We've ALL Crossed the Rubicon Now

As Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon River on his way to Rome to maneuver his way to the top as Supreme Leader (Emperor) of what had been a Republic until his move, he famously remarked to the officers around him that the “die is cast!”  

At that time his remark was weighted with the mystery of a new adventure with totally unknown consequences, because until that moment Roman Generals were clearly and unequivocally proscribed from leading their Legions, fully armed and at their command, when they returned to Rome.  As we all know, he did not fare so well in his quest for ultimate power, but at that moment when he crossed the Rubicon, it very much looked that he was unstoppable.

IMO - the moment at hand is equally portentous of deadly and mortal consequences for all the world, as our Fiscal and Monetary authorities have “ALL CROSSED THE RUBICON!”  

Namely, Bernanke’s ZIRP (See our Blog of 11/15), now guaranteed until 2013 or later, is much more foolhardy, suicidal, insane and hugely reckless than was Julius’ move on the Senators of Rome.  

I am rather certain that this country’s, and the entire world’s, economic and political future will prove to be just as disastrously mortal to us with Bernanke’s ZIRP moves, as did the Roman Republic fail to survive the years of disastrous economic and political chaos that followed Julius Caesar’s foolish endeavor.

A sense of the shifting psychological and cultural and societal tides is apparent in the following two articles, which do clearly illustrate the growing fear of loss of one’s financial assets in Europe and the loss of one’s life in the United States.

The “New Normal” is now enveloping the entire world and its impact will become ever more apparent to all, as the ”Kondratieff” Long-Wave breaks over all the earth in the relatively near future.  Of that we are certain.  Review our thoughts about these arising phenomena on the New Normal web page or subscribe to our Market Review for much greater details.

Are you and your company ready?

Gold Traders Most Bullish in Month on Debt Crisis: Commodities

By Nicholas Larkin - Dec 9, 2011 1:10 PM ET

“….Gold traders are more bullish as investors buy metal at the fastest pace in a year to protect their wealth from Europe’s escalating debt crisis. …

Investors are now making a $130.2 billion bet on gold ….“People are buying out of concern, out of fear,” said Mark O’Byrne, executive director of Dublin-based GoldCore Ltd., a brokerage that sells everything from quarter-ounce British Sovereigns to 400-ounce bars. Central banks “are all pursuing extremely loose monetary policies and we still have negative real interest rates. That makes gold attractive.”

Bullion rose 21 percent to $1,717.80 an ounce this year on the Comex in New York, and reached a record $1,923.70 in September. The Standard & Poor’s GSCI gauge of 24 commodities rose 1.8 percent and the MSCI All-Country World Index of equities retreated 8.9 percent. Treasuries returned 9.3 percent, a Bank of America Corp. index shows. …

The ECB also said it would offer banks unlimited cash for three years and loosened the collateral criteria it imposes when lending by making credit claims such as bank loans eligible and reducing the rating threshold on asset-backed securities.

Gold bar and coin demand in Europe more than doubled to 118.1 tons in the third quarter from a year earlier, data from the London-based World Gold Council show. European Union clients opened a record number of accounts with GoldCore last week and that may be exceeded this week, O’Byrne said.

Central banks are adding to their gold reserves for the first time in a generation. South Korea said last week it bought 15 tons in November to diversify its foreign-exchange reserves. The World Gold Council expects central banks to buy as much as 450 tons this year. Official holdings stand at 30,708 tons, data from the council show. …”

In the Untied States, a much more pronounced and prominent fear and loathing of the unknown prompted by the total erasure or lowered thresholds of all moral codes has now engendered a level of FEAR that is totally new and very unwelcome to us who remember the 50’s.  

The following article also reveals the shifts in demographics that now have produced an atomized society of fearful and apprehensive Americans that simply did NOT exist in the 50's. Those days are indeed gone, forever.  And, President Obama revealed EXACTLY why they don't exist in this country anymore, when  he so cogently,proudly, defiantly and foolishly proclaimed in his first days in office:

“This is no longer a Christian Country!”

As a fervent Christian, who does KNOW Almighty God and His Son – The Christ – I am in total agreement with the President on this one!

 

Buddhist Packing Bond Pistol Shows American Embrace of Guns

Bloombeg; By Ken Wells - Dec 9, 2011 5:37 PM ET

 “…Violet Blue poses for a photo in San Francisco in this still photo taken from the documentary "A Girl and her Gun." Source: Cathryne Czubek via Bloomberg

Robin Natanel picks up a compact black pistol, barrel pointed down range. Gripping the gun with both hands, left foot forward, she raises the semi-automatic and methodically squeezes off five shots. The first one creases the left edge of a red bull’s-eye on a target 25 feet away. The four others paint a three-inch pattern around the first. If the target were a person’s head or heart, he’d probably be dead.

Natanel is a Buddhist, a self-avowed “spiritual person,” a 53-year-old divorcee who lives alone in a liberal-leaning suburb near Boston. She is 5-foot-1 (155 centimeters) and has blonde hair, dark eyes, a ready smile and a soothing voice, with a hint of Boston brogue. She’s a Tai Chi instructor who in classes invokes the benefits of meditation. And at least twice a month, she takes her German-made Walther PK380 to a shooting range and blazes away.

Two years ago, an ex-boyfriend broke into her house when she wasn’t home. The police advised a restraining order. Instead, she bought pepper spray and programmed the local police number on her cell phone’s speed dial. “I was constantly terrified for my safety,” she says.

Ultimately, she got the Walther, joining a confederacy of people who might once have been counted on in the main to be anti-handgun -- women, liberals, gays, college kids. They are part of a national story: Domestic handgun production and imports more than doubled over four years to about 4.6 million in 2009, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a gun-industry trade group.

‘Societal Change’

The surge has been propelled by shifting politics and demographics … Events like yesterday’s fatal shootings on the Virginia Tech University campus reinforce a feeling that the world is an unsafe place,… Natanel found it was no trouble to purchase the Walther, a brand favored by movie superspy James Bond, or to locate experts to train her “I’d never considered a gun,” Natanel says. “I thought they were scary. I wanted nothing to do with them. I didn’t think anyone should have them.”

Twenty years ago, 76 percent of women felt that way about handguns, and 68 percent of all people in the country were wary enough of firearms of any kind to tell Gallup pollsters that they backed laws more strictly limiting their sale. Then what Gallup calls “a clear societal change” began.

Democrats, Women

In October, a Gallup poll found record-low support for a handgun ban -- at 26 percent among all, and 31 percent among women. The poll, which has tracked gun attitudes since 1959, documented a record-low 43 percent who favor making it more difficult to acquire guns and record-high numbers of women and Democrats saying there is a firearm at home. Forty-seven percent said someone in the household owns at least one gun, the highest reading in 18 years.

The growing acceptance of guns echoes a transformation in the politics of weapons. In 1987, Florida joined a handful of states that by law or tradition allowed people to carry hidden guns; now Illinois is the sole conceal-carry holdout, and the U.S. House of Representatives on Nov. 16 sent to the Senate a bill advocated by the NRA that would require those that issue concealed gun permits to recognize licenses from other states.

... Students for Concealed Carry on Campus, which claims 45,000 adherents on Facebook, sprang up in response to the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings.

….The advent of the 24/7 news cycle and its steady thrum on violent crimes may also be helping to drive people to handguns. Deciding to acquire one is part of “a broader feeling of helplessness that doesn’t come out of any kind of thoughtful calculation of risk,” says Homsher. “People buy guns to get rid of their phantoms.”

Women, too, may be liberalizing gun attitudes, because of the unprecedented numbers of them who have trained on firearms in the military and law enforcement in the past 30 years. Some 250,000 women have served in combat zones -- and often in combat roles -- in Iraq and Afghanistan, returning with a familiarity of firearms their mothers never had.

….Besides Students for Concealed Carry, there are the Pink Pistols, Mothers Arms, Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, the Second Amendment Sisters, the Women’s Firearm Network and the International Defensive Pistol Association, among others....

The public face of the 11-year-old Pink Pistols, which claims 1,500 members across 29 chapters, is Nicki Stallard, a 52-year-old, San Jose, California, medical technician who has a Colt .45 and a conceal-carry permit. She recruits under the group’s motto, “Armed gays don’t get bashed.”

Stallard, who had a sex-change operation in 2007, is in a documentary being made by HEYbabe Productions, a group of independent film makers, that amounts to a call to arms for gays. The title, “Arming Laramie,” derives from Laramie, Wyoming, the site of the 1988 murder of Matthew Shepard, a 21- year-old gay college student, that led to the passage of a 2009 federal hate crimes law named after him.

‘It’s Emotional’

As Gwen Patton, a former spokeswoman for the Pink Pistols, says in the trailer: “We teach queers to shoot -- then we teach everybody that we’ve done it.”...

Women Living Alone

Natanel is emblematic of a demographic bulge that may help explain why women are drawn to handguns: More and more of them are living alone. The number of one-person households in America increased to 27 percent of the population in 2010 from 13 percent in 1960, according to U.S. Census data. Including single mothers, about half of all women now live without spouses, up from about 35 percent in 1950, based on census estimates. …

 ‘You’re Done’

Over lunch at a Friendly’s restaurant in Springfield, Massachusetts, Robin Natanel marvels at her changed attitudes. A half-hour earlier, she was browsing the Smith & Wesson retail store and, she says, “drooling over guns -- it’s like shoe- shopping to me now.”

She was considering a smaller pistol because she’d become enamored of a new conceal-carry holster called the Flashbang that attaches to the underwire of a bra. The wearer simply pulls up her blouse or T-shirt and with a single swipe downward can free the gun and fire, hence the archly descriptive name. The Walther, she says, “is just too big to fit the Flashbang.”

The topic turns serious. Natanel recalls the Oct. 12 shooting rampage at a Southern California hair salon in which eight people died. “If people couldn’t get guns at all, yes, maybe that would have prevented the shooting. But that’s not the world we live in,” Natanel says. “And what if I had been there with my gun? What if I could have intervened? Slowed him down. Would people judge me then?”

She adds: “I wake up every day saying, ‘Please, I never want to shoot.’ But make no mistake about it -- you try to hurt me and you’re done.”