Gold is flooding west to east - History repeats.

Zero Hedge noticed gold is moving from London to Switzerland almost twenty times faster than last year, it's destiny to be melted and re-poured in sizes Asian buyers like.  Colorfully expressed:

"What has happened is lobotomized Westerners have sent much of their gold to Asia just as the financial system prepares to melt down again".

We have an odd situation where demand for real gold is up and demand for paper gold is down.

This has happened before.
Way before.
What happened to the gold and silver grabbed from the Incas and Aztecs?  It caused inflation in Spain and Portugal and moved towards the mercantile countries like the Netherlands and gradually moved from there to India and China.  We hear about the spice, tea and silk trade from the east.  Those ships and caravans weren't all going empty on the outbound leg.


Professor Braudel in his wondrous tour de force, "The Structures of Everyday Life" makes the point, p 462.

Wikipedia, The Age of Discovery: "Europeans had a constant deficit in silver and gold,[26] as coin only went one way: out". (This was ca 1500).

Expanding Universe or maybe not.

The math seems to work equally if the universe is expanding or, radically rethought, if particles are shrinking and becoming more massive.  Professor Wetterich has put this forward and so far his peers take him seriously.   What about the red shift caused by the Doppler effect as distant matter recedes faster and faster from us?  The same result is expected if particles occupy less and less space for the same mass.  One consequence is that the beginning isn't a big bang but something more gradual, like a glissando on the piano, beginning in lower pitches and passing to high ones.

Notes extracted from Roger Highfield'article in the Calgary Herald. 
h/t smalldeadanimals

Picture borrowed from the Herald just because it looks nice.

Adams: "Christians murdered all over Egypt, New Puppy at White House" Updated.

Cute little fellow

"All over Egypt, Christian churches are being burned, Christians murdered, and nuns paraded in the streets as “prisoners of war.”  The war can only mean a war of Islam vs. Christianity, right? What other “war” could they be prisoners of? Their words, not mine. The Muslim Brotherhood ...are conducting a war of genocide against Christians, and trying to erase the Copts from the land, one of the oldest Christian groups in the world. Once upon a time in America, the American President would have stood before the world and...."

Posted by J Christian Adamas at pjmedia.com/tatler 
"Making nice" works with nice people, not so well with a dialogue of clubs and bullets.

Update 1: A call for backbone:  "Not one more plane, not one more tank, not one more dollar, until Egypt's Christians are Protected".
Update 2: Too late.  Egypt is finding aid from Saudis and Russia instead.

The oceans fell

An unexpected drop in world ocean levels (about the thickness of a pencil) happened in 2010-2011. Remember those floods in Australia?  Massive rainfall in tropical areas of the earth removed water from the seas. Australia got an average of about one foot extra water dropped over its entire surface.   Not much of it drained back to the ocean.  Divvy that up over the entire surface of the sea and you get a measurable move.   Climate science is still learning.  Linked to Science Daily News

Click through to this live moisture map of the whole earth.  Large areas of ocean cloud are carrying up to 6 cm of water that would otherwise be sitting at the ocean's surface. (The map is amazing, updated daily, showing the motion of moisture laden air.)

Come on in Verizon

Let's have that extra edge of competition
and spit on the awful protest ads from Bell, Telus and Rogers.

Sly misdirection

The big three push your buttons with this line: "“Sweetheart deals for U.S. giants are a bad call for you.” and hide their self interest in the small print. Shabby language from Canada's little giants.  Two little companies (Wind Mobile, Mobilicity) that may be bought by Verizon have brought Canadian cell pricing down.  The "US Giant" will have to sell its product in Canada for less than it gets in the US.  Remember that giants pass away as Bethlehem Steel, TWA and Kodak did when they stopped giving good value to their customers.  I used to shop at Dominion ("It's mainly because of the meat") years ago.  Verizon (Formerly Bell Atlantic Corporation) isn't new to Canada because it used to own a lot of BC Tel (Telus today).  What about losing jobs?  When Kentucky Fried Chicken and Walmart came to Canada, they hired Canadians.  Same with Verizon.

Added: Political Insider points out Telus has a call centre in the Phillipines. So much for job losses.

There are some blocks of spectrum that Canada's big three can't bid on and Verizon, if it buys one of the smaller companies, would be able to bid on it.   The reason there is a restricted bid is to encourage more players into the market!, protecting Canadian consumers from monopolizing tendencies of Telus, Rogers and Bell.

Update: More nuance from Michel Kelly-Gagnon at the Financial Post.

Remember this ad? Greyhound pissing
on unidentified plane.

Do you remember when discount Greyhound Air was going to open up in Canada? They wanted to get people out of cars and into planes.  Air Canada in particular led the charge to have government regulations dump on them before Greyhound could get out of the gate.  If you ever wonder why Canada has such high air fares compared to the US, remember the Greyhound Air that never happened.  (Hmmm. Reading a little further I see that Laidlaw bought Greyhound Canada but didn't want to continue support for the air venture, the National Transportation Agency (egged on by Air Canada and CP) declared Greyhound didn't have a domestic air licence??)  I thought it was cronyism between big airlines and big government, at the time. Am I wrong?

Does the Middle East need a bloody defeat to catch up to the West?

Glenn Reynolds, Professor of Law
University of Tennesee.

Some lessons are never learned until  our nose is rubbed in them. Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit expands on the horrible idea that maybe the Arabs should be left to spill each others blood while we burn oil and gas we drilled and fracked for ourselves. A proper defeat will open minds to change.
The Middle East was spared most of the bloodshed of the two World Wars and hasn't learned to sober up about calling for Jihad and vainglorious murderous struggles.

Notable comments from the Instapundit story:
-"Use barbarians to fight barbarians" Sun Tzu. (Ob1knob)
-"With regard to that comment about the Arab world missing out on massive bloodshed, recall that a million men died in the Iraq/Iran war of 1979. If that's not bloody enough, I don't know what to say." (Brown Line)
-Link to Spengler "All-out Middle East war as good as it gets"  (DrEvilDoer)

Stalin slaughters Polish officers at Katyn, 1941.

Expand Canada. Why think small?

The 1846 Oregon Treaty between the Brits and the Yanks gave up all the lands north of the Columbia to the 49th parallel.  The Columbia is a natural boundary between Canada and the US. Why is there a Vancouver in Washington State?  Because it used to be our Fort Vancouver.  If you ever drive through the lower Fraser Valley, you can see the rest of the delta farmland that should have been Canada stretching south.  With the farmland and the Seattle harbour, the West of Canada would be a powerhouse. (This deal happened just 21 years before our Confederation.)

We've flirted with the Turks and Caicos Islands:   Robert Borden PM (1917), NDP Saltsman (1974), PC McKenzie (1986),  Conservative Goldring (2004) and the Province of Nova Scotia (2004) which offered to annex the Islands within Canada.

A 1952 business poll in Barbados showed most were keen to join Canada. (Wikipedia link above).

Iceland has been thinking about adopting the Loony.

There's even a tiny separatist movement in Siberia which has thought of joining the US (Alaska).  We're just as close. China will end up with that land, not Russia, the way things are going.

Why think small?  We have one of the safest, wealthiest, healthiest and friendliest countries on the face of the earth and many would like to come here or have a chance to rub some of that off on themselves.

Turks & Caicos beach

Secret tunnel between biggest sovereign public gold vault and formerly biggest commercial gold vault?

Side by side on the map.

What's this?  The world's largest private gold vault is joined by a tunnel to the world's largest public sovereign gold vault and the former is emptying out and up for sale.  Zero Hedge reports JP Morgan is selling 1 Chase Manhattan Place which is just across the road from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.  The two vaults are 90 feet underground, linked by a little known tunnel, and served by elevators that would lift a tank. The storage was developed on bedrock to survive an A bomb.

How solid are these facts?  The tunnel and elevator report comes from a one year old comment made on an earlier Zero Hedge article.  (Captain Kink: "I have seen it")   ie, not very solid.  On the other hand, that two extraordinary and same-purposed vaults are side by side is pretty good circumstantial support.  The Fed may not be the very biggest sovereign public gold vault on earth.

A related story: Germany has arranged to gradually get its national gold supply back from the NY Fed vault across the road but has not been allowed to verify the gold is there.
How big:  The Fed vault is built on bedrock to support 530,000 gold bars safely.This gold mostly belongs to foreign nations and is separate from the Fort Knox and West Point repositories of US gold.

Canadiana: best naughty limerick

"Took a dip in the chill Illecillewaet".  Heard it years ago on the CBC when I had a stomach for their programming.   Click to be amused.

Pricey shades reverse color blindness

$300 to $600 will buy you specially-coated and cool-looking glasses that restore lost color vision.  All the bands of the rainbow reappear.
Link to NYT story.

Google: Friendly Giant or another NSA? Updated.

Google everything was down for about three minutes August 16th. Worldwide internet traffic dropped 40%
What does the transparent administration of Google have to say about that?  "The web giant is refusing to discuss why all its services from Google Search to Gmail to YouTube stopped working across the world."
Not only do they know more than we think proper about ourselves, we now depend on them when we want to know about others.

Update: Google was paid millions by NSA to cover administrative costscomplying with all the NSA requests. (The Guardian).

Google.com was down for a few minutes between 23:52 and 23:57 BST on 16th August 2013. This had a huge effect in the number of pageviews coming into GoSquared's real-time tracking - around a 40% drop   (BST= British  Summer  Time)

Calibrate your Egyptian news with Totten, Spengler & Mead.

Chasing the news cycle in Egypt is a losing game.  Read these three gentlemen instead. Michael Totten talks to the Brotherhood and their observors, giving you their own words. "Spengler" (David Goldman) spends time in Egypt and notices the importance of little things like putting food on the table and regional sway.  The informed Mead thinks clearly about everything, sifting greys to find sharp conclusions.   The rest that I read is pictures, churn and confirmation.

http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/blogs/michael-j-totten

http://pjmedia.com/spengler/

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2013/08/16/average-egyptians-not-aghast-at-armys-actions/

Will you believe Obama or your lying ears and eyes?

This is not a pipe

This is not a scandal.

More troublesome than scandals is a new lawlessness abroad in the land.  As Kate at smalldeadanimals notes from time to time: "When the president does, it, that means that it is not illegal"

Oprah's Purse and Bo's Private Plane show "Civil Rights" is dead. Try the Constitution instead.

After

Roger Simon points out the obvious that Civil Rights is like bell bottom trousers from the sixties.  Obama's dog (for the second time) gets a separate flight) to go on holidays.  Oprah (for the second time) calls "Discrimination" (over a $35000 purse she fancied) just before a movie she backs comes out.  Roger fingers the NAACP and Black Caucus, Sharpton and Jackson et al.   "Civil Rights" now means a Democrat vote and grievance machine to raise money and status.

Before

The fall back position is superior:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,

China will reach the Indian Ocean

Maps show that China has everything to gain by getting access to the Indian Ocean.  She's walled into the South China Sea by a string of strong island neighbours with alliances to the United States.  The lion's share of its goods have to travel back and forth through the narrow Malacca Straits over which it has no direct control. It's paid for oil and gas lines running through Burma/Myanmar. (Gas complete July 29th and oil a couple months behind). It's paid for major ports in Sri Lanka and Pakistan.  There are frequent border provocations between China and India and you have to wonder why bother with these Himalayan high spots. Lhasa, the capital of Tibet is close to India's bottleneck between Bangladesh and Tibet. It's hardly a dozen miles from Bangladesh to Nepal and maybe fifty miles from Bangladesh to Bhutan. That's almost indefensible and if Bangladesh was a strong supporter of a decision by China to interdict transport there, the east of India could easily be conquered.    Bangladesh already uses Chinese tanks in its army, frigates in its navy and jets in its air force.

Lhasa, Calcutta and the two bottlenecks highlighted.

This is strictly speculation, but if I were an Indian general tasked with defining worst case scenarios, I'd be losing sleep over that bottleneck of land bet
ween Bangladesh and the Tibetan highlands.

From the Economist via Via Media

Map links Red Hair to Slavery and Neanderthals

First is the map of Red Hair in Europe.   You're not surprised that Irish and Scots have a lot of red hair.

Next is the map of a mutation on Chromosome 16.  It's almost a perfect match.


Slavery?  See the patch of red hair at the SW tip of Norway?
This is certainly explained by the Vikings capturing Celts from the land of  modern Ireland and Scotland a thousand years ago.

Neanderthals?  Notice the outlying patch in Russia.  It has no connection to the Chromosome 16 mutation map.  The Udmurt tribal group in the Urals at the headwaters of the Volga are as red as the Irish but unrelated.  Suspicion points to a Neanderthal link.  Neanderthals have about 10% of their genome present in ours and don't have the recessive mutation on #16.

If you read the article on Red Hair genetics and mapping, you'll see there are several historical details that don't quite fit this narrative. (The Tarim mummies, ancient Thracians)  Most of the content of this posting is abridged from the link.

Pooh's diet advice: Patience and less food

Why you need a Pooh refresher is because dieters are impatient.  How many times a day can you climb on a scale to make progress?   If  you're losing the equivalent of half a hamburger patty daily (2 oz) and drinking 32 oz of water and wine and pop, you won't learn anything useful until you are patient.  You can't even tell if you are gaining or losing if you are in a hurry.  The ups and downs of one day are twenty times bigger than any actual loss for the day.

So here is Pooh being patient, albeit sadly, after stuffing himself while visiting Rabbit and being stuck on the way out.

Laundry hanging on the South End, A reading about Jam and Honey at the North End.

The original is still for sale!

Greedy or Angry Americans renouncing citizenship? Small number processed into Enormous Story.

Recent headlines include:
U.S. Expats Balk at Tax Law:  American Citizen Renunciations Are Soaring  (Wall Street Journal)

Americans renouncing citizenship in record numbers, seek to avoid tax  (Fox)
Americans-giving-up-passports-jump-sixfold-as-tougher-rules-loom   (Business Week)

Not a lie but still a modest number.  In the first half of the year, fewer than one American in three hundred thousand renounced citizenship to avoid a pernicious tax.   The number has bumped up because a new predatory tax law is about to come into effect.  (Noted in

Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act.

the Wall Street Journal link above).  That number will be heading back down soon.   America is about the only jurisdiction that tries to tax what its citizens make in other countries as well as their own, leading to double taxation.  This is absurd overreach.  It's also behind recent stories condemning Apple for holding earnings overseas where they were earned.  To bring them to America to create American jobs would wipe out about a third of the treasure trove.