Miners Paper Is Still Paper

JIm Rogers Thoughts on 2012

Andy Hoffman On Silver & Gold

Victor Davis Hanson - A Vandalized Valley

Here is a story that tells what is happening in rural California and how the economic meltdown is effecting the hinterlands first, before you see it in larger urban areas.

December 22, 2011  A Vandalized Valley by Victor Davis Hanson I am starting to feel as if I am living in a Vandal state, perhaps on the frontier near  Carthage around AD 530, or in a beleaguered Rome in 455. Here are some updates  from the rural area surrounding my farm, taken from about a 30-mile radius. In this  take, I am not so much interested in chronicling the flotsam and jetsam as in fathoming  whether there is some ideology that drives it. Last week an ancestral rural school near the Kings River had its large bronze bell stolen.  I think it dated from 1911. I have driven by it about 100 times in the 42 years since I got  my first license. The bell had endured all those years. Where it is now I don’t know. Does  someone just cut up a beautifully crafted bell in some chop yard in rural Fresno County,  without a worry about who forged it or why — or why others for a century until now  enjoyed its presence? The city of Fresno is now under siege. Hundreds of street lights are out, their copper wire  stripped away. In desperation, workers are now cementing the bases of all the poles — as  if the original steel access doors were not necessary to service the wiring. How sad the synergy!  Since darkness begets crime, the thieves achieve a twofer: The more copper they steal, the easier  under cover of spreading night it is to steal more. Yet do thieves themselves at home with their  wives and children not sometimes appreciate light in the darkness? Do they vandalize the street  lights in front of their own homes? In a small town two miles away, the thefts now sound like something out of Edward Gibbon’s  bleaker chapters — or maybe George Miller’s Road Warrior, or the Hughes brothers’ more  recent The Book of Eli. Hundreds of bronze commemorative plaques were ripped off my town’s  public buildings (and with them all record of our ancestors’ public-spiritedness). I guess that is  our version of Trotskyization. The Catholic Church was just looted (again) of its bronze and silver icons. Manhole covers are  missing (some of the town’s own maintenance staff were arrested for this theft, no less!). The  Little League clubhouse was ransacked of its equipment. In short, all the stuff of civilization — municipal buildings, education, religion, transportation,  recreation — seems under assault in the last year by the contemporary forces of barbarism.  After several thefts of mail, I ordered a fortified, armored mailbox. I was ecstatic when I saw  the fabricator’s internet ad: On the video, someone with an AK-47 emptied a clip into it; the  mail inside was untouched. I gleefully said to myself: “That’s the one for me.” And it has been  so far. But I wonder: Do the thieves not like to get their own mail? Do their children not play  Little League? Do they not want a priest at their funeral? Would they not like to drive their cars  without worrying about holes in the street? Or is their thinking that a rich society can cover for  their crimes without their crimes’ ever much affecting them — given that most others still do not  act as they do? I know it is popular to suggest that as we reach our sixties, everything seems “worse,” and, like  Horace’s laudatores temporis acti, we damn the present in comparison to the past. Sorry, it just  isn’t so. In 1961, 1971, and 1981, city street lights were not systematically de-wired. And the fact  that plaques and bells of a century’s pedigree were just now looted attests that they all survived the  Great Depression, the punks of the 1950s, and the crime-ridden 1970s. A couple now in their early 90s lives about three miles away from me on their small farm. I have  known them for 50 years; he went to high school with my mother, and she was my Cub Scout leader.  They now live alone and have recently been robbed nine, yes, nine, times. He told me he is thinking  of putting a sign out at the entrance to his driveway: “Go away! Nothing left! You’ve already taken  everything we have.” Would their robbers appreciate someone else doing that to their own  grandparents? Do the vandals have locks on their own doors against other vandals? There is indeed something of the Dark Ages about all this. In the vast rural expanse between the  Sierras and the Coast Ranges, and from Sacramento to Bakersfield, our rural homes are like stray  sheep outside the herd, without whatever protection is offered by the density of a town. When we  leave for a trip or just go into town, the predators swarm. Last summer several cars drove into my driveway, the surprised occupants ready with all sorts of  innocent-sounding inquiries: “We just are looking for a rental.” “Do you have scrap for sale?”  “We’re having car trouble.” And so on. All this serves as a sort of red/green traffic light: If someone comes out from the house, the driver  poses the question and then abruptly leaves; but if no one appears, he strikes quickly. I remember  three or four intruders I confronted this year who had trucks as nice as or nicer than my 2006 Toyota.  Two had sports apparel more expensive than my jeans and sweatshirt. All were heavier than I. In  other words, malnourishment, the desire for basic transportation, the need for clothing on their backs —  all the classically cited catalysts for stealing — are not what is driving these modern vandals. At a local gathering last week, lots of farmers — of a variety of races and religions — were swapping  just such stories. In our new Vandal state, one successful theft begets another — at least once deterrence  is lost. In my case, one night an old boat in the barn was stripped. Soon, the storage house was hit. Ten  days later, all the antique bolts and square nails were taken from the shop. Usually — as is true with the  street lights — the damage to the buildings is greater than the value of the missing items. I would have  given the thieves all the lost items rather than have had to fix broken locks and doors. I just spoke with another group of farmers at a rural fairground. Every single person I talked to has had  the copper wire ripped out of his agricultural pumps within the last two years. The conduits taken from  my own 15-horsepower and 10-horsepower pumps were worth about $200 at most. The repair bill was  $1,500. Most farmers have lost any steel or iron lying around their barnyards, whether their grandparents’ iron  wagon hardware or valuable replacement furrowers and discs. Stories of refuse piled in their vineyards  and wrecked cars fished out of their orchards are monotonous. Did the thieves never eat raisins, a peach,  an almond? And did they not appreciate that if we did what they did we would all starve? As I write, I am looking out the window toward my barn at a strange new trash pile that, presto,  appeared overnight while I slept: all the accouterments of an old car — seats, dashboard, outside  moldings, etc. — are heaped together, along with household garbage. What am I to do with it? I can’t  burn it. (Believe me, an environmental officer would appear out of nowhere at the rising of the toxic  smoke to fine me, as surely as he is absent when the garbage and refuse are tossed on the roadsides  outside of town.) There is too much of it to pile into my $100-a-month Waste Management bin, where  I put the plastic garbage sacks tossed by the mailbox each week. It would take two trips in my pickup  to haul it to the distant county dump. So for now, the problem is mine, and not that of the miscreant  who tossed it. Was he thinking, “Mr. Hanson has more time, more money, more concern over trash,  or more neuroticism of some sort, and therefore is more likely to deal with my trash than I am”? —  as if to say, “I can live in a neighborhood where wrecked car parts litter the road; he obviously cannot.”  So are these tossers simply comfortable with refuse on our streets, or are they not, but, like irked toddlers  with soiled diapers, expect someone else to clean up after them? And is not that the point, after all? Behind the easy criminality of stealing metal or driving outside of town  to toss your garbage is an implicit mentality, as frightening as it is never expressed. Someone will indeed  take the garbage away. And someone indeed will have copper wire for others to harvest for their needs.  And someone will pay the taxes and costs associated with the commission of the crime, efforts at  prevention, and rare apprehension of the criminal. And lastly, someone most certainly should. In our  crude radical egalitarianism, the fact that one has more, and another less, is de facto wrong, and invites  popular remedies. Now, for every crime committed, a new sociology will arise to explain away its  commission. We are back to the bankrupt French philosophers who asserted: “Property is theft!” read more here....

GET OUT OF PAPER NOW! More Ann Barnhardt..WOW!

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Jim Willie Explains Euroland Contagion

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Kyle Bass @ AmeriCatalyst NOV. 2011

Incredible insight and thoughts from Kyle Bass, managing partner at Hayman Capital Management. He seems to be all over the financial net with
thoughts on Euroland debt restructuring and why it won't work.  Why Japan is going to blow up and when all of this will reach America's shores, and a time line for all of these actions.

Kyle Bass @ AmeriCatalyst NOV. 2011

If you are interested in what is really happening in our financial markets and where we are headed take the time to watch this video!

Who Do You Trust?

Your Freedoms As A US Citizen Have Been Stolen By CONgress

Jim Roger's: "It's Gonna Get Worse"

Silver Ready To Explode? Got Physical Silver?

Senate Bill 1867 Passed. Are You On The Kill List?

Look Into The Future. What Do You See?

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. That is what we were taught in high school mathematics and attributed to Sir Issac Newton and his laws of motion. This physics lesson also is in play in financial markets where we may see action and reaction regarding the days news. And if it seems that a financial tsunami is churning towards the worlds markets, you would be correct. Our governments have created most of this mess through manipulating laws and bailing out the TBTF banks and Financial institutions for the last 40 years and now it is becoming obvious to those who are willing to look beyond the "hopium" the media pours out to the public on a daily basis. Kicking the can down the road is the game our politicians play, whether it is Social Security, Medicare, Fannie & Freddie, etc. They cover up mistakes and corruption and put a band aid on the problem and pass it down the road to the next guy. So we find ourselves in a worsening storm and our governments scramble about, as their currency meltdown (Fiat Crisis) expand beyond their shores. Their solution? They are trying to bail cash back into the system by inflating (printing) their currencies which is a huge hidden tax on you!  And yet most slumber, oblivious to the crushing wave heading towards your shores. These obvious attempts to stem the tide of the financial crisis doesn't take into account the hidden consequences their actions create.

William Buckler of the Privateer explains this spot on:

This is, and always has been, the central problem of what is called “political economy”. It was the title of the first “chapter” of Frederic Bastiat’s justly celebrated Selected Essays in Political Economy. The entire problem, never so topical as it is today, is contained in the first two paragraphs of that essay - written 170 years ago. We quote M Bastiat: “In the economic sphere an act, ...a law produces not only one effect, but a series of effects. Of these effects, the first alone is immediate; it appears simultaneously with its cause; it is seen. The other effects emerge only subsequently; they are not seen; we are fortunate if we foresee them.” “There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen. Yet this difference is tremendous...” The size of the difference can be seen today wherever you look in the global economy. What is seen - indeed what is being screamed from the rooftops - is the alleged necessity to rescue the global economy by pumping ever greater quantities of “money” into it. What is not seen - or is avoided, evaded or is kept out of the gaze of potentially prying eyes - is that it is the process of pumping new “money” into the economy that caused the problem in the first place.

© 2011 - The Privateer

http://www.the-privateer.com

capt@the-privateer.com

(reproduced with permission)

This is exactly the law of unintended consequences, or is it? In America, our Central Bank, The Federal Reserve is a private bank that regulates the banking business in America, and after this weeks bailout of Europe's banks, perhaps the world. Remember, The Fed is private, yet they control America's banks and monetary system. Is the crisis's we are sailing into and the Crash of 2008, incidents that, as economist's claim, "no one saw coming" or part of economic cronyism that is raping the American public daily? How can I saw that?  Look at MF Global and the Ex Governor of new Jersey, John Corzine, who "just doesn't know what happened" to the $ 1.2 billion of client funds that were looted, er, lost. Can't find it. Look at US Banks, they have reported the highest profits they have seen in the last four years since 2007. Why? Because of artificially low interest rates, they aren't paying depositors any interest  and are leveraging the free money. This scheme is imploding Euroland banking and may make an appearance here in the USA sooner than later. At some point, the costs to pay for the debts will explode as interest rates, which is the cost of the money lent plus the risk factor of bankruptcy, will rise and wipe out all of the fiat currencies in the western world.  It seems that the can can not be kicked much further. Yet CNBC, leading economists like Paul Krugman and our politicians refuse to acknowledge the problem, while espousing fiscal hopium. 

It is all a lie.

Things will not get better. They will get worse. We as a nation must cut our spending by 50% right now just to start being fiscally responsible.

We will not do it.  Too many people rely on government handouts to survive. We have almost 50 million Americans receiving food stamps alone! Americans are trying to survive on 99 weeks of unemployment without finding a job. The military will not cut their budget by 50%, Medicare and Medicaid will not cut their budgets by 50% either. The outrage, wrath and ire from  Americans on the government dole would send our politicians scurrying like cockroaches in the light. They know they won't get reelected if they even  honestly acknowledge the looming problem.

It is coming people. Starting in March of 2012 and  exploding in January of 2013. In January of 2013, we have major financial changes headed our way.    Some of the highlights include...

The Bush tax cuts expire on those making more than $ 200k.

The Bush tax cuts on those making less than $ 200k will also expire.

2013 is the first year that there will be mandatory caps on discretionary spending.

The patch on AMT will expire.

Social programs, like Social Security & Medicare will be seriously sloshing in debt that can't be ignored.

So here we are...the hard unvarnished truth and sure to follow, devastating fiscal consequences to the average American.