The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. – Benjamin Franklin
– Firefighters called to historic Boleskine House on Loch Ness:
Firefighters have been called to a blaze at a historic property above Loch Ness.
Crews from Foyers, Inverness, Beauly and Dingwall have been sent to Boleskine House near Foyers.
The Scottish Fire and Rescue Service said a large part of the property has been destroyed.
Boleskine House was owned by infamous occultist Aleister Crowley and later for a time by Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page.
H/t reader squodgy:
I often wondered what happened to the predicted hyperinflation following QE.
It never happened.
OK, inflation in school fees, obamacare etc has been negated by cheap oil, and yes, food costs are indeed rising, but the expected rampant inflation across the board never happened….why?
It made the doom-mongers look daft.
Here’s why…..we never saw it, it all went to the club.
– I was asked: Whatever Happened to Inflation after all this Money-Printing?
* * *
In my opinion real hyperinflation (incl. consumer price inflation) is coming and the euro, the dollar and the Japanese yen will become worthless.
It will take just a little longer.
– Venezuela Bans GM Crops with New Seed Law:
Venezuela’s seed law has the backing of campesinos and rural families and will regulate the production of hybrid seeds in Venezuela and prevent the research, production, importation and distribution of GMO seeds.
Source: www.telesurtv.net/
Venezuelan lawmakers approved last Wednesday a new law that will impose stricter regulations on hybrid seeds and ban transgenic seed research.
As if the Japanese government would give us the correct numbers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ8-0MS4lCk&feature=youtu.be
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgzTanaOA4k
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– Swiss Army Chief Warns Of Social Unrest, Calls Upon Citizens To Arm Themselves:
Swiss army chief André Blattmann warned, in a Swiss newspaper article on Sunday, the risks of social unrest in Europe are soaring. Recalling the experience of 1939/1945, Blattman fears the increasing aggression in public discourse is an explosively hazardous situation, and advises the Swiss people to arm themselves and warns that the basis for Swiss prosperity is “being called into question.”
As Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten reports, speaking on the record for the first time since the November Paris terror attacks, Blattmann told the paper that despite a rise in security incidents over the past two years Switzerland’s means of defence were being reduced.
Read moreSwiss Army Chief Warns Of Social Unrest, Calls Upon Citizens To Arm Themselves
– Sweden: Rapes, Acquittals and Severed Heads
One Month of Islam and Multiculturalism in Sweden: November 2015
- Some 30 Muslim men thought that the woman was in violation of Islamic sharia law, by being in Sweden unaccompanied by a man. They thought that she should therefore be raped and her teenage son killed.
- Sometime during the night, the victim was awakened by the Iraqi as he raped her. The woman managed to break free and locate a train attendant. At first, the woman did not want to call the police. “She felt sorry for him [the rapist] … and was afraid he would be deported back to Iraq.”
- Two Swedish citizens were convicted by a Gothenburg Court of joining an Islamist terror group in Syria and murdering two captives. Video evidence showed one victim being beheaded. “Every night when I have gone to bed, I have seen a head hanging in the air.” – Court Chairman Ralf G. Larsson.
- One week after Sweden raised its terror alert level to the highest ever, the police raised another alarm — saying their weapons are simply not good enough to prevent a potential terror attack.
November 4: The Swedish Immigration Service sent out a press release, saying that it had hired close to a thousand additional employees since June. The Immigration Service now has over 7,000 employees, including hourly workers and consultants — double the 3,350 employees who worked there in 2012. Most of the new recruits work with the legal processing of asylum applications, but the units dealing with receiving migrants and filing their initial applications have also expanded considerably. As if the record influx of migrants this autumn were not crushing enough, the Immigration Service also had trouble retaining its staff. Employees complain about being badly treated: they are always expected to be on call, and possibly even work Christmas Eve.
November 4: Bobel Barqasho, a 31-year-old Syrian, was sentenced by Sweden’s Supreme Court to 14 years in prison. Before his case reached the Supreme Court, Barqasho had been sentenced by a lower court to 9 years in prison, then acquitted by the Court of Appeals. In February 2013, Barqasho threw his wife off a sixth-floor balcony. Against all odds, the woman survived the 13-meter (about 43 feet) fall, but was badly injured. When she woke up after five weeks in a coma, her head was held together by a helmet, her face felt loose, and her teeth were gone. In the Court of Appeals, the defense managed to plant reasonable doubt about the man’s guilt by claiming the woman was depressed and had jumped of her own free will] so the Court of Appeals set him free. By the time the Supreme Court pronounced its sentence of 14 years, Barqasho had disappeared. He is now being sought by Interpol.
Read moreSweden: First Month Of ‘Islamic Multiculturalism’ … Rapes, Acquittals, & Severed Heads
– Obama’s Hawaii Vacation: $8 Million; Secret Service: $317k; Nailing A 40-Foot Chip: Priceless:
Thanks to the deep digging from Judicial Watch, we now know that President Obama’s Christmas 2013 vacation to Hawaii cost taxpayers a handy $8.1 million. The itinerary, we are sure, was very similar to this year’s golfing (and shave ice) extravaganza, which explains why, the known total expense to the American taxpayers thus far for all Obama travel is now $70,880,035.78. Well, it’s only fair right?
Judicial Watch announced today that it recently received expense records from the Department of Homeland Security revealing that Secret Service expenses for the Obama family vacation to Honolulu during December 2013-January 2014 cost taxpayers at least $316,698.03. These new expenses bring the total for the Hawaii Christmas vacation trip to $8,098,060.33. The Secret Service waited nearly two years to produce the requested numbers to Judicial Watch.
– In Latest NSA Spying Scandal, World Learns Obama Lied Again; Congress Furious it Was Spied On:
In January 2014, during the scandalous aftermath of Edward Snowden’s NSA snooping revelations, one which revealed the US had been spying on its closest allies for years, Obama banned U.S. eavesdropping on leaders of close friends and allies and promised he would begin reining in the vast collection of Americans’ phone data in a series of limited reforms.
Below are the key highlights from his January 17, 2014 speech:
– SHOCK: 71 percent of U.S. youth too obese or over-medicated to qualify for the U.S. Army Reserve:
A shocking 7 out of 10 potential Army Reserve candidates are unfit to serve their country due to obesity, prescription drug addictions and other reasons.
As reported in The Washington Times, “According to Army Recruiting Command statistics compiled last year, 71 percent of young people wanting to join the military would fail to pass service tests because of their physical, moral or cognitive shortcomings.”
– Financial Armageddon Approaches: U.S. Banks Have 247 Trillion Dollars Of Exposure To Derivatives:
Did you know that there are 5 “too big to fail” banks in the United States that each have exposure to derivatives contracts that is in excess of 30 trillion dollars? Overall, the biggest U.S. banks collectively have more than 247 trillion dollars of exposure to derivatives contracts. That is an amount of money that is more than 13 times the size of the U.S. national debt, and it is a ticking time bomb that could set off financial Armageddon at any moment. Globally, the notional value of all outstanding derivatives contracts is a staggering 552.9 trillion dollars according to the Bank for International Settlements. The bankers assure us that these financial instruments are far less risky than they sound, and that they have spread the risk around enough so that there is no way they could bring the entire system down. But that is the thing about risk – you can try to spread it around as many ways as you can, but you can never eliminate it. And when this derivatives bubble finally implodes, there won’t be enough money on the entire planet to fix it.
– Something Just Broke In The U.S. Silver Market:
After looking over all the figures, it seems as if something broke in the U.S. Silver Market this year. By that, we mean the normal supply and demand forces no longer make sense.
…
– US Government Is Taking Credit For Bringing Peace to Syria — and They’re Not Joking:
State Department spokesperson John Kirby is raising eyebrows after he released a recap of 2015 “success stories” in which he credits the United States for bringing “peace” and “security” to Syria and “stepping up” to help the country’s people at a difficult time.
“The United States and many members of the international community have stepped up to aid the Syrian people during their time of need,” wrote Kirby in his laudatory year-in-review released late last week. He went on to claim that “the United States has led the world in humanitarian aid contributions since the crisis began in 2011.”
Read moreNOT The Onion: US Government Is Taking Credit For Bringing Peace To Syria
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
– Why WWIII Is On The Horizon — Paul Craig Roberts:
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 gave birth to a dangerous American ideology called neoconservativism. The Soviet Union had served as a constraint on US unilateral action. With the removal of this constraint on Washington, neoconservatives declared their agenda of US world hegemony. America was now the “sole superpower,” the “unipower,” that could act without restraint anywhere in the world.
The Washington Post neoconservative journalist Charles Krauthammer summed up the “new reality” as follows:
“We have overwheming global power. We are history’s designated custodians of the international system. When the Soviet Union fell, something new was born, something utterly new–a unipolar world dominated by a single superpower unchecked by any rival and with decisive reach in every corner of the globe. This is a stagering new development in history, not seen since the fall of Rome. Even Rome was no model for what America is today.”
Read moreDr. Paul Craig Roberts: Why WWIII Is On The Horizon
– The Big Short’s Michael Burry Warns “The Little Guy Will Pay” For The Next Crisis:
We are sure, just as many of the so-called “smartest men in the room” ignored him last time, so every status-quo-maintaining, asset-gathering, commission-taker will be quick to dissonantly shrug off Michael Burry’s (the economic soothsayer from Michael Lewis’ book “The Big Short”) warnings this time.
As NYMag.com reports, in an email, which readers of the book will recognize as his preferred method of communication, the real-life head of Scion Asset Management answered some of questions about the state of the financial system, his ominous-sounding water trade, and what, if anything, we can feel hopeful about…
The movie portrays all of you as kind of swashbuckling heroes in some ways, but McKay suggested to me that you were very troubled by what happened. Is that the case?
Read moreThe Big Short’s Michael Burry Warns “The Little Guy Will Pay” For The Next Crisis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jllRRtzXNyk
Albuquerque Journal, Dec 28, 2015 (emphasis added): A 62-year-old employee was found dead Sunday at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in southeastern New Mexico. Robert Staffel, an employee at the nuclear waste repository’s quality assurance department, was found unresponsive by emergency response personnel around 8 p.m. after family members alerted staff that they had tried to reach him by phone, according to a spokesman… Eddy County Sheriff’s Office and state medical examiner responded to the site and an investigation is ongoing. Staffel is believed to have died of natural causes… Phil Breidenbach, NWP president and project manager [said] “We will continue to support the investigation into Mr. Staffel’s death.”
Read moreEmergency center activated at U.S. nuclear site — ‘Dead body found at facility’
– Eyes on the road: Police surveillance database logs 30mn car journeys every day:
Britain’s surveillance commissioner has questioned the legality of a police database that holds the details of 22 billion road journeys and was established without parliamentary consent.A network of 8,300 sophisticated cameras capable of recognizing vehicle registration plates take photos of up to 30 million cars traveling on roads throughout England and Wales each day.
The Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) system is believed to be the biggest in the world and is used to find stolen cars and uninsured drivers.
Read moreBritain: Police Surveillance Database Logs 30 Million Car Journeys Every Day
