Jim Sinclair: German Gold Repatriation is the Most Significant Gold Event in 50 Years, Beginning of the End of the US Dollar As Reserve Currency

The Doc: Legendary gold trader Jim Sinclair has sent an email alert to subscribers today regarding last night’s news that Germany will begin repatriating it’s gold held on deposit at the NY Fed back to the Bundesbank, as well as all 374 tons held at the Bank of France.
Sinclair states that history will look back on this salvo fired across US war financing as being the beginning of the end of the US dollar as the reserve currency of choice, and that under normal circumstances, no major central bank would insult another major central bank in the way that the Bundesbank just has.
Sinclair states that the Bundesbank repatriating its gold reserves is the most significant event in the gold market since Charles De Gaulle called the US hand that it would stand by convertibility, and that gold is headed to $2111 in the near future in the wake of the Bundesbank’s actions.

Forget Previous Bubbles, This Is The Big Lebowski

Submitted by Tyler Durden: 2012 was an odd year in many senses. The Fed and the ECB are both verging on $4 trillion balance sheets, the total for all of the world’s central banks is $14 trillion and these small pieces of paper float around in the breeze and are plucked at will to feed the fires of Wall Street. When all of the central banks on the planet work in concert then, without off-world bourses, there is no place else left to go and the spatial restraints of our planet are the same boundaries for the investment of money. Here then we find the explanation of 2012. It is not a dot-com bubble or a real estate bubble or a specific bubble of any type at all or any we have ever seen but the Big Lebowski, the giant squid, the mother of all Blue Whales and the days of living in some place that we have never occupied before. Those that bet with the central banks have prospered, made fortunes, become vastly richer but how long does this game go on and is there a way out that is devoid of the usual pain to be found in contractions. The bet of last year was to place your money with the bankers-at-large but will that be the correct bet of this year as the plastic is stretched so thin now that a misstep, the politics of nationalism either of the funding or the funded bursts the balloon and sends it cascading around the room in some wildly gyrating manner.

History of US slavery in Africa

UK/Europe Banned Press TV: Documentary program "The Façade of the American Dream" depicts how the US removed Africans from their country of origin, worked them to death as slaves & today, in schools, is brainwashing them to make believe they are inferior in many aspects. Source

Inflation Rocks the UK as Beer Gets Watered Down

By Michael Krieger: These types of stories are popping up with increased frequency throughout the western world.  Products are simply declining in quality, and in many cases these declines are being accompanied by price increases.  Remember my article from a week ago Inflation Hits Coffee as Brewers Secretly Swap Robusta for Arabica.  This is more or less the same story, except this time in the UK and centered around beer.  From CNBC:
Britain’s favorite pint of bitter is being watered down as austerity continues to bite and taxes rise.
John Smith’s Extra Smooth, billed as “no nonsense beer”, is being reduced from 3.8 percent alcohol to 3.6 percent in response to rising costs and reduced beer consumption.
Heineken, which is also raising the cost of the famous bitter by about 2.5 pence a pint, said it was bringing John Smith’s “in line with competitor smooth ales that already sit at or below this alcoholic strength”, including its biggest rival, Carlsberg’s Tetley Smoothflow.
Now here is my favorite line:

Whore-der of JP Morgan - Max Keiser with David Hales

Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss the fact that markets don't kill economies, banksters kill economies. They also discuss JP Morgan's copper ETF in London and Blythe Masters, the well known hoar-der of commodities. In the second half of the show, Max Keiser talks to David Hales about the economics of bit torrent and the future of peer to peer banking. Source

Globally financed mercantilism’s direction takes shape. But the big question is still ‘Why?’

The Slog: Now that we know it’ll be the job of each sovereign EU State to bail out its own banks (according to yesterday’s FT) one has to feel that the era of pretense about ‘all for one and one for all’ really is finally at an end. Ten days ago, I posted that ‘Yesterday was a qualitative turning point in my book. I think we got the first signs that the crew of the globalist SS Titanic had assessed the damage and decided it was lifeboats time.’ The kind of stuff coming out of the EU and elsewhere suggests that the latest order is “Sod the women and children, every man for himself”. Not that long ago, EU leaders were promising bravely to break the Treasury-emptying affair between failing banks and sovereigns. Now their spines are, once again, revealed to be rubber – with occasional patch repairs made from recycled tissue paper. Be under no illusion here: this is a neo-fascist anti market-freedom European Union handing the bill for anti customer market-fixing investment banker criminality to the citizen. It is the collapse of this corrupt club – its total surrender, in fact, to the  neocon élite’s misplaced belief that their dying system can be monetised and repaired by the taxpayer.
The baton-pass is more than a double-whammy for that taxpayer: it’s a lose-treble in which QE (and other forms of money-printing used to prop up failing Treasuries and carpetbagging bondholders) will have reduced the value of the citizen’s income and savings before they start paying. And as that value declines, so too will the range and quality of social services available for relief.
None of this is capitalism, but rather a jarring cacophony of disguised protectionism, corrupt favouritism, globalist monopolism, investment fraudulence, legislative incontinence, and information distortion.

‘Red October’: Global cyber-spy network uncovered by Russian experts

RT: A sophisticated cyber-espionage network targeting the world's diplomatic, government and research agencies has been uncovered by the Kaspersky Lab, whose experts say the malware's complexity could rival that of the notorious Flame virus.

­The system's targets include a wide range of countries, with the primary focus on Eastern Europe, former Soviet republics and Central Asia – although many in Western Europe and North America are also on the list.
In addition to attacking traditional computer workstations, Rocra – a shortened name for Red October, the name given the network by the Kaspersky team – can steal data from smartphones, dump network equipment configurations, snatch files from removable disk drives, including those that had been erased, and scan through email databases and local network FTP servers.  
Unlike other well-known highly automated cyber-espionage campaigns like Flame and Gauss, the Rorca's attacks all appear to be carefully chosen. Each operation is apparently driven by the configuration of the victim’s hardware and software, native language and even habit of document usage.

Gun control is a scam

End the Lie: The mass media and the alternative media are missing or ignoring some facts about gun control.
How long have the major street drugs been illegal?  Are there any shortages?  No, the country is flooded with them.  Banning guns will have the same effect as banning drugs.

The black market always takes over the distribution of banned items.  It always has and it always will.
Never take political actions at face value.
Gun control is a move to make Congress appear as though it’s trying to do something about the recent shootings.
But it also could also be a scheme to stimulate public resistance, which will then result in more rigorous enforcement by the authorities – more TSA and DHS, more stops and searches, more surveillance, etc.
I believe this is what the authorities really want and that gun control is just another trick in order to advance the police state agenda.
People in power always want more power, and what better way to accomplish that than to excite rebellion from the masses by banning something for which there is a great demand?
The authorities then have an excuse to “get tough.”  And they will, you can count on it.
Here’s how it works:
First they ban something that’s popular, such as a drug.  That results in more trafficking, more policing, more penalties, more prisons, and more corruption.
The result is more profits for everyone on both sides of the law.  The ban itself becomes a business.

The secrecy surrounding the US government’s illegal spying has grown to the point of complete absurdity

By Madison Ruppert: In a perfect example of how the (US) government treats the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) received documents related to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) with almost everything redacted.
Keep in mind that the FISA Amendments Act was recently reauthorized for another five years, thus enabling even more illegal warrantless surveillance – which is growing at exponential rates.
Some might find it noteworthy that anything was released at all given the fact that a federal judge ruled the Obama administration never has to explain why they claim it is legal to assassinate Americans without charge or trial, while still being able to claim it is legal to do so.
The so-called compliance with the EFF’s FOIA request is nothing short of laughable. Even when they claim to be “responsive” to the request, everything except a single sentence and the cover page has been redacted from the document.
To make matters even more absurd, the single sentence that has not been removed reads, “The Government has provided copies of the opinions and the filings by the Government to this Committee, and the Government will continue to inform the Committee about developments in this manner.”

Oxford Bullingdon Club's distasteful initiation ceremony

EPHRAIM HARDCASTLE: Oxford's notorious Bullingdon Club, whose past members include David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson, is said to have a distinctly tasteless initiation ceremony at present.
An Oxford stalwart claims it involves burning a £50 note in front of a beggar. Rather tactless of them, just as David Cameron was putting the whole Andrew Mitchell plebgate saga behind him!

Photo: Christchurch College, Oxford. The Bullingdon Club is a university wide society with a reputation of elitism Source

Dollar will not hyperinflate - Martin Armstrong

SilverFuturist: Hyperinflation v Inflation

Greeks Raid Forests in Search of Wood to Heat Homes

By Michael Krieger: Greece just seems to be getting worse and worse.  Being the leading edge of Southern Europe’s descent into 3rd world status, Greece’s lessons are all of our lessons, as I outlined in my piece last year The Global Spring.  From the Wall Street Journal:
EGALEO, Greece—While patrolling on a recent cold night, environmentalist Grigoris Gourdomichalis caught a young man illegally chopping down a tree on public land in the mountains above Athens.
When confronted, the man broke down in tears, saying he was unemployed and needed the wood to warm the home he shares with his wife and four small children, because he could no longer afford heating oil.
Tens of thousands of trees have disappeared from parks and woodlands this winter across Greece, authorities said, in a worsening problem that has had tragic consequences as the crisis-hit country’s impoverished residents, too broke to pay for electricity or fuel, turn to fireplaces and wood stoves for heat.
Such woodcutting was last common in Greece during Germany’s brutal occupation in the 1940s