Doing it the right way

The AP reports that Indian Navy and Coast Guard have engaged and, in a three-hour battle, captured sixteen Somali pirates as well as sinking their hijacked vessel (an Iranian trawler) and rescuing the trawler's crew. This brings the total of pirates captured by the Indians to over 120 this year. It seems that the pirates were using a hijacked trawler as a base to attack other ships and were caught in the act by the swift response of the Indians to a call for help. The Indians chased the smaller boats back to the trawler and sunk it (apprently as there is no mention of recovering the trawler after it caught fire due to Indian gunfire). I assume they also sank the smaller vessles as well.

WTF?????

OK, so I am a big fan of oppressive regimes being overthrown, all for it, huzzah! and all that.

Syria has been gunning down its citzens for the last couple of days and they seem to be getting a pass, it seems that the Baathist/Leftist connection still holds and the Resident can't bring himself to suggest to Hillary that we should drop something other than a subservient Pelosi on the Mad Optometrist. His people were chanting that they are not looking for regime change (largely because all of their relatives are currently being held in a hangar loaded with high explosives until the Western press remembers that there is a new season of American Idol) so a massacre or two can be overlooked. That is not what caught me off-guard (google Hama Massacre if you think I am bullshitting about how happy the Assad family is with dead Syrian citizens).

The Bears are Back!

Yep, more advice from the Silver Bears.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzyXn8t0plM&feature=player_embedded

I don't know why but  it is clearer when Teddy Bears tell me.

Perhaps I need therapy.

This explains so much

Here is a short essay by Carlo M. Cipolla, a man of true genuis, who saw the world as it truly is. He should have been awarded a Noble prize for this seminal work (of course he wasn't) it explains so many of the thing going on in the world today.


 The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity, an absolute Must Read;   http://www.cantrip.org/stupidity.html?seenIEPage=1

CORRECTION

You will notice that I place mine at the Masthead, not buried amongst the obituaries like the New York Times.


I was wrong about the price of cruise-missles that I quoted the other day in the post about our non-involvement in the UN sponsored Pseudo Police Action/No Fly Zone in Libya, Operation Endless Aimlessness, I think it is called. Anyways a friend that is more up to date on this stuff than I am pointed out that a base-line cruise missle is about $1,400,000.00 these days.

I humbly stand corrected, apologies to anyone who did pointless math at my request.

To make it up to you I will do it, and show my work;

          112 x 1.4M = 156.8M

If you would like to find out more than you will ever need to know (hopefully) about the Tomahawk check this site; http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/smart/bgm-109.htm tons of data.

Precious Metals to spike in May

I have heard rumors that the OTHER Precious Metals (better known as brass and lead) are soon to spike in price, so I did a little checking around and it seems that we can expect a bump of almost 10% by the beginning of Summer. Lots of things contribute to this; for starters, copper is a significant component of brass and prices have risen about 80% over the last year, lead has seen an increase as well. Added to the base cost of metals there is the fact that ammo is HEAVY and the cost of moving it about is subject to the cost of oil, which has seen a significant increase in prices over the last year. So get out and buy what you can afford before the price spike (doesn't that pretty much apply to ANY commodity these days?).

You will need some to keep your other PMs safe, don't scrimp.

Hat Tip to Mike B. for the lead (as in hint, not the stuff you make bullets with).

NABbed by the IMF

The IMF (who are these assholes, really I mean who are they? no country, no assets, no resources just political hot air!) have expanded the "New Arrangement to Borrow" by $500,000,000,000.00 (previous limit $50,000,000,000.00, kinda scary when you see it in numbers rather than say $500bn). Apparently they were tired of being upstaged by old Printing Press Ben and decided to create a half-trillion dollars out of thin air, all at once, you know, just in case somebody (Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Spain....hell just about anybody that can bamboozle their proles) would like to sell their taxpayers into debt-slavery for the next zillion years or so. You have to admit these guys think big, none of this creeping QE for them, no POMO dribble, they went straight to the money-shot (bad pun, I know) increasing the fund by 1100%.

The newly enhugeified (yes, I just made that word up) balance  "will boost the fund's ability to prevent or resolve economic crises". Ahhh, nothing like some Central Planning to smooth things along; I mean what could possibly go wrong with that?

The Race to The Bottom just went into Super-Turbo-Hyperdrive, weeeeeeee!

I hope you hold some precious metal, because at the rate they are printing this stuff there soon will be no trees anywhere. On the upside the planet will be set for toilet paper for the next ten thousand years.

And there they go!

Silver

Gold

 
It looks like the PMs are going to really break out the range-bound trading they have exhibited of late, price-suppression/manipulation becomes ever more difficult when the world has gone mad and the fiat just keeps "easing". All in all the fundementals haven't changed, if anything the increasing level of instability/madness/geological activity will press the prices higher.

Rejoice not My Friends, you must remember that what you are looking at is your buying power dissipating, unless you are the last remaining human with a COLA in your contract (or already have all your wealth secured in precious metals).

And there goes Portugal

It is official, the austerity measures proposed by the government of Portugal have failed to pass muster, Prime Minister Socrates had staked his position on passage and now will resign. The bonds have spiked to an all-time high and bail-outs of some sort are inevitable. The EFSF and the IMF are circling to offer a "rescue" package that will reduce the entire state to prole status. The only other options are bankruptcy and/or withdrawal from the Eurozone.

The IED comes to Israel

News reports of the latest bombing in the beseiged state of Israel indicate that the bomb was not a suicide bomb but a bomb fixed to a telephone pole near a bus station. The cowardly pool of rat-pus that set it doubtless waited nearby until the bus stop was full of old people and little kids before detonating it and then wacking-off while screaming "Allah-Akba". I have been wondering how long it was going to take before this particularly nasty sort of weapon was going to be deployed by the brutish baby-murdering pigs of Hamas (et al) and now here it is.

Hey, can we start bombing those sub-human shit piles that call themselves Hamas now to, you know, "..protect civilian lives.." just like in Libya?

What has this world come to?

So explain this to me again

We are currently (not) leading the assault against MadMummar Quackdafyy (or however you spell his name) in what is absoultely a War For Oil (notice the total lack of European protestors screaming  "No blood for oil" odd isn't it) to benefit Italy, France and the rest of the Euros. Don't get me wrong, Reagan should have finished that little turd back in the day, but of late he has been behaving himself. On the other hand the Revolt of the Week Club seems to have moved to Syria and our government has yet to mumble anything about it, despite civilians getting gunned down in the street by the Armed Forces just like in Libya.

A most excellent post....

I just wish I had written it; http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2011/03/20/downstream-of-green/

For anyone not familiar with The Belmont Club you will find that Richard Fernandez is one of the most thoughtful news aggregators out there, the bulk of the commentariat is very smart as well. The Pajamas Media site that hosts it is overly political and misses some important news but Wretchard's writings are often beautiful pieces of literature.

Read it ya bum!

A Black Swan comes to rest

I have refrained from any commentary up to now as there is little that I can say about the Earthquake/Tsunami in Japan that would change any of the horror readily veiwed in the pictures on everyone's monitors and televisions. My prayers go out to the survivors of these events. The Japanese people have an enourmous task before them as they try to pick up the pieces and deal with recurrent aftershocks and several atomic plants that are nearing meltdown. Please donate to whatever charity that you trust, just because Japan is a wealthy country does not mean that these people are suffering any less.

The States Rebel....

No it is not another Civil War, just a little bit of the States reawakening to their rights and responsibilities to their citizens. Utah has fiinally passed the law covering tax payments in gold and silver. I have not seen a copy of the law as yet but I hope that it makes some recognition of the difference between face value and nominal value. I also hope that they were wise enough to include an option for citizens to ask for payment in same and a stipulation that the State never send the PMs to the Federal Government but rather sell at market and pay the Feds in fiat.

Something that every US citizen should be aware of

I had often wondered why it is that the Fed seems to act against the interests of the US public. I came slowly to the awareness that they are not part of our governement but actually a private corporation that "loans" our money to us. As I looked further into the situation it became apparent that the Fed has always been a corporation that has its own interests at heart and has been the source of the many financial bubbles that have plagued our nation since WW1. The attached article explains it better than I can, it is not a easyt read but you need to understand the monsterous nature of this foreign thing that keeps ruining our economy.

What to do, What to do......

The persistent rumblings of an end to the Fed's QE program grow louder by the day.

This of course means that the chance of a complete market collapse becomes more likely. Without the $100billion a month in "fluffing" the bull market willl suffer a quick deflation, with it will go the commodities and, to a certain extent, PMs. On the other hand old Printing Press Ben has not, as yet, listened to advice and has some very definite ideas about  how he wants to wreck the economy, so there may very well be a QE3.

It boils down to this; no QE3 means sit on my money and buy the dip when the market drops, if QE3 is a go I need to grab as much physical as soon as possible as the price is likely to jump toward $100 an ounce by year-end.

Quandaries, I hates 'em!

Utah gets its act togther

Utah is voting today on the act proposing that gold and silver coins can be used for the payment of taxes. I am surprised that they took this long. See the article over at Zerohedge; http://www.zerohedge.com/article/utah-pushes-accept-gold-silver-alternative-currency  Other states considering a similar move are; Georgia, Montana, Missouri, Colorado, Indiana, Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Tennessee, Washington, Vermont and Oklahoma. More and more people are placing their trust in money that cannot be printed at the whim of the Fed.

In other news it looks like China is getting ready to conduct cross-border trade denominated in the Renminbi. This would mean that nations bordering China, and trading across the borders, would have less need of dollar reserves. This is a big step toward making the Renminbi a "local" reserve currency and (combined with the huge purchases of gold to back it with) is a clear threat to the dollars continued reign as the world's currency of account.

The Barbaric Relics get a nod..... from Banksters no less!

Check out this little gem from ZeroHedge; http://www.zerohedge.com/article/italian-banks-pushing-mark-market-benefit-surging-price-gold  I find it enlightening that the banksters want to Mark-to-Market only certain assets while ignoring the (rapidly vanishing) value of others. You would almost think that they are up to something......

On another thought, I'll bet that Utah is wishing that they had started accepting gold coins as payment a while back, with gold going up faster than inflation they could have a balanced budget (or even a surplus) in no time.

Keep in mind one thing.......

Silver and gold have a natural, almost fixed, value; so this chart is really just marking how fast the fiat currency is burning down. Perhaps it should be viewed this way;

Think of the green line as the value of the dollar moving against silver and you will see what I mean.

Even worse, take a look at the chart below, this is the Ten Year price chart for silver, imagine what that would look like inverted. This is what the Fed has done to the dollar, small wonder that nobody wants it as the Reserve Currency anymore.

I hope you have food and ammo ready, this could pop at any time. Remember that today the dollar was gaining strength and silver and gold both rose against it. People are beginning to prefer hard metal to Federal Reserve Notes. The Dollar is losing credibility; this is not a good thing for our economy, the international situation or our citizens.

If things in the KSA blow up oil could hit $200bbl with very little stretch of the imagination, think about what that would do to the "economic recovery". Maybe TPTB will open ANWAR and the Gulf and let us use our own oil before the collapse is complete.