U.S. State Department Promised Blackwater Mercenaries Immunity from Prosecution for Their Role in the Massacre of 17 Iraqi Civilians
October 30th, 2007Via: AP:
The State Department promised Blackwater USA bodyguards immunity from prosecution in its investigation of last month’s deadly shooting of 17 Iraqi civilians, The Associated Press has learned.
The immunity deal has delayed a criminal inquiry into the Sept. 16 killings and could undermine any effort to prosecute security contractors for their role in the incident that has infuriated the Iraqi government.
“Once you give immunity, you can’t take it away,” said a senior law enforcement official familiar with the investigation.
State Department officials declined to confirm or deny that immunity had been granted. One official — who refused to be quoted by name_ said: “If, in fact, such a decision was made, it was done without any input or authorization from any senior State Department official in Washington.”
Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd and FBI spokesman Rich Kolko declined comment.
FBI agents were returning to Washington late Monday from Baghdad, where they have been trying to collect evidence in the Sept. 16 embassy convoy shooting without using statements from Blackwater employees who were given immunity.
Three senior law enforcement officials said all the Blackwater bodyguards involved — both in the vehicle convoy and in at least two helicopters above — were given the legal protection as investigators from the Bureau of Diplomatic Security sought to find out what happened. The bureau is an arm of the State Department.
New Alex Jones Documentary: End Game: Blueprint for Global Enslavement
October 30th, 2007About two dozen people have sent me emails about the new Alex Jones film, End Game: Blueprint for Global Enslavement.
My Internet access is A) slow and B) metered. I need to wait until I visit my mother and father in laws’ place to download videos like this.
Yes, I want to watch it. No, I haven’t had a chance to yet. I typically don’t link to videos I haven’t been able to watch. Maybe I should have with this one… Maybe not. I don’t know. But here it is:
More: Main Endgame Page
More: Very High Quality Version of Endgame
Chomsky on Who Was Really Behind the JFK Murder and 9/11: “Who Cares?”
October 30th, 2007To any of you who still think that the limousine liberal industrial complex isn’t in on it, here’s the high priest himself on two of the most significant political events in recent history.
Translation: Just go to another shit-for-brains protest and listen to these lectures for a few more decades.
Alan Greenspan Talking Up Gold on Fox News
October 29th, 2007WARNING: This is not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any financial instrument.
I just picked myself up off the floor.
Brace yourself:
Bubbles Greenspan Speaking Favorably About Gold + Fox News + Gold Just Under $800?
I just wrote about the Money Honies talking up gold. Now, Alan Greenspan is doing it… On Fox Financial.
Bubbles Greenspan is a friend of goldbugs!?
Holy sh*t.
I strongly suggest re-reading my recent post on hedging your long gold positions.
Extreme overbought stochastics and RSI for weeks… And now Alan Greenspan is on Fox Noise talking up gold…
If this doesn’t qualify as a great disturbance in The Force, I don’t know what would.
The video is also at the bottom of this page.
How Much of Cryptogon Has Google Disappeared?
October 29th, 2007Over the past few months, I’ve noticed that Google has been dropping Cryptogon material from their index. I’ve also noticed fewer referrals from Google searches.
Google is a particularly evil organization, but, for a long time, search worked well (unless you happened to be in China).
Not anymore. Well, not for people looking for information on Cryptogon.
Say, for example, that you wanted to find the Cryptogon page that contained the phrase:
“kicks evil people in the nuts”
Woops. It’s not there, according to Google.
I remembered that phrase, so I knew it was on my site… Somewhere. Luckily, the WordPress search engine doesn’t forget. Neither does Dogpile metasearch, which has the Cryptogon page in question indexed properly. [UPDATE] Google indexed a recent story (“We’re Inching Dangerously Close to the Point Where Consumers Run for the Hills”) that contains the phrase “kicks evil people in the nuts,” but not the original article from which the quote was taken (MEXICO GAS LINE EXPLOSIONS FORCE MAJOR FACTORIES TO CLOSE DOWN).
Maybe you wanted to find the Cryptogon story that contained the phrase:
Woops. Google doesn’t like that one either.
Of course, the Cryptogon story is here. Dogpile metasearch reveals “Heavy on the PSYOP” indexed properly in three other search engines, but not on Google. Ironically, Google indexed the story on a different website, but not on mine.
I could go on, but you get the point.
I suppose that it’s just a coincidence that Google previously refused to take paid advertising from me because of my anti fascist perspective and now some amount of Cryptogon’s content is missing from their index.
I’d really like to know what other information Google is disappearing and who or what draws up the tasking list for their memory hole operations.
Cheney Receives Email Addresses of Over 150 Justice Department Whistleblowers
October 29th, 2007How many of the whistleblowers who used throw away email addresses have ever heard of the NarusInsight Intercept Suite?
I’m sure that Cheney won’t be able to determine who the senders actually are… for a few minutes, at least.
Via: TPM Muckraker:
This summer the House Judiciary Committee launched an effort to collect tips from would-be whistleblowers in the Justice Department. The U.S. attorney firings scandal had shown that much was amiss in the Department, and with the danger of retaliation very real, the committee had set up a form on the committee’s website for people to blow the whistle privately about abuses there. Although the panel said it would not accept anonymous tips, it assured those who came forward that their identity would be held in the “strictest confidence.”
But in an email sent out today, the committee inadvertently sent the email addresses of all the would-be whistleblowers to everyone who had written in to the tipline. The committee email was sent to tipsters who had used the website form, including presumably whistleblowers themselves, and all of the recipients of the email were accidentally included in the “to:” field — instead of concealing those addresses with a so-called blind carbon copy or “bcc:”.
Only the email addresses were exposed; none of the names or other identifying information of the whistleblowers was revealed. The blunder, however, was noticed by a number of people who had used the website form and received today’s email. One disgruntled recipient replied to the entire list of whistleblowers angrily complaining about the snafu; two others forwarded the committee email to TPMmuckraker with similar complaints.
Compounding the mistake, the committee later sent out a second email attempting to recall the original email; it, too, included all recipients in the “to:” field, according to a recipient of the emails.
…
It’s not immediately clear whether the mistake will lead to the exposure of those who had contacted the committee. There are more than 150 recipient addresses revealed in the email. Some of the email addresses appear to be transparently fake, but there’s also, much more troubling, a vice_president@whitehouse.gov carbon copied on the email, which is the public email address for Vice President Dick Cheney. In other words, an email containing the email addresses of all the whistleblowers who had written in to the committee tipline was sent to public email address of Vice President Cheney.
World’s Largest Wind Farm Slated for South Dakota
October 29th, 2007Via: AP:
Plans for the world’s largest wind farm, proposed to be built in South Dakota, have become more grandiose.
South Dakota is officially rated No. 4 in the nation for the potential capacity to make electricity from wind, although the ranking is more than a decade old. Many industry officials believe the Great Plains state is the windiest of all.
Clipper Windpower of Carpinteria, Calif., intends to erect enough wind turbines in several South Dakota counties to produce up to 6,000 megawatts of electricity, said Bob Gates, the firm’s senior vice president of commercial operations.
That would be eight times larger than the biggest wind farm in the world, a 735-megawatt FPL Energy facility with 421 turbines stretching across three Texas counties.
Travelers: Homeland Security is Googling You
October 29th, 2007Via: Cleveland Leader:
Andrew Feldman, a Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor who’s currently a psychotherapist in Vancouver, was recently detained for four hours, fingerprinted, and then barred entry into the United States after Homeland Security googled him and found an article he wrote in a literary and scientific journal in which he talked about using LSD and various other drugs in the 1960’s. And even though he has no criminal record and says he hasn’t used drugs since the 1970’s, Feldmar must now get formal permission from the U.S. consul before entering the U.S.
Feldmar has been accustomed to visiting the U.S. about five or six times per year to visit his children, but last summer when he was pulled over for a random search, border patrol turned up online evidence that he had experimented with drugs for therapeutic research in the past.
Related: U.S. Airport Screeners Are Watching What You Read
Research Credit: PD
U.S. DOLLAR INDEX BELOW 77
October 28th, 2007Just getting started in Asia. It’s going to be a weird week.
Gold Futures Close at Highest Level Since 1980
October 28th, 2007WARNING: This is not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any financial instrument.
I worry more about Cryptogon readers’ investments than my own.
When I see the commissions on BullionVault, before I think, “Wow! That’s great!” I think, “I hope folks are diversified. I hope they know when hedging might be an appropriate option.” (Key word: Option. As in, put option.)
Several Cryptogon readers have taken positions in physical gold that, I’m almost sure, are larger than what would be considered prudent by even the most in-the-bunker financial planners. Very few people in the world are in a position to hold hundreds of thousands of dollars in physical gold as a component of a diversified portfolio—even a portfolio geared toward doom—yet, there are several Cryptogon readers who have done this. (Yep. Cryptogon is read by bag people and millionaires alike.)
If your outlook is years, or decades, stop reading now. But… If you chased this recent move, if you’re in heavy and sweating it…
Look at that weekly chart. Throw a stochastic and RSI on that thing. Look back to the left. Notice the other times when those indicators got this whacked out, and the resulting red candles…
It’s like a rubber band that has been stretched very far one way. When it is released, it whips back hard the other way. I’ll be the first one to admit that oscillators can go extreme for a long time, and, on gold, they have. It has been happy days for gold bugs.
My concern now is that the oscillators have been extreme for weeks and now the press is fanning the flames. There is so much negative economic news. There is literally a consensus in the media now about “safe haven” buying on gold. This should be a cause of great concern with short term outlook gold longs.
This might be what Dow Theorists call the “Public Participation Phase.” This is the phase in a trend where average retail investors read about something in newspapers and/or see the Money Honies on TV and then actually make an investment decision based on that information.
If you are in a profitable investment, and your outlook on the investment is short to even medium term (depending on how close to vertical the chart has gone), you should be thinking things like: “CAUTION. WARNING. DANGER. The sheep are now doing that same thing as me. The Money Honies are now saying things that I was thinking before the frenzy kicked in. CAUTION. WARNING. DANGER.”
Forget fundamentals, for a moment, as thinking about the fundamentals can really screw you when it comes to anything that’s traded on margin in real time, including gold. Look at that chart again.
Is this it? Is this what gold bugs have been waiting for?
Maybe.
Maybe not.
I’ll be the first one to admit that I have no idea what’s going to happen. It wouldn’t surprise me if I woke up one morning soon and saw a price quote with four digits to the left of the decimal point. In fact, this is what virtually the entire gold bug industrial complex thinks is about to happen. Again, for gold longs: Caution. Warning. Danger.
Indeed, I can’t make much of a fundamental case for gold going down. It seems like gold should just keep going, with all of the panic and uncertainty out there, and the Fed possibly cutting rates again next week. Right? Again, for gold longs: Caution. Warning. Danger.
Am I saying to consider selling?
Not exactly. Gold is, in my opinion, almost certainly going to go much higher in the long term, and if you’re able to withstand the possibly grim whipsaws ahead, stand fast with confidence.
But for those of you who are in heavy, you should seriously consider an options strategy when the thing gets so extreme; like right now. Consider spending some money to hedge your long bets.
Of course, we’re talking about December gold put options. The premiums on the strikes from 725 to 760 seem VERY reasonable.
How about strikes under 725?
Look, if that thing really unwinds, if the speculators—or people wearing black capes and masks—(temporarily) kick the main pole out from under the big top, the move down could leave new gold longs walking funny. New and inexperienced gold players will start to see gold as another four letter word that shouldn’t be uttered in polite conversation. Good. When they tap the mat, buy their gold at a discount.
I wouldn’t call you reckless for taking some put options in the 700 to 720 range. I mean, I wouldn’t take too many of them, and I wouldn’t expect them to ever be in the money… But that’s why I might be squinting at them with one eye after too much to drink.
Anyone who bets against this freight train is probably going to lose money, but that’s not what I’m asking you to consider, you big gold holders. This is a hedge against the unthinkable.
Don’t ask me how They would kill this rally. I have no F-ing idea. My hunch is that it would involve central bank collusion and tons of yellow stuff showing up on the spot market without warning.
The wider economic picture looks unbelievably grim to me. And in nearly twenty years of thinking The End was near, guess what… Here we are.
I’m not the kind of man who plays options anymore, but I’ll tell ya, that 725 strike for $200 (at the moment) is tempting, looking at that weekly chart.
Do you wait for the Halloween Trick or Treat from the Fed? They’re probably going to cut rates again, if you’re to believe any of the thousands of articles saying as much. Gold should spike up on a rate cut. For hedging purposes, use that as your blow off top moment to buy higher strikes on your December puts so that you have a better chance of being in the money on any breakdown by expiration on 11/27.
If none of this makes any sense to you, that’s probably a good thing. And gold could just as easily keep rising. I mean, maybe this really is “it”. Nobody knows, least of all me. But if you’re sitting on several hundred thousand dollars worth of metal right here… Blowing a few grand on some December put options might be worth it.
If you’re interested in learning more about options, there are plenty of resources online (Yahoo’s option education center is pretty good). Options may be traded online for very low fees. I encourage all heavy gold investors to familiarize themselves with the use of options for hedging purposes.
Via: Marketwatch:
Gold futures closed at their highest level in nearly 28 years on Friday, as gains in the metal were fueled by record-high crude prices as well as the tumbling of the dollar to a new all-time low against the euro.
Gold for December delivery rallied $16.50, or 2%, at $787.50 an ounce on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Gold futures posted a gain of $19.10 on the week.
Earlier in the session, gold hit $787.80, its highest level in nearly 28 years. The all-time high for a benchmark gold contract on Nymex stands at $875, set on Jan. 21, 1980.
“Gold is reaching new highs on the back of record oil prices and a weak U.S. dollar,” analysts at Action Economics said.
Gold climbed to its “highest level since January 1980 on a combination of inflation concerns and safe-haven buying in the wake of a sensitive geopolitical environment and renewed concerns about the U.S. growth outlook,” they said. “Coupled with the prospect of further Fed easing this will continue to underpin gold.”
Dollar hits record low vs. euro
The dollar was lower against most major currencies except for the yen Friday, dragged down by surging oil prices and expectations that the U.S. Federal Reserve will cut interest rates again next week. The euro was trading at $1.4383. Earlier, it rose to $1.4392, its loftiest level since the European unit began trading in January 1999. See Currencies.
The dollar index, which tracks the performance of the greenback against a basket of other major currencies, fell 0.3% at 77.04. Gold, as a dollar-denominated commodity, benefits from dollar weakness.
