The days of declaring way with a lengthy proclamation signed by a
prime minister or president are in the past. Israel announced on Tuesday
that it was launching a strike on the Gaza Strip with a single tweet.
RT: A message sent from the official Twitter account for the Israeli
Defense Forces’ press department confirmed that the Jewish state has
started a new round of action against their adversaries in what is
believed to be the first time that a military campaign has been issued
through the social media site.
“The IDF has begun
a widespread campaign on terror sites & operatives in the #Gaza
Strip, chief among them #Hamas & Islamic Jihad targets,” reads
the message from the @IDFSpokesperson account. The IDF then confirmed
over Twitter that additional strikes had seriously damaged Hamas'
long-range missile capabilities and an underground weapons storage
facilities.
Moments
later, the account confirmed that their first target, Ahmed Al-Jabari
of the Ezzidine Al-Qassam Brigades, the Hamas’ military wing, had been
hit in the attack. In a follow-up tweet, the IDF account says they have “embarked on an operation against Hamas, an Iranian proxy responsible for terror attacks on Israel.” They then warned that Hamas operatives should “show their faces” above ground in the coming days.
By The Doc: Bloomberg has released a MUST WATCH
interview with our good friend Eric Sprott of Sprott Asset Management
discussing his thoughts on gold. While unable to specifically discuss
silver due to the current PSLV follow-on, Sprott simply destroyed the
MSM pundits’ anti-gold arguments, stating that gold has beat the Dickens out of every other asset class over the last 12 years, and questioned whether the Western Central Banks have any physical gold left in the vaults, as the gold listed on their balance sheets includes gold receivables, which has been leased out and is gone for good.
The legendary Eric Sprott’s full MUST WATCH interview below:
Bloomberg
kicked the interview off by asking Sprott whether he is as much a fan
of precious metals today as he once was, ”given the fact that they’ve
treated you so poorly over the past 18 months?” Sprott replied:
A little history is probably important here. Gold has gone from $250 to over $1700. It’s beat the Dickens out of every other asset class over the last 12 years…To specifically answer your question, am I more optimistic today than I might otherwise be? Absolutely. I wrote an article recently questioning whether the Western Central Banks had any gold left.
We simply did a physical analysis of the people that are coming into
the gold market and the changes that have happened since 2000, (and the
supply of gold has not changed since 2000 on an annual basis, it’s still
4,000 tons). When you look at the fact that the central banks used to sell 400 tons annually, now they buy 500 tons. The ETF didn’t even exist in 2000, now they buy 300 tons a year.
In the one week since US President Barack Obama won his bid for
re-election, representatives from all 50 states have filed petitions
with the White House asking to secede from the United States.
RT: Just seven days after a citizen of Louisiana asked for the state’s
peaceful secession from the rest of the country, hundreds of thousands
of electronic signatures from around the United States have been
submitted to WhiteHouse.gov for review as Americans from all corners of
the country ask the president to grant them amicable separation from the
union.
According to the White House’s own rules on the ‘We the
People’ portal of the Executive Branch’s official website, a staffer
from within the walls of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue will respond in a
timely manner to any petition that can garner more than 25,000
signatures. As of the morning of Nov. 14, pleads out of Louisiana,
Texas, Alabama, Florida, North Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee have all
crossed that threshold, with petitions from the rest of the country
quickly accumulating enough signatures to soon require a reply as well.
In almost every case, signees say that the time has come to do something about the state of the union.
Using bureaucratic means to “bypass the will of the people”
is a complaint that 1,758 people as of this writing say is reason
enough to separate Virginia from the current rule of the US in one
petition; elsewhere on the site, a separate petition also calling for
that state’s secession has received more than triple the signatures,
with residents agreeing with an interpretation of the Declaration of
Independence that decries, “When in the Course of human events, it
becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which
have connected them with another.”
RT: Israel’s Foreign Ministry has reportedly proposed “toppling”
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas if a Palestinian bid for state
observer status is approved by the UN later this month. It is also
allegedly considering annulling the Oslo Peace Accords.
“Toppling Abbas’s regime would be the only option in this case.
Any other option would mean waving a white flag and admitting the
failure of the Israeli leadership to deal with the challenge,” the Foreign Ministry position paper obtained by AFP says.
The document warns of "grave consequences," including unspecified "unilateral Israeli responses.” It also says that Israel "must extract a high price from Abbas," and that receiving state status at the UN "would be considered a crossing of a red line."
Israeli
Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman is reportedly expected to endorse
the position paper and would then present it to the Israeli officials
charged with formulating Israel’s response to the Palestinian bid.
A
senior Israeli official on Wednesday told AFP that Israel is also
considering annulling part or all of the 1993 Oslo Accords in response
to the UN bid.
"The claim is that the Palestinians' appeal to
the UN is such a fundamental breach of the Oslo Accords that it
nullifies them. And if they are nullified, we are not committed to them
either. The Oslo agreement specifically says that every dispute will be
resolved through direct negotiations, not by going to a third party," the official said on condition of anonymity.
The Justice Department isn’t exactly winnings its fascist war on
so called "intellectual property theft" — the attorney general says so himself.
Until then, though, that doesn’t mean they are going to start going
soft.
RT: A Mississippi man was sentenced to 15 years behind bars and another
three under supervised release this week after pleading guilty to
selling five counterfeit DVDs and one bootleg music CD to an undercover
agent.
Patrick Lashun King, 37, was sentenced by Judge Lamar
Pickard of Copiah County Circuit Court after he pleaded guilty to six
counts of selling pirated material, charges that he was lobbed with
after an undercover agent attempted to purchase just a half-dozen
homemade copies of music and movies the defendant wasn’t authorized to
have up for sale.
When investigators searched King’s home and
businesses, they eventually turned up 10,510 counterfeit discs and the
computer equipment they believe he used to manufacture the bootlegs. The
Clarion Ledger notes that authorities also uncovered a number of
weapons, including an assault rifle, from King’s Hazlehurst, MS home,
but it was only the six counts of piracy that will put him away until
2027.
By Felix Salmon: What to make of Rolling Jubilee, the latest bright idea from Occupy? The idea is simple:
Banks sell debt for pennies on the dollar on a shadowy
speculative market of debt buyers who then turn around and try to
collect the full amount from debtors. The Rolling Jubilee intervenes by
buying debt, keeping it out of the hands of collectors, and then
abolishing it.
Rolling Jubilee has already raised $115,000 — which they say is
enough money to buy and cancel more than $2.3 million of debt. After
Thursday’s variety show and telethon, both sums will surely rise substantially.
The reaction from the financial press has been mixed. Tim Worstall somehow contrives to admire the idea while bashing everything else associated with Occupy at the same time; Nick Summers, on the other hand, thinks it’s fundamentally misguided.
By AlexJones:
Government insider Steve Pieczenik will
blow the lid off what he says is the truth behind the tragedy in
Benghazi and the General Petraeus mega-scandal. Source
Yesterday the
New York Stock Exchange suspended trading in 216 companies for most of
the day, according to the FT. The trading suspension was due to a
technical problem with a server; this is just one more report of an
electronic trading glitch in the era of the Flash Crash, Knight Capital,
and the botched Facebook IPO. We talk to CFTC Commissioner Bart Chilton
about what should be done about algorithmic and high frequency trading,
and why it has taken so long. We mention the work of Eric Hunsader and
his team at Nanex, who saw significant improvements on the data side of
markets following the Knight Capital debacle and a decline in HFT
manipulation, that he attributes to a rare enforcement of regulations.
We ask Bart Chilton if ENFORCEMENT is the issue, and not the creating of
new regulations.
Submitted by Tyler Durden: Shining a little reality light on the
otherwise pollyanna-like dearth of pragmatism that is the mainstream
media's guest-list, Ron Paul provided Bloomberg TV's Trish Regan a
little more than we suspect she bargained for when asked if he had any
hope that we avoid the fiscal cliff. The constant
"delaying-of-the-inevitable" enables our politicians to avoid facing up
to the serious consequences of our reality and as Representative Paul
notes the chances of a grand bargain are "probably zero... that's why I think we're over the cliff [already]." Just like the handling of the debt ceiling debacle, Paul notes they will "pretend they are going to do it"
until we get a total crash of the dollar and the entire financial
system (which he notes is what will occur if we continue the status
quo). "We are at a point of no return" unless certain things change, since "we are not the productive nation we used to be."
Paul on the fiscal cliff and whether politicians are under more pressure to just do what they need to do to get votes:
By MARTIN WALKER: Driven by bad wheat and a serious collapse the Siberian harvest,
world wheat prices have risen more than 40 percent since January and are
once more flirting with the panic prices of 2007 and 2008.
Those price peaks, along with surging oil prices, were critical
factors in the world economy's plunge in recession. The bread shortages
and riots that followed the food crisis destabilized countries dependent
on food imports like Egypt and helped trigger the Arab Spring. (Angelo: We told you it was an Arab Winter!)
Oil prices can hurt but they don't kill. Food shortages, however, are
lethal to poor people and to governments. Either one eats or one
starves.
It is too soon to say how bad this will get but last year saw the
harvest in the United States savagely cut by the worst drought in 50
years. And most of the main wheat producing regions around the world are
hitting trouble at the same time.
In Siberia and Central Asia, a combination of drought, forest fires
and heat waves have slashed the Russian harvest 33 percent. For Russia,
this is the worst crop since the disasters of the 1960s forced them to
start spending scarce foreign currency on buying U.S. wheat. The
Kazakhstan crop has been halved. This means very little wheat is
available for export.
But the European Union, which might otherwise supply those export
market, has seen its own wheat production fall 4 percent. Argentina and
Australia have also been hit by bad weather and so it looks certain that
the world will this year consume more wheat than it grows. Matters
would be worse except that the U.S. wheat crop increased, mainly because
farmers gave up on corn and hurriedly planted wheat instead.
Moments
later, the account confirmed that their first target, Ahmed Al-Jabari
of the Ezzidine Al-Qassam Brigades, the Hamas’ military wing, had been
hit in the attack. In a follow-up tweet, the IDF account says they have “embarked on an operation against Hamas, an Iranian proxy responsible for terror attacks on Israel.” They then warned that Hamas operatives should “show their faces” above ground in the coming days.
RT: A message sent from the official Twitter account for the Israeli
Defense Forces’ press department confirmed that the Jewish state has
started a new round of action against their adversaries in what is
believed to be the first time that a military campaign has been issued
through the social media site.
