extensively on STRUG and it looks a bit... earthshaking, geologically, financially, etc. But we still got time before that.So that's enough for now. Let's get ready for the "hidden form"...
* * *
https://www.goroadachi.com/etemenanki/hidden_form.html |
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Blackstar Shockwave
David Bowie, Super Bowl & Gravitational Waves
By Goro Adachi
February 10, 2016
On February 11, LIGO - the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory - is expected to announce at the National Press Club in Washington DC they have detected gravitational waves from colliding black holes. Some call it the most important breakthrough in modern science.
As expected, such a major novelty comes with intense multicontextual (i.e. symbolic/synchronistic) "whispers". In this article I'd like to quickly point out how this scientific discovery interacts with and was foreshadowed by the passing of David Bowie (Jan 10) and the Super Bowl (Feb 07).
    
Though a lot has already been said about the heavy symbolism of David Bowie's passing accompanied by his new song/video & album, Blackstar...
...no one seem to have paid attention to the typical depiction of gravitational distortion on the cover of the Blackstar single (song):
Per Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, massive objects like planets and stars warp the fabric of spacetime around it, producing an invisible pull called "gravity".
Gravity was discovered by Isaac Newton supposedly when he saw an apple fall from a tree...
...resonating with Super Bowl 50:
- A black star quarterback named "Newton" took a big fall
UPDATES:
- The Black Panther Party's founder/original leader was named Newton (Huey P. Newton)
- David Bowie in the 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth played the main character named Thomas Jerome Newton
- Bowie's Blackstar (song) was used as opening music for the television series The Last Panthers directed by Johan Renck who also directed the music video for Blackstar. [h/t reader Szabolcs]
Gravity (Newton/apple) and black star(s)...
  [Left: Blackstar single cover | Right: Blackstar album cover]
Notice the "black star" creating a "gravity well" is invisible in the Blackstar single cover art... a la Planet X or more pertinently here a black hole. 1. Planet XStrong evidence for the existence of Planet X or "Planet Nine" was announced on January 20th, 2016, mere 10 days after the passing of David Bowie and 12 days after the release of his new album Blackstar.
The scientists did not see the planet. Instead, they inferred its existence from examining the peculiar clustering of six previously known objects that orbit beyond Neptune, theorizing that the clustering has been caused by the gravitational pull of the hidden giant, Planet Nine/X. An invisible planet - a "black star" - leaving behind only gravitation effects. 2. Black HoleBlack holes, by definition, are invisible. They are "black" because not even light can escape their extreme gravity. Not surprisingly "black star" or "dark star" is a scientific term for what is essentially a black hole, i.e. a star whose gravity is strong enough to trap light.
* * *
It is in this context that we are seeing this announcement about gravitational waves from colliding black holes, 4 days after Super Bowl 50.
Astronomers may finally have found elusive gravitational waves, the mysterious ripples in the fabric of spacetime whose existence was first predicted by Albert Einstein in 1916, in his famous theory of general relativity.
Scientists are holding a news conference Thursday (Feb. 11) at 10:30 a.m. EST (1530 GMT) at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., to discuss the search for gravitational waves, which zoom through space at the speed of light. [...]
...LIGO has detected gravitational waves produced by the merger of two black holes. The discovery will be published Thursday in the prestigious journal Nature...
We may even have seen a simulation of colliding black holes at the Super Bowl (halftime)...
Two "black forces" did collide in the form of Beyonce (and her all-female, all-black dancers dressed in black) and Bruno Mars (and his all-male, all-black dancers dressed in black) aggressively walking toward each other from opposite sides of the stage for a dance-off... where a black hole-like vortex ignited and released energy ("gravitational waves").
Planet X/Nine, gravitational waves, perhaps to be followed by a confirmation of CERN's possible LHC discovery announced back in December potentially having to do with dark matter, hidden dimensions, and/or... graviton. Also the issue of the blinking star/alien megastructure but that's for another time...
Hello from the other side... Seems we are entering a period of dark and heavy stuff coming out of the "Underworld". Are you ready?
* * *
UPDATE - Feb 11, 2016
https://www.goroadachi.com/etemenanki/blackstar_shockwave.html |
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