RAY DALIO: There's No Sensible Reason Not To Own Gold

Ray Dalio, one of the most successful hedge fund managers of all time, spoke with CNBC's Maria Bartiromo at the Council on Foreign Relations this morning. 

The hedge fund god made some interesting comments on gold. 
Here's what we've transcribed from his interview. (emphasis ours) 

"Gold is a currency.  Throughout the history, I won't tell you in length, money was like a check in a checkbook and what you would do was get your gold and gold was like a medium.  So gold is one of the currencies-- We have dollars, we have euros, we have yen and we have gold.

And if you get into a situation where there's an alternative in this world, where we're looking at 'What are the alternatives?' and the best alternative becomes clearly one thing, something like gold, there becomes a risk in that.  

Now it doesn't have the capacity.  The capacity of moving money into gold in a large number is a extremely limited.  So the players in this world that I have contact with that move that money really don't view gold as an effective alternative, but it could be a barometer and it is an alternative for smaller amounts of money.

Marc Faber on Hedging the Bernanke Put and QE3 with Gold, Land and Equities!

The Fed gave the QE-addicted markets another dose of its stimulus drug today as it announced another securities purchase program. The Fed launched an open-ended program to buy $40 billion in mortgage backed securities each month, a program that will continue until the labor market improves. The Fed also committed to record low interest rates even after the economy strengthens. To what end will the Fed pursue this accommodative stance? In response to this action gold climbed to a six month high. Marc Faber, Gloom Boom and Doom publisher, has said that he will not sell any of his gold as long as people like Ben Bernanke are running the world's central banks. We ask Dr.Faber about his near term outlook for gold, and what he thinks of Ben Bernanke's monetary policy.

Ron Paul: "Country Should Panic Over Fed's Decision" + Corruptobernanpithicus

Submitted by Tyler Durden: What took Ben Bernanke sixty minutes of mumbling about tools, word-twisting, and data-manipulating to kinda-sorta admit - that in fact he is lost; Ron Paul eloquently expresses in 25 seconds in this Bloomberg TV clip. Noting that "we are creating money out of thin air," Paul sums up Bernanke's position perfectly "We've Lost Control!"

Paul’s reaction to more Federal Reserve stimulus:

“It should not surprise anybody, but it is still astounding. To me, it is so astounding that it does not collapse the markets.

[Bernanke] said, ‘We are in very big trouble. We are going to do something unprecedented and we believe it will not hurt the dollar.’  And yet the stocks, they say ‘we love this stuff.’ But the dollar didn’t do so well today and the real value of the dollar is measured against gold, and gold skyrocketed

Nigel Farage destroys Barroso's State of the Union

European Parliament, Strasbourg, 12 September 2012

Transcript:
Thank you, well I begin today on a happy note, to remember, that it is twenty years ago this very week that the United Kingdom, having been signed up by the Conservative government to the exchange rate mechanism, broke out of the exchange rate mechanism.

It was a great liberation for us and of course once having been bitten we didn't join the euro project thank goodness. Sadly the same is not true for the rest of Europe and I thought through the last 18 months or so that the economic logic of why Britain left the ERM would apply particular to those Mediterranean countries and I foresaw that actually those countries would leave the eurozone, probably with Greece leaving this year.

But I now have to accept that I've been wrong about that, because I have totally underestimated the complete fanaticism, Mr Barroso of you, your college of commissioners and the European Central Bank.

Banksters Bilking Billions - Max Keiser with 'Boom Bust' Reggie Middleton

Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss David Cameron appointing former bankers to Treasury. We look at another former banker who became a Treasury Secretary only to become a bankster - Robert Rubin - and his role in Citigroup bilking Abu Dhabi of billions. In the second half of the show, Max Keiser talks to Reggie Middleton about Facebook, fraud and financialization. Source

Understanding the GFC - "Ivor Badfeeling, a self-funded retiree" Clarke and Dawe

Psychoanalyzing the Fed + Gordon Long and I discuss "Marginal Return" - Charles Hugh Smith

Few of the many analyses on Federal Reserve policy consider the psychology of diminishing political and financial returns of Fed promises.
Rather than regurgitate the usual economic analysis of the Fed's policies, let's hazard a psychoanalysis of the Fed. Given the primacy of psychological factors in human behavior, it is astonishing how little attention is paid to the psychology of the Fed's statements and policies. 

New video: Gordon Long and I discuss "Marginal Return":

Zero Hedge offered just such a psychological insight (with a deliciously Freudian twist) with this question: Does the Fed need to re-instill some discipline in order to regain its omnipotence? Why (For The Fed) It Is All In The Foreplay
Exactly. Subservience is a slippery slope, and if the Fed "caves in" to market demands for a massive QE campaign, then where is the Fed's vaunted autonomy? It's gone.

‘Vagina’ by Naomi Wolf - 'The Brain Vagina Connection'

By Kate Tuttle: The story of Naomi Wolf’s “Vagina” starts with Naomi Wolf’s vagina.
At 46, in a loving relationship, veteran of years of good sex, she began noticing that her orgasms were less profound and satisfying. Sex was still good, but she “no longer experienced it in a poetic dimension.”
Eventually Wolf’s doctor diagnosed a damaged nerve, which was repaired surgically; still, the crisis sent her on a journey to confirm her instinctive feeling about the “brain-vagina connection” and resulted in this book. Here, Wolf examines the history of how women and men have regarded female sexuality, how they’ve responded to it in art and literature, and how the personal and political coexist, sometimes uneasily, in our feelings about the vagina.

Ecco, via Associated Press

At its best, “Vagina” attempts to reclaim and reframe earlier visions of women’s sexuality and sex organs — Wolf writes stirringly about the near-mystical respect accorded by early cultures to what the Sumerians called the “lap of honey.” Her breakdown of the “[a]luring holes, beautiful boxes, and valuable treasure chests” that serve as codes for female genitalia in Victorian fiction is wonderful, as is her tour of loving, often humorous references in blues songs that praise a woman’s body for its sweetness and strength.
Of the sexual revolution, which she disparages for its anti-Freudian rejection of the vaginal orgasm (and championing of the clitoral), Wolf writes: “The post-1970s ‘reclamation’ of female sexuality . . . is quite mechanical. It is not about the spirit. It is much debased.” Of the contemporary feminist stance that privileges sexual freedom, including an embrace of pornography and promiscuity as sex-positive choices for women as much as for men, she argues that “a nation of masturbating people who are looking at screens rather than at each other . . . is a subjugated, not a liberated, population.”

You Can Tell Evolutionary Psychology Isn’t True Because It’s Not True

Lindy West: 

I don't want to hate evolutionary psychology, but I do. I hate it. It's a field of study that could be legitimately interesting, if it weren't constantly being twisted into a justification for backward (and, frankly, un-evolved) anti-feminist bullshit. Like, sure, maybe a part of me does want a dude who could kick a rogue triceratops to death, because that would be pretty hot (plus, hella triceratops meat!). But a waaaaay bigger part of me wants a dude who laughs at my jokes and cooks the best chicken wings (so good it's fucked up!!!) and will listen to Game of Thrones audiobooks with me in the car on the way to see Ginuwine perform at a local casino. Or, sure, evo psych dudes—maybe I'm just looking for territorial urination and robust thatches of body hair. Whatever. You're probably righter about me than I am. Pesky lady-brain!

So that's why this Slate article made my day. Researchers cross-referenced people's self-professed desires in a mate with the social egalitarianism in their home countries:

Marcel Zentner and Klaudia Mitura of the University of York, U.K., asked more than 3,000 people in 10 countries what they valued in a mate. On a four-point scale, people rated the importance of various qualities: chastity, ambition, financial prospects, good looks, etc.-all identified by Buss and his likeminded peers as being qualities that only men or only women are evolutionarily predisposed to seek out.
The researchers used a World Economic Forum measure of gender equality to rank the 10 countries as (a) relatively gender-equal, (b) backwards but improving, or (c) screamingly sexist (my terms, not theirs). And the results were clear: The more egalitarian the country, the less likely men and women were to value traditional qualities that Buss and co. believe to be innate. In Germany, women said they'd very much like a man who is a good housekeeper. In Finland, men were more likely than women to prefer a mate a bit smarter than themselves. In the United States, women ranked chastity as more important than men did. At the other end of the scale, in Turkey and South Korea, women wanted mates with good financial prospects and men valued good cooks.

Ha ha, ding-dongs. It shouldn't come as a surprise that the most socially evolved countries are the farthest away from our primeval evolutionary priorities. That's what progress means

Images of Minors "We are conditioned to see not as we see, but as we assume some sick person would see."

cthulu2016: (I have noticed that it is increasingly commonplace to consider images of nude human beings under the age of 18 as categorically being "child pornography"—an assumption that even non-sexual youthful nudity is illegal.

This is an unfortunate social trend. If take to its logical conclusion it would require the elimination of a wide swath of art history and it has the loathsome effect of defining children as intrinsically sexual objects.

The nude child is, traditionally, the quintessential symbol of innocence. Most people do not think of children in primarily sexual terms. And the fact that a small segment of the population has corrupt associations does not dictate that society must, or should, internalize the pedophilic gaze, and make it our own.

Consider these two images.



The joke in the Esquire cover is that what is clearly innocent in the classic Coppertone ad would be far from innocent of the girl were an adult.

Consider how we have inverted that sensibility. If the classic Coppertone ad came out today people it would be more controversial than the Esquire cover! Some would say that it is "child pornography" and sexualizes the little girl.

Congressional report calls on TSA to address body scanner health risks and privacy concerns

By Madison Ruppert: In a somewhat surprising report entitled, “Rebuilding TSA into a Smarter, Leaner Organization,” the Subcommittee on Transportation Security of the House Committee on Homeland Security provided a quite strong critique of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), even recommending that the TSA sponsor “an independent analysis” of the now ubiquitous body scanners.
The report not only calls on the TSA to investigate the health risks of the devices but it also recommends the installation of privacy filters on all of the devices.
Finally, our so-called representatives have actually pointed out that the TSA has completely and utterly failed to follow the ruling in the case of the Electronic Privacy Information Center vs. the Department of Homeland Security (EPIC v. DHS) in which a federal appeals court to receive public comments on the devices.
I find it especially absurd that DHS is now working with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) on new airport security technology when the TSA has yet to even properly address the concern surrounding the currently deployed devices.
The report covers several areas of reform broken up into five chapters: refocus on security mission, improve passenger experience and privacy protections, eliminate wasteful spending, support private sector job growth and eliminate unnecessary or burdensome regulations.

The Sources of the Euro Crisis and the EU Superstate with Godfrey Bloom!

Germany's Constitutional Court ruled the Eurozone's permanent bailout fund, also known as the ESM, does not violate the country's laws. Reportedly, there is some ambiguity in the ruling that could beget more political wrangling. Lauren speaks with Godfrey Bloom, Member of the European Parliament and the UK Independence Party, about what motivated the court's decision and the problems that lie ahead for the European Union.