Silicon Palms

Author: Aaron

  • John of God

    John of God

    John of God
    João de Deus (“John of God”)

    João Teixeira de Faria (born June 24, 1942), known also as João de Deus (“John of God”), is a self-described medium and “psychic surgeon” from Signal river. I’m on my way to this small town in the state of Goiás, southwest of Brasília (a 5 hour drive from my home in Sao Paulo) to visit his farm.

    For as long as I can remember hearing about John of God, I’ve wanted to meet him. Years ago I met a man from the Philippines, whom I witnessed perform some extraordinary treatments and help people (including myself) to heal. My suspicion is that John of God is far more evolved, than the Philippine “psychic surgeon”, which means that I’m in for a truly enlightening experience.

    UPDATE:

    May 12, 2019

    Now that I’ve had a chance to review the accusations and hear the testimony of one of the Whistleblowers, I need to report my understanding and add my own thoughts and observations.

    In my case, John of God helped me and I believe that the Casa was and is a very energetic place. My treatment was entirely metaphysical and the perception I had of Joao, was that he was a gifted healer and that he had helped to heal me. Whatever happened when I was in the treatment, worked and my broken ankle did in fact excrete some type of fluid, which had never happened before or since. I walked better after the treatment.

    I may have experienced psychosomatic healing but something improved with my injury as a result of the John of God treatment. Also, the people who volunteered were so nice, committed to well-being and absolutely convinced that John of God was holly, or at least very gifted.

    To this day I use a crystal from Abadiânia and since I brought my mountain bike to the Casa and spent allot of time riding all around the area, I observed many crystals in the ground. This is something I’ve not seen anywhere, some times I would stop my bike, look down and see pieces of crystal in the dirt. Plus the amount of crystals, some the largest I’d ever seen and all the energy from people in mediation, probably helps people heal themselves.

    Some people I met were watching UFO’s and most locals just accepted the fact that UFO’s are seen over the area so constantly that it’s just normal. I have never seen a UFO but never tried to summon them. However, that’s the place I’d go if I wanted to prove they exist.

    My heart goes out to the victims and I admit that I was completely conned as well, so it’s easy to understand how a sexual predator was dressed as Lamb and tricked so many people. We all want to believe that God could channel his energy through living people, when in fact he does but none more so than an other. We all have healing power but don’t know it.

    Early life of John of God

    João Teixeira de Faria was born in Cachoeira da Fumaça, Goiás (now Cachoeira de Goiás). There are no records of his early life and De Faria himself has not provided precise details. His best known biography is The Miracle Man, written by Robert Pellegrino-Estrich, who runs tours to Abadiânia.

    De Faria has no medical training and describes himself as a ‘simple farmer.’ He completed only two years of education and spent a number of years travelling from village to village in the states of Goias and Minas Gerais.

    Casa de Dom Inácio de Loyola, Abadiânia Brazil

    João Teixeira de Faria - João de Deus (“John of God”)
    João Teixeira de Faria

    De Faria says he was told by his spirit guides that he must expand his work to reach more people and spiritist medium Chico Xavier told him he should go to the small Goiás town of Abadiânia to fulfill his healing mission. Around 1978, when João first performed ‘healings’ there, he just sat outdoors in a chair near the main road where people began to arrive seeking cures for their various illnesses and conditions. Gradually the numbers increased to thousands per day and he developed his centre, Casa de Dom Inácio de Loyola. The Casa de Dom Inácio de Loyola has since been visited by millions of people seeking healing. He also owns a nearby cattle ranch, which covers about 1,000 acres.

  • Flouride and the Pineal Gland Mystery

    Flouride and the Pineal Gland Mystery

    Water fluoridation Indictment

    Fluoride in the water, is charged with attempted murder of the pineal gland, by calcification. Fluoride is very harmful to the pineal gland, because it disrupts the pineal gland’s natural functions by hardening its interior walls. Fluoride is also very toxic to the brain and other organs of the body, as NootropicsInfo says.

    Gray's Anatomy of the Pineal Gland
    Reproduction of a lithograph plate from Gray’s Anatomy of the Human Body, originally published in 1918 and therefore lapsed into the public domain.

    The fluoride used for treating drinking water is not the natural calcium fluoride found in nature; rather, it is the synthetic industrial version, which is known as sodium fluoride. The natural version of fluoride (calcium fluoride) is not that harmful to us. It is usually found in the soil and spring water in very small quantities. The synthetic version of fluoride (sodium fluoride) is a hazardous waste containing very toxic chemicals.

    Pituitary and Pineal Glands
    Pituitary and Pineal Glands

    The pineal gland, also known as the pineal body, conarium or epiphysis cerebri, is a small endocrine gland in the vertebrate brain. It produces the serotonin derivative melatonin, a hormone that affects the modulation of sleep patterns in the circadian rhythms and seasonal functions. Its shape resembles a tiny pine cone (hence its name), and it is located in the epithalamus, near the centre of the brain, between the two hemispheres, tucked in a groove where the two rounded thalamic bodies join.

    The gland has been compared to the photoreceptive parietal eye present in the epithalamus of some animal species, which is also called the pineal eye or the third eye. The secretory activity of the pineal gland is only partially understood. Its location deep in the brain suggested to philosophers throughout history that it possesses particular importance. This combination led to its being regarded as a “mystery” gland with mystical, metaphysical, and occult theories surrounding its perceived functions.

    [box type=”info” style=”rounded”]”Keep the pineal gland operating and you won’t grow old — you will always be young”. — Edgar Cayce[/box]

    Water fluoridation Crime Scene

    Water fluoridation is used in the United States, United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, and Australia, and a handful of other countries. The following nations previously fluoridated their water, but stopped the practice, with the years when water fluoridation started and stopped in parentheses:

    • Federal Republic of Germany (1952–1971)
    • Sweden (1952–1971)
    • Netherlands (1953–1976)
    • Czechoslovakia (1955–1990)
    • German Democratic Republic (1959–1990)
    • Soviet Union (1960–1990)
    • Finland (1959–1993)
    • Japan (1952–1972)

    In the United Kingdom a Strategic Health Authority can direct a water company to fluoridate the water supply in an area if it is technically possible. The strategic health authority must consult with the local community and businesses in the affected area. The water company will act as a contractor in any new schemes and cannot refuse to fluoridate the supply.

    Water fluoridation Witness

    So why have they gone to all this trouble to put a toxic chemical in our water?

    [box type=”note” style=”rounded”]Arvid Carlsson, winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize for Medicine, opposes water fluoridation. He took part in the debate in Sweden, where he helped to convince Parliament that it should be illegal due to ethics. He believes that it violates modern pharmacological principles, which indicate that medications should be tailored to individuals.[/box]

    Water fluoridation was characterized in at least one journal publication as a violation of the Nuremberg Code and the Council of Europe’s Biomedical Convention of 1999. A dentistry professor and a philosopher argued in a dentistry journal that the moral status for advocating water fluoridation is “at best indeterminate” and could even be considered immoral. They asserted that it infringes upon autonomy based on uncertain evidence, with possible negative effects.

    Reason for Conviction

    [quote]Eliminate all other factors, and the one which remains must be the truth. ~ Sherlocke Holmes[/quote]

  • Right Brain/Left Brain Creativity

    Right Brain/Left Brain Creativity

    Recently I saw this amazing visual while surfing the web, then thought to remind myself, the next time I saw it, to stop and curate it. This series of 3 illustrations are so remarkable to me, that it came as no-surprise that they belonged to Mercedes Benz. None-the-less, I captured the wild, exotic beauties for my image collection (I love graphic art). Although in categorizing this art to post, I had to decide; mind or design?

    During another session of curating today, on the Elephant Journal (my fave of late), I stumbled on to this perfect quote ( from a German-American no-less), to go with the heisted art;

    [quote]“Creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.” ~ Albert Einstein[/quote]

    Left Brain
    Mercedes Benz
    Right Brain

    [typography font=”Cantarell” size=”10″ size_format=”px”]Source: adsoftheworld.com[/typography]

    [quote]“Creativity takes courage. ” ~ Henri Matisse[/quote]

    My tool of choice for Curating, is the insanely creative (and free) – Evernote. The most versatile content creation tool I have ever seen, or could ever have imagined. One of my favorite things to do with Evernote, is to create a new personal journal page each day. I never thought I could enjoy keeping a digital diary, as much as I am enjoying this new habit. Just starting each day with a new clean note, then putting that date to create a new page in life, it’s like imaging that you’re the script writer and the lead role. It’s second nature to find cool stuff in the inbox, or click stuff on my social nets, plus I keep a couple Moleskines beside my keyboard, one of them is smaller and contains my on-the-fly notes and questions (also, to-do lists, names, numbers, questions and ideas). I use a pen and paper every day, to continue moving forward.

    My Mozilla Thunderbird inbox handles tens of thousands of messages per day, the software is stable even with 4 GB, from 8 email profiles, each with hundreds of folders, for (amongst other things) dozens of filtered Google Alerts. For example, every morning I get 20 story overviews about Rio de Janeiro, from all over the world. That’s just one of about a dozen News Alerts I personally filter. The creativity is made manifest by Evernote, because as the busy day flies by, I take the time to curate things from the web, add thoughts, ideas and notes, about the real things that I’m doing, what I’m eating, where I’m going, important phone calls, how many KMS I ride on my bike, how much yoga, how many minutes of language study, etc… I created a score card, with a total of 100 points, and at the end of each day I give myself a score on that day.

    [box type=”tick” style=”rounded”]I’m really liking this Evernote strategy, it’s called radical time management.[/box]

    One more thing about Evernote: The app for mobile device is the coolest thing you’ll ever see, once it’s loaded up with all the cool photos, about half of which are from my own collection (the other half are downloaded, mostly from Wiki Commons). And all the things that were happening in the past 30 days, it’s got the layout and style of a ultra-cool digital magazine. That’s a digital diary, when feb 1 comes I won’t even see those rich pages I created (each day) because they’re tucked neatly away in the folder marked “January”. It’ll be super fun to review this movie script at the end of the year. One things for sure, this is making me much more productive because each day I try to score higher. I’m so tough on myself, that with my grading system, I’ll be happy to get into the 80’s. Living each day, like it might be my last.

  • Back in the saddle…

    Back in the saddle…

    Brazil beach cruiser
    Ride in style – Brazil beach cruiser

    Welcome to the new WordPress site for Silicon Palms. When installed it said: This is my first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging! So I left it as it was and started blogging (again). What motivated me was an opportunity to bring some incredible Internet products and services to Brazil.

    For years I was an advocate of Movable Type (MT) content management software but a couple of years ago, after Sixapart the parent company was bought by a Japanese tech company, the open source community dispersed. WordPress advanced in quantum leaps in the time that MT was stagnated, the open source community grew to be larger than any other software community online, with hundreds of excellent and practical plugins. Not to mention the massive design community with theme templates and entire frameworks to ride on top of WordPress and achieve outstanding SEO services to accompany the awesome design choices. More info here http://sydneyseoservices.net/.

    Still the point remains the same; how does a small business make money from the Internet, or by using web marketing? This is the most important question and the reason I have rebuilt Silicon Palms website, to turn my attention, once again, back to web development. The business development experts and/or venture capitalists will tell you that the key to success, in any business, is the model to make money – the business model. I’m convinced that I’ve arrived at Mecca when it comes to business models and this site is going to be the vehicle for me to promote the new strategy.

    The life-blood of a business is cash flow and the key to cash flow is sales. If a product and/or service can sell itself, than all that needs to happen is marketing and advertising but aside from sex and drugs, most products and services require a concerted, professional sales-team and a strategy, added to an enthusiastic sales campaign. This is what lays in front of Silicon Palms but as they say, before you can work the plan, you need to plan the work – so without further ado – I’m off to launch a new product line.

    Please come back soon to learn more about the new improved Silicon Palms. Thanks for taking the time to read this impromptu blog post.

  • Canadian International Society

    Canadian flag on building in Vancouver
    Canadian flag on building in Vancouver

    Recently I met British fellow at the commodity and futures exchange in downtown Sao Paulo, during lunch he mentioned that his wife, originally from New Zealand (aka Kiwi) and several other Kiwi and Canadian women, were members of a charity organization that was formally called “Canadian Women’s International Society” and that they were hosting a party at the house of the Canadian Consul General, to celebrate the re-launch of their charitable society, plus opening the doors to men. My curiosity was piqued and a few days later I found myself enjoying the company of about 50 foreign nationals (Expats), many of whom were from Commonwealth countries, and all of whom were charmed by the gracious hospitality of our hostess, the Consul General of Canada for Sao Paulo, Brazil.

    As my good luck would have it, I’m now a member of the newly formed “Canadian International Society”

    Who we are

    The Canadian International Society (CIS) takes its name from the group of Canadian Women, who founded the group in 1962. Led by the wife of the Canadian Consul General, it was founded as a social organization with a focus on charitable work in Sao Paulo.

    These days the CIS is open to women and men of all nationalities, and has a broad range of members. The group has expanded and today has over 60 members from at least 20 different countries, including Brazil.

    What We Do

    The CIS mission is to offer a social forum for its members while also assisting NGO’s in the Sao Paulo area through fundraising events and opportunities to volunteer in vulnerable communities. These activities include monthly luncheons and happy hours as well as one or two major events throughout the year such as family day BBQs, fashion shows or evening soirees.

    The Society is coordinated by a volunteer Board of Governors who are elected yearly. Positions include President, Vice-President, Secretary, Treasurer, Charities, Membership and Communications. The Canadian Consul General is the Honorary President look these up.

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  • Lexicon of Sustainability

    Introducing … The Lexicon of Sustainability from the lexicon of sustainability on Vimeo.

  • Offshore Banking for Expats

    Offshore Banking for Expats

    Piraeus Bank HQ
    Piraeus Bank HQ

    People ask me all the time about moving money from one country to another and when I use the term “offshore banking” they often have a quizzical look on their faces and ask me: “is it legal to have an offshore bank account?” That about sums-up the way most people think about banking offshore, especially because of the way mainstream media has portrayed the topic but also movies often depict the lawyer with the brief case, on a tropical island, meeting-up with the beautiful co-conspirator, after having pulled of some big rip-off back in the states. So it probably surprises my friends in Brazil and Canada even more when I suggest that United States offers some of the best offshore banking services that they’ll be able to find anywhere – now they’re really confused….

    Offshore relates to banking in any country outside of where you are domiciled (definition of domicile: a person’s fixed, permanent, and principal home for legal purposes). Therefore, your bank account doesn’t need to be in Cayman or Switzerland to be offshore and in many cases you can get excellent bank services from almost any country in the world. I recommend U.S. banking for anyone not permanently living there because the rates are relatively low but more importantly it’s really easy to get a Paypal account with a U.S. bank account. However, in today’s world privacy and asset protection play a more important part of an overall banking strategy and let’s face it, the U.S. is just not big on privacy, as a matter of fact, when you open a new business account in America you’ll soon-after be barraged with solicitations from local businesses and services, which means that the bank sold your information before the ink was even dry. Now that’s not as much of a problem, more of an annoyance but the fact is that most people just don’t want anyone, including a snooping government, to know how much money they have in the bank – that’s where I come in and the reason people ask me about banking, as I’ve been setting-up offshore accounts since 1994.

    (more…)

  • Brazil Poker Pro

    BPP-250x250.jpgIn the country of Brazil the supreme court ruled that Poker is a game of skill, and is not classified as a game of chance like, say, Bingo. For this reason there are legal poker rooms throughout the country and online poker may be growing faster in Brazil than any other market on earth, which has prompted many of the biggest online poker companies to sponsor top players and spend allot of money in marketing and advertising their brands inside Brazil.

    Brazil Poker Pro was launched to get twitter followers andprovide poker information in Portuguese and in a short few months the site has grown in popularity and created a buzz on Twitter and Facebook amongst Brazilian poker aficionados, some relationships with followed and strategic partnerships were formed and now less than 4 months later BrazilPokerPro.com is generating revenue and has a promising future to become a key voice in the poker community of Brazil.

    The main author of Brazil Poker Pro is a an authority on the topic, extremely passionate about poker, has won some significant poker tournaments both online and in the big poker rooms of Sao Paulo but most importantly he’s very prolific and likes to publish a new story every day, as well as Tweet to his large group of followers and friends and Facebook. We’re seeking more strategic partners and thinking about adding another author, once the traffic reaches 1,000 visitors per day. Also, we’d like to hire an assistant to help us keep up with the social networking.

    Nowadays with the built-in translation tools found on Google chrome, or available at the click of a mouse to Babelfish etc… the information on Brazil Poker Pro offers value to any poker player, no matter the language they speak.

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  • Speaking Brazilian Portuguese

    Garota de Ipanema - album coverOne of the great benefits of mastering Brazilian Portuguese is being able to fully appreciate the music by understanding the lyrics. Brazil enjoys the largest recording industry outside of the United States, so the number of brilliant artists and the wide variety of genres (most people have never heard of), is truly staggering. Perhaps the first time I’d ever hear this beautiful language was by recorded music, as my father had an extensive jazz collection, and even before I was born the bossa nova was played in my house and now today the first song I can sing in Portuguese is the Garota de Ipanema (The Girl from Ipanema).

    Legend has it that the Portuguese language was brought to Portugal by the Knights Templar and was the last Romance language created from Vulgar Latin by an order of monks who were language makers, somewhat like today’s software makers, that means that Portuguese was on the cutting-edge of the evolution of Latin, maybe a: Latin 5.0 at that time. Now there are some 800 million total Romance language speakers, worldwide, the largest segment of which would be about 500 million Spanish/Castilian and the French with 250 million are just slightly ahead of the worldwide population of Portuguese speaking people, however Brazil has the largest population of Portuguese speaking citizens and then a slightly lessor number of Italian speaking people. I’ve been told that it’s easier for Portuguese speakers to understand and adopt the other Romance languages, for example many Brazilian’s can understand Spanish but my friends from Costa Rica, for example, found it really difficult time to understand Portuguese.

    Once upon a time the Portuguese were a great seafaring nation with a colony spread far and wide over the globe, today it is the fifth most spoken language in the world, the most widely spoken in the southern hemisphere, and the third most spoken in the Western world. In addition to Brazil and Portugal, it is used in Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Macau, Mozambique, São Tomé and Príncipe and East Timor, as well as in the former territories of Portuguese India (Goa, Daman, Isle of Angediva, Simbor, Gogol, Diu and Dadra and Nagar Haveli) and in small communities that were part of the Portuguese Empire in Asia as Malacca, Malaysia and East Africa as Zanzibar, Tanzania.

    In modern times the language has a home, if you can imagine that? The world’s only museum for a language was opened in 2006 in Sao Paulo, in a refurbished building (see photo) that was once the central train station, Estacao da Luz where 300 thousand passengers arrive and leave the station everyday, in a neighborhood of the same name. The Portuguese language lives and grows in this fabulous refurbished building which was chosen for the museum because of the fact that, it was mainly here that thousands of non-Portuguese speaking immigrants arriving from Europe and Asia via the Port of Santos into São Paulo got acquainted with the language for the first time.

    Estação_da_Luz.jpg

    The famous Brazilian singer, songwriter and composer, Gilberto Gil spoke at the opening of Estacao da Luz, with these remarks:

    The language speaks for you. The purpose of studying and interacting with a language in a museum, cultural and exchange programs, orthographic agreements, and the development of new words show how important it is. The language is our mother. This museum covers most, if not all, the aspects of the written and spoken language, of the dynamic language, the language of interaction, the language of affection, the language of gestures and of any other aspects that this museum was meant to promote.

    Looking around online I found some very good resources, both free and subscription, plus found a large variety of YouTube videos, some making the nearly impossible claim of having you speaking Portuguese in 30 days, The reason I say “nearly” impossible is because if you already speak another Latin language then it is possible to be conversational in a relatively short period of time, depending on your memory, study habits and your latent ability for languages. For myself I will be satisfied to reach the conversational status before the end of 2011 and plan to use this blog to post updates, from time to time, on the best resources I find.

    The amount of positive comments from Rosetta Stone was what won-me-over to try their software but I also liked the course offering (especially price) and free downloads, blog and Facebook group associated with the company called Transparent Language and a really cool Blog called Tecla SAP.

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  • Pursuit of Happiness

    A Little Happiness

    Image via Wikipedia

    To become successful in life requires a long list of important steps, lots and lots of persistence but above all else; determination. There are several great manifestos, filled with the keys to achieving success and several thousand (or more) places where you can obtain this information, all of which is meaningless until it’s assimilated to become knowledge, then put into practice to become wisdom. This process is known as “The Pursuit of Happiness”.

    If we were to amass all that’s ever been written or spoken about happiness and then distilled it down to the purest idea, that which we could consume like a magical elixir, it would be this: the secret to success is in your mind. Now I know that may sound rather simplistic, and yes it’s been said by a thousand different people but herein lays the road-map to enlightenment – master your mind, moment by moment, and make yourself manifest your destiny.

    There’s so much more than can be said on this topic and so many ways to come to the same conclusion but anyway you slice and dice it, you’ll always come back to the same understanding. My favorite comparison of the mind, is the computer. Since the operating instructions for the applications to create happiness are default programs installed on the hard-drive (brain), and came delivered that way from the factory. It happens that sometimes we get more excited by new programs and become distracted by the gee-whiz shiny new applications, and forget the need to keep things simple.

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