Baltic Dry Index. 1197 Unch.
LIR Gold Target in 2019: $30,000. Revised due to QE programs.
Thirteen years on, but not forgotten.
Thirteen years ago today, our world entered into
the murderous madness of fanatical Moslem terrorism. Thirteen years on, two
wars, a “mission accomplished,” terror attacks from Bali to Bombay, Madrid to
London, and our modern world has never been in a more dangerous state. A
murderous perverted Islamic Nazi-like ideology now runs from Nigeria to South
Sudan, north to Libya and across to Syria and Iraq. Though supposedly a fight
against modern western values, the Moslem fanatics kill far more Moslems than
anyone else. Neither the west nor the native local populations seem able or
even willing, to bring the murderous madness to an end.
Below, America’s Nobel Prize Peace President surges
back somewhat unconvincingly to the Middle East, to take on “the Caliphate.”
This time it’s different, we’re supposed to believe, but it didn’t sound to me
like FDR after Pearl Harbor, nor Churchill after Dunkirk.
“Obama
nodded. A sombre nod. The nod Napoleon might have given if somebody had met him
in 1812 and said, "So, you're back from Moscow, eh?”
With
apologies to P. G. Wodehouse.
Obama Relying on Mideast Allies to Counter Islamic State
Sep 11,
2014 5:00 AM GMT
President Barack Obama is relying on Middle East allies including
Saudi Arabia as linchpins in escalating the offensive against Islamic State
extremists with airstrikes on both sides of the Iraq-Syria border. In a speech to the nation last night, the president said the U.S. would be joined by a broad coalition of partners for a “steady, relentless effort” against the group. No American ground combat troops will be needed, he said, as American airpower will support local forces, primarily Iraqis and select members of the Syrian opposition.
“American power can make a decisive difference, but we cannot do for Iraqis what they must do for themselves, nor can we take the place of Arab partners in securing their region,” Obama said in an address from the White House.
After winning office on a pledge to end the war in Iraq, Obama is reasserting U.S. military power in the region to combat a Sunni extremist group that has swept from Syria deep into Iraq in recent months with a campaign of terror that has included the beheading of two U.S. journalists. The group’s victories over Iraqi forces galvanized public fears of a rising terrorist threat and stirred demands from lawmakers that Obama articulate a plan for dealing with it.
Obama’s strategy turns on bolstering training and aid for vetted members of the Syrian opposition who are rivals to Islamic State in Syria’s civil war.
The
White House has asked Congress to authorize the Defense Department to begin
training and equipping the rebel forces, part of a $500 million program that
Obama first proposed in June.
More
Islamic State Talked of Entering U.S. Through Mexico
Sep 10, 2014 10:14 PM GMT
Islamic State extremists have discussed infiltrating the U.S. through its
southern border with Mexico, a U.S. official said. Francis Taylor, under secretary for intelligence and analysis at the Department of Homeland Security, told a Senate committee today that the Sunni militants have been tracked discussing the idea on social-media sites such as Twitter Inc. (TWTR)
“There have been Twitter and social-media exchanges among ISIL adherents across the globe speaking about that as a possibility,” Taylor said in response to a question from Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican. Islamic State is also known by the acronyms ISIL and ISIS.
Referring
to the 1,933-mile (3,110-kilometer) boundary with Mexico, Taylor said he was
“satisfied that we have the intelligence and the capability at our border that
would prevent that activity.”
More
Obama’s Islamic State Plan Poses Test for Both Parties
Sep 11, 2014 5:00 AM GMT
Fighting Islamic State presents a political problem for President Barack Obama,
and now his call for action is creating one for Democrats and Republicans, too.
Obama’s fellow Democrats, who have embraced an end-the-wars mantra toward Iraq and Afghanistan, must now rally around the commander-in-chief as he authorizes a military plan to defeat the extremists. There has also been a growing call inside the party to end the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, the legal justification for the Bush and Obama administrations to carry out anti-terror policies without approval by Congress.
Democrats are now being pressed into this new posture in the conflict with Islamic State, the justification for which is that 2001 authorization.
Republicans, meanwhile, have embraced a strategy of opposing or blocking votes on Obama’s major initiatives and accusing him of responding too slowly to national security challenges from the Middle East to Eastern Europe.
Now that Obama is calling for more aggressive action against Islamic State, albeit without the use of U.S. combat troops, Republicans are cornered: back the president or be accused of being unpatriotic or, worse yet, weak on national security.
----Obama’s address comes after an abrupt change in public support for a strategy to contain and defeat Islamic State, and a recognition of the threat it presents.
On Sept. 2, the extremists released the videotaped beheading of American journalist Steven Sotloff and blamed Obama for his fate. It was the second such beheading of a journalist in two weeks, after the killing of James Foley.
Half of Americans said U.S. anti-terrorism policies aren’t going far enough, in a Pew Research Center poll conducted Sept. 2-9, up from 35 percent in July 2013. Sixty-two percent of Americans described themselves as very concerned about the rise of Islamic extremism, a 25-percentage-point rise from July 2011.
----The country’s rallying toward a more aggressive response to the threat has politicians in both parties hedging their positions.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, who months ago said it was time to reconsider the legal justification for engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan, said on the Senate floor yesterday that Obama’s plan to destroy Islamic State with airstrikes and drones is a “smart, strategic and effective approach, and I support it.”
Reid also put down a marker, lest Obama be tempted to test the Authorization for Military Force’s legal boundaries down the road. “I support President Obama’s decision not to send in ground troops,” Reid said. “That’s not an option for the American people.”
More
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-11/obama-s-islamic-state-plan-poses-test-for-both-parties.html
In Scotland proper there was a setback of sorts for
“Wee Eck’s” Scottish Nats. The latest opinion poll shows the Unionists leading
53 to 47 percent. With two of yesterday’s
three Mouseketeers safely back in London after their day trip, today, a company of “Red Ed” Milliband’s Old
Labour, English and Welsh shock troops is set to storm Glasgow and rout “Wee
Eck’s” Scots “Cossack’s of the Clyde.”
With exactly one week to go before the Scotch vote, it’s enough to drive a man
to drink at breakfast in Brussels.
“I hadn't the heart
to touch my breakfast. I told Juncker to drink it himself.”
Wee Eck, with apologies to P. G.
Wodehouse.
Alex Salmond's independence bandwagon stalls on his 'Black Wednesday'
A new opinion poll gives the Unionist campaign a six-point lead as the Bank of England's Governor warns a separate Scotland faces billions of pounds of spending cuts or tax rises
8:03PM BST 10 Sep 2014
Alex Salmond’s independence bandwagon has been stalled as a new opinion poll
gave the Unionist campaign a six-point lead and the grim economic reality of
leaving the UK started to emerge. At the end of a day of political drama, a survey of 1,000 Scots was published showing 53 per cent rejected independence and 47 per cent were in favour when undecided voters were excluded.
The six-point margin was the same that pollster Survation recorded two months ago, prompting an immediate jump in the value of the pound on the money markets and suggesting the Yes campaign may have peaked too early with a week to go until the referendum.
The Unionist fight back will gain momentum on Thursday as 100 English and Welsh Labour MPs arrive in Glasgow, before fanning out across Scotland to join an unprecedented ground campaign.
The survey was published in the Daily Record as Mr Salmond yesterday endured his own "Black Wednesday", with some of Scotland's biggest companies warning against the dangers of separation and the Bank of England indicating he faces a £145 billion hole in his plans to keep the pound.
More
Labour voters could break up the Union, admits Ed Miliband
Comments are an admission that Labour supporters shifting their backing into the Yes camp could result in Scotland leaving the Union after 300 years
Labour voters who want to punish the Conservatives could break up the United Kingdom next week, Ed Miliband has admitted.The Labour leader’s warning is an admission that Labour supporters shifting their backing into the Yes camp at next Friday's referendum could result in Scotland leaving the Union after 300 years.
Such a move would be a disaster for Labour particularly, because the over-whelming majority of Scottish MPs - who would lose their seats after independence - are from the Labour party.
Mr Miliband has now cleared his diary and will campaign in Scotland until Friday at the earliest. He said: “There is nothing else remotely of this importance. You can be guaranteed I going to be here a lot in the next eight days. I am certainly here til the end of this week.”
The suggestion that Labour supporters were behind the astonishing recent surge in support for the separatist vote first emerged in polls at the weekend.
More
Elsewhere in Scotland Without, there was anything
but brotherly love on the South China Sea, or the East Scottish Sea as it’s
called north of the border in what the Economist happily calls Skintland.
China Disputes Vietnam Claims Its Vessels Rammed Fishing Boats
Sep 11, 2014 3:22 AM GMT
Vietnam should prevent
illegal fishing in Chinese waters, China’s foreign ministry said, dismissing
claims its boats attacked Vietnamese fishermen near disputed islands in the
South China Sea. Vietnam’s foreign ministry said Sept. 9 that it demanded compensation after Chinese vessels last month rammed and robbed three fishing vessels off the Paracel Islands, known as the Xisha Islands in Chinese. Vietnam and China both claim the islands and surrounding waters.
The accusation is “far from the truth,” Hua Chunying, a spokeswoman for China’s foreign ministry, said yesterday at a briefing. A Vietnamese vessel on Aug. 15 illegally entered waters off the islands to blow up fish and China’s law enforcement authority boarded the ship and confiscated explosives, she said.
More
We end for this special day with bad news from
Brazil. No not that the price of iron ore has fallen again, making the decline
close to 40% this year. Brazil has started destroying the rain forest again.
Brazil confirms Amazon deforestation sped up in 2013
By Marcelo Teixeira SAO PAULO
(Reuters) - The destruction of the world's largest rainforest accelerated
last year with a 29 percent spike in deforestation, according to final figures
released by the Brazilian government on Wednesday that confirmed a reversal in
gains seen since 2009. Satellite data for the 12 months through the end of July 2013 showed that 5,891 square km (3,360 square miles) of forest were cleared in the Brazilian Amazon, an area half the size of Puerto Rico.
Fighting the destruction of the Amazon is considered crucial for reducing global warming because deforestation worldwide accounts for 15 percent of annual emissions of heat-trapping gases, more than the entire transportation sector. Besides being a giant carbon sink, the Amazon is a biodiversity sanctuary, holding billions of species yet to be studied.
Preliminary data released late last year by Brazil's space research center INPE had indicated deforestation was on the rise again, as conservationist groups had warned.
The largest increases in deforestation were seen in the states of Para and Mato Grosso, where the bulk of Brazil's agricultural expansion is taking place. More than 1,000 square km (390 square miles) has been cleared in each state.
Other reasons for the rebound in deforestation include illegal logging and the invasion of public lands adjacent to big infrastructure projects in the Amazon, such as roads and hydroelectric dams.
Despite the increase in 2013, the cleared area is still the second-lowest annual figure since the Brazilian government began tracking deforestation in 2004, when almost 30,000 square km (11,580 square miles) of forest were lost.
More
Normal service, hopefully, will resume September 19th
after the result of the Scottish referendum is in. Either way, it seems to me,
a 51 v 49 result or even a 53 v 47 result, won’t really resolve the issue. This
being Europe, the Scottish government will just keep making the Scots vote
until they get the “correct” result. After the vote is in and assuming it’s a
vote to stay, English voters are likely to get very mad at the parties that
yesterday promised Scottish voters “Independence Lite” at their expense.
“I am
not always good and noble. I am the hero of this story, but I have my off
moments.”
Red
Ed, with apologies to P. G. Wodehouse.
At the Comex silver depositories Wednesday final figures were: Registered 63.92
Moz,
Eligible 115.86 Moz, Total 179.78 Moz.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
Below, Obama and the War Party’s Ukraine bedfellows. Sadly they forgot
the Second Rule of Coups, “after winning keep control of the coup.” Like Blair
and Bush in Iraq, Peace Prize winner Obama, Biden, Nuland, McCain and Co., have
blood on their hands.
Azov fighters are Ukraine's greatest weapon and may be its greatest threat
The battalion's far-right volunteers' desire to 'bring the
fight to Kiev' is a danger to post-conflict stability
Wednesday 10 September 2014 13.36 BST
"I have nothing against Russian nationalists, or a great Russia," said Dmitry, as we
sped through the dark Mariupol night in a pickup truck, a machine gunner
positioned in the back. "But Putin's not even a Russian. Putin's a
Jew."Dmitry – which he said is not his real name – is a native of east Ukraine and a member of the Azov battalion, a volunteer grouping that has been doing much of the frontline fighting in Ukraine's war with pro-Russian separatists.
The Azov, one of many volunteer brigades to fight alongside the Ukrainian army in the east of the country, has developed a reputation for its fearlessness in battle.
But there is an increasing worry that while the Azov and other volunteer battalions might be Ukraine's most potent and reliable force on the battlefield against the separatists, they also pose the most serious threat to the Ukrainian government, and perhaps even the state, when the conflict in the east is over. The Azov causes particular concern due to the far-right, even neo-Nazi leanings of many of its members.
Dmitry claimed not to be a Nazi, but waxed lyrical about Adolf Hitler as a military leader, and he believes the Holocaust never happened. Not everyone in the Azov battalion thinks like Dmitry, but after speaking with dozens of its fighters and embedding on several missions during the past week in and around the strategic port city of Mariupol, the Guardian found many of them to have disturbing political views, and almost all to be intent on "bringing the fight to Kiev" when the war in the east is over.
The battalion's symbol is reminiscent of the Nazi Wolfsangel, though the battalion claims it is in fact meant to be the letters N and I crossed over each other, standing for "national idea". Many of its members have links with neo-Nazi groups, and even those who laughed off the idea that they are neo-Nazis did not give the most convincing denials.
"Of course not, it's all made up, there are just a lot of people who are interested in Nordic mythology," said one fighter when asked if there were neo-Nazis in the battalion. When asked what his own political views were, however, he said "national socialist". As for the swastika tattoos on at least one man seen at the Azov base, "the swastika has nothing to do with the Nazis, it was an ancient sun symbol," he claimed.
The battalion has even drawn far-right volunteers from abroad, such as Mikael Skillt, a 37-year-old Swede, trained as a sniper in the Swedish army, who described himself as an "ethnic nationalist" and fights on the front line with the battalion.
Despite the presence of these elements, Russian propaganda that claims Kiev's "fascist junta" wants to cleanse east Ukraine of Russian speakers is overblown. The Azov are a minority among the Ukrainian forces, and even they, however unpleasant their views may be, are not anti-Russian; in fact the lingua franca of the battalion is Russian, and the majority of them have Russian as their first language.
Indeed, much of what Azov members say about race and nationalism is strikingly similar to the views of the more radical Russian nationalists fighting with the separatist side.
The battalion even has a Russian volunteer, a 30-year-old from St Petersburg who refused to give his name. He said he views many of the Russian rebel commanders positively, especially Igor Strelkov, a former FSB officer who has a passion for military re-enactments and appears to see himself as a tsarist officer. He "wants to resurrect a great Russia, said the volunteer; but Strelkov is "only a pawn in Putin's game," he said, and he hoped that Russia would some time have a "nationalist, violent Maidan" of its own.
On one afternoon earlier this week, the Guardian travelled with a group of Azov fighters to hand over several boxes of bullets to Ukrainian border guards. During an artillery attack outside Mariupol in the days before, the border guards had come to the rescue of a group of Azov fighters, and the bullets were their way of saying thank you.
"Everything in this war is based on personal links; Kiev does nothing," explained the Azov's Russian volunteer, as we sped towards a checkpoint in a civilian Chevrolet; the boot full with the boxes of bullets and rocket-propelled grenade launchers; one of the windows shot out by gunfire during a recent battle.
"This is how it works. You go to some hot spot, they see you're really brave, you exchange phone numbers, and next time you can call in a favour. If you need an artillery strike you can call a general and it will take three hours and you'll be dead. Or you can call the captain or major commanding the artillery battalion and they will help you out straight away. We are Azov and they know that if they ever needed it, we would be there for them."
More
It is
never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of
sunshine.
P. G.
Wodehouse.
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished Aug.
DJIA: +152 Down. NASDAQ: +312 Down. SP500: +231 Down.
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