Russian Billionaire In Exile Boris Berezovsky Commits Suicide - The First Cyprus Casualty!

Submitted by Tyler Durden: Just your ordinary run of the mill Russian billionaire oligarch in exile who had so much money he was terminally depressed... or just the opposite, and the first tragic casualty of the Cyprus capital controls which are about to eviscerate a whole lot of Russian wealth (and ultraluxury Manhattan real estate prices)?

From RT:

Exiled Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky has died at the age 67, according to a Facebook post from his son-in-law Egor Schuppe. Details regarding the nature of his death are yet to be released.

His death has not been officially confirmed, and details have not been disclosed.

According to Schuppe, Berezovsky was recently depressed. He failed to keep in touch with friends and acquaintances, and often chose to stay at home rather than go out.

Damian Kudriavtsev, the former CEO of Kommersant Publishing House also commented on the businessman’s death saying he passed away at 11:00 GMT in London.

Six unresolved questions about the Cyprus fiasco

Robbing banks, reducing wages, increasing hours worked: the lessons to take from the Cyprus bailin.

The night Cyprus joined the euro….what goes up, must come down

 What is the American State Department up to? What will Turkey do? Why didn’t things develop in Moscow?  Where is Mario Draghi? WTF is this really all about?

The Slog: How do you tell if a eurocrat is short-sighted? You ask him to spot the difference between a Russian billionaire’s pocket money and a Cypriot’s life savings.
That gag doing the rounds in southern Europe sums up the perfectly natural focus of most people in ClubMed: this is just more of the same old same old Brussels-am-Berlin bullying cock-up, followed by mealy mouthed denials and a screwed up financial system. As indeed it is. Put with less humour but equal bluntness is this verdict from the OECD Director General’s adviser Adrian Blundell-Wignall:
‘The Cyprus crisis is the result of policy mistakes and a failure of collective responsibility, as well as an illustration of what bad policy can do and could do if it’s not corrected.’ Quite. But not everyone is as stupid as they pretend to be.
Type ‘Cyprus’ and ‘Putin’ into The Slog’s search engine, and you can see that this small island is, and always has been, of pivotal strategic importance in relations between Europeans and Arabs. The energy and rare-earth mineral finds of recent years have merely accentuated what was already a place of obvious military importance: access to the Med for Moscow, and a jumping-off point for the US and its obsessive concern with securing energy supplies and the ever-more tenuous Al Qaida.
What very few people do for starters is just look where the hell Cyprus is.

Banksters On Drugs - Max Keiser with Marc Hochstein

Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss central bankers injecting meth into their eyeballs and Freddie Mac then pushing the meth labs onto unsuspecting investors and homebuyers through sales of foreclosures. They also discuss the bold print of the Constitution that should trump the small print of the so-called sacroscant contracts of collateralised debt obligations and other bogus derivatives. In the second half of the show, Max Keiser talks to Marc Hochstein of AmericanBanker.com about whether or not bitcoin is a ponzi scheme and about the issue of privacy in banking and financial transactions. Source

Texas Wants it's Gold Back From The Federal Reserve!

By Michael Krieger: This is one of the most interesting stories I have read regarding the precious metals market in quite some time.  It appears that Texas Rep. Giovanni Capriglione has a bill in play that would move the state’s gold from New York (where its under the “safekeeping” of the ultra shady Federal Reserve) to a depository within the state of Texas itself.  The reason this would be such a big deal if it happens, is because a lot of the gold bought and sold globally is very likely not actually owned by those that “buy” it.  From my perspective, pretty much the only countries that actually buy gold and bring it within their borders are China, Russia and Iran.  Most other nations that claim they “bought” gold, most likely hold a certificate that states they have gold in London or New York.  So in other words, they have no gold.  It looks like Texas is wising up.  From the Star-Telegram:
Freshman Rep. Giovanni Capriglione, R-Southlake, is carrying a bill that would establish the Texas Bullion Depository, a secure state-based bank to house $1 billion worth of gold bars owned by the University of Texas Investment Management Co., or UTIMCO, and stored by the Federal Reserve.
“If you think gold is a hedge, or a protection, you always want it as close to the individual and the entity as possible,” Paul told The Texas Tribune on Thursday.” Texas is better served if it knows exactly where the gold is rather than depending on the security of the Federal Reserve.”
You’ve gotta love Ron Paul.  The guy is still raising hell even after he left Congress.
The highly political Governor also appears to be on board…
“If we own it,” Perry said, “I will suggest to you that that’s not someone else’s determination whether we can take possession of it back or not.”
“We don’t want just the certificates. We want our gold. And if you’re the state of Texas, you should be able to get your gold.”

Gagged! UK government brings in full press censorship, pledges death to the internet

By Richard Cottrell: There is only one thing worse than gutter journalism, and that is gutter politics. The British Government has decided that it knows better what people should or shouldn’t read in their newspapers or on the internet and thus becomes the first European government to endorse a system of full blown censorship.
In part, this is a fall-out from the massive phone-hacking scandal which wracked Rupert Murdoch’s press empire in the UK, provoked the closure of his flagship red top called The News of the World and continues to take a heavy toll among the scribblers of what used to be called Fleet Street.
The other side of the coin is effectively shutting down the Net by imposing penurious penalties on bloggers and web sites that refuse to co-operate with the new word order.
The accounts for the miraculous silence of all but one of the major dailies published in London. With the sole exception of the Daily Mail, buttoned lips are the order of the day. The daily rags cannot believe their luck: their chief enemy leeching readers and influence either takes the proffered keep-out-of-jail co-operation card or face enormous fines.

Why Kings of Galapagos are long equity under (mild) Mugabenomics

Steen Jakobsen:  I am pleased to introduce my friend Joel Guglietta, who has a formidable mind and is an economist working in the hedge fund industry in Singapore. After having a long e-mail conversation about this crisis and how it ends or not, I finally persuaded Joel to send me an article on it. You will find it interesting and provocative, but also deep in historic analogies showing Joel’s strength in history, economics and logics. It is an honour for me to have Joel as my guest blogger this week and I hope you will all sit down and read his piece. The views expressed are Joel’s personal opinion and should be read as such...
There exists a super-Bernanke who proved also a super-Hollande, a gentleman who Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe cannot compete with: his name is Robert Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe. When he took power, he seized the farmlands of one social group to give them to another social group. Afterwards, in part because the new social group did not manage the farms that well, the economy took a turn for the worse. Therefore, the state issued some bonds to finance its spending and asked the central bank to issue some money to buy this government debt. But they printed big time and turned the printing press into something of a cosmic proportion. According to Professor Steve Hanke from John Hopkins, monthly inflation was 80 billion percent, so per year it is a 65 followed by 107 zeros. This is what I call Mugabenomics, the conjunction of (i) state-forced wealth transfer between two social groups along with (ii) the monetisation of the debt. As we shall see below, Mugabenomics, or at least its mild version implemented now in the Western hemisphere, has drastic consequences on the final episode of the global financial crisis.

Cyprus Officially Passes Capital Controls Into Law + Banksters on Drugs + Cyprus Deposit Levy Vote Delayed, Will Go "Down To The Wire" As Up To 70% Deposit Tax Contemplated For Some

Submitted by Tyler Durden: While it is unknown if the Cypriot parliament will agree to, and enact into law, the Troika-demanded deposit haircuts, after the shocking vote of mutiny against Merkel earlier this week that saw not one politician vote for the Europe suggested deposit tax levy (and even the ruling party abstained), a vote which will once more take place tomorrow, moments ago Cyprus became the first Eurozone country to officially implement governmental capital controls into legislation. At this point it had no choice: whatever happens with the deposit haircut, or with everything else, it is now inevitable that the local Cypriots will do all they can to pull as much money from domestic banking system as possible following the complete loss of faith and trust in banks, which is why the government had no choice but to intervene with its own "controls." Sadly, this marks a milestone in the development of the Eurozone - it's all downhill, and accelerating, from here.

Hydrological (by Hugo) (mash-up)

A journey around our planet's hydrological cycle, from the point of view of a water molecule.

Triple Bubble Implosion Coming - Paul Craig Roberts + FEMA Preparing US Police for 'Domestic War'

AJ: Alex welcomes American economist and renowned columnist Paul Craig Roberts to examine the Cyprus bank crisis situation and America's own crumbling economy. "The European Union, the bureaucracy that comprises the EU is using the crisis to subvert the independence of the individual sovereign states that make up the EU, so the real villain here is the EU bureaucracy, Brussels and the European Central Bank (ECB) which is in line with them and they are making a power play to simply take over the budgets and the authoritative economic decisions of the individual countries!"

Humanitarian Missiles: Turkey's AKP Biggest Player In Bombings - Voice Over Angry Turkish Man + 3 Palestinian Women Visiting London

With Iraq:
I want to say unfortunately the main role player in Iraq, Libya and the Syria war is the AKP ( Erdogan's ruling party ) and most of the bombings in Syria are planned and organised by Turkish - Israeli and American intelligence - the raw material for all the bombings is from Turkey TNT and others

Baby bomber Obama reaffirms eternal ties with apartheid gulag Israel + US, Israel continue to terrorize Palestinians: Mohsen Saleh

Press TV: US President Barack Obama 'the bomber' is currently tripping around what they call Israel and the rest of us know to be Palestine, celebrating as he said the 'eternal' relationship between the United States and the Zionist state.

It's true that 'baby bomber' Obama did say that the Palestinians "deserve" the state. But he did not say where that state would be; how it would be created and when it would arrive. He did condemn Israel's latest proposed new illegal settlements, but he did nothing about the illegal settlements they have already built using United States' money.

Time To Plan For The Worst Rather Than Hope For The Best

Brandon Smith: Preparation for disaster, whether natural or man-made, should be as vital as any ideal found in the various practices of religion and spiritualism. Preparedness should be treated with reverence, discipline and duty. The drive for preparation should be seated in the very heart of humanity. As individuals and as a society, we should hold preparedness dear, for it is an expression of the desire for survival and the key to maintaining our inherent freedoms. Without self-sufficiency, we set ourselves up for endless failure and enslavement.

Preparedness must be approached with passionate resolve; otherwise, there is no point. Halfhearted survivalists are just as likely, if not more likely, to get themselves killed as the average oblivious urbanite and suburbanite. Unfortunately, even in the liberty movement, I have come across many halfhearted and lazy survivalists who would rather hope for the best than prepare for the worst.
The primary issue has always been one of “distraction.” Even those who are fully informed of the very real and immediate dangers to our economy and our Nation as a whole find it difficult not to get wrapped up in the concerns of the old America. Mind-numbing job environments, superficial family dramas, television hypnosis, Facebook narcissism, consumer addictions, improving one’s perceived social status: all of these things waste precious time in our daily lives, making us weak and sapping our resiliency. They encourage us toward apathy. Always, we are telling ourselves: “I did nothing today, but tomorrow will be different.”

I hear many excuses and conflicts in my work as an economic analyst and preparedness adviser. Some come from people who are already in the liberty movement and should know better. Others come from people who for one reason or another seek to dissuade us from personal preparation. Here are just a handful of the many irrational arguments against survival planning that I am confronted with on a daily basis.
"Prepping Is For Crazy People And Chicken Littles"