The Heavy Metal War

No, AC/DC aren't fighting Metallica to the death, cool and all though that would be.

I'm talking about the real world war being conducted today. The war that actually matters to us in Ireland, as opposed to the US colonisations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Heavy Metal War isn't being fought with bullets. That's not how the big wars take place anymore. It's being fought on the financial markets, by bankers and speculators and governments.

China, as we all know, has America by the scrota due to its ongoing huge trade surplus and its massive stockpile of greenbacks. Realising that the US, from municipalities, through states all the way up to the Fed, is actually bust, China is now trying to get out of the dollar before America takes them down too.

So they've been buying up Africa, and Australian commodities. Then they decided to stop exporting rare earths. These are obscure elements that are used in modern technology, from laptops to mobile phones. We need them for our toys. China's stopped sending them to us.

But even though China is in one mother of a property bubble, they still have infrastructure to build. They need things like concrete and copper. Oddly enough, one US banker (JP Morgan Chase) just cornered the copper market the other day. They now own half of all the copper on Earth, or 80%+ of the copper traded on the London metals exchange.

So we have a metals war between the US and China, playing out via the markets with banksters as the frontline generals.

It's not the only metal war, though. As the US prints its way out of economic trouble, the logical thing would be for the dollar to collapse into inflation. But that's not entirely happening right now. Why? Because as well as hedging their currency globally (by virtue of its position as the de facto world currency), America has also seen fit to suppress the value of real money, gold and silver.

Keeping the price of gold and silver down effectively keeps the price of the dollar and Dow Jones up.

JP Morgan admitted they were 'shorting' this market recently, after an investigation by regulators. This is the second front of the metals war. JPM have been fighting the price of precious metals down to prop up the dollar at the Fed's request.

Problem is, every time they smack the metals down, buyers pop up in China and India and snaffle up the real money for a bargain. And round and round the liabilities keep going, until sooner or later a stress fracture appears that cannot be papered over by permaprinting greenbacks.

This shit is likely boring the hole off you, so I'll stop there. Let's take a breath. What the fuck has any of this crap got to do with Ireland, you may be asking, if you're still awake?

Well, this is how things get done today. No more marching into the trenches to decide global disputes. Instead, you employ weapons of economic mass destruction and occupy nations via the markets.

That's what has happened in Ireland. Our sovereignty is one of the first casualties in the current world war. Bankers have run up debts, transferred them to our state and then foreclosed on us. Now we are mortgaged to international bankers to the tune of €170,000 each that we never borrowed. That's the size of a house loan. Each. One for every man, woman and child living here.

We can't pay it back. The idea isn't that we pay it back. The idea is that we service the loan for generations, as Germany did with the Versailles payments for WW1, which were only finally paid off the other month.

And while we're paying, our economy remains theirs to do with as they wish. And we remain indebentured debt slaves of the international bankers.

That's why you should care about the Heavy Metals War. Ireland was just a skirmish, a fundraising episode for bankers on the way to taking on China. But China just might be too big a target for them to take down.

For us in Ireland, until we're Back in Black, Nothing Else Matters. (Sorry!) But we don't have to accept our servitude without protest. Iceland conducted an effective guerilla economic war against their banker occupiers and succeeded. We could too.

By reneging on the bank guarantee, we would free ourselves of a hundred billion worth of debts that aren't rightfully ours. However, our politicians do not have the back bone or the sense of responsibility to their citizens that the Icelandic ones do.

But sometimes even the individual citizen can take guerrilla tactics to an occupying power. And this is something you can do too, in this economic war.

JP Morgan Chase are very short on silver. This means they've bet the price will remain low (thereby keeping it low) in order to keep the dollar high. So what can you do? Buy silver.

When you buy silver, you exchange paper money for real money. You make it that little bit harder for the banksters to keep the price low and the dollar high. You bring the banksters who took Ireland out that little bit closer to the precipice themselves. And you do yourself a favour too, by storing your hard-earned labour in real value, real money.

Crash JP Morgan, Buy Silver and let's save Ireland from the banksters.

All that glitters

It's US mid-term election night.

The exit polls are predicting a hammering for the Democrats. That should mean good news for the dollar and bad news for precious metals on the markets.

After all, the perception is that the Obama socialists (US perception, not mine) are flagrant tax-and-spenders, while Republicans are fiscal scrooges.

But of course, these aren't ordinary Republicans. These are people who have to issue ads telling the electorate that they aren't witches. These are ill-educated, small government looneys who have, with the support of frothing-mouthed cheerleaders at Fox News, successfully eaten up the GOP.

The markets like Republicans. But they don't like looneys. They probably like Obama better than they like looneys. (After all, he did bail out Wall Street.)

That fact, coupled with the inevitability of Ben Bernanke's great dollar printing machine going back into overdrive tomorrow, is driving the dollar back down and precious metals up.

Today, the Aussie dollar smashed through parity with the greenback. Expect the Swiss franc and the Canuck dollar to do likewise shortly.

What does this all mean for Ireland? Well, firstly, we're still screwed. The Germans are keeping the euro high in the ongoing currency war, meaning we're buggered on exports outside of the EU (ie to two of our nearest and biggest trading partners, Britain and America, who are both printing money like it was going out of fashion.)

Secondly, a bunch of Tea Party nutjobs won't look outside their narrow national interests. There will be more rabble-rousing about illegal immigrants, and more demands to repatriate jobs back to America. Either President Hopey Changey concedes to some of this rhetoric or he kisses a second term goodbye over two years of lame duck administrating.

The gelding of the Obama administration in conjunction with the destruction of the GOP by Tea Party malignants is not and cannot be good news for us.

Right now, Ireland is so far gone that we need a white knight to save us, and the Germans won't play ball, and the Americans are taking off their armour and hiding in a cave. And for all the Fianna Fail rhetoric and ass-kissing in Beijing, I wouldn't expect any help from the Chinese.

After all, they made their money playing a rigged currency game for the past few years, leading to the current beggar-thy-neighbour currency wars.

In 24 hours, America will look inward. It will look bankrupt. And it will look stupid.

And our Uncle Sam won't be playing sugar Daddy to Ireland possibly ever again.

Catch the pigeon!

It appears that the phoney war between Iran and the USA/UK has reached the levels of cartoon comedy already.

According to reports, the ayatollahs arrested two 'spy pigeons' who were flying suspiciously near their controversial uranium enrichment facility, which the Western powers allege is being used to develop nuclear bomb capacity.

The ever sober and responsible online editors at Sky News' website have produced this mock-up below of the errant birds:

However, I'm more inclined to envisage the event something along the lines of this:


Only, Dick Dastardly would be wearing a big, bushy Mullah beard, Muttley would be in a burqa and the pigeon would be sporting a Star of David, of course.

Obama becoming more unelectable by the day

Apparently it IS possible to make Barack Hussein Obama even more unelectable than he already is.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the next never-will-be-vice-president of the United States, Joe Biden.

Okay, he's an aged white man, just like the Obamaniacs wanted (though one wonders why.)

But he's also one of the wettest eco-liberals in US politics. Not exactly the sort of person to mitigate and soften Obama's own hyper-lefty tendencies so much as exaggerate and amplify them.

Biden's pro-environment, pro-choice, anti-tax cuts, pro-gun control and pro-gay civil unions. Whatever the merits of any of those individual positions, they certainly won't endear the Obama ticket to the MOR Republican-lite voters and undecideds that they need to get over the line in November. If anything, the opposite.

He is vaunted for his foreign affairs knowledge, however. Again, his positions seem unelectable to me. He's in favour of dialogue with Iran and North Korea, the so-called axis of evil, for example. He wants American troops sent into Darfur.

While his pro-Israel views might align him with the US mainstream, they're hardly a standout issue. After all, is there ANYONE in American politics who doesn't give the Zionist regime a carte blanche?

According to the Washington Post, who analysed senatorial voting patterns, pretty much the only Senator with a more liberal voting record than Biden is - Obama, of course.

Response in the States has been predictable:

Glee from the McCain camp, who are delighted to see Obama pick such an unelectable running mate.

More dark murmurings from the Clintonistas and the sisterhood that they don't feel comfortable voting for the Obama ticket, especially without a woman on it, and double-especially without Hilary.

Forced cheer from the true believers, whose initial JFK hysteria is subsiding into an 'Omigod, what have we done?' hangover more and more each day.

What does it all add up to? Another Republican president, of course, albeit a one-termer.

I don't mind adding my voice to the cliche - the Democrats really are set hard on grasping defeat from the jaws of victory, and it looks like they've managed it now.

On Icarus' wings

Ever get the feeling that air travel is becoming impossible?

I don't mean that the physics underpinning flight has been found false. To my knowledge, planes do still take off.

But in recent years, air travel has come a long way from the luxurious pampering and glamour which it was known for in the Sixties and Seventies.

These days, Ryanair flights resemble cattle trucks, with the lame and the disabled abandoned on the tarmac as the other passengers scramble into the world's least comfortable space for a seat.

Other airlines are little different, and totally indifferent to the cares of customers as a recent run-in I had with allegedly decent airline Qantas revealed. (The allegation about Qantas being decent is one I can happily refute, incidentally.)

But now I get the impression that politicians are joining the airlines in making air travel almost impossible.

First the European Parliament decides to levy Green, 'Save the Planet', 'combat carbon emissions' charges upon air travel. In other words, their solution to climate change is that they're going to tax us.

That warped gnome Michael O'Leary warns that this could cost at least 50 euro on every ticket. This is a self-fulfilling prophecy, as he'll hike tickets at least that much and blame the Eurocrats, no matter what slice they carve off for themselves.

Then that bastion of democracy, the United States Department of Homeland Security, reveals that they want to replace air tickets and boarding passes with electric-shock bracelets, designed to torture any traveller at the press of a button.

For a lot of reasons, it looks like we're entering the endgame of the air travel era for the normal person.

Lack of fuel isn't one of those reasons (an excuse, but not a causal reason). The combination of shit service, prices hiked by state, superstate and providers, and finally conditions which now approach actual torture are the real reasons why we're going to start turning our backs on flight.

Which of course is going to make life interesting for anyone living on an unconnected island in the Atlantic.

The meaning of life?

I've just discovered below that there are 42 people with my exact name in the United States of America. Which is strange really, since there were at least two people with that name in my family home when I was growing up, and it was an awful lot smaller than the USA.

The other interesting element of this is the number 42, which as every geek knows is the answer to the meaning of life, the universe and everything in the late and much missed Douglas Adams' Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy.

Like Marvin the paranoid android (above), I'm still pondering the meaning of all of this.

It seems also that there is only one person with Mrs Skinner's name in the US. I think it may actually be her. There is also one person with Mini-Skinner's name in the States too, but I'm pretty sure that's an imposter.

Either way, I'm miffed to discover that they both have more exclusive names than me. Perhaps it's time to review the bad names list and pick something unique to change to. Like Toolio, perhaps. Only we already know there's at least one of them in America already.

HowManyOfMe.com

There are: 42 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

Man down

And the first casualty of the Republican Party's dismal performance in the US elections appears to be Donald Rumsfeld.

Couldn't have happened to a nicer bloke.

Now, will someone please charge him with war crimes and ship him to The Hague to make my joy complete?

This sudden move seems to imply that George Junior reckons it is Iraq that has seen the House and probably the Senate too fall to the Democrats.

Which just shows he really is as thick as people say, since it's clearly the falling house prices, spiralling budget deficit and rising unemployment. In other words, it's still the economy, stupid.