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IVAN....Ivanhoe Energy has been tax-losss sold with abandon recently. I picked up a block of stock here thinking the tax sales are about exhausted and the stock may find support at the nice round number of $1.
http://stockcharts.com/def/servlet/SC.web?c=IVAN,uu[h,a]daolyyay[dd][pb50!b200!f][vc60][iut!Uc20!Lh1...
I've seen other poster's on the boards like it at much higher prices for fundamental reasons.
It's very oversold and could see at the very least a "speculater's snap-back rally" of easily up to 50% soon.
Rogue
OTC....maybe everyone has gone into "deep reflection"???
Maybe those who frequent this board are starting to realize that "roguedolphin" is a true patriot who wants the best for his country and freedom and liberty FOR ALL!
And just maybe people are realizing the AGENDA truly exists....and there are some real "Vipers in the den" trying to destroy our great government and country.
Rogue
New book out exposing the Fascist AGENDA behind 9/11.....
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0930852311/qid=1135116068/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/102-8205390-57129...
Rogue
Global oil addiction to boost coal
Commentary: Energy opportunity lies underfoot
By Kevin Kerr, MarketWatch
BALTIMORE, Md. (MarketWatch) -- Opportunities abound for investors in the energy market right now if we just look at what is being set in motion globally.
The end of the age of oil will not be a disaster if we are prepared for it as investors and consumers. Acceptance is the first step.
Oil is the life blood that moves things, that keeps the whole world functioning and growing. In the last 100 years we have become very spoiled. We have become used to the easily obtained, easily moved and easily processed petroleum, crude oil, and natural gas. We have simply come to expect it will always be there, or at least for our lifetime.
Oil, among other things, helped to develop internal-combustion engines which do the work of a thousand men. Oil is in essence is providing a major workforce throughout the world.
This essentially invisible workforce has allowed the world's population to grow to over six billion people. Not only that, it has allowed us to plow millions of acres of land, to produce fertilizers, to transport people and goods, even to wage global wars and to set up global communication systems. Our dependence on oil and energy as we know it is similar to an addict's powerful affliction. The world's craving and need for oil is just as debilitating.
There is no 'Twelve Step' program
One can argue about the exact moment oil production will peak, but not about its causes -- geological inevitability (there is after all only so much oil) and increased global demand.
At the moment, oil consumption is at record levels and is showing no signs of slowing. The growth is mainly supported by China with its 10% annual growth in oil consumption. The argument that more big "fields" are still to be found on the planet are of little solace. For example the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, if drilled under perfect conditions could only satisfy the world's consumption needs for a few months, if even that long.
Oil reserve data is another flawed concept. The data is at best inaccurate and at worst, completely false. For example, the official oil reserves of the OPEC countries in the mid 1980's grew by billions of barrels almost overnight seemingly like magic. The reason for this was simple. Back then OPEC's internal production quotas were allotted according to the declared reserves of these countries.
Examples of oil addiction are all around us and the results of increased prices are too. Layoffs across all sectors due to fuel costs -- transit companies need subsidies or must increase ticket prices, ambulance and fire stations must decrease the coverage due to fuel costs, farmers cannot afford to purchase fuel for tractors or the nitrogen based fertilizer that is created using natural gas. Politicians are feeling the heat and moving fast to partner up with other countries that can help.
The New World of Energy
In the ever changing energy scene in Eastern Europe and Russia, leaders are scrambling to develop sources of energy as well as partnerships that will continue to provide profits for their respective countries. For example, Russia's Vladimir Putin is looking for someone to head up the Rosneft energy company, preferably a Westerner. He clearly wants a Republican with ties to the White House and toward that end he recently met with Donald Evans. Evans is the former chairman of the Bush 2000 campaign and also a Texas oilman. Evans cold play a key role in Russia's efforts to help Western investors feel safer about investing in the country especially after the Yukos affair. Putin is pulling out all the stops to get Rosneft more positive visibility before its upcoming IPO.
At this moment the United States does not have an energy source that would be as easy to produce and transport as oil. Nuclear power can produce electricity, but the remaining rich uranium ore will last for decades, not for centuries. Renewable energy can probably never cover the current levels of global energy consumption or even U.S. consumption. Projects like the nuclear fusion plant in France that will cost 10 billion euros and hydrogen fuel cells are great concepts but of little practical value. Even if the fusion plant does produce electricity, it won't turn on any light bulbs. Supposedly though it could heat all the oceans, even that's only a theory. So what is a practical solution right now?
Coal -- the perfect stocking stuffer
Santa may be scratching his head about what to give this year. But with coal prices soaring all year long it's not such a bad present. Coal is cheap and reliable and nowadays cleaner burning. As the world goes through painful withdrawal on dependence on oil, coal may help. Coal companies like Consol Energy (CNX) and Foundation Coal Holdings (FCL are two examples of outstanding coal companies that have surged in 2005 and should continue to in 2006. Canadian resource companies are also exploding too, and one coal company there is Western Canadian Coal (CA:WTN: news, chart, profile) .
The rapid depletion of oil will drive demand to other areas like coal, these shares stand to benefit from a rising coal price. Recovery from oil addiction is possible and the long-term easy to reach answer may be in a fuel source that is right under our feet, coal.
***Rogue comment....check out this one, great speculative coal play. There's also been some heavy institutional(a firm recently bought over 10% of the outstanding shares) buying of this one (HLB.to) recently.
http://stockcharts.com/def/servlet/SC.web?c=HLB.TO,uu[h,a]daolyyay[dd][pb50!b200!f][vc60][iut!Uc20!L...
Hesperian Capital Management Ltd. Makes a Significant Investment in Hillsborough Resources Limited
12/19/05
CALGARY, Dec. 19, 2005 (Canada NewsWire via COMTEX) --
Hesperian Capital Management Ltd., which manages a strategically focused group of public and private investment funds, announced today that it has acquired control or direction over 5,078,200 common shares (or 10.48%) of Hillsborough Resources Limited.
The Hillsborough Resources Limited shares are held by Hesperian for investment purposes, and will be reviewed by Hesperian's management on a regular basis. Management may increase or decrease its share ownership of this investment in the future. A copy of the report filed by Hesperian in connection with the acquisition, as required under applicable securities legislation, may be obtained by contacting the office of Hesperian at 1-877-531-9355.
Hesperian Capital Management Ltd. is a Calgary-based investment manager that manages the Norrep Group of Funds. They have approximately $500 million in combined assets.
Visit www.hesperiancapital.com for more details about Hesperian and the Norrep Group of Funds.
%SEDAR: 00017183E
SOURCE: Norrep
SOURCE: Hesperian
Randal L. Oliver, CFA, President, Hesperian Capital Management Ltd., (403) 531-2651, randy@hesperiancapital.com
Rogue
12/19/05 - TraderMike: A Shakeout in the Gold Market
http://216.104.181.206/wallstreetwindow/articles/tradermike121905.htm
Two weeks ago I warned that gold was about to make a climatic top and informed you that I sold almost all of my gold stocks. Last week we saw gold fall over 40 points as it briefly dipped all the way back down below 500 on Friday. Toward the end of the week, however, gold stocks firmed up against the metal giving hope to the idea that gold stocks are going to rally to new highs.
Despite the positive strength in gold stocks late last week, I find it very unlikely that gold or the gold stocks will move up much higher in the short-term. If you look at how intermediate-term tops in gold and gold stocks have been formed over the past few years, they almost always go sideways for one or two weeks after topping and then they fall hard.
In our current situation, to make matters more convincing, they are still in a corrective phase and are digesting the gains made since March. Take a look at the chart of gold above. Any market that makes a parabolic move up, such as this one here in gold, always corrects. I doubt one could find an example of any market in history that has not corrected after making such a parabolic move.
Just think of oil back in October. Energy stocks fell 18% in two weeks after the price of oil topped out in September. But after dropping 18% they quickly bottomed and have been trending up ever since. I think something very similar is in the cards for gold and gold stocks.
I see both continuing to decline over the next four to eight weeks. Gold has support at 492 and then 475. Ultimately, I think it will go to 475 or a few percent below that point before bottoming. The XAU is likely to bottom in the 104-112 area. The correction in gold stocks is likely to be led by the bigger cap names, like Newmont and Goldcorp, not the smaller exploration stocks like Paramount or Fortuna that are on the recommendation list. In fact, some of them may not even drop at all. The reason being that most of the selling is coming from hedge fund momentum managers who bought in near the top simply because the stocks were going higher. Due to a need for liquidity, most hedge fund money flows into the large cap gold stocks, leaving the smaller ones alone.
Right now gold is trying to gather support at 500. It will likely pause or bounce off of that number for a few days before slipping back down below it. I think this is why the stocks acted well on Thursday and Friday - they were looking ahead to a technical bounce in gold. Once that bounce comes and goes the stocks should go back down again, probably by the end of the week. The long-term picture, however, looks even more bullish than ever. 2006 should be a huge year for gold.
In fact, oil provides another angle to thinking about gold right now. Oil stocks have been going up for almost three full years now. However, they didn't get much attention in the press until this year. Bull markets usually come in three stages. The first stage being when insiders and professionals invest in the market. The second stage is when the general public and financial media recognizes that the bull market is real. The third stage is the mania stage when people feel that not only is the bull market real, but it is a MUST OWN situation. Oil entered phase two of its bull market earlier this year. Gold is entering it now.
Even though the gold bull market is now going on its fourth year, up until the past few months it got very little attention in the press. The only people really participating in it were a select group of gold insiders, so called "gold bugs", and a few investment professionals who also understood the gold trend. Over the past six weeks we've seen hedge funds start to flock into the gold market and commentary in the mainstream press is now recognizing that gold is going up.
Typical of this was a comment I saw by one guest on CNBC three weeks ago. This "expert" said that gold was going up and the viewers should buy some if they want to make money. He then said that gold isn't a great long-term investment, but is going up because demand in India for jewelry is growing. I've seen other comments by Wall Street analysts interviewed in newspaper and press wire stories who have said things to the effect that, gold is going up, it is going to keep going up, we don't really know why though. The smarter ones admit they don't know why, the bad ones make up reasons.
For the past few years, the mainstream media has mocked gold bugs whenever it has mentioned the gold trend. Now it is recognizing that the trend is real. This is a sign that we are beginning phase two of the gold bull market. However, phase three will come when the mainstream media and the general public comes to see gold as a 'must own' hedge against inflation or a falling dollar. We are a long way from that happening.
Gold corrections can be tough. You need to realize that this one is likely to continue and prepare yourself mentally to buy back in or add to your position once it comes to an end. Why? Because 2006 is going to bring the biggest move in gold that we've seen yet. Fortunes are going to be made.
The broad market is starting to get sloppy. Although the market has been rising since October, fewer and fewer stocks are participating in the move. The S&P briefly made a new high for the year on Friday, but did so with only 1 out of 10 industry sectors doing the same. The rally is deteriorating, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is over. Almost every year, the broad market rallies in the last two weeks of December and it probably will do so this year again. It is in January when the rally will be in its most vulnerable state.
Rogue
The Would-Be Dictator: How We Got to This Awful Place
by Bernard Weiner, The Crisis Papers
December 20, 2005
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_bernard__051220_the_would_be_dictato.htm
"If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just as long as I'm the dictator." -- George W. Bush, December 18, 2000 (during his first trip to Washington as President-Elect)
It's clear that Bush violated the law by ordering the National Security Agency to engage in warrantless domestic spying on U.S. citizens. So, once again, I have a question for those who, perhaps somewhat reluctantly, voted for George Bush: NOW do you get it?
I posed that same question several months ago, in the wake of the stupendous Bush Administration incompetency that left thousands dead and homeless after Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. Now more and more facts are being revealed (about spying, torturing, lying) that should make it obvious that those residing in the White House are not only bunglers on a grand scale but dangerous to the current and future health of our democratic republic. They should be impeached and removed ASAP before they take us all down with them.
We already knew how they lied and deceived the citizenry into supporting a war against a country that was weak, contained, posing little or no imminent threat to any of its neighbors, and certainly not to the United States. (Recent polls indicate that nearly two-thirds of Americans believe the war was a mistake and the figures are steadily rising for those who think the troops should be brought home as soon as possible.) We already knew how the Bush Administration had effectively turned over environmental and public-health regulation to the polluting industries and drug companies.
But these new revelations about secretly ordering warrantless domestic spying is, as one senator said, an "astounding" violation of how America works as a country of laws.
How could this have happened in a free society? The reasons are many and varied, including a corporate-owned mass media that knew a lot more than it was telling the public. But before we get to the spying and torture scandals -- and the twisted legal reasoning that Bush&Co. use to justify their violating laws whenever they feel like it -- here's my abbreviated chronological take on how we got to this awful place:
THE "OPPORTUNITY" AFFORDED BY 9/11
One could begin with the reasonable presumption that plans for various Administration moves -- taking control of oil abroad, invading Iraq, packing the courts with HardRight judges, neutering the Democratic party, etc. -- were being discussed by Bush&Co. even before the election of 2000. But so much of that was secret.
Let's start with something more public: the tragic events of 9/11. The Bush Administration may not have known the details of those terrorist attacks -- the date, time, and exact targets -- but a barrage of intelligence reports were coming into the White House in the Spring and Summer of 2001 from allies around the globe that a "spectacular" event was about to be launched by al-Qaida on the U.S. mainland.
In the Presidential Daily Briefing of August 6, titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.," Bush was told that the FBI had found evidence of "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York....CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our embassy in the UAE in May saying that a group of bin Laden supporters was in the U.S. planning attacks with explosives." (The Bush Administration apparently ignored intelligence gained after the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center indicating that the terrorists wanted to use airplanes to strike government buildings in Washington.)
Given the urgent warnings from foreign governments along with this PDB, the logical, intelligent, professional thing for Bush to do would be to summon all his key military, intel and emergency-preparedness advisors and figure out how to disrupt the impending attacks. What did Bush and his colleagues do? Absolutely nothing. They chose to look the other way. Nearly three thousand innocents died.
On the morning of the attack, what did Bush do? Absolutely nothing. He sat there with those elementary-school students, and took photos with the teacher and kids, even after his chief-of-staff whispered in his ear that the second tower had been hit and America was under attack. Normally, when there's a possible threat to the president, the Secret Service is trained to surround the guy and whisk him immediately to safety; why was no such policy followed here? Very strange indeed.
What did Rumsfeld do at the Pentagon? Absolutely nothing. He was incommunicado at a meeting in another part of the building when the Twin Towers were hit and collapsed, and when the Pentagon was struck. He emerged only after all the mass-murders had taken place.
Whether all this behavior was simply evidence of utter confusion and/or total incompetence (or, as some would have it, something more sinister) isn't clear. The point is that the Bush Administration did nothing until after the attacks had transpired.
A few days later, then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice told NSC staffers that, given 9/11, the key question now was "how do you capitalize on these opportunities" to fundamentally change American doctrine, and shape the world?..."It's important to try to seize on that and position American interests and institutions," she said.
In that sense, 9/11 was analogous to Pearl Harbor, freeing an administration to act boldly, both internally and abroad, in the face of enemy attacks. Recall the telling quotation, referring to radical military reform, from a 2000 Project for The New American Century report: '"[T]he process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor."' Note: The HardRight founders of PNAC -- among them Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Lewis Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Zalmay Khalilzad, et al. -- a year later became those in charge of U.S foreign/military policy.
Shortly after 9/11, deadly anthrax spores were mailed to media outlets and to Democratic leaders of Congress, causing additional fright and panic. Nobody ever has been charged in the anthrax attacks; the spores were traced back to stock from the Army's Fort Detrick Biological Weapons Lab.
Congress, which was shaken badly, didn't need much convincing to urgently pass the so-called USA Patriot Act, even though virtually no members had the chance to read the final version from the White House. Large sections of the Patriot Act consisted of bills introduced by HardRight conservatives over the years but which were rejected by earlier Congresses as far too violative of civil liberties. (Four years later, finally, the Senate is standing up for the Constitution, refusing to extend the worst aspects of the Patriot Act.)
In short, 9/11 gave the Bush Administration a green light to do whatever it said was necessary to locate and destroy those responsible, and to block future terrorists from doing damage to the U.S. again.
But, as we learned years later, that wasn't all that the Bush Administration was engaged in.
THE DOMESTIC SPYING SCANDAL
The Bush crew claim that whatever seemingly shady actions they take are done to "protect Americans" from future terrorist attacks. For the sake of argument, let's assume that they are acting out of those best intentions.
Even if one were to give them the benefit of the doubt, why would they constantly and consistently find it necessary to hide and disguise what they're doing (even paying media types to publicize their spin) and to violate the law and the Constitutional protections of due process? Why wouldn't they explain what they're doing, why, and get Congress (with the GOP controlling both houses) to pass the necessary authorizing legislation? And, most importantly, why would they do everything possible to ensure that the appropriate federal courts would have no role in evaluating the legal correctness of their approach? I'll provide an answer below, but first consider:
Bush ordered the NSA to begin secret domestic spying, even though the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act restricts the NSA to spying abroad, except in certain circumstances when the FISA court can OK a wiretap or whatever. With Bush's secret order in hand, and the court in the dark, the NSA could forget about seeking warrants for phone-taps, computer invasions, email readings, and who knows what else (breaking&entering? sneak&peek black-bag jobs?).
Alberto Gonzales, the Bush toady who then was White House Counsel (now Attorney General), devised a legal philosophy claiming that the President is permitted to violate laws whenever he asserts he's acting as "commander-in-chief" in "wartime." Since Bush unilaterally has declared that the U.S. is at "war" -- a war with no foreseeable end against terrorists -- he feels he's home free to do whatever he feels is required. (For more on this legal mumbo-jumbo, see "No Other Way to Say This: Torture Memos Reveal Fascist Mentality."
So far as is known, the memos establishing this authoritarian legal strategy are still operative; indeed, Bush used the "commander-in-chief" rationale in his most recent radio address and news conference when attempting to justify his ordering the NSA to spy inside the country. To "protect the American people," Bush effectively said, I did it, I'll do it again, what are you going to do about it? Gonzales likewise is pounding the theme that the president is acting legally when acting illegally. (When Richard Nixon tried to sell the president-is-above-the-law justification, the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed that argument quickly.)
"WE DON'T TORTURE" RE-DEFINED
Similarly, to get around U.S. laws and international treaties against torture, Gonzales and Rumsfeld's lawyers at the Pentagon, simply redefined torture to mean causing either death or organ-failure; anything else, including "waterboarding" (near-drowning) and beatings and shootings, pass the test. So, follow the reasoning here: If the interrogation doesn't kill the prisoner or result in organ-failure, ipso facto it's not "torture," and Bush and Rice and the others can baldly assert that "we don't torture." (They have yet to explain the estimated 100+ or more deaths of detainees in U.S. care. Oops.)
Uncooperative high-value detainees are either spirited to secret CIA prisons around the globe for interrogation -- in Poland, Romania, North Africa, etc. -- or are "rendered" to countries (Egypt being one) that are less squeamish about inflicting excruciating pain. The CIA even has its own planes to fly those suspects to the secret CIA prisons or to the "rendering" countries.
One could go on and on, but you get the central idea: The Bush Administration believes itself to be, and acts in accordance with that belief, that it is above the law, untouchable. By any definition, that is a dictatorship -- maybe not a total dictatorship, yet, but heading full-steam in that direction.
And they're willing to draw the line in the political sand right now, making their stand in the face of a tidal-wave of revulsion and anger, probably because they figure Karl Rove's in-your-face approach -- come and get me, copper! -- has worked in the past, so why not one more time? Besides, they may figure that things are going to get worse for them months down the line, when even more Republicans will desert them, so why not try to stanch the flow of impeachment talk now, while they still can call in their markers from the GOP faithful in Congress.
IT'S THE P.N.A.C. PLAYBOOK
This bullying, take-no-prisoners attitude, it should be noted, mirrors the philosophy behind the brazen foreign/military policy laid out by PNAC in 2000 and which became the official National Security Strategy of the United States two years later: acting unilaterally, courting no competitors for power, steamrolling and destroying opposition by any and all means necessary.
From this point of view, there can be only one locus of power in America: The Chief Executive. The time-honored "checks and balances" between the three branches of government, under Bush&Co., are no longer valid -- they're sort of "quaint," to borrow Gonzales' term about the Geneva Conventions.
The Judicial Branch is either frozen out of the equation where possible, or packed with like-minded HardRight ideologues who believe in Executive dominance. The Legislative branch is run pretty much by the GOP leadership as an appendage to the White House's political agenda, with the Democrats (made to seem "unpatriotic" if they question Bush's war and torture policies and the like) shuffled off into a backwater, with no real power or influence. The corporate-owned mainstream media, the Fourth Estate, which normally would be the public's watchdog over legislative and executive perfidy, seems content to play lapdog instead.
AN END-AROUND THE JUDICIARY
On those rare occasions when the Judicial and/or Legislative branches stand up and assert their rightful place in the checks-and-balance system of government, the Bush Administration finds ways to go around whatever restrictions are placed on Executive power. Let's take three recent examples:
1. After 9/11, the Bush Administration, exercising what amounts to police-state powers, began rounding up terrorist suspects -- including American citizens -- and throwing them in prisons without recourse to any judicial review, or even contact with an attorney. Several years later, the U.S. Supreme Court finally received a case about such authoritarian treatment of detainees, and ordered the Administration to grant the prisoners access to the court system where they could challenge the legality of their incarceration.
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor was as blunt about the Administration's illegal misbehavior as could be imagined -- and she's a staunch conservative: The court, she wrote in reference to American citizen Yaser Hamdi, ''made clear that a state of war is not a blank check for the president when it comes to the rights of the nation's citizens."'
The response of the Bush Administration to the detainee decision was, in effect, to ignore the court's order. Promises were made, some papers were shuffled, etc., but in practice not much changed. Some prisoners, who had been imprisoned for several years ("the worst of the worst," we were assured when they were first incarcerated), were released as not being threats after all. Few have had their day in court in Bush's military tribunals, and attorneys furnished them by the Administration have denounced the process as pretty much of a fixed farce. Lower courts, packed with Bush appointees, have been supportive, and the Administration is hoping that with two new justices appointed to the Supreme Court -- who will support wide-sweeping Executive power during "wartime" -- the original Hamdi ruling will be overturned. If that were to happen, fascism would have come full flower in America.
THE TORTURE ESCAPE HATCHES
2. Last week, facing rebellion in his own GOP ranks and a united Democratic opposition, Bush seemed to cave on the McCain Amendment that would put the U.S. officially on record as not permitting torture to be carried out on prisoners in U.S. care. Politically it was, on the surface, a major humiliation for Bush, who had vigorously opposed the McCain Amendment and threatened to veto any legislation to which it was attached.
McCain came off looking good, but, in reality, he'd been outmaneuvered by Rove, Cheney and Rumsfeld.
Bush agreed to McCain's language because that trio already had neutered the impact of the amendment. They were able to carve out enough legalistic wiggle room to permit the continuation of torture, without much fear of political or judicial retribution.
For example, those who reasonably believe they are following lawful orders would be permitted to continue their "enhanced" interrogation methods. (It's the old "I was only following orders" ploy -- a defense used by Nazi war-criminals that was disallowed at the Nuremburg Tribunals.)
Note that the McCain amendment said nothing about the ongoing practice of "extraordinary renditions" to countries allied with the U.S. where tortures of high-level suspects are carried out for the Bush Administration.
3. Finally, McCain and others tied their ban-on-torture amendment to the well-respected Army Field Manual that carefully defines what constitutes acceptable (and successful) interrogation methods and what would go over the line into abuse and torture. Pulling the rug out from under McCain, Rumsfeld simply had the Army Field Manual rewritten to permit "harsh" interrogation methods -- and stamped the descriptions of what is now permissible with a "classified" label, to prohibit quoting from them. (An unnamed Pentagon official suggested that the alteration of the Field Manual was designed to be "a stick in McCain's eye.")
As in all things, he who controls the dictionary controls the world. Torture now means what the Bush Administration says it means, so there -- unless enough ruckus can be generated to get them to back off. (Assistant Defense Secretary Stephen Cambone still has to approve the final Field Manual language.)
In short, thanks to Bush & Friends, U.S. torture is alive and well, despite the reasonable words that appear on a no-torture amendment overwhelmingly ratified by Congress. Needless to say, the Bush Administration's torture practices are the best recruiting tool for Muslim extremists, doing great damage to America's long-term national security.
IMPEACHMENT AS AN URGENT NECESSITY
Momentum is moving against the Bush Administration as more and more indictments are delivered against key aides and supporters in the innumerable scandals. (You may wonder why so few Democrats are being indicted. Early on, Bush&Co. made sure that the Democrats were frozen out of the power loop, therefore the big-money lobbyists and bribers went to the locus of power -- i.e., to the Republicans.)
Since we don't have official "votes of no-confidence" in our system of government, electorally we have to wait until November 2006 to get the Republicans out of power in the House so that impeachment hearings can begin, and in the Senate, so that a possible conviction can be obtained. (All this pre-supposes that we finally get an honest, verified voting system in place, with no more outsourcing of vote-counting to partisan corporations, in this case Republican-supporting, who use secret coding and who easily can manipulate the tally-results.)
But non-electoral solutions are available:
* So much citizen pressure could be put on Democratic and Republican incumbents, anxious to preserve their jobs, that they will vote to initiate impeachment hearings in the next few months. Certainly, there are enough grounds to justify, at the least, calling for impeachment hearings in the House: the felonious outing by Administration officials of a CIA agent for political reasons, Bush's unlawful order to the NSA to spy on U.S. citizens inside the country, commiting perjury before Congress to obtain authorization for war on Iraq -- well, those will do for starters. There are no shortages of willful "high crimes and misdemeanors" in Bushland.
* Or, another option, perhaps a bit more fanciful at the moment, though perhaps more realistic next year: Republican corporate and political leaders will see the handwriting on the wall -- and the long-term effects on the economy of keeping the disgraced, corrupt Bush regime in power -- and urge Bush and Cheney to resign, for the good of the party and the country.
So our job now, as I see it, is first to supply energy and political cover to the Democrats, Independents and traditional Republicans who want to see the reckless reign of Bush&Co. ended, while we're moving the impeachment ball forward day by day by leaning on our opinion-makers and elected officials to start the process of transformation back to a government of which we can once again be proud.
If this takes massive civil disobedience to convince the elected officials that the citizenry is serious, and that they may be ousted at the ballot box if they don't challenge Bush's crimes, so be it. It's time to move; America can't take much more.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bernard Weiner, Ph.D., has taught government & international relations at various universities, worked as a writer/editor with the San Francisco Chronicle, and currently co-edits The Crisis Papers (www.crisispapers.org). To comment: crisispapers@comcast.net .
Originally published by The Crisis Papers and Democratic Underground 12/20/05.
Copyright 2005 by Bernard Weiner.
www.crisispapers.org
Bernard Weiner, Ph.D. in government & international relations, has taught at various universities, worked as a writer-editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, and currently co-edits The Crisis Papers (www.crisispapers.org).
Rogue
I favor our current "Republic" over a "Democracy" ANYDAY without a DOUBT!!
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/AmericanIdeal/aspects/demrep.html
We are now a Republic!!! I don't want fascistic "mob rule" which can and most likely will accompany a Democracy.
This "Democracy" we incessantly hear about from the Neo-cons will certainly bite us all in the ass!! Our Constitution and the Bill of Rights stands in the way of these modern day Fascists.
Am I alone in this belief???? Have I... like Alan Greenspan, read too much Ayn Rand in my day?
"Mob Rule" is quite a possible and likely "threat" in a Democracy especially since the "elite powers that be" have the brains and the financial wherewithawal to completely obfuscate and distort the truth for their AGENDA.
"THEY" know how to "push the buttoms" to manipulate the "unwashed masses" just like Pavlov's dog "salivating at the ring of a bell" with their propaganda.
The "Democracy" we hear about from the neo-cons is very Fascistic and reminds me very much of Adolph Hitler's visions of a "New World Order". Is it frightening that Hitler had the German people so willing to believe his "great lies" and accept his visions of a grand Germany???
He destroyed his own Government with the burning of the Reichstag building. I see the same pages from the "Nazi playbook" being used today to get the American people to believe the "Big Lie". What's next to scare the American people into submission and destroy our great REPUBLIC???
President John F. Kennedy had a very good idea what the CIA "was" and what they were up too..... that's why they murdered him. It was either the CIA or Kennedy....one had to go.
Kennedy was actively getting rid of the "Nazi Skull and Bones" faction of the CIA (he fired 3 of them just days before his death).....so they "wacked" him.
Then his brother who was running for the US Presidency was killed, then Martin Luther King was "taken out".
The extremely popular and high profile son of JFK at the time ...."John John" Kennedy, just days after he let his George magazine co-workers know of his intention for running for the US Senate for New York state..... was "murdered" in the air. The news media coverage of that event was so "bogus" as to have me nearly kicking my TV set.
Senator Ted Kennedy is a drunk who "knows his place"( so he's no threat to them now). Will he ever talk? Who know's??.....
Former CIA Director Willaim Colby started talking again later in his life just days before he was "wacked" in 1995 just after the Oklahoma City bombing.(He's the CIA director that was fired and very "oddly", if you don't know the REAL reason, was replaced with George H.W. Bush{allegedly never worked for even a day for the CIA previously!} back in 1975).
So the AGENDA rolls on!!.......(please watch the absolutely fascinating free 92 minute documentary on the murder of John F. Kennedy on this link!!)
http://www.government-propaganda.com/skull-n-bones.html
God Save our Republic!!!
Rogue
"Emerging Candian oil/gas companies from the Iradesso Report....
http://www.stockhouse.ca/pfolio.asp?page=customview&portID=207949&viewid=3276
(let me know if the link works for you guys!)
Lot's of possible "home runs" may be lurking on this portfolio that tracks some Canadian listed energy plays from the last Iradesso report.
Lot's of potential "DD" stuff here!
Let me know if anyone finds anything they like!!!!
Rogue
YIWAE...I have no position at this time. I happily traded my way out of my loss on this one.
I would pull the bid and see where the dust settles for now. It could get really "wacked" on the pinks. This is really reminding me of YDHCF which I took a beating on.
Interesting that YDHCF stopped filing a while back and went pink and it got smashed into the penny or two range. Now just yesterday(Dec.19,2005) YDHCF "out of the blue" files a 20F with the SEC. This comes(the 20F) several days after very unusual high volume in the stock at a few pennies. They show a loss for 2004 but what about 2005? Now the offer is at 7 cents and "sell the rumour,buy the fact" may be at work here.
At least they(YDHCF) are filing again and the stock may have a run in 2006. I'm long(stuck?) 100,000 shares of YDHCF but it may get a pump from JM Dutton Brokerage or Jonathan Lebed again??
Anyway ......the same scenario may play out in YIWAE. So I'm "flat" and looking for "capitulation" and "rebirth" in much the same way I believe may be happening with YDHCF.
The fact of no filing for YIWAE may mean a large loss and sitting in the "dumpster" of "pinkieland" for awhile. I'm following it.....but being careful not to jump the gun.
Rogue
TG WORLD ENERGY CORP (TGWEF.PK)/TGE.v.... My "boat is loaded" on this one.....
http://stockcharts.com/def/servlet/SC.web?c=TGE.V,uu[h,a]daolyyay[dd][pb50!b200!f][vc60][iut!Uc20!Lh...
Cannacord Capital and David Pescod had a big favorable write up on this one after the bell today. Should have a good rally tommorow.
Long-term this is "zip-code changer" material.
Rogue
I favor our current "Republic" over a "Democracy" without a DOUBT!!
We are now a Republic!!! I don't want fascistic "mob rule" which can and most likely will accompany a Democracy.
This "democracy" we hear about from the Neo-cons will certainly bite us all in the ass!! Our Constitution and the Bill of Rights stands in the way of these modern day Fascists.
Am I alone in this belief???? Have I... like Alan Greenspan, read too much Ayn Rand in my day?
"Mob Rule" is quite a possible and likely "threat" in a Democracy especially since the "elite powers that be" have the brains and the financial wherewithawal to completely obfuscate and distort the truth for their AGENDA.
"THEY" know how to "push the buttoms" to manipulate the "unwashed masses" just like Pavlov's dog "salivating at the ring of a bell" with their propaganda.
The "Democracy" we hear about from the neo-cons is very Fascistic and reminds me very much of Adolph Hitler's visions of a "New World Order". Is it frightening that Hitler had the German people so willing to believe his "great lies" and accept his visions of a grand Germany???
He destroyed his own Government with the burning of the Reichstag building. I see the same pages from the "Nazi playbook" being used today to get the American people to believe the "Big Lie". What's next to scare the American people into submission and destroy our great REPUBLIC???
President John F. Kennedy had a very good idea what the CIA "was" and what they were up too..... that's why they murdered him. It was either the CIA or Kennedy....one had to go.
Kennedy was actively getting rid of the "Nazi Skull and Bones" faction of the CIA( he fired 3 of them just days before his death).....so they "wacked" him.
Then his brother who was running for the US Presidency was killed, then Martin Luther King was "taken out".
The extremely popular and high profile at the time "John John" Kennedy, just days after he let his George magazine co-workers know of his intention for running for the US Senate for New York state..... was "murdered" in the air. The news media coverage of that event was so "bogus" as to have me nearly kicking my TV set.
Senator Ted Kennedy is a drunk who "knows his place"( so he's no threat to them now). Will he ever talk? Who know's.....
Former CIA Director Willaim Colby started talking again later in his life just days before he was "wacked" in 1995.(He's the CIA director that was fired and very "oddly", if you don't know the REAL reason, was replaced with George H.W. Bush back in 1975).
So the AGENDA rolls on.......
God Save the our Republic!!!
Rogue
ABN.v/(ABNAF.PK)CONS ABADDON RES......Bought a nice block of this Canadian uranium asset play today. This can be a "10-bagger" and more in a few years if it pans out.
http://stockcharts.com/def/servlet/SC.web?c=ABN.V,uu[h,a]daolyyay[dd][pb50!b200!f][vc60][iut!Uc20!Lh...
It's very oversold here technically on tax-losss selling and could be good for at least a good "January effect" bounce. Looking for and expecting at least a 100% gain from this level in 2-3 months.
Rogue
Hey "Brainwashed man".....Can you tell me why George H.W. Bush was named Directer of the CIA in 1975 when he had allegedly no "experience" whatsoever with that organization???
Why would he be put in that position with absolutley no experience??????????
WHY?
WHY?
WHY?
Tell me OTC??? Freedom and Democracy??
Don't make me laugh!!
ALL PLEASE WATCH THE VIDEO DOCUMENTARY ON THE MURDER OF JFK!!!!
http://www.government-propaganda.com/skull-n-bones.html
Hiel Hitler!
Rogue
OTC...I made some revisions to my previous post.
http://www.investorshub.com/boards/read_msg.asp?message_id=8954238
I've posted several links to Hitler and Nazism between Skull and Bones and now I'll drop another BOMB on you!!
Were you or are you aware of former US Senater Prescott Bush's(The grandfather of our current President and the father of our former CIA directer/President) link to the financing and buildup of Adolph Hitler????
Hmmm...were you????
See this documentary video(92 minutes long) on the JFK assassination and they'll show you the historical link to Adolph Hilter!!!!!
http://www.government-propaganda.com/skull-n-bones.html
Truth can be "stranger than fiction"...I'm NOT MAKING THIS UP!!!
Hiel Hitler!!
Rogue
otc.....Your democracy is VERY DANGEROUS to my and any individuals "god-given unalienable freedoms" that a Republic ensures.
Your statement...."When a "representative" is carrying out the will of the people then I suggest to you that is democracy in action."...... sends SHIVERS DOWN MY SPINE!
Wasn't Adolph Hitler carrying out the "will of the people" when he went after the "bad guys" he framed when he burnt down the Reichstag?(Germany's government building...like "terrorisits burning our Capital building or White House)???
Your "Democracy" is a recipe for the loss of all our Freedoms in the Bill of Rights. The AGENDA knows it and has sold you OTC a "Bill of Goods". You've bee snookered. I wish you WERE RIGHT and I WAS WRONG!!
But the facts support how our leaders are suppressing the individual rights for their version of Democracy! Hiel Hitler!!
A Republic
"A Republic, on the other hand, has a very different purpose and an entirely different form, or system, of government. Its purpose is to control The Majority strictly, as well as all others among the people, primarily to protect The Individual’s God-given, unalienable rights and therefore for the protection of the rights of The Minority, of all minorities, and the liberties of people in general. The definition of a Republic is: a constitutionally limited government of the representative type, created by a written Constitution--adopted by the people and changeable (from its original meaning) by them only by its amendment--with its powers divided between three separate Branches: Executive, Legislative and Judicial. Here the term "the people" means, of course, the electorate.
This system of Constitution-making, for the purpose of establishing constitutionally limited government, is designed to put into practice the principle of the Declaration of Independence: that the people form their governments and grant to them only "just powers," limited powers, in order primarily to secure (to make and keep secure) their God-given, unalienable rights. The American philosophy and system of government thus bar equally the "snob-rule" of a governing Elite and the "mob-rule" of an Omnipotent Majority. This is designed, above all else, to preclude the existence in America of any governmental power capable of being misused so as to violate The Individual’s rights--to endanger the people’s liberties."
Rogue
otcbargains...I've had enough of your Fascistic "Democracy" from these neocon creeps.
I'd like you to read this.....
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/AmericanIdeal/aspects/demrep.html
An Important Distinction: Democracy versus Republic
It is important to keep in mind the difference between a Democracy and a Republic, as dissimilar forms of government. Understanding the difference is essential to comprehension of the fundamentals involved. It should be noted, in passing, that use of the word Democracy as meaning merely the popular type of government--that is, featuring genuinely free elections by the people periodically--is not helpful in discussing, as here, the difference between alternative and dissimilar forms of a popular government: a Democracy versus a Republic. This double meaning of Democracy--a popular-type government in general, as well as a specific form of popular government--needs to be made clear in any discussion, or writing, regarding this subject, for the sake of sound understanding.
These two forms of government: Democracy and Republic, are not only dissimilar but antithetical, reflecting the sharp contrast between (a) The Majority Unlimited, in a Democracy, lacking any legal safeguard of the rights of The Individual and The Minority, and (b) The Majority Limited, in a Republic under a written Constitution safeguarding the rights of The Individual and The Minority; as we shall now see.
A Democracy
The chief characteristic and distinguishing feature of a Democracy is: Rule by Omnipotent Majority. In a Democracy, The Individual, and any group of Individuals composing any Minority, have no protection against the unlimited power of The Majority. It is a case of Majority-over-Man.
This is true whether it be a Direct Democracy, or a Representative Democracy. In the direct type, applicable only to a small number of people as in the little city-states of ancient Greece, or in a New England town-meeting, all of the electorate assemble to debate and decide all government questions, and all decisions are reached by a majority vote (of at least half-plus-one). Decisions of The Majority in a New England town-meeting are, of course, subject to the Constitutions of the State and of the United States which protect The Individual’s rights; so, in this case, The Majority is not omnipotent and such a town-meeting is, therefore, not an example of a true Direct Democracy. Under a Representative Democracy like Britain’s parliamentary form of government, the people elect representatives to the national legislature--the elective body there being the House of Commons--and it functions by a similar vote of at least half-plus-one in making all legislative decisions.
In both the Direct type and the Representative type of Democracy, The Majority’s power is absolute and unlimited; its decisions are unappealable under the legal system established to give effect to this form of government. This opens the door to unlimited Tyranny-by-Majority. This was what The Framers of the United States Constitution meant in 1787, in debates in the Federal (framing) Convention, when they condemned the "excesses of democracy" and abuses under any Democracy of the unalienable rights of The Individual by The Majority. Examples were provided in the immediate post-1776 years by the legislatures of some of the States. In reaction against earlier royal tyranny, which had been exercised through oppressions by royal governors and judges of the new State governments, while the legislatures acted as if they were virtually omnipotent. There were no effective State Constitutions to limit the legislatures because most State governments were operating under mere Acts of their respective legislatures which were mislabelled "Constitutions." Neither the governors not the courts of the offending States were able to exercise any substantial and effective restraining influence upon the legislatures in defense of The Individual’s unalienable rights, when violated by legislative infringements. (Connecticut and Rhode Island continued under their old Charters for many years.) It was not until 1780 that the first genuine Republic through constitutionally limited government, was adopted by Massachusetts--next New Hampshire in 1784, other States later.
It was in this connection that Jefferson, in his "Notes On The State of Virginia" written in 1781-1782, protected against such excesses by the Virginia Legislature in the years following the Declaration of Independence, saying: "An elective despotism was not the government we fought for . . ." (Emphasis Jefferson’s.) He also denounced the despotic concentration of power in the Virginia Legislature, under the so-called "Constitution"--in reality a mere Act of that body:
"All the powers of government, legislative, executive, judiciary, result to the legislative body. The concentrating these in the same hands is precisely the definition of despotic government. It will be no alleviation that these powers will be exercised by a plurality of hands, and not by a single one. 173 despots would surely be as oppressive as one. Let those who doubt it turn their eyes on the republic of Venice."
This topic--the danger to the people’s liberties due to the turbulence of democracies and omnipotent, legislative majority--is discussed in The Federalist, for example in numbers 10 and 48 by Madison (in the latter noting Jefferson’s above-quoted comments).
The Framing Convention’s records prove that by decrying the "excesses of democracy" The Framers were, of course, not opposing a popular type of government for the United States; their whole aim and effort was to create a sound system of this type. To contend to the contrary is to falsify history. Such a falsification not only maligns the high purpose and good character of The Framers but belittles the spirit of the truly Free Man in America--the people at large of that period--who happily accepted and lived with gratification under the Constitution as their own fundamental law and under the Republic which it created, especially because they felt confident for the first time of the security of their liberties thereby protected against abuse by all possible violators, including The Majority momentarily in control of government. The truth is that The Framers, by their protests against the "excesses of democracy," were merely making clear their sound reasons for preferring a Republic as the proper form of government. They well knew, in light of history, that nothing but a Republic can provide the best safeguards--in truth in the long run the only effective safeguards (if enforced in practice)--for the people’s liberties which are inescapably victimized by Democracy’s form and system of unlimited Government-over-Man featuring The Majority Omnipotent. They also knew that the American people would not consent to any form of government but that of a Republic. It is of special interest to note that Jefferson, who had been in Paris as the American Minister for several years, wrote Madison from there in March 1789 that:
"The tyranny of the legislatures is the most formidable dread at present, and will be for long years. That of the executive will come it’s turn, but it will be at a remote period." (Text per original.)
Somewhat earlier, Madison had written Jefferson about violation of the Bill of Rights by State legislatures, stating:
"Repeated violations of those parchment barriers have been committed by overbearing majorities in every State. In Virginia I have seen the bill of rights violated in every instance where it has been opposed to a popular current."
It is correct to say that in any Democracy--either a Direct or a Representative type--as a form of government, there can be no legal system which protects The Individual or The Minority (any or all minorities) against unlimited tyranny by The Majority. The undependable sense of self-restraint of the persons making up The Majority at any particular time offers, of course, no protection whatever. Such a form of government is characterized by The Majority Omnipotent and Unlimited. This is true, for example, of the Representative Democracy of Great Britain; because unlimited government power is possessed by the House of Lords, under an Act of Parliament of 1949--indeed, it has power to abolish anything and everything governmental in Great Britain.
For a period of some centuries ago, some English judges did argue that their decisions could restrain Parliament; but this theory had to be abandoned because it was found to be untenable in the light of sound political theory and governmental realities in a Representative Democracy. Under this form of government, neither the courts not any other part of the government can effectively challenge, much less block, any action by The Majority in the legislative body, no matter how arbitrary, tyrannous, or totalitarian they might become in practice. The parliamentary system of Great Britain is a perfect example of Representative Democracy and of the potential tyranny inherent in its system of Unlimited Rule by Omnipotent Majority. This pertains only to the potential, to the theory, involved; governmental practices there are irrelevant to this discussion.
Madison’s observations in The Federalist number 10 are noteworthy at this point because they highlight a grave error made through the centuries regarding Democracy as a form of government. He commented as follows:
"Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed, that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions."
Democracy, as a form of government, is utterly repugnant to--is the very antithesis of--the traditional American system: that of a Republic, and its underlying philosophy, as expressed in essence in the Declaration of Independence with primary emphasis upon the people’s forming their government so as to permit them to possess only "just powers" (limited powers) in order to make and keep secure the God-given, unalienable rights of each and every Individual and therefore of all groups of Individuals.
A Republic
A Republic, on the other hand, has a very different purpose and an entirely different form, or system, of government. Its purpose is to control The Majority strictly, as well as all others among the people, primarily to protect The Individual’s God-given, unalienable rights and therefore for the protection of the rights of The Minority, of all minorities, and the liberties of people in general. The definition of a Republic is: a constitutionally limited government of the representative type, created by a written Constitution--adopted by the people and changeable (from its original meaning) by them only by its amendment--with its powers divided between three separate Branches: Executive, Legislative and Judicial. Here the term "the people" means, of course, the electorate.
The people adopt the Constitution as their fundamental law by utilizing a Constitutional Convention--especially chosen by them for this express and sole purpose--to frame it for consideration and approval by them either directly or by their representatives in a Ratifying Convention, similarly chosen. Such a Constitutional Convention, for either framing or ratification, is one of America’s greatest contributions, if not her greatest contribution, to the mechanics of government--of self-government through constitutionally limited government, comparable in importance to America’s greatest contribution to the science of government: the formation and adoption by the sovereign people of a written Constitution as the basis for self-government. One of the earliest, if not the first, specific discussions of this new American development (a Constitutional Convention) in the historical records is an entry in June 1775 in John Adams’ "Autobiography" commenting on the framing by a convention and ratification by the people as follows:
"By conventions of representatives, freely, fairly, and proportionately chosen . . . the convention may send out their project of a constitution, to the people in their several towns, counties, or districts, and the people may make the acceptance of it their own act."
Yet the first proposal in 1778 of a Constitution for Massachusetts was rejected for the reason, in part, as stated in the "Essex Result" (the result, or report, of the Convention of towns of Essex County), that it had been framed and proposed not by a specially chosen convention but by members of the legislature who were involved in general legislative duties, including those pertaining to the conduct of the war.
The first genuine and soundly founded Republic in all history was the one created by the first genuine Constitution, which was adopted by the people of Massachusetts in 1780 after being framed for their consideration by a specially chosen Constitutional Convention. (As previously noted, the so-called "Constitutions" adopted by some States in 1776 were mere Acts of Legislatures, not genuine Constitutions.) That Constitutional Convention of Massachusetts was the first successful one ever held in the world; although New Hampshire had earlier held one unsuccessfully - it took several years and several successive conventions to produce the New Hampshire Constitution of 1784. Next, in 1787-1788, the United States Constitution was framed by the Federal Convention for the people’s consideration and then ratified by the people of the several States through a Ratifying Convention in each State specially chosen by them for this sole purpose. Thereafter the other States gradually followed in general the Massachusetts pattern of Constitution-making in adoption of genuine Constitutions; but there was a delay of a number of years in this regard as to some of them, several decades as to a few.
This system of Constitution-making, for the purpose of establishing constitutionally limited government, is designed to put into practice the principle of the Declaration of Independence: that the people form their governments and grant to them only "just powers," limited powers, in order primarily to secure (to make and keep secure) their God-given, unalienable rights. The American philosophy and system of government thus bar equally the "snob-rule" of a governing Elite and the "mob-rule" of an Omnipotent Majority. This is designed, above all else, to preclude the existence in America of any governmental power capable of being misused so as to violate The Individual’s rights--to endanger the people’s liberties.
With regard to the republican form of government (that of a republic), Madison made an observation in The Federalist (no. 55) which merits quoting here--as follows:
"As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust: So there are other qualities in human nature, which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence. Republican government (that of a Republic) presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form. Were the pictures which have been drawn by the political jealousy of some among us, faithful likenesses of the human character, the inference would be that there is not sufficient virtue among men for self government; and that nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another." (Emphasis added.)
It is noteworthy here that the above discussion, though brief, is sufficient to indicate the reasons why the label "Republic" has been misapplied in other countries to other and different forms of government throughout history. It has been greatly misunderstood and widely misused--for example as long ago as the time of Plato, when he wrote his celebrated volume, The Republic; in which he did not discuss anything governmental even remotely resembling--having essential characteristics of--a genuine Republic. Frequent reference is to be found, in the writings of the period of the framing of the Constitution for instance, to "the ancient republics," but in any such connection the term was used loosely--by way of contrast to a monarchy or to a Direct Democracy--often using the term in the sense merely of a system of Rule-by-Law featuring Representative government; as indicated, for example, by John Adams in his "Thoughts on Government" and by Madison in The Federalist numbers 10 and 39. But this is an incomplete definition because it can include a Representative Democracy, lacking a written Constitution limiting The Majority.
From The American Ideal of 1776: The Twelve Basic American Principles.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
For another great article on the differences between a Democracy and a Republic, including many additional quotes, visit this site.
Rogue
Distinguished University of Minnesota Philosophy Professor Joins 9/11 Fight, Saying the Truth Must Be Uncovered
James H.Fetzer, PhD., has publicly thrown his hat in the ring to support other professors seriously questioning and casting doubt on the official 9/11 story.
16 Dec 2005
By Greg Szymanski
http://www.arcticbeacon.com/articles/article/1518131/39247.htm
A University of Minnesota philosophy professor, like an unexpected Christmas snowstorm, has dropped a large bundle of holiday cheer on the 9/11 truth movement, as this week he has thrown his hat into the ring with others seeking the truth.
“I stand with Steve Jones, professor of physics at BYU and David Ray Griffin, professor emeritus of Theology at Claremont and other students and scholars of 9/11, who believe that extraordinary times require extraordinary measures,” said James H. Fetzer, PhD., a distinguished McNight University professor at the University of Minnesota at Duluth.
Professor Fetzer now becomes another in a long list of academicians, including Jones and Griffin, who have cast severe doubt on the credibility of the government’s official 9/11 story, calling for a renewed debate and independent investigation to get at the truth.
Fetzer has published more than 100 articles and reviews as well as 20 books in the philosophy of science and on the theoretical foundations of computer science, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science.
According to his biography on this web page, his publications have been divided by area, including special vitae for computer science, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, evolution and cognition, and his applied philosophical research on the death of JFK.
Fetzer, who just entered the public 9/11 arena this week, agreed to appear next Monday on Greg Szymanski’s nationwide radio show, the Investigative Journal, on the Republic Broadcasting Network at www.rbnlive.com to explain why he has joined in the 9/11 truth fight.
As expected, a philosophy professor digs deep into the heart of the matter, dissecting words and meanings Before talking about specific evidence, Fetzer provides this illuminating discussion on “conspiracy theories,” relating to 9/11 in a recent paper he wrote called “Thinking About Conspiracy Theories: 9/11 and JFK.”
“One fascinating aspect of 9/11 is that the official story involves collaboration between some nineteen persons in order to bring about illegal ends and thus obviously qualifies as a conspiracy theory,” wrote Fetzer.
“When critics of the government offer an alternative account that implicates key figures of the government in 9/11, that obviously qualifies as a ‘conspiracy theory’, too. But what matters now is that we are confronted by alternative accounts of what happened on 9/11, both of which qualify as "conspiracy theories". It is therefore no longer rational to dismiss one of them as a "conspiracy theory" in favor of the other. The question becomes, which of two ‘conspiracy theories’ is more defensible?”
After setting the record straight on conspiracy theories, Fetzer in his paper delves into an analysis of the 9/11 evidence, saying that the controlled demolition of the WTC must be taken seriously.
“Most Americans may not realize that no steel-structure high-rise building has ever collapsed from fire in the history of civil engineering, either before or after 9/11,” wrote Fetzer. “If we assume that those fires have occurred in a wide variety of buildings under a broad range of conditions, that evidence suggests that these buildings do not have a propensity to collapsed as an effect of fire. That makes an alternative explanation, especially the use of powerful explosives in a controlled demolition, a hypothesis that must be taken seriously.”
Besides the WTC, Fetzer also provides a detailed analysis of the Pentagon crash, questioning as many before him, “What Really Happened?”
In his paper, he states:
“If a small fighter jet rather than a Boeing 757 had hit the Pentagon, that would tend to explain the small impact point, the lack of massive external debris, and a hole in the inner ring of the building, which the fragile nose of a Boeing 757 could not have created.
“It would also suggest why parts of a plane were carried off by servicemen, since they might have made the identification of the aircraft by type apparent and falsified the official account. A small fighter also accommodates the report from Danielle O'Brien, an air traffic controller, who said of the aircraft that hit, "Its speed, maneuverability, the way that it turned, we all thought in the radar room—all of us experienced air traffic controllers—that it was a military plane.”
In concluding his academic look at 9/11, Fetzer boldly asks Americans to Endeavour to seek the truth in every possible way, suggesting the “government-dominated” mass media has presented one of the biggest obstacles.
“Which raises the question, who had the power to make these things happen and to cover it up,” asks Fetzer. “Once the evidence has been sorted out and appropriately appraised, the answer is no longer very difficult to find. Like the assassination of JFK, the events of 9/11 required involvement at the highest levels of the American government.
“This conclusion, moreover, receives confirmation from the conduct of our highest elected officials, who took extraordinary steps to prevent any formal investigation of 9/11 and, when it was forced upon them by tremendous political pressure, especially from the survivors of victims of these crimes, they did whatever they could to subvert them. There are good reasons for viewing The 9/11 Commission Report (2004) as the historical successor to and functional equivalent of The Warren Report (1964).
“I therefore believe that those of us who care about the truth and the restoration of responsible government in the United States have an obligation to make use of every possible media venue from talk radio and the internet to newspapers and television whenever possible. The American people can act wisely only when they know the truth.
“So, while the truth is said to "make us free", the truth only matters when the American people are able to discover what is true. Obstacles here that are posed by the government-dominated mass media, including the use of stooge "reporters" and of prepackaged "news releases", only make matters that much more difficult. As John Dean asks in Worse than Watergate (2004), if there has ever been an administration more prone to deceiving the American people in our history, which one could it be?”
Greg on the Radio.
Listen to my Radio Broadcast live every Monday night at 8pm Pacific time on LewisNews Radio. Look for program scheduling each week at http://webs.lewisnews.com/radio/index.htm. Greg is also a weekly regular on "The Power Hour with Joyce and Dave," a three-hour syndicated daily radio broadcast on the Genesis Network, broadcasting on many AM/FM stations nationwide. Greg appears every Monday at 7a.m to 8a.m. Pacific time.
Streaming audio can be heard at:
Internet: http://www.m2ktalk.com ; http://www.whri.com
Rogue
RGYLF or RGY.V....I recently sold half my position to lock in some profits of nearly 100%.
http://stockcharts.com/def/servlet/SC.web?c=RGY.V,uu[h,a]waolyyay[df][pb50!b200!f][vc60][iut!Uc20!Lh...
Although the stock is great "value" it is pretty overbought on the charts and I am hoping to try to "reload" it on an oversold condition.
Rogue
Oil Shale -- a skeptical view...
Oil shale may be fool's gold
Extraction hurdles are high
By Randy Udall and Steve Andrews
DenverPost.com
Buried underground in western Colorado are a trillion tons of oil shale. For a century, men have tried and tried again to unlock this energy source. But the rocks have proved stubborn, promising much, delivering little.
Recently, the U.S. Department of Energy published a new report on oil shale. It claimed that the nation could wring "200,000 barrels a day from oil shale by 2011, 2 million barrels a day by 2020, and ultimately 10 million barrels a day" from fields in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. These predictions - both the production targets and their timing - are preposterous, as some industry experts admit.
But hyping oil shale is nothing new. As geologist Walter Youngquist once wrote, "Bankers won't invest a dime in 'organic marlstone,' the shale's proper name, but 'oil shale' is another matter."
California Rep. Richard Pombo and Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch are spearheading efforts to jumpstart the industry. "I find it disturbing that Utah imports oil from Canadian tar sands, even though our oil shale resource remains undeveloped," says Hatch.
In truth, oil shale presents a paradox. If these rocks are, as some claim, the richest fossil fuel resource on Earth, why has it been so difficult to unlock them?
The primary explanation is that oil shale is a lousy fuel. Compared to the coal that launched the Industrial Revolution or the oil that sustains the world today, oil shale is the dregs. Coal seams a few feet thick are worth mining because coal contains lots of energy. If coal is good, oil is even better. And oil shale? Per pound, it contains one-tenth the energy of crude oil, one-sixth that of coal.
Searching for appropriate analogies, we enter the realm of Weight Watchers. Oil shale is said to be "rich" when a ton yields 30 gallons of oil. An equal weight of granola contains three times more energy. America's "vast," "immense" deposits of shale have the energy density of a baked potato. Oil shale has one-third the energy density of Cap'n Crunch, but no one is counting on the Quaker Oats Company to become a major energy producer soon.
Historically, oil shale has been mined, crushed and roasted in large kilns, or "retorts." The slag, swollen in volume and contaminated with arsenic, must then be disposed. The process is so costly, laborious and polluting that global output has never exceeded 25,000 barrels a day, compared to 84 million barrels of conventional oil production.
In the last 150 years, humans have used 1 trillion barrels of conventional oil. The second trillion will be consumed in the next 30 years. Given projected demand for fuel, Royal/ Dutch Shell has been experimenting with a new way to produce shale oil, a way that is, at first glance, more promising.
Humor columnist Dave Barry once demonstrated that if you put a "strawberry Pop-Tart in a toaster for five minutes and 50 seconds, it will turn into a snack-pastry blowtorch, shooting flames up to 30 inches high." Putting a chunk of oil shale into your toaster would not offer similar excitement, but in a strange way, Shell's fascinating experiments near Rangely resemble something Barry might attempt if he had the money to build the world's largest underground toaster oven.
The plan is audacious. Shell proposes to heat a 1,000-foot-thick section of shale to 700 degrees, then keep it that hot for three years. Beam me up, Scotty, but first share some details. Imagine a 100-acre production plot. Inside that area, the company would drill as many as 1,000 wells. Next, long electric heaters would be inserted in preparation for a multi-year bake. It's a high-stakes gamble, but if it works, a 6-mile-by- 6-mile area could, over the coming century, produce 20 billion barrels, roughly equal to remaining reserves in the lower 48 states.
Although Shell's method avoids the need to mine shale, it requires a mind-boggling amount of electricity. To produce 100,000 barrels per day, the company would need to construct the largest power plant in Colorado history. Costing about $3 billion, it would consume 5 million tons of coal each year, producing 10 million tons of greenhouse gases. (The company's annual electric bill would be about $500 million.) To double production, you'd need two power plants. One million barrels a day would require 10 new power plants, five new coal mines. And 10 million barrels a day, as proposed by some, would necessitate 100 power plants.
How soon will we know whether Shell's technology is economic? The company plans to do more experiments, before making a final decision by 2010. If it pulls the trigger, it would be at least three or four years before the first oil would flow, perhaps at a rate of 10,000 barrels a day. That's less than one-tenth of 1 percent of current U.S. consumption. But if it turns out that Shell needs more energy to produce a barrel of oil than a barrel contains, bets are off. That's the equivalent of burning the furniture to keep the house warm. Energy is the original currency; electricity its most valuable form. Using coal-fired electricity to wring oil out of rocks is like feeding steak to the dog and eating his Alpo.
In a ham-and-egg breakfast, the chicken is involved but the pig is committed. With half the world's oil shale resources located here, our region is committed. Another recent report by the RAND Corp. warned that if oil shale developers "overstress the environmental carrying capacity of the area, we may never see more than a few hundred thousand barrels per day of production." Amen.
Large-scale development of the kind proposed by the U.S. Department of Energy and Pombo would be a disaster. The DOE casually dedicates all of western Colorado's surplus water to oil shale, proposes enormous open-pit mines 2,000 feet deep, and advocates retorting up to 6 billion tons of shale each year. That's twice the tonnage of all coal mined in the U.S. and China. This is not a vision, it is a nightmare.
Americans love panaceas. We want thinner thighs in 30 days, a pill to cure baldness, an ultrasonic carburetor that will double our mileage. A magic wand would be nice, because the nation faces serious energy challenges. Since domestic oil production peaked 30 years ago, the need for energy efficiency, conservation and renewable energy has been obvious. Instead, like an addict on a binge, we continue to pursue a policy of "strength through exhaustion." Drilling the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge before improving our woeful vehicle efficiency is one example of this brain-dead approach.
What contribution can oil shale make to energy security? Producing 100,000 barrels per day of shale oil does not violate the laws of physics. But the nation currently consumes that much oil every seven minutes. Improving the efficiency of our automobiles by 2 miles per gallon would save 10 times as much fuel, saving consumers $100 billion at the pump. The National Academy of Sciences has stated that cars, trucks and SUVs that get 30, 40 or 50 miles per gallon are doable. An aggressive national commitment to fuel efficiency is not optional, it's inevitable. In time, a more efficient fleet could save 20 times as much petroleum as oil shale is likely to ever provide.
All hype aside, oil shale is the poorest of the fossil fuels, containing far less energy than crude oil, much less even than hog manure, peat moss or Cap'n Crunch. A meager amount of energy, tightly bound up in an enormous volume of rock, oil shale seems destined to remain an elusive bonanza, the petroleum equivalent of fool's gold.
Randy Udall directs the Community Office for Resource Efficiency, a nonprofit energy office in Carbondale. Steve Andrews is a Denver-based energy expert.
Rogue
Latest from Coxe...
Nesbitt Burns Institutional Client Conference Call for December 16, 2005
Don Coxe
Chicago
[The webcast of the call cut off the beginning, so Don starts below in mid-sentence.]
…call was suggesting that maybe The Great Symbiosis was threatened because of the fall in the Yen. And the fall in the Yen was the key. Once people saw that it seemed to be breaking out of its trading range relative to the Dollar and the Renminbi indicating that maybe all the open spats between Japan and China, signaled by the fact that at this meeting that was held in Asia this week that Hu Jintao refused to speak to Koizumi, indicated that maybe this situation which had underlain the whole global monetary system since 1998 was going to give way.
And that of course was a crucial thing for judging everything else, because the deal that began in October 1998 after the collapse of Long Term Capital, where the Japanese revised upwards sharply the value of the Yen, undoing the stealth devaluation they had done, was a key to all sorts of things in the world, most particularly to generating the purchase of about 1.3 trillion in Treasuries and the foreign exchange reserves of China and Japan which was the thing that allowed the US consumer boom to progress the way it did.
Because despite the Fed funds rate going from 1% past 4, that long-term interest rates did not go up. As shown by the fact, for example, this year, the T-Bond futures - which is sort of one way to measure the long end of the US bond market - are up modestly, up .4%. So when you put in the running yield on the T-Bonds what you have is returns on the T-Bonds this year, which are higher than the returns on NASDAQ. And not many people would have predicted that knowing that the Fed was going to be tightening at every single meeting.
So, The Great Symbiosis has been so important to our overall asset calls, that the thought that this was going to unravel was something we wanted to alert people to. And the fact that this was driving this thirty-five dollar move in gold so suddenly, where gold was going up at a time that the Dollar was going up, because of course the Yen is so important in the Dollar index, was something that was stunning to a lot of people. We were getting arguments such as “Well, the gold market senses that all the inflation statisitics are fraudulent, we’re going to have gigantic global inflation. You got to get in to gold now.” None of that was true.
This week, of course, the CPI was negative in the US because we didn’t have another rise in the price of energy, it actually went down for the month. And we’re still of the position that ex-energy, not only the US CPI but world CPI is in very, very modest levels, around the 2% range, despite the fact we’re nearly four years into an economic recovery.
So, the reversal that’s occurred this week is truly dramatic. And we’ve taken the Yen down from…it was cruising along at around the 121 level and as we alerted you last week, 122 was to us, a line in the sand that Japan [he probably meant to say China] had drawn back then. They told the syndicate of three hundred bankers bailing out Indonesia that the Yen had to go up from at least the 145 range that it was then, to 122. That was their minimum target.
So it’s fascinating to see the trading action of the Yen in recent weeks, just how that trading range held up. That it went to 121, it did not touch 122, and it reversed. And we’ve had this sharp rally in the value of the Yen, taking it from the 121 and change all the way to 115.80. And that of course has brought gold back down to the 500 range.
And so the big story is that we aren’t going in to year-end facing some kind of global financial crisis, which allows us to look at everything else. Our approach has always been that we talk in terms of long-term investment themes. We try to use five-year themes in what we talk to you about. But we keep a weather eye out there for sudden storms.
And to us, the big thing to us that would signal that the game had changed and that you had to start moving in to shore would be a move in the Yen, which would trigger a breakdown of The Great Symbiosis. And then we wouldn’t know what safety net there was under the Dollar. And without having a safety net under the Dollar, then some pretty ugly things could happen. Now, it would be good if you owned gold, but it wouldn’t be good if you owned much else.
And so, this evidence that once again, that Japan is once again, however unhappily, not let the Yen get devalued below that level that China warned them about is a sign that as much as these countries may resent each other, that they’re still run by rational people. And so we have, I think, the chance is for a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year instead of a major global financial crisis.
And that’s of course, unalloyed good news. But it means that we’re going to have to watch the value of the Yen as being one of the most important indicators going forward. Because there’s nothing else out there which gives us this direct correlation into a gigantic policy arrangement, which is this new currency environment.
As you know, we’ve taken the position that there have been three global currency environments. The first was the Bretton Woods, 1944, the second was the Plaza and its successors beginning in 1985 and now we are in the Beijing-Tokyo axis.
And there will be a successor to this and it’s not going to last forever, but in the meantime, what it does is allow the bond markets of the world at long-term interest rates to all or to remain at low levels, which is the gigantic underpinning of global economic growth. It’s not…when the US Treasury bonds don’t break down then you get remarkably low yields around the world. And we’ve got all these bond markets of the world where the long 10-year bonds are trading with a three handle, despite an economic recovery and despite the huge move in oil and natural gas and in the industrial metals.
That gives us a chance then to look at what else is out there from an investment concept going through year-end. Now there’s no doubt that part of what’s happened here is that the US hedge funds who’ve been short the Yen and long the 10-Year note have been having to unwind their position and put on currency hedges, but what they clearly have not done is heavily sold the 10-year note. Because we’re looking at 4.43 on the 10-Year note today.
So it looks as if the hedge community has concentrated on Euro funding, which we always thought was the most important aspect of how the carry trade was being done. And that still remains a good pick-up, but no as glorious a pick-up as there was in the past and certainly not the pick up you get if you’re borrowing in Yen and long in the 10-Year note.
So, the world is undoubtedly short the Yen, which is one of the reasons why, of course, the Yen could never have been the global store of value. And to have a currency as the global store of value with zero interest rate is an oxymoronic thought.
And what this illustrates though, is that the Yen plus the Renminbi are the new global store of value and that the Dollar is very much at risk for the decisions that we made and the transactions that will occur going forward among most currencies. And that it’s part of the concept that this is Asia’s century and it underlies our view that we’ve got to remind everybody that this is the first economic recovery in two centuries where the incremental unit of demand comes out of China and India, not out of the United States and not out of the OECD. And that is so important in evaluating what investments will outperform.
Now, on a year-to-date basis it’s been no contest as to which sections of the market have done well. Those that are tied in to China and India, which is the energy and the base metal stocks, they’ve had tremendous returns. If we use, as our proxy, for the base metals, we use the TSX Capped Mining Index, it’s up 42 ½% this year. And the XOI, which is the US oil stocks, it’s up 40%. The XAU, which is gold, is up 23%, as against a 5% move for the S&P, a 1% move for the Dow and a 3.8% move for NASDAQ.
So, the theme of the upcoming issue of Basic Points, which will come out early next week, is the fundamental mispricing in the US market and to a lesser extent, global markets. Which is, that there’s a pretty efficient market operating in the non-commodity sectors of the stock market, because you have thousands of economists, strategists and analysts who are following each tick of economic numbers within the OECD and the analysts covering the large-cap stocks, which have really done very little in this millennium. So there’s very efficient pricing there.
But within the mining and oil sectors of the market, we have very few analysts covering them. And it relates to our basic line…our Obesity Index. Which is, that obesity is dangerous to your financial health if you invest in an equity group where the weight of analysts on Wall Street is heavy in relation to the group’s weight in the index, you’re going to lose.
What you want are the Anorexic Index, a few scared, skinny analysts who are too frightened to issue a bullish forecast. That helps to explain why it is that for four years now the Wall Street consensus on oil prices and on the earnings of the oil companies has been that they’re going down. And in the base metal stocks, why it is that such low price assumptions are used for the base metals going forward.
For a while, this was vindicated by the forward curve for the base metals because there was such a deep backwardation. And even though the backwardation remains, it’s not as intense as it was and now we have a situation where even looking further out on the copper futures, which are the ones that are the most easily obtained, what we see is that they’ve been moving up. And so, next year’s copper, that is, a year from this date, it’s 1.79 now. And that’s so far above the kinds of numbers that are used by analysts - Wall Street analysts at least – in their earnings forecasts, that we see that there’s still mispricing there.
Now, as you know, the second mispricing that we’ve talked about and discussed in this Basic Points is the mispricing of the commodity stocks within their own group, based entirely on earnings or cash flow. And that is, as if they were just stocks like the rest of the stock market. But since what makes them commodity stocks is commodities, what you really have to do is say “Well what distinguishes them is the value of their reserves.” And it’s got to be reserves in the ground in politically secure areas of the world.
And, oh boy, we’ve had lots of news in the last seven days to vindicate that way of evaluating the big stocks.
This week the big oil companies operating in Venezuela had to capitulate to Chavez, giving up a significant percentage of ownership in the fields they’re currently producing a half a million barrels a day of oil on and those fields are a big constituent of the Reserve Life Index of ExxonMobil and Total.
So what we see then, is with a stroke of the pen, that reserves get deleted. And this has been a bad three weeks for ExxonMobil, because they lost the exploration leases off Angola, which Lee Raymond had indicated was something they could make up for the fact that they were not counting on Russia or Venezuela going forward. And it just illustrates that political security is a big part of the evaluation of these assets. And now we switch over to the mining side and the news has been really bad.
We’ve got an election in Bolivia this weekend and it looks really bad. And it’s a Chavez-backed person who’s likely to win that. Now Bolivia is not a big deal anymore, we’re not talking about the Patino tin mine, but it is a major natural gas producer and this is viewed as something where the natural gas thing will be nationalized.
But the victory for this radical in Bolivia suggests that the next big election, which is Peru next year, the leader in the polls there is somebody who actually makes Chavez look somewhat moderate and a Chavez ally with financial backing from Chavez. And so this is already knocking the Peruvian stock market down. And we’re talking here about the world’s fourth biggest copper producer.
This is not a trivial election. Because if these mines are nationalized, and the candidate there is talking about abolishing currencies and abolishing private property, I mean, he’s a true radical and a person who’s been prepared to actually engage in open warfare. It’s hard to put a good spin on this story.
And yes it’s true Phelps Dodge has some production there, but Phelps Dodge’s biggest reserves are Arizona and Chile. And in Chile, they’re going to have elections there although it’s a Social Democrat who’s favored to win, this is a moderate. And so, we’re taking out from the world’s secure copper reserves, a significant part. Just because of politics.
So this helps to explain why it is our enthusiasm for the big mining stocks who have operations around the world and that they have a lot of reserves in politically secure areas of the world. And therefore, I think that the market will start to make these kinds of distinctions going forward.
So far this year, although it’s true that the oil sands stocks have outperformed short reserve life stocks, the market still doesn’t really get it, in terms of how much more they’re worth. And I think that that is going to unfold next year. Apart from the fact that we’re going to have the SEC ruling, I assume at some point next year, I don’t know how much longer they can put it off. But if you look at…just using a leading US oil producer, such as Apache, which is up 39% this year, a great number indeed and just about exactly on the US XOI index, but Suncor is up 84%.
So that’s a sign of how much people are starting to realize what the value is of multi-decade reserves. And I believe that this is going to be a fundamental part of how the stock markets are going to evolve next year. That we are going to go at the two kinds of mispricing.
I believe the commodity stocks will gain weight in the indices going forward because they’ve been supplying such a gigantic percentage of the earnings gains of the indices, so they will assume a heavier weight. And that within the commodity stock groups, that analysts will start to evaluate them by what’s in the ground as opposed to what their current or near-term earnings are. So this we discuss in the upcoming issue in more detail. But, as I say we can do this with rather more calm and comfort now that we’re not worried about some kind of financial crisis, that doesn’t mean that we can’t keep a weather eye out for the Yen.
Therefore I’m quite comfortable with the notion that we don’t have to alter any of our investment asset mix recommendations. I never like to do them precipitously, but I was worried if we’d gone through that 122 Yen level that this would mean that some caution, extreme caution, would suddenly be in order.
So, those of who say “Well you alarmed us last week and everything’s gone fine, now why did you do that?” Well, I’m fundamentally risk-averse and so if a basic part of the thesis that I’ve been using for years for evaluating financial assets is threatened, you can bet that I’m going to say, yes I still have a long-term view of the value of these stocks but something could happen in the near-term which could be quite devastating for the financial markets. That’s no longer the case, so relax and enjoy the upcoming season and that’s it and let’s have questions.
[no questions]
Okay well if there’s no questions at this time then we will talk to you next week. And given what’s going to be happening next week with vacations, the call will come to you on the 22nd, Thursday the 22nd. So have a good weekend.
Don Coxe Profile from the BMO websites:
Donald G. M. Coxe is Chairman and Chief Strategist of Harris Investment Management, and Chairman of Jones Heward Investments. Mr. Coxe has 27 years experience in institutional investing, including a decade as CEO of a Canadian investment counseling firm and six years on Wall Street as a 'sell-side' portfolio strategist advising institutional investors. In addition, Mr. Coxe has experience with pension fund planning, including liability analysis, and tactical asset allocation. His educational background includes an undergraduate degree from the University of Toronto and a law degree from Osgoode Hall Law School. Don joined Harris in September, 1993.
Don Coxe Weekly Conference Call – Current
http://bmoharrisprivatebanking.com/webcast.asp
Basic Points – Archive
Basic Points is a monthly publication of opinions, estimates and projections prepared by Don Coxe of Harris Investment Management, Inc. (HIM) and BMO Harris Investment Management Inc.:
http://www.harrisnesbitt.com/bresource/basicpoint/default.asp
Rogue
How does BDGR "tie in" with PTLDE and OMOG?? That's what I'd like to know.
Are the Lanza guys involved in any way with BDGR?
Rogue
otc......Bluntly, you are buying into the propaganda of highly paid "touts" like Hannity and Limbaugh.
I arrived "where I am at"....(farther out there than Rogue lol!) by alot of studying of facts over decades. Some things just don't "FIT" with me, as well as growing numbers of other Americans. I've been top of class at some of the best schools so I'm no dummy and you're not going to sell me "the Brooklyn Bridge"....I know propaganda when I smell it.
I think an understanding of the murder of JFK and more recently "9/11" should have every American guarding the freedoms this nation was founded on.....the Bill of Rights is a treasure for individual freedoms that the neo-con fascists despise and call a "useless piece of paper".
The War on Iraq is not going to do anything except usher in Fascism and ultimately destroy our individual freedoms in this country........unless enough Americans wake up!
Rogue
echos....You are so right!!! I am "aghast" that an extremely intelligent man like Lentinman can so casually disregard the foundation of our freedoms....The Bill of Rights!
We're in "deep do-do" if this type of thinking is more than just an abberation.
The "AGENDA" rolls on....will it be the rise of the Fascist Police State and the destruction of America?
I certainly hope there are enough good Americans left to save our country from the group of vipers within trying to destroy it!!
Rogue
Len...."If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. It's about time those who have something to hide start to fear!! Those who fear the most scream the loudest."
That's shameful and I'm very dissapointed you say things like that.
What about Nazi Germany? Is this America or Nazi Germany? Did you ever see the movie "The Piano Player" by Roman Polanski??
Because I know the truth and speek it do I need to fear for my life when the door knocks in the middle of the night?
Please see "The Diary of Anne Frank"....
THIS IS BONE CHILLING!!!!!!!!!!!
Hiel Hitler!
Rogue
US Govt. Energy Forecast
Adam Hamilton Dec 18
http://321energy.com/editorials/hamilton/hamilton121805.html
Wall Street seems to have a pathological aversion to acknowledging the long-term secular bull market in commodities unfolding today. This is unfortunate since big Wall Street firms have such great influence over the information that ultimately reaches mainstream investors.
The primary facet of this Great Commodities Bull is energy, the crucial fuels that make all global commerce possible. Rising energy prices herald wondrous opportunities for investors, but Wall Street has largely chosen the head-in-the-sand approach. It wants to ignore rising energy prices since their bull markets will ultimately weigh on the market-darling sectors like technology.
The higher energy prices rise, the more consumer disposable income is diverted to paying for energy. When consumers have less to spend, they buy fewer products made by the big American publicly traded corporations. Lower sales mean lower corporate profits. And lower profits make current valuations far too high so stock prices must correct to reflect the new fundamental realities. Thus, Wall Street is no friend of energy.
But as investors, our mission is to seek to maximize our returns while minimizing our risks. Today there are probably no other sectors on the planet that better reflect this higher-potential lower-risk ideal than the various energy sectors. Today energy stocks generally have low valuations, they are cheap relative to their profits, and the energy prices that drive these profits are likely to rise for many years to come, driving profits even higher.
Investors owe it to themselves to bypass the de facto Wall Street embargo on energy information and learn why the opportunities in energy today are so awesome. A fascinating report just released by the US government this week, its new 25-year forecast for the energy industry, does a wonderful job explaining why energy fundamentals remain so phenomenally bullish. Everyone who manages money, from individual investors to professional fund managers, needs to read this report.
It is called the Annual Energy Outlook 2006 (Early Release), henceforth AEO. It is available at www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/aeo/index.html. As this web address indicates, the AEO is published by the Energy Information Administration (EIA), the statistical branch of the US Department of Energy (DoE) that compiles all of the official energy statistics for the US federal government. This is the official position of the government of the United States of America on energy trends.
I think you will agree with me that rising energy prices are politically incorrect. Remember Congress having hearings about gasoline and oil prices in recent months? Americans hate paying more for energy, so they whine whenever prices rise, and Congress responds by parading CEOs in front of cameras and hammering them with ridiculously naïve questions. Thus, the EIA has every incentive to lowball its estimates to keep its political masters happy. So we can probably safely assume that information out of the AEO is conservative.
This latest AEO captured my attention this week because the EIA radically departed from its previous energy stance. Prior to a few days ago, the official DoE oil price projection was around $33 per barrel in 2025 in today's dollars. This week its projections were raised by 2/3rds to $54 in 2025 in today's dollars. If the 2.7% average annual CPI inflation rate of the last 5 years is applied to the next 25 years, the DoE is officially forecasting $112 oil in 2030!
This is a financial bombshell. I cannot count the number of times I have heard or read Wall Street analysts justifying their belief that $30 oil was right around the corner by citing official US government predictions. With these very predictions now forecasting oil to conservatively rise to $112 nominal in the next 25 years, much of the intellectual foundation under the $30 oil fantasy has been shattered. Investors and money managers have to realize that we have entered a new fundamental energy paradigm.
The US government now believes oil supplies will remain tight for decades to come. The AEO says, "The United States and emerging Asia - notably, China - are expected to lead the increase in demand for world oil supplies, keeping pressure on prices through 2030." The US government now expects that world oil demand is going to rise from 82m barrels per day in 2004 to 111m bpd in 2025, a 35% increase.
This is a staggering amount of additional global demand, equivalent to the output of 29 new Alaska oil pipelines coming online (assuming current Alaska pipeline throughput)! The US will account for about 1/5th of this global demand growth. In the US alone the DoE predicts domestic demand growth of 25%, from 20.8m bpd to 26.1m bpd.
Where will all this oil come from? The US expects OPEC nations to grow their production by 42%, from 31m bpd today to 44m bpd in 2025. The rest of the world will have to grow its production from 52m bpd today to 67m bpd in 2025, a 29% increase. Actual US oil production is expected to grow modestly from 5.4m bpd today to 5.9m bpd in 2014 at its next interim peak, and then taper off to 4.6m bpd by 2030.
60% of US oil is still expected to be imported in 2025, and OPEC will shoulder much of the burden. This is interesting in light of the growing number of analysts who believe Saudi Arabia has already or will soon hit its peak production. If Saudi production peaks soon, it's unlikely that OPEC will be able to grow its production by 42%.
If these new DoE forecasts prove even remotely correct, the opportunities these secular trends present to investors today are staggering. Globally most of the easy oil to find has already been found. It is getting more and more difficult to find new oilfields, and giant elephant field discoveries have become extinct. Even the elite oil companies of the XOI only have sufficient reserves today to cover 11 more years of production. The best of the companies that own oil reserves and sell oil are going to become immensely valuable.
In the current issue of our Zeal Intelligence newsletter I did a study on oil-stock valuations. The elite XOI oil stocks are trading under 11x earnings on average. Compare this to 31x average earnings for the market-darling NASDAQ 100 tech stocks. Why pay $31 for a dollar of tech-stock profits when you can pay $11 for an identical dollar of oil-stock profits?
Oil stocks are cheap today fundamentally, their product is getting more scarce by the day, and it is extraordinarily difficult for new companies to enter the industry since so much capital is necessary. What a phenomenal investment opportunity!
Wall Street's irrational fear of a secular bull market in oil and antipathy towards companies that produce it as reflected in their low valuations is just plain dumb. The best investors are sector-neutral, they don't care in which industry they invest as long as it is going to be wildly profitable. The new AEO offers a great deal of fundamental predictions suggesting oil-stock investors are likely to reap fortunes in the years ahead. We are currently deploying into the most promising oil stocks in our newsletters to ride this wave.
High oil prices create interesting peripheral investing opportunities as well. For example, global peak production of light-sweet crude has probably already been reached, so the proportion of world oil that has high sulfur content (sour) will only grow. Sour crude is less expensive since it can't command light-sweet's premium price. Refineries that specialize in this difficult-to-refine sour crude are likely to soar. We are researching sour-crude refining and have already started layering in trades in our Zeal Speculator alert service.
The AEO also addressed natural gas, probably the second most-important source of energy today after crude oil. It expects real natural gas prices to decline gradually from today's high levels but it is still forecasting $12 nominal natural gas prices in 2030. The DoE is forecasting gas consumption to grow 21% to 27t cubic feet in 2025. But domestic US production is only expected to run 21t cf then leaving a massive 6t cf shortfall that must be made up by other means.
Part of this core 21t cf of US gas production in 2025 will come from a new Alaska natural gas pipeline that the US government expects to be completed and online by 2015. It will help Alaska expand its gas production an awesome 450% from current levels, but total Alaskan production will still only run at 2.2t cf. Thus the DoE already accounted for a surge in natural gas from Alaska when forecasting its 6t cf domestic gas shortfall in 2025.
The only way to close this structural gas deficit is via natural gas imports. The AEO only expects 1.2t cf of natural gas to be imported from Canada and Mexico by 2030, less than a quarter of the projected US domestic shortfall. On an interesting sidenote, the report even mentions the decline in gas production in Alberta. The little known fact that Albertan natural gas reserves are being depleted has huge implications for the oil sands industry there. Without natural gas to fuel the difficult extraction of oil from oil sands, the entire oil sands industry would grind to a halt. Natural gas may prove to be the key to the future of the oil sands.
So where will America get its gas that we so desperately need to heat our homes and generate 20% of our electricity? The DoE says, "Growth in LNG imports is projected to meet much of the increased demand for natural gas." LNG is liquefied natural gas. The gas is supercooled to -260°F to shrink its volume by 600x so it can be loaded in LNG tankers to be shipped across the world's seas. The LNG industry is going to explode.
The US government now expects US LNG imports to soar a staggering 583% to 4.1t cf in 2025. It will make up over 2/3rds of the shortfall between US gas demand and domestic production. Amazingly the US only has four existing onshore LNG terminals today. The DoE only expects another eight or so to be built. In the current issue of Zeal Intelligence we just purchased a company that is building four of these desperately needed new LNG terminals. LNG has to be offloaded into the US somewhere and investors can profit from it by investing in the handful of companies that are involved in this LNG buildout.
It is not just the LNG industry that will thrive though. Domestic US gas producers are finding and pumping a scarce product already in high demand that is only going to grow. We've been researching trading natural-gas stocks and are now layering in a campaign of the best of the elite US gas producers. Like oil, barriers to entry in the gas industry are very high so new gas companies cannot just be wished into existence with no capital like the dot-coms of yore.
Natural gas offers little-known peripheral opportunities too. For example, gas is often found with oil. When oil is pumped out of the deep sea or in remote locations where no gas pipelines exist, the gas is considered stranded. Oil companies have no alternative today other than burning off this valuable gas in great flares, wasting it. Today there are companies working on converting stranded gas into synthetic oil on site at remote wellhead locations so it can be pumped out with the rest of the oil. We just bought one of these companies in our alert service.
The DoE's AEO report goes on to discuss coal, a commodity that flies much lower on investors' radars than oil or even gas. US coal prices are expected to gradually decline in real terms and total US coal production is expected to grow 36% by 2025. Interestingly the DoE believes nearly 2/3rds of US coal in 2030 will originate from Western states. It even singles out the low-cost coal from Wyoming's Powder River Basin as an example. Investors can certainly ride this shift to cheaper coal from the west.
But the greatest coal opportunities may lie in coal-to-liquids (CTL) technologies. The AEO expects coal use in CTL plants to soar to 190m tons by 2030, 1/9th of US coal production. CTL heats coal into a gas in a contained reaction that requires no external energy. This coal gas is then cleaned of sulfur, mercury, arsenic, and other toxins. It is then distilled into a synthetic form of crude oil that can be refined on site to produce gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel. These ultra-clean synthetic fuels burn in conventional engines with no modifications.
While this sounds like science fiction, it is not. In the 1940s Germany powered most of its war effort using coal-based synthetic diesel. The US government started exploring synfuels in 1925 and Congress passed an act in the 1940s funding synfuel research and production. But as cheap oil was later discovered in the US, synfuels fell out of favor. It costs about $35 a barrel to produce synthetic oil so high oil prices are essential for this innovative industry.
Obviously in light of the DoE's projection of continuing high real oil prices in the coming decades, synfuels are once again attractive. While they can be produced from coal or natural gas, the coal angle is much more attractive due to the price differential between coal and gas. And the US is believed to have over a quarter of the world's recoverable coal reserves, it is known as the Saudi Arabia of coal. Wide-scale CTL to use this coal and reduce crude oil imports is a match made in heaven. Has your Wall Street broker talked with you about CTL yet?
The AEO also addressed nuclear power. The US government believes US nuclear generating capacity is going to grow to 109gw in 2019, up 9% from today. Nuclear power is expected to produce 10% of the electricity consumed in the US by then. What is "burned" to generate nuclear power? Uranium! Investors can profit tremendously here too. Back in August we took a long-term stake in the world's largest uranium miner and we are already up 28%.
While this multi-decade bull market in energy is great for prudent investors who understand this new paradigm of energy demand growth outstripping supply growth globally, it is not as exciting for consumers. Some folks think higher energy prices will sink the economy and destroy general growth. Interestingly the DoE addressed this very point and does not share this opinion.
The AEO says, "Despite the higher forecast for energy prices, gross domestic product (GDP) is projected to grow at an average annual rate of 3.0 percent from 2004 to 2030 ... The ratio of final energy expenditures to GDP has generally fallen over time and was only about 0.07 in 2004, down from a high of 0.14 during the 1970s. It is projected to fall to about 0.05 in 2030 as a result of continued declines in energy use per unit of output and growth in other areas of the economy."
Thus, even though energy prices are expected to be high for decades, the total energy costs as a percentage of the US economy are still expected to decline in these coming decades. High energy prices today are very different from the high energy prices of the 1970s in the sense that it doesn't take anywhere near as much energy today to produce a given output. The DoE calls this energy intensity and says it is projected to decline 1.8% per year to 2030.
This suggests high energy prices will not come close to triggering economic Armageddon. Investors can buy elite energy stocks, potentially earn fortunes, but the very products the companies they own produce are not going to sink the economy. Energy prices are simply rising up to a new higher norm reflecting global demand growth exceeding supply growth. This is the normal and expected free-market response to a structural deficit.
While I really feel strongly that you investors and money managers ought to go read the DoE report for yourselves, I want to share a few charts copied directly out of the report. There are additional interesting charts in the AEO, but these really capture the gist of the DoE's research. The horizontal axes all run from 1980, to 2004 at the center lines, to 2030 on the right. The upper-left price chart is in constant real 2004 dollars.
These charts summarize the DoE's latest official US government energy forecast rather nicely. In the upper left real oil and gas prices are expected to rise in the coming decades. Interestingly these are conservative long-term average prices, filtering out any potential geopolitical crises or other events that drive the tremendous oil and gas volatility that we have grown accustomed to in 2005.
In the upper right US energy consumption is expected to grow at a faster rate than domestic energy production, pushing up imports of energy in an absolute sense although as a percentage of consumption imports will remain fairly constant. Companies that can produce energy or facilitate its import from overseas are going to thrive in such a bullish fundamental environment.
In the lower left US fossil-fuel consumption is expected to grow at far faster rates than alternative energy including hydroelectric, non-hydroelectric renewables, and nuclear. While everyone wants the science-fiction future of unlimited clean energy, the reality of the coming decades will be the continuing dominance of oil, gas, and coal. The realm of exotic energies like hydrogen fusion remains decades away so investors should concentrate on the existing dominant energies today.
In the lower right US oil production is expected to decline, US gas production is expected to remain stable, and only coal production will grow dramatically. Nuclear and hydroelectric are largely expected to remain flat although non-hydroelectric renewables should grow. But even if the latter doubles, it will still only make up a small fraction of total US energy production by 2030. Once again the big money will be made in conventional energy in the next two decades.
As investors, we need to evaluate potential opportunities and deploy our capital accordingly. The official acknowledgement by the US government this week for the first time that $30 oil is nothing but a memory is very important as it signals the dawn of a new fundamental energy paradigm. Regardless of what Wall Street wants mainstream investors to believe, enormous fortunes should be won by energy investors in the coming years.
At Zeal we are now layering in elite oil, gas, and other energy trades in response to the recent oil correction. Our first round of Zeal Intelligence picks layered in a couple weeks ago is already thriving. Our new December ZI stock trades are up an average of 12% already while our energy-stock options trades have averaged 58% gains just this month alone. We are continuing to pour our time into researching the best oil and gas producer opportunities as well as peripheral areas like LNG and CTL.
Most investors do much reflecting this time of year, wondering what the most promising sectors will be in 2006 and beyond. If you are interested in learning about commodities-bull-related stock trades with tremendous potential on an ongoing basis, please subscribe today. If you are already honoring us with a subscription, consider gifting a friend with one. The energy journey in 2006 and beyond should be awesome.
The bottom line is this week's release of the US government's latest official forecast of secular energy trends is extremely important. It deftly guts the long-standing Wall Street fantasy that the return to a cheap-energy world is right around the corner. Love it or hate it, the new reality is higher energy prices while global production struggles to keep up with world demand growth.
Prudent investors and speculators who understand the times and deploy their capital accordingly ought to reap fortunes in this still very young energy bull. But the time to seize this rare opportunity is now. By the time Wall Street finally adores energy stocks more than techs or financials the greatest gains will have already been won.
December 16, 2005
Adam Hamilton, CPA
So how can you profit from this information? We publish an acclaimed monthly newsletter, Zeal Intelligence, that details exactly what we are doing in terms of actual stock and options trading based on all the lessons we have learned in our market research.
Please consider joining us each month for tactical trading details and more in our premium Zeal Intelligence service at www.zealllc.com/subscribe.htm.
Questions for Adam? I would be more than happy to address them through my private consulting business. Please visit www.zealllc.com/financial.htm for more information.
Thoughts, comments, or flames? Fire away at zelotes@zealllc.com. Due to my staggering and perpetually increasing e-mail load, I regret that I am not able to respond to comments personally. I will read all messages though and really appreciate your feedback!
Copyright ©2000-2005 Zeal Research All Rights Reserved.
Rogue
Bobwins/Canadian dollar.......Do you know if you can "trade"(i.e. buy and sell) your cash in your account into the Canadian dollar with IB????
http://charts3.barchart.com/chart.asp?sym=CDH6&data=A&jav=adv&vol=Y&divd=Y&evnt=....
Since I'm 80% cash I could see this as a major "kicker" to my account if I time correctly. Just picking up a couple of pennies on the foriegn exchange swings could yield substantial gains.
Rogue
Polish Immigrant Harassed
By Covert Operatives
Says America Headed Down
The Path Of Suppression
Like Behind The
Old Iron Curtain
American citizen, Andrew Suda of Poland, has been poisoned and almost killed by his girlfriend, working as an undercover operative with apparent assistance from Homeland Security and the U.S . government
By Greg Szymanski
12-16-5
Andrew Suda feels like a cornered animal with nothing left to do but fight back.
Suda, 46, a 1985 Polish immigrant, is another in the long line of citizens being hounded, harassed and raked over the coals by thugs operating under the radar screen with the assistance of the U.S. government.
"I have been poisoned," said Suda in an extended telephone conversation from his San Diego home, adding it came from doses of ricen administered by his girlfriend who turned out to be a covert operative. "Attacks have been made against my financial well-being, isolating me socially, sabotage at work and of my car, ringing in ears, super vivid dreams that drain you and keep you asleep for many, many hours - these are all tricks constantly used on me."
The Polish native and now American citizen said he has been targeted by authorities since he is considered an "annoying fly or loose end" in what has become a shocking attempt at a total lockdown of the truth being played out on the streets of America.
Although Suda came here looking for peace and freedom, he might as well be walking down the streets of Moscow, since literally his every move has been monitored by what has turned out to be Polish and Russian communist intelligence operatives given free rein to operate with the help of certain factions inside the U.S. government.
"What's going on here, reminds me of what went on in Poland when I was a boy," recalls Suda.
In fact, when Suda was a young student in a Polish university, one the equivalent to an American Ivy League school, he was extremely vocal about the fall of communism being a charade or "good theatre," as he calls it.
He considered the sudden fall of communism and the Polish freedom movement to be contrived for strategic deception purposes, considering it nothing more that a plan of deception orchestrated by the communists and certain factions of the American government.
"Otherwise," he says, "why would the communist 'Old Guard' remain in Eastern European command positions and why would some former KGB officials now be allowed to operate freely in America and actually be on the Homeland Security payroll?
Not surprisingly, the horror stories coming out of the Homeland Security Department related to the abuses allowed under the Patriot Act are at the heart of Suda's problems, since both the agency and the laws it is operating under are geared at taking away liberties previously protected by the Constitution.
And this Polish immigrant, who is all too familiar with communist oppression, said the same thing is happening here in America that went on behind the veil of the Iron Curtain when he was growing up in Poland.
"The symptoms are the same as occurred in Poland and the USSR," said Suda, adding Americans better wake-up quick before its too late. "Why are people afraid to talk and speak their minds? Why is it when you speak the truth or have opinions contrary to the government, people on the streets even look at you like your crazy or like you are an idiot.
"This is what it was like under communist suppression, but it may even be worse because nobody is even thinking about it. In fact, I think it will now even be easier for them to take away freedom here than it was in Eastern Europe since most people aren't even arguing."
Feeling restricted under communism, Suda naturally brought his outspoken views to America, thinking life would be sweet. But instead his "politically incorrect" opinions landed him in big trouble. Although he's not locked away in a gulag, the 21 st
century American equivalent is perhaps even more dark and sinister if not just as confining as a cold and dank jail cell.
"I literally cannot sleep in my home anymore and I feel as if I am being cornered like an animal just for my political views," said Suda, adding he feels the 'powers that be' pulling the worldwide strings have decided it would be easier to manipulate people under a capitalistic system rather than communism.
"You see, there always needs to be an enemy even though it's not real. This is how people are controlled, rounded up like cattle and eventually slaughtered. The world powers who come from all countries have now decided it is easy to control the masses under the guise of capitalism and that is why communism fell so quickly.
"Now, you are seeing here in America what happened in Russia and Poland. In fact, it is my opinion that certain U.S. officials, determined to destroy America, all along have been cooperating with the Communist enemy instead of fighting them? Whistle blowers being harassed and terrorized by the U.S. government? Did we really have an enemy in the form of IVAN? Or was IVAN an older, cruder OSAMA? This would explain the "enemy of my enemy is my enemy paradox."
"I think Americans need to wake-up. I lived under suppression and see the same thing happening here. Now the fake enemy is Osama and without a doubt this is an orchestrated government effort to place the population under fear so that takeover becomes an easy matter.
"Like I said and I want to emphasize that the 'powers that be' may actually have an easier time of takeover here since there has been an orchestrated effort in America to disrupt strong family values and a decaying of the school system, eventually leading to the utter lack of free and independent thinking."
Whatever Suda's views are, it appears what's playing out in Eastern Europe backs up what he is saying. Although democracy has been touted in Poland and other places previously behind the Iron Curtain, it's a fact that same old communist leaders have again taken control.
In fact, in 2000 Polish headlines reported that the famous anti-communist Solidarity leader and former Polish President, Lech Walesa, was actually a communist agent recruited by the Russians in the 1970's under the code name of Bolek.
Although Walesa has denied the charges, the question must still be asked if Walesa was a KGB agent, were the communists actually orchestrating the fake freedom movement from the beginning in order to work hand in hand with devilish forces in the American government for an eventual takeover here?
And could this also be a reason why covert operatives have gone to great lengths at silencing Suda? Could this be why they enlisted the services of a Polish female operative who entered into a romantic affair and eventually tried to kill him through poisoning?
Could this also be why the FBI and other federal authorities have backed off the investigation even though clear evidence exists Suda's life is in danger by something or someone more than a psychotic girlfriend?
"I was tested by doctors in California who found numerous poisons in my system," said Suda. "One day I realized that my Polish girlfriend was a spy and I was so well manipulated and brainwashed by people surrounding me that I couldn't see, or rather understand, things happening just in front of me.
"Since I 'woke up' it was pretty easy to collect enough evidence and go to FBI. I knew that I had a big case. Between other things there was evidence that local Congressman, then chief of armed forces committee, gave my girlfriend a Green Card with no questions asked after Department of State attempted to deport her.
"Guess what - her old INS file where the reason for deportation was presented strangely disappeared after that and it wasn't available even for the Office of Inspector General of U.S. Dept. of Justice. I then approached the Office of Inspector General after an incident where the FBI exposed me to the Polish network.
"O.I.G. did a good job and we were able to get a hard evidence of FBI wrongdoing. Unfortunately, Washington forced O.I.G. to stop. My investigator from O.I.G. was then quickly transferred to San Francisco and doesn't want to talk to me any more.
"And where is the mind control issue in my case? Well, after all the experiences I realized that there is something bigger than the Cold War. I knew that one of my girlfriend's supervisors or handlers was a Polish representative to the UN, who became a professor at Harvard. I knew that local ( San Diego) ABC station was personally stopped by Peter Jennings from investigating my case even though they aired a program about similar KGB operatives earlier."
At a time when Suda was near death from poisoning, everyone who could help backed away, leaving him in financial ruin after losing his house and being subjected to an unfair IRS audit even though his work involved a simple painting business.
Asked about the congressman involved with his girlfriend, Suda added: "If you are a protected spy or agent like my girlfriend you can use military technology, federal agents and you can use politicians. I don't know how successful she was with our local congressman but the fact is without any questions he got her a green card when she was about to be deported. That speaks volumes."
"I might add two weeks after I stopped living with my girlfriend, my health improved. Also ricen is a protein and it leaves no residual in the human body and it isn't a poison you get easily off the street and only a few countries in the world are making it."
And when the entire Suda story is evaluated, his conclusions appear logical since covert mind control, espionage and economic sabotage are extremely difficult crimes to prove. Also, looking back at Suda's story, most likely his problems began with his outspoken nature in Poland since contacts he made there, like a bad nightmare, have now appeared to surface on the streets of San Diego.
"I came here 20 years ago wanting a better life but perhaps my outspoken ways have been my downfall," recalls Suda. "Unfortunately, I used my college contacts to stay in America. I used the sister of a friend from college. I didn't think they were involved in UB, the Polish KGB, though.
"And it was through her I met my girlfriend, who I found out was simply a spy. I then found out she was involved with federal agents and military contractors, finding love letters written to DEA agents. I showed these letters to a military expert and he said they were recognized as 'trap letters' used by the KGB since the Korean War.
"These letters use sophisticated psychological hooks and are used as a method to recruit spies called 'honey traps.'"
Although Suda's story is complex involving the FBI, DEA and the Office of the Inspector General, there exists numerous facts beyond mere suspicion which takes his story out of the realm of human paranoia into the world of covert harassment through the use of a wide range of tactics employed by the KGB and CIA.
For more ionformative articles, go to www.arcticbeacon.com
The arctic beacon is asking for your support. Please go to www.arcticbeacon.com and contribute by credit card or paypal as it is the only way the truth can be told.
Rogue
Just A
Goddamned
Piece Of Paper!
By Dave Lindorff
12-15-5
So, according to a report by Doug Thompson, editor of the journal Capital Hill Blue, three stalwart Republican congress members who had gone to see President Bush the lesser in his White House digs to advise against passage of the new version of the oxymoronically named USA PATRIOT Act were treated to an angry shout of "Stop throwing the Constitution in my face! It's just a goddamned piece of paper!"
This coming from a man who twice swore on the Bible he claims to live by that he would "uphold and defend the Constitution."
This from a man who said that he would make "strict adherence to the Constitution" the key requirement for his nominees to the US Supreme Court.
What a sad joke this buffoon in the White House has proven to be.
What a dangerous buffoon, too.
For after his initial outburst, the president had some more choice words to his loyal, if questioning, Congressional colleagues. When one of them warned that his push for more police state powers in new version of the ham-fisted legislation that Congress initially passed in the wake of the 9-11 attacks might alienate some of his conservative backers, the president shouted, "I don't give a goddamn: I'm the President and the Commander-in-Chief. Do it my way."
Here's a real danger.
The role of commander-in-chief is expressly explained in the Constitution as referring to the president's position as top officer of the nation's military. That is an important provision, because it is essential that a civilian have final control over even the highest general if a democracy is to survive. But the title commander-in-chief has no relevance with the respect to the rest of society. The president, according to the Constitution, is not commander-in-chief of the Congress, or of the administration, or of you or me. He's just the president, and in three more years, or whenever he's impeached, he'll be gone.
Unless, of course, the Constitution is "just a goddamned piece of paper."
Then all bets are off.
http://thiscantbehappening.net
Rogue
Gold Will Hit US$900 In 2006
James Turk, founder, GoldMoney.com.......
http://www.robtv.com/servlet/HTMLTemplate/!robVideo/robtv0726.20051214.00035000-00035253-clip2/h/220....
Rogue
Martial Law No Longer On The Horizon: It's Already Here - Part One
Militarized Federal Police All Over The Streets With The Precedent to Kill
http://www.infowars.com/articles/ps/martial_law_no_longer_on_the_horizon_its_here.htm
Steve Watson / Prisonplanet | December 15 2005
Prison Planet.tv members click here to listen to Alex Jones and Paul Watson discuss the issues in this article.
The latter half of this year has seen a significant shift. For a long time we have been reporting that Martial Law is coming to America. We do not believe this to be the case anymore. Unfortunately this is because IT HAS ARRIVED.
So many individual incidents have contributed towards the shift towards a police state and away from freedom in America and across the globe.
With the reports of December 14 stating that VIPER Teams are to Patrol Mass Transit Facilities, we can no longer hold back and suggest that we can prevent martial law from happening. We now have to progress with the peaceful revolution of information in order to OVERTURN the police state.
The Associated Press reported that Federal air marshals are expanding their work beyond airplanes, launching counterterror surveillance at train stations and other mass transit facilities in a three-day test program.
This involves Federally brainwashed goons stomping round with machine guns and vicious dogs, getting in everyone's face and randomly grabbing and searching people on the subway.
This is to be implemented NATIONWIDE: "The so-called "Visible Intermodal Protection and Response" teams — or VIPER teams — will patrol Amtrak's Northeast Corridor and Los Angeles rail lines; ferries in Washington state; bus stations in Houston; and mass transit systems in Atlanta, Philadelphia, Washington and Baltimore."
We reported over and over again that former Homeland Security Tsar Tom Ridge said the airport provisions were going to go nationwide everywhere. He also said that security provisions including fingerscanning and biometric face scanning would spread from airports. No doubt this next stage will be implemented after the next terror scare.
We reported in July that in the immediate aftermath of the London tube bombings it was revealed that passengers may soon have to undergo FULL body scans. The technology, that is now being used in airports will scan through clothes a reveal a naked picture of the person.
The VIPER teams have nothing to do with preventing terrorism, they are there to get people to cower and accept they are under control. Air marshal spokesman David Adams has commented that there is no new intelligence indicating that terrorists are interested in targeting transportation modes.
The move into martial law comes one week after the incident in Miami where reportedly mentally unstable man Rigoberto Alpizar was gunned down on board American Airlines Flight 924 for "saying he had a bomb".
We exposed the fact that witnesses reported that Alpizar never screamed that he had a bomb and passengers related that they were more frightened of Air Marshals putting guns to their head and threatening them not to look at what was taking place. The incident was a primer for the move to put Federal militarized police on the streets and all over transport networks.
The incident has uncanny parallels with the murder of Charles de Menezes by British undercover police one day after the supposed aborted second London bombings on July 22nd.
De Menezes was wearing a light denim jacket, did not vault a barrier, calmly picked up a newspaper, did not have wires trailing from his jacket and was not seen coming from the building under surveillance one day after the failed bombings. CCTV tapes of the incident were seized by police who then claimed that the tapes didn't exist due to the cameras conveniently malfunctioning at that exact time, something which the London Underground workers wholesale denied.
De Menezes walked onto the train and was the shot in the head officially eight times, possibly more.
The two separate events set a precedent: YOU WILL FALL DIRECTLY INTO LINE should the military police deem your behaviour suspicious and wish to question you because if you don't they will KILL YOU.
So, for example, should you attempt to help someone out by selling them a spare token you have, that may be deemed as suspicious behaviour and you will be cuffed and taken away. If you resist you will be shot.
There's no half way here, that is Martial Law.
Last month we reported that Miami cops are to stage sieges, randomly check ID's, ride buses and trains and stop anyone they choose for no reason.
The Miami model is the very definition of a pervasive police state based on the fear of terrorists and the fear of being identified as a terrorist if you do not comply with every demand, no matter how much it brutalizes every notion of what it is to live in a free society.
All of this seems to be direct fallout from the London transport bombings in July. However, in London there are currently no more personnel at underground stations than there was before July 7. How is it that there are major debates going on over new terror laws in Britain and urgent talk of installing biometric ID scanning equipment, yet the authorities do not seem to care one jot about hiring more London transport workers to man stations.
Furthermore, the government have announced that there is to be NO INDEPENDENT INQUIRY into the July 7 bombings. They are simply going to release an official report telling us what happened - how helpful. So no public inquiry, no extra workers at stations but we HAVE to pass new terror laws and install surveillance equipment, and then possibly military police and sniffer dogs?
Coming in Part Two - The domestic surveillance grid and the extended global police State
Hiel Hitler!!...
Rogue
Blowoff Top In Gold an Historic Event
http://www.mcoscillator.com/reports/special/257-goldblowoff.html
***Rogue comment....we'll have to see about this. I'm not bullish short term on Gold, but a "Major Top" is still unproven.
In a couple of years, people are going to be looking back and asking each other, “Do you remember that big gold blowoff back in `05?” Then they’ll co-opt the line uttered by thousands of Texas oil men, and say, “Lord, just give me one more of those gold bubbles and I promise not to screw it up this time.”
Our mission at this point, as analysts and investors, is not to decide whether this is a blowoff top or not. The market has made that pretty clear in the past few days. Instead, our mission is to figure out what this means for the future, and not to get misled by contrary signs which might pop up to confuse us in the near future.
The top chart on this page shows the cash price of gold compared to its 50-day high-low range. A couple of things are worth noting as we start out. First, gold tends to make more rounded bottoms, and more spiked tops. This is the opposite of the stock market, for example, which tends to have quiet, rounded topping action and panicked, violent and volatile conditions at bottoms. Second, seeing a big range over a 50-day period like we have right now is a condition that reflects that spiky top nature of gold prices. Such high readings tend to only appear at important price highs.
That chart also allows us to see that the recent run up from the congestion earlier this year at around the $420 level dwarfs any of the other price structures in this 15-year chart history. Clearly, something unusual has just taken place, and now we get to see the after effects.
The point to understand about blowoff tops is that once the blowoff is completed, then what follows is a thorough dismantling of most or all progress that had been made on the way up. Each of the different blowoff tops varies somewhat from one to the next, but the common thread among them is that the slope of the decline after the top is very much symmetrical to the slope of the advance on the way up.
The middle chart compares the current gold price top to the blowoff top of Aug. 2, 1993. The lower chart shows a comparison to the Feb. 5, 1996 top. These comparisons allow us to see that the chart structures leading up to the blowoff top were similar to the current structure in both cases. It is reminiscent of the way that a pole vaulter traces out his steps beforehand on the runway, so that each time he approaches the vault the steps are nearly the same.
Most notable is the hesitation structure which formed during October and early November 2005. It closely matches a similar choppy sideways structure that formed in May and June 1993, leading up to that final Aug. 2, 1993 top. It also resembles another choppy structure which formed December 1995 ahead of the final run up to the February 1996 top in the lower chart.
In each of these cases, the selloff which followed was very severe. 1993’s example saw a quick downside hit, perhaps too quick because it exhausted all of the selling pressure in just a couple of months. That selloff still erased nearly all of the gains that the gold bulls had needed 5 months to build, and did so in only a two month decline.
The 1996 blowoff top also saw its rapid drop immediately after the price high, losing about 2/3 of the magnitude of the rally in just 6 weeks, but then proceeding to give away the rest of it and more over the months that followed. In that 1996 case, the more gradual selling kept the selling pressure from washing out all at once, which kept the downtrend going for longer.
If the 2005-06 instance is like either of those prior examples, then we can count on a huge decline between now and mid to late January. We have already seen a big price drop in just the first two days, but that is just a down payment. To erase the entire run up to the blowoff top would mean a return to the $420/oz area. That’s not a prediction or an objective, just a statement of how much more downward movement is yet to be done to completely erase the run up to the blowoff. Erasing the run up to the blowoff is the mission of the post blowoff decline.
Now, if you don’t care at all about gold prices, or gold as an investment, then you have probably already quit reading this by now. But just in case you are still hanging on, waiting for the “so what” moment of insight, then this final chart is what ought to make you care. It compares the monthly cash price of gold to the 3-month T-Bill yield. The difference is that we have slid the gold price pattern forward in this chart by 15 months, in order to show how gold acts as a leading indication for short term interest rates. Gold actually serves as a leading indication for inflation, but short term rates respond to inflation which is what makes this relationship work.
The rise in gold prices that we have just seen has not yet been fully reflected in short term interest rates. Certain members of the FOMC might think that they are almost done raising the Fed Funds Rate target, but they are going to realize in 2006 that inflation pressures compel them to continue raising short term rates further than they thought.
Bottom Line:
The blowoff top we have just seen in gold should mark the end of the up move, and now the expectation is for most of those gains to be erased over the coming weeks and months. Inflation and rising interest rates will still be with us for another 15 months, in response to this gold spike. Resist the temptation to buy gold as a hedge against that coming inflation, as that opportunity is already passed. We may not see the equivalent magnitude of blowoff in short term rates that we have just seen in gold prices, but the upward pressure on interest rates should continue for about the next 15 months. Blowoff tops in 1984 and 1993 saw corresponding rises in short term rates, even though the gold uptrend was relatively short-lived. The 1996 blowoff top which we show for comparison above was actually fairly small in terms of gold price movements, so its effect on interest rates was much more muted.
The Fed erred in early 2000 by thinking it was smarter than the market, and trying to fight inflation which was not yet evident but which was thought to lie “over the horizon”. Once they realized their mistake, they had to overcompensate by drastically cutting rates all the way down to 1%. Those low rates, and the ponderous rate at which the Fed has been “removing policy accommodation” have had the result of creating the tremendous amount of excess money that has been driving gold prices upward. That excess money will gradually get converted into price inflation over the next 14 months, to which the short term rates will be rising in response.
Rogue
Kerry.....The only valid point I'd like to make is that both he and Bush are members of Skull and Bones.
The "AGENDA" rolls on.......
Is ANYONE starting to see anything here???
The truth isn't so pretty....
Sherlock Rogue
YIWAE..... I bailed last week after it started to remind me of another Chinese company that stopped filing....YDHCF.
I've had some big "hits" in China over the years and some strike outs. YIWAE hurt me pretty bad in the pick six contest.
Rogue
GCE.to/GACHF.pk....Grande Cache coal looks interesting here technically.
http://stockcharts.com/def/servlet/SC.web?c=gce.to,uu[h,a]daolyyay[dd][pb50!b200!f][vc60][iut!Uc20!L....
On the "bottom-fish" watchlist.
I'd like some of the great fundamental guys on this board to take a look at this one.....the bottom may be in on this.
Rogue
Bottom fishing....I love "bottom fishing" for oversold end of year tax-loss values.
I've been searching and "concentrating" amongst mostly natural resources. I think the next few weeks will turn up some good picks for 2006.
With the current weakness in Gold and Silver after the huge runup I had expected, I would be looking amonst the laggerds/underperformers in that area to be good gainers in 2006 after they get "booted" for tax purposes this year.
I correctly predicted Gold above $500 by the end 2005 about 5 months ago and predict we will see Gold get to at least $650-$700/once in 2006.
Anyone have any "bottom-fishing" picks to share with the board???
Rogue
AEYIF.pk or AEI.to......Arsenal Energy is lifting off today from a period of "base building". Bought another block today on the open to add to my position.
http://stockcharts.com/def/servlet/SC.web?c=AEI.TO,uu[h,a]daolyyay[dc][pb50!b200!f][vc60][iut!Uc20!L...
From another board.....
Looks like AEI.TO has lifted up from its doldrums. There is a great interview on their website with AEI's CEO which gives insight to what the company has planned in 2006. In the interview Vandale goes into a bit of detail regarding their Egypt concession with TGA. I did not know that Repsol had previously drilled 5 holes on the property with each hole indicating oil. Also, Ed Bell from Nexen (who is responsible for 3/4 billion barrels of oil in Yemen)is heading the exploration team in Egypt.
http://www.ceocfointerviews.com/interviews/ArsenalEnergy3.htm
Rogue
Stratic Energy......SCRGF.PK or SE.v. Sold 50% of my position acquired 3 weeks ago on the "capitulation selloff" for a 33% gain. Still may have a little more left on this move to the upside....if price objectives are met will sell another 40%.
http://stockcharts.com/def/servlet/SC.web?c=se.v,uu[h,a]daolyyay[pb50!b200!f][vc60][iut!Uc20!Lh14,3]....
Will "reload" on an oversold condition as this one has 10-bagger potential long-term.
Rogue
Canadian coalbed methane producers report by Raymond James....
http://www.emberresources.com/research/RayJames12_07_05.pdf
Rogue