Friday, June 7, 2013

Hilarity and Desperation In The (Real) Money Pits


Manipulating and hammering down the price of gold and silver futures contracts has become the SOP at the COMEX and LBMA.  I really wish JP Morgan would explain a couple of things for us.  Firstly, how does it make any sense covering losses on naked short PM contracts by selling more naked short PM contracts? Secondly, if PMs are such a bad investment why is their inventory (and that of the GLD) disappearing into the hands of customers demanding delivery of physical metals?  I don’t think I’m going to hold my breath waiting for answers that will never come.  Well at least not until there is default coupled with massive class action suits.

This of course brings us back to my favorite realm, that of unintended consequences, brought on by that most magnificent of combinations; arrogance and stupidity.  It would seem the investing public is not quite as stupid or gullible as Jamie Dimon and company would hope.

Case in point #1.  Total demand for US Silver Eagles and for Canadian Silver Maple Leaves is far out stripping domestic production by millions of tons.  Laws in both countries require that coins must be produced from domestic supplies.  This forces both the mints and all the manufacturers that require silver for their products onto the import markets to meet demand.  The public knows a bargain basement price when they see it, even when premiums over spot are at 30%!

And that is just the silver market.  Demand for the popular 1/10 toz. Gold Eagles has been so high that the West Point Mint has had to halt production several times because the refineries can’t provide enough metal to the blank manufactures to meet supply requests from the Mint.

Case in point #2.  India has long been one of the largest consumers of gold in the world, both for investment and dowry jewelry.  Demand in India has become so large that the imports have grossly distorted the country’s balance of trade. This had caused India to levy a 6% tax on gold imports.  The tax has had no effect on demand and it was recently raised to 8%.  Again the tax had no effect on demand, so now the Central Bank of India has directed that commercial banks stop selling bullion coins.  Year right, that’ll work!  Nothing stifles demand for something like telling people they can’t have it.

Case in point #3.  Over the last year or so France’s economy has been sliding down the same hole of unpayable debt and expanding deficits that has driven Greece, Italy and Spain into insolvency.  Newly elected President Hollande’s noted response was to attempt to raise the top marginal tax rate to 75%.   Not surprisingly then, anyone and everyone in France with any measurable amount of wealth is busily engaged in finding ways of getting said wealth out of the grasp of the Hollande government’s tax collectors.  In spite of various capital controls measures asset liquidation and outflows continue unabated.  The latest reaction of the French government; prohibit sending currency, bullion and jewelry through the mails!  Yeah that’ll work.  Future headline; “Massive jewelry smuggling operation found at Swiss border!” 

Oh wait gold is a just a “barbarous relic,” never mind.

Wednesday, June 5, 2013

“The nature of bad news infects the teller”. William Shakespeare

Julia Caesar is an acclaimed columnist at Snaphanen. Her essay below has been translated from the Swedish original, which was published last month at Snaphanen.
This is a samizdat account of what it is like to be a Counterjihad writer in Sweden, but the story could equally apply to all Western nations that groan under yoke of the Multicultural hegemony.

The author has clearly reached a point of despondency and that makes parts of this piece difficult to read.  That does not however detract from the importance of this piece or the sentiments and truths it reflects. JWM Jr.

We changed our lives
by Julia Caesar

Somebody or something woke us up. We changed our lives without really understanding how this happened. It could have been a book or some newspaper articles. It could have been blogs on the Internet. It could have been many years’ observations and slowly growing insights — pieces of a puzzle that suddenly fell into place.

We weren’t the ones who changed our lives. In secrecy our politicians changed our lives. Without ever being asked about our opinion, we were forced into a society of multiculture and extreme mass immigration which has never functioned anywhere or anytime. Like guinea pigs we were thrown into a gigantic social and demographic laboratory experiment without any possibility of getting away. We were told that we were supposed to feel enriched. Otherwise we were racists.

When we understood the complete implications of the immigration policy it felt like a punch in the nose. Something that we for a long time and in vain had been looking for information about became clear. We were searching for knowledge. Dammit, we were not going to be misled for one single minute longer! We read. We studied. We seized on information like someone thirsting for water.
It was a normal day. We heard ourselves say to our best friends that when you’ve read this book, life will never be the same again. It was as if our words came from deep inside of someone that we didn’t know. But we realized that the words were true. Little by little we realized that we weren’t the ones who chose our mission. The mission chose us, and we could not oppose.

We kicked back. We tried to escape. We had good lives; why would we choose something worse, more uncomfortable, and more thankless? We could for example have embroidered. We could have taken up joinery, tinkered about with cars, grown roses or painted on china. We saw our friends living a possible life. But we couldn’t. We had always been refractory, cheeky kids scaring our parents by coming out with things which shouldn’t be said. As far as we could remember we had recognized and loathed fraud and falsehood. On the doors of our refrigerators there was a scrap of paper with a motto: ”Only the one who is swimming against the stream will reach the source.”
We couldn’t silently watch Sweden being dismantled piece by piece. We wanted to tear apart the thick veil of silence over the immigration policy and spread facts that a few people knew and nobody talked about. Our opinion was that people had the right to know what was going on in their country.
We were dazed, shocked, newly informed. We were scarred veterans. Some of us were already dead and had, unlike many other people, died with our honour and human dignity intact.
We wrote. Nobody asked us to. We chose it on our own. But did we really have a choice?
We were our own employers. Nobody ruled us. No humming managing editor told us to delete this and that because it was too controversial.

We worked almost all the time. We worked for free because the truth has no payment by the hour. When other people relaxed and did nice things we worked. Every day in the calendar we wore our chairs and computers. We toiled as if obsessed with the task we had commanded ourselves to accomplish. We wanted finally to get through with it. It took some time to understand we never would get through. Our task would outlive us.

It was our antagonists who had the resources. Thousands of journalists sat all day long, occupied with lying to the Swedish people in return for fat salaries and for thumps on the back on Twitter from their equally mendacious colleagues in their mutual fan club. Media, political parties, think tanks and lobby organizations had access to billions. But we had something they didn’t have: the truth.

It was the truth-keeping that kept us swinging. We knew that no human being and no political system building their existence on lies could last forever.

We knew the truth always wins.

We knew the truth can break through quickly.

We knew the truth can take a long time and sometimes breaks through with violence.

We knew the truth had been replaced with new systems of lies.

We wrote books full of facts that were carefully hushed up in all media. We wrote debate articles, blog posts and chronicles. Most of the time mainstream media refused to publish our articles, without reason. The facts we presented punctured their entire shadowy project.

We did the work of journalistic pioneers. We dug up truths that highly paid journalists were too lazy or cowardly to concern themselves with. We knew that many people read what we wrote. But not one single journalist or anyone else with a social position to maintain dared to mention it. We understood that they read it on the sly, and the poor devils didn’t dare to pronounce our names because of the risk of ruining their whole career. We simply didn’t exist. It was as if we were infected with a mortal virus. They stole our texts and facts they hadn’t managed to google up for themselves but doctored them up so they could save their own skin and seem to be better journalists than they really were.

We wrote under pseudonyms. We hated that we had to. If journalists in mainstream media hadn’t lied so terribly we could have written under our real names without endangering our lives and our children’s. Now we had to hide our identities.

We wrote with our real names. It didn’t seem to matter. Our topics were taboo. The entire journalistic profession seemed to have come to an agreement that our books and articles were not allowed to be mentioned under any circumstances. On the few occasions that we were mentioned we were harassed and stigmatized and were sprayed with vomit full of hatred, written by well-known and honoured journalists. We had crossed the limits set by taboo, and from now on we didn’t exist.

We applied for a new job. We had the very best merits and qualifications. We didn’t get the job. There was nothing wrong with our merits and qualifications. The fault was our articles on inappropriate topics.

We thought of the fact that messengers who brought bad messages had, since the very beginning of humanity, been stoned. Shakespeare had put it into words: “The nature of bad news infects the teller”.

We exiled ourselves inwards. We cancelled all our newspaper subscriptions. We stopped listening to the radio and stopped watching television. For a long time we tried at least to listen to and watch the news. But finally we couldn’t manage to. We couldn’t stand hearing the lies. It became more and more clear that the journalists’ main ambition wasn’t to tell the truth but to hide it.

What we most of all didn’t manage to see was how the journalists degraded themselves. They stooped themselves by writing and saying things they knew were lies. They refused to learn, to be introspective and ask themselves what they were doing.  We saw straight through them. We saw through their double standards and hypocrisy.

They turned their backs on the multiculture and mass immigration that they used to praise, and settled in 100 percent ethnic white areas. The tremendous cynicism of their message was that multiculture shouldn’t be forced on them, but on The Others; the poor, the weak, the sick ones who couldn’t manage to move or didn’t have enough money to buy themselves a place in an immigrant-free area.
We wondered how the journalists handled their self-contempt. Until we realized they didn’t have any.
Our parents gave us their silent support but worried about us and said we should slow down and not work that hard. In their view we were never anything else but children. Our parents died, and nobody worried about us any longer. We stood alone at the front line. It became chilly and deserted around us.

We heard the murmur from our ancestors in their graves. They urged us to go on. They couldn’t stand the desecration of everything they had built with hard work and hardship during their lives.

Our friends got tired of our working all the time and our “no thanks” to invitations. They didn’t understand what we were doing and why it was that important.

Our friends gave us their support. They went through the same process of disillusion as we did. Without the good supporting conversations with them we would never had the strength to go on.
Our friends suddenly stopped replying our e-mails.  Our friends said they couldn’t understand how we could be critical of refugees, and when we objected that it wasn’t the refugees but the immigration policy we criticized and told them only a few percent of the immigrants who got residence permits are refugees, they didn’t want to listen. They didn’t try to find out anything about our opinions but told us our opinions were disgusting. They broke their relationships with us and continued with their doll’s-house lives.

Our friends said it can’t be that bad, everything will surely be okay.  Our friends told us they weren’t interested in what we were doing.  Our friends called us pessimists, and we saw the dollar signs in their eyes when they scanned their memory for occasions when we had said something racist. But they didn’t find anything.

Our friends said it was good that the Somalis came here and learnt how to read and write. Strangely enough, these friends were stingy with every cent they had to pay and used to scold the staff in the grocer’s shop if they hadn’t ordered every single special offer that week.

Our conversations became watered-down. We didn’t know what to talk to our friends about any more. Did they see what was happening to our country, to Europe? Nothing indicated that. Anyway, they didn’t say anything about it. We continued to talk about commonplace things. But it felt like a stage play, and when we left dinners with our friends we just felt relieved to come home and be alone.

Fear affected us without knowing how it happened. We no longer lived in a safe democracy with freedom of speech and of opinion. Every day we read about people who had been exposed to violence because of their opinions and others who had been robbed, raped and murdered without expressing any opinions at all.

At first we wouldn’t admit it. But fear began to reduce possibilities in life which we always had taken for granted. We had always walked alone in the woods and never felt afraid. The woods were our most sacred room. Now we didn’t dare to walk alone there anymore.

We taped up our letterboxes. At our country cottages where we always had felt secure we began to lock the door. Every time we started our car we were afraid it would explode. We told our loved ones that if someone kills us we want them to know that we died with our boots on. Our lives had been good. We didn’t regret anything.

We took turns in losing courage. Those who were of good cheer encouraged and comforted the others. To those who were dispirited for the time being we said that it’s going to be better. But we knew it wasn’t true.

Inside we thanked our parents and other people who had been close to us. Thanks to them we remained confident in a stable identity and never doubted what we were doing.  We gathered strength from people we looked up to; Vilhelm Moberg, Herbert Tingsten, Torgny Segerstedt, Enoch Powell. They dared to oppose to a dominant monopoly opinion. But we also knew that they paid a very high price for their opinions and their integrity.

We brooded on the idea of conscience. Why were some people equipped with one while others weren’t? 

We didn’t want to become cynical. We became cynical.

We didn’t want to be contemptuous. But we had always despised cowardice and fellow-travellers.
More and more often we wondered if our lives were dreams. It occurred especially in that floating state of mind between sleep and wakefulness when we stayed in our beds and slowly released ourselves from our dreams. This happened when we were by a sea thousands of miles from home. We kept the doors out to the sea open day and night because we wanted to hear the breathing of the sea, the slow groundswell that was rhythmically rolling ashore. In the same rhythm memories and images were rolling inside our heads.

Our memories were a groundswell, too, in our internal seas. Nobody could prove that they were real. They sought us when we least expected it and touched our innermost selves. Dream and reality met. The limits were wiped out. The past was there, radiant and shimmering. But was it real? Or had we dreamt everything?

Our inner images came from a quite different Sweden where we were born and grew up. It was a country of fervour and unity, poverty, hard work and belief in the future.

The Sweden we now were living in was so different from the country where we grew up that it couldn’t be the same country. In other countries people cared for their recollections of the past. In Sweden the existence of the country and Swedish culture were denied.

Our history was defamed. We were told early on that we didn’t have any country. Sweden didn’t exist. We should be ashamed of being Swedes.

We refused to feel ashamed. The shame wasn’t ours.

The propaganda had a certain purpose: to wipe the past out of our consciousness. We should forget that it had ever existed. We really should doubt our own memories. The revisionists of history had usurped the preferential right of interpretation, and we had silently let it happen. We were not supposed to remember the country that we were part of, and it made us deeply sad and furious. Without a rear-view mirror we had no yardstick for the present time. But that wasn’t the intention, either.

Who stole our dreams from us? It was not just a single person. It was tens of thousands of people, traitors and quislings, who together did their part in destroying Sweden. Their hatred hit us like corroding lye from their newspaper pages and radio and television programs, from the government and the parliament and the whole politically correct elite who earned big money from destroying Sweden.

The biggest change of all was that our belief in the future was gone. Piece by piece the traitors had taken it away from us. It was the most valuable thing they could take, and they knew it. The belief that everything was going to be better had encouraged generations before us, and it had always been fulfilled. Sweden’s whole history up to the seventies consisted of a strongly upward curve as far as the economy and welfare were concerned. It was the optimism for the future that carried our ancestors through their hard work with farming, in the woods, at sea and in the factories. If they worked hard enough, we all would get better lives. Now all dreams were wiped out. It was as if the whole country were washed with chlorine.

We slept well at night with our conscience as a pillow.

We had a troubled sleep at night when the chilling images of where Sweden was going didn’t want to leave us alone. It occurred that we woke up in the morning in the middle of a dream in which we tried to climb a steep slope of snow. We tried to grip the snow with our hands, we buried our nails as deep as we could. But they slipped over and over again. For every inch we climbed up we slipped down even more.

We dreamt that we were staying at a hotel in Istanbul that was going to be occupied by Islamist terrorists. We tried to convey the danger with our body language, but everybody just laughed. In the basement of the hotel was our Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt dyeing the Swedish flag Islamic green while someone played “The Internationale” on a pedal organ.

We ransacked ourselves. Why were we doing this? We believed that we were born with different gifts and we were meant to use them. We even believed it was our responsibility to use the skills we were equipped with. Some people could build houses. They should build houses. Some could play Bach so that people wept. They should play Bach. Some could write. They should write.

There were days when we didn’t want to write one more letter. We believed that people would like to know. We believed that they would be susceptible to facts. With facts and statistics we could show: this is the reality. We couldn’t understand why people had such a blockheaded difficulty in taking in appropriate facts. It took us a long time to realize that people don’t want to know. They preferred to remain in their lies and illusions. They wanted to feel as good people. They wanted to believe that Sweden’s resources were enough for all inhabitants around the world.

We wanted to keep our confidence in man. But it was more and more difficult. It took us some years to realize that man was his own worst enemy and wanted to go on being so.

What drove us most of all was our concern for what society we were going to leave to our children. They were mainly the ones we were working for.

Our children said that what we did was okay and they were proud of us.

Our children were politically correct and stopped talking to us.

Our children were busy with their careers and had no time to engage in what was going on in Sweden.

We used to think about the orchestra playing onboard the sinking Titanic. We thought that the musicians perhaps felt a little better than those who ran around on deck in a state of panic. And we had no choice, for that matter. We simply couldn’t manage to watch our country going down.  We wrote in water. We knew that what we wrote would soon be forgotten, just like everything else that had been written. As we didn’t exist even while we were alive, the only thing we possibly could hope for was to have sown a seed.