"The CFTC released it’s commitment of traders report for the last Monday’s Silver Smack Down. And it shows the big guys used the raid to cover -5,209 short contracts (each contract is 5,000 oz. of silver) which is a little more than 26 million ounces of short silver. I wonder how much they covered with a much larger raid last night? This is a huge development. As soon as these guys either cover their shorts or they fail to deliver the physical metal it will be game over. (Remember we have less than 38 million ounces in the registered inventory of the CRIMEX. World wide silver production is 735 million ounces and the banks are still short 258 million ounces or 51,644 contracts. They have a long way to go.)
The big question is"
"As was predictable, the death of Osama bin Laden doesn’t mean the war on terrorism is over. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stresses that al-Qaeda’s message “might have even greater resonance” now that bin Laden is dead.
No one should be surprised that the war will continue. The mission creep in Libya, for example, foreshadowed this.
But there is irony to behold, given that Obama, to great liberal fanfare, announced the end of the war on terrorism in August 2009. Then, in case people forgot, Obama declared the end of the war on terror once again in May 2010.
Of course, this would have seemed odd to those who followed the news. For Bush had ended the “global war on terror” back in the summer of 2005. See Bob Higgs’s insightful comments about that marketing ploy.
It can easily be countered, however, that none of these developments meant the actual tangle of policies together described as the “war on terrorism” would come to an end – nor that the very approach of U.S. foreign policy post 9-11 being conducted as a crusade directed against the abstraction of “terrorism” rather than a more definitive enemy was meant to be reversed. Not in 2005, 2009, nor 2010 did the Bush or Obama administrations actually mean there would be an end to the U.S. government’s preventative wars, its occupations, its counterinsurgencies, its drive toward greater hegemony in the Middle East, its claims to have executive jurisdiction, tempered by neither international law nor domestic checks and balances, over every last one of the planet’s inhabitants on every square foot of land and sea. And, presumably, now that Osama bin Laden – whose activities supposedly justified the U.S. policy of perpetual war for the last decade – is gone, it would be unreasonable to expect that would mean such a policy should cease.
When will the policy end? Perhaps when all “terrorists” everywhere are vanquished. Even then, the job will not be done. Three days after 9/11, Bush said the U.S. must “rid the world of evil.” Thus is the U.S. war on terrorism – whatever we call it – a quest far more ambitious than the war on poverty, the war on drugs, the war on illiteracy and the war on recession combined. For thousands of years, all the clerics, all the governments, all the social activists and all the philosophers have struggled even to define evil precisely. Almost none has claimed the capacity to eliminate it altogether. This was the cornerstone of Bush’s humble foreign policy: the mere vanquishing of all evil. And although Obama would probably hesitate to use such hyperbolic language, there appears little sign of any actual shift in foreign policy since he took office.
Now we know for a fact that the war on terrorism is not just about finding bin Laden, although neither Bush nor Obama ever really implied that it was. However, in Obama’s speech last night, he focused on the one act of violence against Americans that united about ninety percent of the population behind the government ten years ago, and continues to bring life in people’s minds to the “evil” that our government is supposedly out to destroy:
It was nearly 10 years ago that a bright September day was darkened by the worst attack on the American people in our history. The images of 9/11 are seared into our national memory — hijacked planes cutting through a cloudless September sky; the Twin Towers collapsing to the ground; black smoke billowing up from the Pentagon; the wreckage of Flight 93 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where the actions of heroic citizens saved even more heartbreak and destruction.
And yet we know that the worst images are those that were unseen to the world. The empty seat at the dinner table. Children who were forced to grow up without their mother or their father. Parents who would never know the feeling of their child’s embrace. Nearly 3,000 citizens taken from us, leaving a gaping hole in our hearts.
This is no mere abstract discussion of evil. It is as concrete as it gets. We are talking about a delineated, specific atrocity – 9/11 – whose principal perpetrator, as we have been told for a decade, was Osama bin Laden, a man that we are told is now dead. The war on terror is about 9/11, for without the memory of this specific event there is no rationale for the wars, the invasions of our personal liberty, the mass bloodshed and huge expenditure of resources. And yet, paradoxically, the war on terror is not just about avenging the deaths of 9/11, or bringing to justice the man behind it. No, it is about fighting extremists who, as Clinton says, may be emboldened by the very act of killing bin Laden.
Perhaps this is true, and perhaps it could be argued that this alone does not negate the justice of killing bin Laden. But what of the many others who were killed since 9/11? The many, many thousands directly slaughtered by U.S. bombs in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and elsewhere? The many children who were killed? One would think that this, too, might embolden the enemy, and because they, unlike bin Laden, did not have any justice coming to them, we might wonder if the war on terrorism is a policy that, by circumstance if not by deliberate design, cannot help but increase the threat of terrorism far more than it does anything to subdue it.
This raises other uncomfortable questions about U.S. foreign policy. Lost in today’s jubilation is the issue: Why did bin Laden’s goons attack Americans in the first place? Clinton gives a hint. They are actually motivated by what the U.S. does to people abroad. But killing bin Laden, one would logically assume, is no less controversial than, say, killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children through sanctions, propping up an apostate regime in Saudi Arabia, or financing Israel’s scandalous policies of expansion and occupation. You might find these three policies defensible, but they are certainly no more defensible than the killing of Osama bin Laden himself, an event our Secretary of State says might make the terrorist problem worse. Is it so strange to think that the killing of innocent Muslims might also make the terrorist problem worse?
Now that Osama bin Laden is dead, the U.S. has less excuse than ever to continue warring against terrorism. But we are offered no sign that the warring will subside. At least when Osama was said to be on the lam, there was hope that his capture would mean and end to the madness. At this juncture, no such hope can be found."
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, Relics, Memorabilia, Books, Art, Weapons, and much, much more
According to another one of those White House briefings of reporters designed to suck up all available credit for good news, President Obama's homeland security advisor reveals that it was a really tense time in the air-conditioned White House as unidentified U.S. Navy SEALs closed in on the world's most wanted man after midnight a half a world away.
"Minutes passed like days," says John Brennan, who bravely stood with press secretary Jay Carney before reporters and TV cameras today chronicling his boss' weekend heroics.
The heavily-armed commandos flying in a quartet of darkened Blackhawk and Chinook helicopters more than 100 miles into Pakistan were probably listening to their iPods and discussing the NFL draft.
"The concern was that bin Laden would oppose any type of capture operation," said Obama's Sherlock Holmes. So U.S. troops were prepared "for all contingencies."
In fact, this weekend was such a tense time in the White House that Obama only got in nine holes of golf. But he still managed to deliver his joke script to the White House Correspondents Assn. dinner Saturday evening. Via
Sunday was, Brennan revealed to his eager audience, "probably one of the most anxiety-filled periods of times in the lives of the people assembled here." Poor poor bureaucrats. Extra Tums all around. Did someone order dinner?
We are told Osama Bin Laden is dead by a “president” who is an infamous liar. If Osama is dead, Obama was the wrong man to announce it.
Osama Bin Laden: buried at sea?
It's time to call the curtain on this game and then go back to economics.
Find me one typewriter in the world, anywhere, that can perform kerning and I will believe this "certificate" is real.
For the uninitiated, "kerning" is the process of manipulating the spacing of letters to make the appearance more pleasing. Here's an example from this Ticker itself:
This process, of course, requires that you know what the next letter is. With a computer this is pretty easy, since the computer can retroactively go back and adjust, and it also can typeset the current letter with knowledge of what the previous one was.
A typewriter, on the other hand, is a mechanical device. It does not know what the next letter is that you will type, nor does it know what the last letter was that you typed. It thus has a typeface that always leaves physical space between the boundary of each character and the impression. It has to, lest letters run together and look like utter crap.
Typesetters (offset printing machines and similar) perform kerning - in fact, it's part of typesetting. But typewriters do not, cannot, and never have.
This, of course, is why the typed Birth Certificate has kerned text in it.
Having just returned from seeing Part 1 of Atlas Shrugged my advice to all who haven’t seen it is, pay no attention to the terrible reviews. It is very clear why the movie calls forth such venom. The message is simply unacceptable in today’s dominant political culture. The movie opens in 2016. We see an America where nothing works, not the machines and not the people. The streets are lined with homeless people and derelict automobiles. The airports are littered with wrecked planes.
The Middle East has imploded and no oil is being shipped. We learn that gasoline is $37 something a gallon. (Not mentioned in the movie is that Washington’s drilling phobia has left the nation vulnerable to just such a scenario.)
The remaining railroad is run by a smug James Taggart who is ruining the company he inherited, but is very good at articulating concern for those “who need our help.” He depends upon his Washington connections to keep the company afloat. He condemns his sister, Dagny, for wanting to save the firm the old fashioned way, by making it profitable.
Henry Reardon, the protagonist, is a steel tycoon who also disdains Washington. Instead, he concentrates on developing high strength steel that will transform the industry, and help put the country back to work.
Having taught graduate history for a number of years to mid-level and senior officers at the Army's staff college, I find that those who criticize the Confederacy and Confederates do so not out of reasonable convictions, but total ignorance. Many recent polls (USA Today, Pew, etc.) consistently show that most Americans (not "many" but "most") with a college education have only a nominal understanding of our own history.
This results in emotional arguments based on "sound bytes" of historical knowledge. As an example, one of the surveys asked what caused WWII and a large number of responses cite "the attack on Pearl Harbor". Really? That caused the war? What a simplistic and gross misunderstanding of history. The same can be applied to the Civil War when people claim that "slavery" was "the cause". If that is true, my examination of dozens of Union recruiting posters have yet to find one that encourages enlistment to free the slaves. They mostly state that men should join to "Save the Union" if they give a reason.
It is important to remember that not a single Confederate, including Jefferson Davis, was ever convicted of treason against the U.S. In fact, Chief Justice Taney warned Lincoln not to try the Confederates as the possibility of legal secession might well be validated. Taney was no pro-Confederate. He was a Lincoln appointee.
What I find fascinating is that the foreign officers I teach overwhelmingly consider the Confederates and their cause just and that of the Federal government unjust. They have no bias as we Americans do so their views as disinterested observers adds an interesting perspective to this argument. Consider what the commander of the Union Armies, General Grant, said: * I thought for a single minute that this war is being fought over slavery I would but turn in my sword and join the other side".
Wars are complex. Slavery was a contributing factor to the Civil War. Attributing the war's cause solely to slavery is intellectually dishonest and just plain ignorant. While the war was a terrible event, the people of the South sought remedy for a Federal government that they thought had over-stepped its bounds leaving no other remedy than by force-of-arms. The fact that they lost doesn't necessarily mean they were wrong as I tell my students in our Vietnam classes.
(*I have been unable to document this famous quote. BT)
Last year, Syrian President Bashar Assad agreed to store Hizballah's incoming Iran-made Fatah-110 surface missiles and its Syrian equivalent the M-600 and the mobile SA-8 (Gecko) anti-air battery which holds 18 warheads with a maximum range of 12 kilometers. Tehran paid for the upkeep of the Hizballah hardware on Syrian side of the border after Israel threatened to bomb these potential game-changers if they crossed over.But as is always the case with all military operations, logistics is a bitch:
Deployed at Hizballah bases in Lebanon, the Fatah-110 and M-600 would place almost every corner of Israel within range of bombardment, while the SA-8 would seriously restrict Israeli Air Force operations over southern Lebanon and Galilee.
However, as the uprising against Assad rolls ever closer to Damascus, Hizballah see a very real threat of it infecting the Syrian army and has decided that now might be its last chance to get hold of the core arsenal it has standing by for war with Israel before events get out of hand in Syria.
In an attempt to release the news of Osama bin Laden’s death quickly late Sunday night, MSNBC correspondent Norah O’Donnell accidentally reported on Twitter that “Obama” had been “killed” instead.
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Shue was last seen alive in Laos in November 1969. He was with two other Special Forces soldiers and was wounded. At the time, Special Forces ran secret missions inside Laos and Cambodia, gathering intelligence on the North Vietnamese who were sneaking into South Vietnam through the Ho Chi Minh trail.
A few days after Shue went missing, two Green Berets visited her home. The family was devastated, but none more so than their father. He died two years later.
"I think he died of a broken heart," Jones said. "He just loved that boy."
[W]e have already seen the start of this process in Massachusetts, where Mitt Romney’s health care reforms were nearly identical to President Obama’s. Romney’s reforms increased the demand for health care but did nothing to expand the supply of physicians. In fact, by cracking down on insurance premiums, Massachusetts pushed insurers to reduce their payments to providers, making it less worthwhile for doctors to expand their practices. As a result, the average wait to get an appointment with a doctor grew from 33 days to over 55 days.
