Bad Liar Black Hats

Don’t expect Boehner and Republicans to turn things around. For one thing, they don’t have the power. All the power has been consolidated by the White House. For another, they may not be riding the white horses either. They may just be losers in a race consisting entirely of black horses.

I’m wondering how many of you feel that you’re just hanging by a thread; that you’re just one paycheck away from ruin - or one illness; one car accident; one death in the family; one natural disaster? The feeling has become palpable for more than a few people. You are not alone.

We are a proud people and not given to complain. We tend to believe that the neighbor across the street is doing alright. As we watch neighbors increasingly packing up and moving away, we realize that the hooded man with the scythe is on the loose. He just hasn’t gotten to our house yet.

Fear sells. You know that yourself. Don’t tell me you’ve never been tempted to buy gold (and not just because it’s pretty); store food and water in the basement; subscribe to Lifelock; First Alert; and to whatever the name of that company is that claims to save your files when your computer crashes.

Now there are those who will not readily submit to fear-mongering of any kind. Good for them. But even the most confident and self-reliant among us now know that something’s wrong. Look at Trump. I’m sure he’s taken care of for life. Yet, he too thinks that something should be done to hobble the political class (left and right) that’s running away with our country.

We now build government policy around fear. We allow ourselves to be in effect strip-searched at airports; now there’s talk about doing the same thing for people using trains. All the while, we know very well who bad apples are. (I’ve raised this point before, but still haven’t got an answer: Why are Muslim women exempt?) No, it is we, our wives and mothers, and our children who have to prove we are innocent at these unconstitutional checkpoints! What gives?! It doesn’t add up. The guy who tried to blow up Times Square was granted U.S. citizenship barely a year before, while my own wife is denied the same courtesy. People who cross our southern border illegally will now be granted blanket amnesty, while all those who submit to the ‘process’ are told to wait - seemingly forever.

They’ve got our own phones keeping track of us. They can listen in any time they want. They’ll be reading the odometers in our cars. They’ll tell us where we can build factories and where we can’t build our houses. They worship snail darters before letting us sow our seeds. They won’t let us drill holes in our own ground. It just goes on and on. We’re increasingly kept on a very short leash.

Let me suggest that those who denounce Barack Hussein Obama may very well be racist after all. He’s a black man, to be sure; but he isn’t all that different from previous presidents we’ve had; this new miracle Congress isn’t all that different from previous congresses; the candidates the Republican Party appears to be fielding for the 2012 election cycle aren’t that much different from Obama.

They’ll all do as Tim Geithner tells them: raise the debt ceiling (which, btw, has been raised over a hundred times before since its inception). So what’s the big deal this time around? Despite all the posturing, they’ll raise our taxes and find another name for it.

I now understand why the people were so desperate to get rid of Bush. They wanted someone different; someone who would change our direction; to make it better – not worse. What we got was worse - at a lightning speed, no less. Obama’s only crime is that he’s a bad liar. We can see right through his schemes. And it doesn’t end well.

How much are you personally prepared to give up when the hammer finally falls? What are you willing to do for that sandwich, that gallon of gas? Are you ready to sell out your neighbor to save your own skin? These are questions you must be prepared to answer when it becomes apparent that the white hats have been ambushed and delayed; or, when you realize that we’ve just plumb run out of white hat material.

http://pkoelliker.blogspot.com/

We Will Soon Find Out

Larry Kudlow seems finally to have understood (by his comment that ‘POTUS will go Left for his new economic team’) that Obama couldn’t care less about the economy. The question remains: How far left will he go? Will he go all the way to spark a communist revolution in this country? I suspect so. What better way to achieve it than to precipitate complete economic collapse?

The price of gold on the upswing is not so much a consequence of gold becoming more valuable. It is rather an indication of the dollar depreciating. Pretty soon we could be taking whole wheelbarrows of money to the supermarket to buy a loaf of bread. Don’t you think this would end in social upheavals of the kind this nation has never seen? Don’t you think that this would pulverize the foundations of every institution in this country, reduce them to dust to be blown away by the wind? POTUS would remain the only functioning authority over the ruin of a once great nation.

When Argentina suffered through its period of severe inflation in which the price of common products rose every day, the people themselves pegged the value of commodities on the value of a gallon of fuel. Money became irrelevant. Gas stations in effect became banks.

‘Growth recession' is an oxymoron. There is either growth, or there is recession. The two terms are mutually exclusive. POTUS himself is the one who continues to talk this nonsense. By it, he hopes to gain time to perfect his economic nuclear program. We’re all slow to figure it out. POTUS is banking on it. The majority of us still refuse to believe that the man we elected president would actually do this to us. Meanwhile, every day our economy wanes. The trigger will activate when the promise of new leadership will release all our pent up demand. By that time the guts of the system will have been so totally wrecked. Stepping on the gas will cause the economic engine to explode. …and then, nothing. The old car will stall, never to move another inch.

Already we see the signs of what’s coming. Investors in large numbers have abandoned stocks. Money and jobs are leaving the country. Bonds are shaky. Real estate is collapsing all around us. The last refuge is gold. What comes after gold? Nobody knows. Chaos, perhaps. The abyss. We’ve never been there before. Increasingly it becomes apparent that we will soon find out.

http://pkoelliker.blogspot.com/

Something Has Happened

The world’s economies are imploding. Not that it makes much difference now, but I ask myself, “Did it start with the housing bubble in the U.S.?” Did the insane policy by our government forcing the banks to lend to people who never had a prayer of paying it back result in generating of so much publicly traded toxic paper that it ended up compromising currencies world-wide?

If so, how long will it take for nations around the world to start pointing fingers stateside? Has their reluctance to do so been due to their own disregard of economic principles? Clearly, the integrity of the dollar has been hurt. So far, the banks have absorbed all the blame. At what point will banks drop the pretense and tell what really happened? That what they ended up doing was in response to existential threats from our political class who urged them: First, to continue lending; and, second, to deal with the fallout creatively in anyway they could - short of naming names, of course. As long as the current crop of political elites remained in power, banks were assured, they would be protected. And the banks played the game.

Market signals are oracles. Oracles have no reason to lie. Their integrity is impeccable. Only men can twist the veracity of said signals to suit their own designs – or to ignore them entirely. The rising price of gold, the instability of equity markets, and chronically high unemployment all expose the slight of human hands and the effort to achieve something outside the realm of possibility. Oracles are blunt. They scream the truth amidst the blizzard of whispered lies.

Incompetence? I hardly think so. The oracles are screaming louder. “Name the culprits!” they scream. “Understand their motives!” As the Obama administration (through its mouthpiece, The New York Times) continues to advocate a doubling down on failed policy, we can almost envision the pillow being lowered over the gasping head on the sickbed. Death panels. Rather than taking the screams as proof of potency; rather than taking the oracle’s screams as a warning; the screams must be stifled at all cost.

Last night there was an earthquake off the coast of India. At one thirty in the morning the birds awoke and went nuts. In Chennai, it was a pleasantly balmy night and air conditioners were for the most part turned off - windows open. It took most people till sun up to find out that something had happened.

Republicans On Steroids

Many wordsmiths have cut their teeth exploiting gold and all its ancillary aspects such as greed, avarice, crime and poverty. The higher message all along has been that “money can’t buy me love” or health, dignity and the like – and that it often works to the detriment of the finer virtues.

When talking about gold and/or money we essentially talk about ‘value’. What is valuable in this day and age? The ‘rarity’ of any given commodity is certainly a factor. Gold is rare; as is talent, know-how, hard work, innovation, inspiration, etc. When the political class tells us that everyone is equal, it denies the notion of rarity as well as individual pursuit of excellence. It denies value at its core. The only thing left, then, is gold.

The rise in gold prices reflects the disillusionment with the political class world-wide. Nobody appears to be standing up for value. Bailouts signal a dangerous trend. It means that failure is on par with success. This is not something that inspires confidence. It means that nothing we do can lift us above the average mean; that we are in essence trapped in the prison of the ‘common good’; that all that is left for us to do is to hoard gold - a fleeting reminder of a golden age when America was exceptional (the gold standard) – to build it into shining but soulless pyramids to sit atop in watch out for equally soulless thieves. Eventually we will feel inclined even to abandon our golden perches as the impulse to exercise our bodies becomes increasingly compelling.

The skyrocketing price of gold signals our misgivings about where we are heading. November elections are routinely hyped as our salvation. But what is the alternative? Republicans? American voters are not impressed by the prospect of Republicans taking up the reigns either. They’ve tried that before and it only managed to get them Obama – Republicans on steroids.

Gold

The classic question asked before every election has been, “Are you better off today than you were 1, 2, 3 or 4 years ago?” ‘Better’ was roughly defined in economic terms: jobs, prospects, opportunities, purchasing power, safety, stability, etc. Clearly, the political class has decided that the traditional markers of the economic health of a nation are no longer relevant; that now the notion of ‘social justice’ must be factored in and even take priority over any other consideration. At the same time, every indicator reflecting the relative health of economic activity has been trending downwards.

In our own country, the Obama administration has been promoting policies that have accelerated this downward trend. The popularity of gold is a reflection of the uncertainty and outright fear that the markets are about to collapse. Our administration has done nothing to alleviate such fears. In fact, every policy already enacted as well as proposed seems specifically designed to drive markets down even further. We can no longer interpret this as coincidence, mistake or stupidity. Along with everything else that’s been happening – socially, politically and internationally – it would be foolish to assume that we are not facing a profound change from the way in which we have been conducting our everyday lives.

Gold is seen as the final hedge should everything else collapse around us. It is a fantasy. After everything else has gone up in smoke, a retreat to gold cannot save us. Look at it in practical terms. Imagine lugging a gold bar to the ruin of a store with empty shelves in search of a loaf of bread. People are actually assuming that gold will be capable of performing alchemy in reverse and produce bread.

The futility of hoarding gold was aptly demonstrated during previous wars. When the invading armies were said to be approaching the town, the people packed up their valuables (including their gold candelabras) into wagons and set out to escape certain death, rape and plunder. Along the way they could see all the things once deemed valuable (including gold) strewn by the roadside as so much refuse. They did not even slow their pace. Instead, in a desperate effort to lighten their own load, they dumped their valuables as well. The lucky ones arrived at a safe haven with barely the threads on their backs.

Their ultimate goal was to reach America which promised nothing more than a new start. With America in ashes, there will no longer be anywhere to run to. Gold or no gold, when hope is extinguished humanity has failed.

Corruption Doubled, Tripled and Squared

I’m talking about corruption with all its bells and whistles – CORRUPTION on the highest order.

At first our currency/economy was based on gold. Then we got rid of gold and based our currency/economy on productivity (the talent, sweat and hard work of our population). Next, we based our currency/economy on credit (future productivity).

Note that each step expanded the universe of money significantly. Clearly, the gold supply is finite as there is only so much of it to go around. A calculation involving human productivity clearly increased the amount of what can be termed ‘distributable value’ or wealth. Adding to this a calculation involving future productivity (i.e. credit) had the effect of increasing it even more. Each step expanded the opportunity for individuals to generate untold riches, even as the basis for these (first gold, then productivity and, finally, credit) became more and more illusory and, at the same time, less and less stable.

The latest scam to increase the universe of money once again is ‘cap and trade’ which would essentially base our currency/economy on air. Step one was to declare CO2 a pollutant. Step two involves charging everyone emitting CO2 a fee for the unpardonable sin of breathing; and, thus, move vast amounts of money into the pockets of the people who were in on the hoax. Governments are in on it; academe is in on it; banks and investment firms (GS, Fannie and Freddie) are in on it; computer companies (Google) are in on it; media; education; unions – anyone who has been tireless in promoting the deal did so with the promise of a big pay-off to follow. Chicago was to be the center for trading in carbon credits. Already an exchange similar to the New York Stock Exchange is all set up there and ready to go.

When the University of East Anglia e-mails were released to the public the scam was exposed, it drove a stake in the heart of a world-wide fiction. The Left latched on to it big time for they rightly assumed it would put an end to capitalism. The one-worlders under the auspices of the UN latched on to it for they could now envision their dream - the dissolution of all borders - as being within reach. The religious wing, the environmentalists, viewed it as their ticket to a pristine world without man-made pollution.

Corruption equals the absence of principles. Any human endeavor lacking principles is bound to fail. The West has been in the process of shedding its principles for a long time. We have now reached the point from which there is no way forward. We have reached the wall. The attempt to tax air was the last straw. Still, those committed to what was obviously a hoax persist. They will now be tempted to apply force to get their way. We’re in for some rough sledding, folks.

Will Silver and Gold Climb?

The answer to most of your questions is a resounding YES, except for the one about silver and gold. People from India, for example, have been going to Dubai for decades for the express purpose of buying gold. This is tradition. It is not new. The value of gold is a constant. Only currencies fluctuate – up or down. If the dollar, the yen and the euro implode, gold will not be of much help. Neither will property (unless you are actually living there).

I recall my mother telling me about fleeing the Russian advance during WW II. They'd packed all their valuables into wagons and headed west. All along the wayside, she remembers seeing the carcasses of dead pack animals strewn; along with the 'valuables' people had discarded in an effort to lighten the load. Nobody thought it a smart idea to stop and load gold candle holders or silverware onto their own carts.

Currencies are the only thing capable of gaining in value. It depends entirely on the work and productivity of the people they represent. If a government hinders people from working; if it smothers productivity; if it runs up too much debt; if it prints too much paper; if it taxes too much and makes it unprofitable to work; if it insists on shifting value from productive sectors to unproductive sectors - everything that we are currently doing - the currency will fail and the disaster will be more than just economic. This is why socialism/communism cannot work on a societal plane of higher complexity than the single family unit.

Carry That Weight

What is it in the DNA of the human eye that sees gold the way it does? No other creature on earth sees gold in the same way. A proof, perhaps, that our vision of heaven is bogus might be that (for some reason) we’ve insisted on painting a picture of gilded columns with winged angels playing celestial music on gilded instruments; and there is actually very little to suggest that God views gold (or anything else in his creation) with special favor. The myth of gold seems to be entirely one of man’s creation. As such, it is subject to collapse, like currency or even, what we might call, ‘civilization’ itself.

Since mankind is given some leeway in these matters, it is understood that we are free to assign ‘value’ to whatever we want. Our assignments in this regard can be totally arbitrary. The trick, as always, is to get others to go along with it. The appropriate illusion is by no means impossible to construct. Recent examples show that it was quite successfully done culminating with our election of Barrack Hussein Obama. ‘Global warming’ is yet another such illusion. These two examples, however also show that illusions of this kind, especially ones that are designed to mask real malfeasance, will at some point blow up and vanish, leaving the perpetrators red-faced and stammering.

Gold, aside from some limited industrial applications, has little or no intrinsic value. It cannot be eaten, grown, or loved. We shall see how far its advocates are willing to carry its weight along the corpse-strewn path to irredeemable ruin.