The Crop Circles Phenomena

This show looks at the phenomena of crop circles -- from a 1678 woodcarving of "mowing devils" to the growing occurrences of present day formations both in complexity and number.

A crop circle is a sizable pattern created by the flattening of a crop such as wheat, barley, rye, maize, or rapeseed. Crop circles are also referred to as crop formations because they are not always circular in shape. The documented cases have substantially increased from the 1970s to current times.




Twenty-six countries reported approximately 10,000 crop circles in the last third of the 20th century; 90% of those were located in southern England. Many of the formations appearing in that area are positioned near ancient monuments, such as Stonehenge. According to one study, nearly half of all circles found in the UK in 2003 were located within a 15 km (9.3 miles) radius of Avebury. Archeological remains can cause cropmarks in the fields in the shapes of circles and squares, but they do not appear overnight, and they are always in the same places every year.

Since becoming the focus of widespread media attention in the 1980s, crop circles have become the subject of speculation by various paranormal, ufological, and anomalistic investigators ranging from proposals that they were created by bizarre meteorological phenomena to messages from extraterrestrial beings. Many crop circles have been found near ancient sites such as Stonehenge, a prehistoric monument located in the English county of Wiltshire. They have also been found near mounds of earth and stones raised over a grave or graves, also known as tumuli barrows, or barrows and chalk horses, or trenches dug and filled with rubble made from brighter material than the natural bedrock, often chalk. There has also been speculation that crop circles have a relation to ley lines. Many New Age groups incorporate crop circles into their belief systems.

The Money Masters - the Rothschild mafia controls the Fed and the national Central Banks

Rothschild mafia John Kennedy Woodrow Wilson George Washington Andrew Jackson Franklin Roosevelt Abraham Lincoln Bank of England US Federal Reserve 1996 1913 full documentary

Financial Reform in a Crisis: The Swedish Solution

Whenever the question is raised about the appropriateness of the bailouts for our largest financial institutions during the most recent financial crisis, the usual response among people who defend the idea is to suggest that without those bailouts we would have had a meltdown of Great Depression-like standards. For example, former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is a prominent proponent of this view.

In one sense, the defenders are right: Allowing a wholesale collapse of the "too big to fail" banks likely would have triggered an economic disaster of incalculable consequences. But in another sense, the defenders of the post-Lehman financial reforms have established a false dichotomy. Because there was a third alternative, as Leif Pagrotsky, a Swedish Social Democratic politician who worked at the Central Bank of Sweden (the Riksbank) and in the Ministry of Finance, notes in the interview below.



Sweden did not just bail out its financial institutions by having the government take over the bad debts. It extracted pounds of flesh from bank shareholders before writing checks. Banks had to write down losses and issue warrants to the government.

This strategy held banks responsible and turned the government into an owner. When distressed assets were sold, the profits flowed to taxpayers. Plus, the government was able to recoup more money later by selling its shares in the companies as well.