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Ann,

What is your response to Obama telling Catholics that they have no right to their own consciences vis-a-vis contraception, abortifacients and sterilization?

What is your response to the Obama DOJ, SEC and CFTC allowing Jon Corzine to steal over a billion dollars and effectively destroy the futures and options markets?

What is your response to the Tennessee woman being arrested and imprisoned for asking a policeman what she should do with her legally owned handgun in New York City?

What is your response to Obama adding over SIX TRILLION DOLLARS (to date) to the national debt, thus debasing and destroying the currency?

What is your response to Obama looting the United States Treasury and handing billions of dollars in federally guaranteed "loans" to political cronies to skim off of shell companies that are never intended to produce or be profitable?

What is your response to Obama thwarting every effort for energy production in the United States while handing that same production capacity to the Chinese?

What is your response to Obama gutting, demoralizing and hamstringing the United States Military?

What is your response to the Obama regime eliminating due process and giving themselves the power to arrest and imprison American Citizens indefinitely at their sole discretion?

What is your response to Obama's alliance with the Islamic Caliphate?

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Here is my response:

† Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy Name. Thy kingdom come. THY WILL BE DONE, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And FORGIVE US OUR TRESPASSES, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but DELIVER US FROM EVIL.

For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen †

Hat Tip to BrutallyHonest.org

This arrived in my email box from CME Group this morning and it made my blood run cold.

OVER THE COUNTER agricultural products? No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No.

So help me, anyone in the ag sector that is stupid enough to trade this crap will deserve EVERYTHING that they get. If they are raping and pillaging without compunction in the old school contracts, what do you think they're going to do OVER THE FLIPPING COUNTER?

Here's the CME link.

Some people are "visual learners". That's cool. I gotchu. Here is a perfect visual representation of CME OTC ag products. The waterhole is the marketplace. The gazelle is YOU. The huge crocodile in the foreground is named Goldie, but his homeys just call him "Da Squid." The other croc in the background who does the actual "rolling" is Jamie Dimon. This is pretty close to real life, except in real life there would be FAR MORE BLOOD AND GORE, and the process would drag out over MONTHS AND MONTHS. Enjoy!

DO YOU UNDERSTAND????

DO. YOU. UNDERSTAND.???????????

For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen †

Writing about Sharia finance is oddly refreshing. Why? Because it is a chance to point out the abject stupidity – and guys, we’re talking full-on drooling imbecility here – of islam without anyone getting their head sawed off with a dull Ginsu-II or a child getting raped. Sharia finance is so monumentally stupid that it is actually hysterically funny. Have a few beers around a campfire and I could get you laughing so hard your ribs would ache.

Sharia finance CLAIMS to be lending without interest, because everyone knows that interest is all a sinister plot hatched by the JOOOOOOZ to keep down the white man. Wait. Keep down the black man. Wait, no. I’m getting so confused. Um, it definitely has something to do with the JOOOOOOZ, and I know this because all of the Ron Paul supporters tell me so. They also tell me that the World Trade Center was brought down by cold fusion-powered government tractor beams. They also tell me that the earthquake we had here in Colorado last year was actually the government (or was it the JOOOOOOOZ?) destroying the secret underground mega-city west of Trinidad, CO (Middle Earth is REALZ, yo!) with nuclear weapons, and that Ron Paul actually is the best friend and savior of the JOOOOOOOZ and if I weren’t such a Jew-loving, Zionist c*** I would see that. My email box is proof that truth is stranger than fiction, and that you really, truly can not make this stuff up. But I digress.

So the entire premise of Sharia finance is that there is NO INTEREST. If you borrow money, it is at zero percent, because the paying of interest is “haram”, which means “forbidden”, according to Sharia law. Got it? Good. Now, let me walk you through the reality of Sharia finance, and I warn you, don’t drink while you’re reading this, because if you do, you stand a good chance of spewing your Dr. Pepper out your nose, and I won’t be responsible for that.

Let’s say a person buys a $150,000 home on a 15 year mortgage at 5%. Purely for the sake of simplicity, let’s just say zero down. The amortization table shows that over those 15 years, or 180 months, at 5% interest, the monthly payment would be $1186.19 and that the total interest expense paid over the life of the mortgage would be $63,514.28. So, principal plus interest would be $213,514.28 for the $150,000 property.

Now here is an “interest-free” Sharia loan scenario. And bear in mind that I am dead serious here. I’m not making this up.

A musloid walks in to a Sharia-compliant lender and tells them that they want to buy a $150,000 property on a 15 year term. The Sharia-compliant lender then looks up what the going INTEREST RATE is. (Uh, Houston, we have a problem.) In our example, it is 5% on a 15 year mortgage. He then calculates the amortization table on a 15 year loan on $150,000 at 5%. (Uh, Houston, we've had some sort of major malfunction here.) He sees that the total interest expense would be $63,514.28. So, the Sharia-compliant lender then offers to buy the property at $150,000 and immediately sell it to the customer for . . . $213,514.28. The customer then sets up a note to repay the $213,514.28 in 180 equal monthly payments of $1186.19 at “zero percent”, because $213,514.28 divided by 180 is $1186.19. Voila! Zero interest!

That’s it. I’m not kidding. I’m not making this up. If I was going to make something up, I would make something up that wasn’t totally, completely, laughably stupid.

Um, soooooo, tell me Mister Musloid, what EXACTLY is the $63,514.28 markup? Uh, isn’t that . . . interest? How was that amount calculated? Uh, didn’t you ping the interest rate market to come up with that number? Yes.

Aren’t you paying the lender for the use of his money over the 15 year term? Yes.

Wouldn’t TRUE zero-interest lending mean that you paid a total of $150,000 for the property, and that your monthly payment would therefore be $150,000 divided by 180 months, or $833.33 per month? Yes.

And if you did a 30 year loan at true zero interest, your monthly payment would be $150,000 divided by 360, or $416.66 per month? Yes. THAT would be zero interest. Sharia finance is “zero interest” about as much as I am a bottle of 1964 Chateau Latour.

Over the Christmas holiday, I had the occasion to be around a two year old while traveling. There was a blanket nearby, and we inevitably fell into the old game of “hide under the blanket”. The toddler would pull the blanket over their head right in front of me, and then I would say, “Hey, where did she go? She was here just a minute ago. She just disappeared!” And then the toddler would pull the blanket off of her head and yell “HERE I AM!” and I would act like I had just witnessed some sort of miraculous manipulation of the fabric of space-time – probably having to do with a secret government cold fusion-powered tractor beam. You know the game. And you also know that toddlers at between the ages of three and four become self-aware, and possess enough cognitive sophistication to be able to perceive and extrapolate how OTHERS perceive THEM. And as soon as that intellectual benchmark is reached, the “hide under the blanket game” no longer works, because the child KNOWS YOU CAN SEE THEM.

This is pretty much the dynamic we are dealing with vis-à-vis the musloids. These people are intellectually and cognitively stunted due to 1400 years of inbreeding. As a result of this, they actually think that this Sharia finance “work around” is somehow valid or legit - AND THAT WE CAN'T SEE IT. They think that we non-musloids look at this and say, “My goodness! Yes . . . yes. That truly is a zero interest mortgage! Why didn’t we think of that?!”

The sad thing is that the politically correct morons who infest our culture think that it is somehow “tolerant” or “promoting diversity” to go along with the musloids and their intellectual retardation. And so, all of the megabanks are furiously scrambling to set up “Sharia-compliant” financial products, when the only appropriate response to such absurdity would be something along the lines of, “DO YOU THINK THAT I’M STUPID? GET THE HELL OUT OF MY OFFICE, AND TAKE YOUR BRAIN-DAMAGED NONSENSE WITH YOU. NOW. I’M BUSY.”

Finally, just a word about this in terms of the faux-religious con of islam. Have you noticed that musloids are constantly trying to cheat, deceive, and concoct “work-arounds” of ol’ allah? Sharia finance is merely trying to come up with a childish legalistic way to claim that they aren’t paying interest – but they obviously are. Islam also teaches that men can sin and do whatever they please on Mondays and Thursdays, because these are the two days of the week that allah is “inventorying the deeds of men”, and thus allah “is busy and isn’t watching you.”

I’m telling you, the stupid is STRONG with these people. What the hell kind of religion is built upon screwing over the diety? Oh, yeah - a “religion” that isn’t a religion at all, but a stupid, evil totalitarian political cult that uses faux-religious myths and motifs to control its cognitively damaged slaves. THAT kind of “religion”.

Guys, it is one thing to play “hide under the blankie” with a two year old. It is quite another to play that game with a 50 year old man wanting to buy real estate who smells of goat and Axe Body Spray, and also wants to kill you and take over your country.

For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen †

"The person who does not become irate when he has cause to be sins. For an unreasonable patience is the hotbed of many vices. It fosters negligence, and stimulates not only the wicked, but above all, the good to do wrong."
--St. John Chrysostom
c. 347-407 AD

For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen †

This landed in my email box and I thought it a great reference. The source is Weiss Ratings, and I have no linkage to them and would point you to them for any further details, but considering how many Bank of America, Citi and other mega-bank customers are asking where to go, this list gives you a starting point, at least.

Source Link

I have received enough calls and emails on this within the last few weeks to A.) cause concern and B.) merit a post.

People are having difficulty withdrawing cash from banks. I just received the SECOND call on this from California this week. The question is, do banks have the right to deny you cash withdrawals?

The answer is NO. They do not. And both of the men I have heard from in California were obviously being bee-essed by their bank. The bank couldn't cite statute, and then started haggling over the amount of cash withdrawals they would allow. That's your dead give-away. If there were ANY statute or actual rule, the bank wouldn't set up a conference call and then start haggling. You don't haggle over laws and rules.

What banks can do is ask for up to 7 days notice on a large cash withdrawal just so that they can order the cash in special and not completely drain their cash on hand. This is very logical and sensible. For transactions over $10,000 the bank also does have to file a transaction report. Again, this is standard. We may not like it, but that has been the law for a very long time.

Also, one chap in CA reported that his bank told him that if he took more than $20,000 out of the bank in cash that he would have to hire an armored vehicle and security. This is an abject lie. $100 bills are bundled in 1/2" stacks. a 1/2" stack contains 100 bills. Therefore $20,000 would be two standard 1/2" stacks of hundred dollar bills, which would fit in ANY purse or easily into the inside pocket of any men's sportcoat. We aren't talking bags and bags of cash. Cash is still shockingly compact.

For now, what I would recommend is setting up your new destination bank account FIRST, and then simply closing the old account with the mega-bank and taking the deposit in the form of a cashier's check. Then drive the cashier's check directly to the new bank and deposit it. BUT, if for whatever reason you want or need cash money, no, banks have no right to deny you cash provided you give them the sufficient 7 day notice.

Limiting cash withdrawals is a sign of an insolvent or failing banking system. These sorts of limits are happening in Italy as we speak. It is very telling that banks in the U.S. are now lying and dissimulating in order to avoid and thwart cash withdrawals by their customers.

If anyone has any more details, information or insight on this question, I would be interested to read it in an email.

CITATION HERE.

For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen †

Okay, okay. Yeah, I can be a little slow at the switch sometimes, but NOW I think I get it. MF Global. The CME. The big banks. The Fed. The Federal regulatory bodies. Okay. It's all tied together. Behold the endgame, courtesy of Reuters:

"Clearing houses: the next casualty of the crisis?"

Last two sentences:

Ultimately what began as regulatory push to force transparency in over the counter markets may end up being a more fundamental reform of the clearing house sector itself.
"In an ideal world there would be a single global, not for profit, CCP backed by all central banks," said Orchard.

Sorry. I wasn't thinking on a large enough scale. I tend not to - I'm a micro economist and small business owner with no aspirations (past, present or future) to ginormousness. I don't think in these terms - but there it is.

The point of MF Global and all of the subsequent activity, which looked positively suicidal, was to bring ALL FINANCIAL MARKETS on the planet under the control of a single clearing EXCHANGE owned by the a single global banking entity comprised of the central banks, i.e. the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank.

And who populates, owns and runs the central banks? The big banks. Goldman. JPM. UBS. I thought the banksters only wanted to take over the FCMs and brokerage houses. It didn't occur to me that they not only wanted to be the only game in town for execution and clearing, but they also want to be the EXCHANGE ITSELF. They want to run, own and control absolutely EVERYTHING.

Just theorizing here now, but it seems to me that the best way to bring such a scheme to fruition would be to plant one of your boys in a major FCM, have him raid the customer seg funds, go out of your way (change rules and laws on the fly, abolish all precedents, file fraudulent BKs) to make sure the customers hang and are profoundly damaged, then use the contrived "crisis" to gin up a call for massive centralization.

This is what these rat-bastards do. They create crises and then before it is all over, they have the sheeple BEGGING THE OLIGARCHS to take over and enslave them in the name of "rescue", "protection", "security" and "salvation". Am I the only person who has ever read the history of the Soviet Union?

No wonder Corzine is brazenly shopping for office space in Lower Manhattan. This mess isn't wrapping up - they're just getting started. Corzine was first to bat and got on base just as he was supposed to. We're still at the top of the inning with a man on base and no outs. Oh, and the umps are all on the take and the strike zone is about the size of a saucer.

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On a similar note, here is a URL for a Wall Street Journal piece titled, "MF Global Probe Focuses on Back Office".

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203735304577164670090033702.html

In one of the first interviews I did on MF Global - maybe Andrea Shea King on 11/21/2011? - I was asked if it was possible that a low-level staffer was responsible for any of this. I said at that time that NO, this was NOT the doing of some $40k per year treasury clerk in Chicago, but that I suspected that eventually Corzine et al would attempt to pin this on some poor back office grunt.

It looks like that process is starting. And this is EXACTLY how Marxist-Fascist oligarchs operate. They view the working grunts in society as nothing more than economic units with one purpose and one purpose only. They use the lower class and the lower-middle class (the proletariat) in order to achieve power. They gin up class warfare and government dependency among these people. But they really DESPISE them. They claim to be their champion, but as soon as the proletariat is no longer needed, they are liquidated and exterminated like the vermin that the oligarchs consider them to be.

Here is what they are going to eventually try to do. They are going to find the person who actually, physically keypunched the wire transfers from the customer seg funds to the proprietary trading accounts at JP Morgan.

Let me describe that person to you. That person is probably something like a single mother with a high school diploma or GED who rides the Orange Line into the Loop every morning from the Southside. Her entire job is to sit at a desk in a cubicle with a computer terminal which logs in to the Fed wire transfer system. She is handed pieces of paper or emails all day that are set up in a template that request wire transfers. The template contains the source MF Global account number and the wiring instructions of the destination and the dollar amount. She has absolutely no fathom which accounts are which. She is just a data-entry clerk. Her job is menial and repetitive, but she is happy to have it because it is steady, relatively secure (or so she thought) and has health insurance benefits for her kids. Needless to say, this person has ZERO motive to carry out one of the largest financial crimes in history. None. This person doesn't even understand WHAT all of these accounts trade or why they exist at all. All this person understands is how to do their very specific job, which is to send wire transfers. To the contrary, this person is probably keen to keep their job in the midst of this economic depression and not make any clerical mistakes, and enter the data into their terminal quickly and accurately.

In that last week of October, this menial back office wire clerk was handed or emailed wire transfer requests that looked exactly like all of the other transfer requests she had handled that day and every other day. She entered the account numbers and the money was sent out of the customer seg accounts to JP Morgan - and we know it was JPM and that JPM knew exactly what was going on because they specifically sent a letter to MFG requesting confirmation that the source accounts were NOT customer seg funds. Uh, talk about the most obvious CYA maneuver in the history of the world. Give me a break.

These Marxist-Fascist jackals are probably now planning, as we speak, to frame and send up the river some poor, innocent back office person. And that is the real point I want to drive home. These people are psychopaths and view other human beings as utterly disposable pawns in their game. Think about that. Think about Corzine and the rest sitting around a table with a bunch of attorneys calmly discussing sending an innocent person or people to prison as scapegoats for their crimes. Think about the strategy of repeatedly stating that "Tonya Jefferson" (or whoever) is the person who physically sent the wires, and thus is responsible. Think of how black and evil a heart a person would have to have to do such a thing.

Watch this carefully. IF this plays out and they try to destroy and imprison a back office staffer or staffers who OBVIOUSLY had no material part in this . . . well, let's just say that wars have been fought over less. MUCH less.

For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen †

I'm going to be hypocritical here for a moment and post this video about Mitt Romney that just hit YouTube tonight. Back in June, when I was still working under the assumption that the country could maybe be salvaged, I made a video exposing Mitt Romney and all of his bought-and-paid-for, Marxist, Fascist, oligarchical crap.

Well, some people have taken that video of mine and built an entire 52 minute piece around it, inserting citations, clips of Romney himself, news stories, and all kinds of HILARIOUS pop-culture references. There are movie clips, Randall the Honey Badger guy (a huge guilty pleasure of mine) makes several appearances, even Beavis and Butthead have cameos. The work that went into this was enormous, and the editing is superb. It is long, but it is very informative while being laugh-out-loud funny.

Well done, Guys.

For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen †

Q: Ann,
Who do you support for President?

A: No one. There isn't a serious candidate out there. It is a nauseating thing to behold a nation of 310 million people who can not generate a serious Presidential candidate. At this point, the entire exercise is tantamount to arranging deck chairs on the Titanic, and so I view presidential politics as being just another bread-and-circuses reality TV show. Pffft.

Q: Ann,
I friended you on your Facebook page. Will you friend me back?

A: I don't have a Facebook page. Facebook is evil. I never have been on Facebook and never will be. You "friended" God-knows-who, a person who has nothing better to do than impersonate other people on Facebook. Creepy. And just for the record, the word "friend" actually means something, and it means something sacred and profound. I find the whole "friending" culture of online social networking to be seriously disturbing, akin to sexual promiscuity. Don't throw yourself, your affections or your intimacy around. Don't call someone "friend" unless you actually know them and are not just mere acquaintances, but ACTUALLY FRIENDS.

Q: Ann,
What advice would you have for Tim Tebow?

A: Retire. Get out of that cesspool. You have already accomplished a tremendous amount culturally. You done good, Boy. Now get out of there. The money IS NOT WORTH IT. The single greatest Christian example you could set is to walk away from the NFL right now.

Q: Ann,
Where should I go to college?

A:You probably shouldn't. The people who are going to be in the best shape after this collapse are people who know an honest-to-goodness TRADE. 95% of college degrees are utterly useless. Further, the Marxists are trying to gin up a sense of entitlement amongst the young by stating that a college education is a "human right" and that everyone should have a college degree. What they are really trying to do is enslave everyone with student loan debt. If everyone has a college degree, then a college degree will be, by definition, utterly meaningless. If the guy who scrubs the toilets at Burger King has a bachelor's, then what meaning does a bachelor's have? None. I would recommend learning by apprenticeship something like plumbing, welding, engine repair, carpentry, masonry, animal husbandry, petroleum extraction, machining, fishery, etc. College is over. Most degrees are intrinsically useless. Skip it.

Q: Ann,
What do you think of the Marines who peed on the dead Taliban?

A: I have little sympathy for men who live their lives wiping their anuses with their bare hands after bowel movements, and who view as the pinnacle of human pleasure inserting their genitals and depositing their semen into the feces-laden rectums of boys and other men, who suddenly get squeamish about dead bodies being sprinkled with a bit of urine - which is sterile by the way. Those dead Taliban were probably the cleanest they had ever been in their adult lives after being showered with the righteous tinkles of those Marines. Ooh-rah. That is all. Carry on.

For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen †

There is a YouTube video going around of a young man rapping a screed entitled, “Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus” that needs to be rebutted and shot down. I am the perfect person to do this, because I used to be very firmly in that very camp. The pseudo-church I was made to attend as a small child was so horrific and so false that it turned me off of “organized worship” for nearly 15 years. If you’re curious, that pseudo-church was the United Church of Christ, which is the most liberal schismatic sect on earth that dares still call itself Christian. If you wanted to get any further off the reservation, you would have to go to a Unitarian Universalist group, and they aren’t Christian. In fact, they pride themselves on being absolutely nothing. Ah, nihilism: the answer to the yearning of every human heart . . . NOT.

The United Church of Christ is the same “denomination” as Jeremiah Wright’s Marxist Black Supremacist outfit in Chicago that Mrs. Reggie Love sat in for lo those twenty years, gaining his “black church Southside homie street-cred”, whilst Jeremiah Wright, who appears to be about fifteen-sixteenths Caucasian and one-sixteenth African himself, would scream down curses from the pulpit upon the United States of America and “the white man”. Ah, sweet irony.

The church that I attended as a child was not a black church, but rather a combination of old low church Germans and New England Anglo-Congregationalists. In fact, that is pretty much my ethic composition in a nutshell. The church was demographically old, and the vestiges of Christianity that I did see were mostly among the older congregants of German extraction. Many of those men were veterans of one or both of the World Wars. Anyone younger than that was, pretty much across the board, atheist/agnostic and attended and were active in that church because it provided the cover or pose of Christianity without any awkward and discomforting talk about “Jesus”. No joke.

I remember being drug to a search committee meeting as a young child – probably aged six. One pastor had just left and there was a steady rotation of interim pastors every week. The search committee was discussing the pastors around a table in the church basement hall and I was off several feet away sitting by the piano listening and occupying myself. The name of one of the pastors that I actually enjoyed came up. I enjoyed him because he would preach strongly and even raise his voice during the sermon, and he wore a pretty sky-blue robe, which I liked. At this, one of the search committee members said – and I’ll never forget this – that he didn’t like this pastor because “he talks about Jesus too much.” The committee agreed. That one sentence, spoken nearly 30 years ago while I was sitting and playing twenty feet away, was utterly critical in my Christian formation. At age SIX the seeds of contempt for pseudo-Christian hypocrisy were planted, fertilized and well-watered.

Then, at about age ten I was in Sunday School. The church was very small – a well-attended Sunday would have 50 people total, and thus the Sunday School class I was in was me (aged ten) and four junior high aged girls, aged 13-15. The teacher told us one Sunday that there wasn’t really a person named Jesus of Nazareth and that the Bible and all of Christianity was merely a fictional narrative authored in the Middle Ages in order to flesh out a philosophy. From the age of six I was already cynical. At that point, I just started calling hard-core bullshit on the entire thing. Not Jesus, mind you. I never had any doubts about Him, which is quite amazing in retrospect. But, given the fact that I had been immersed in the worst of 20th century Christian heresy for my entire childhood, I called bullshit on “church” and stopped going a couple of years later.

Hard-core Bible study began at age 17. Four times through, front to back, every word. I was pitched by every possible Christian and faux-Christian outfit in college, with the notable exception of one. The Mormons tried. The Jehovah’s Witnesses tried. The white non-denominational charismatic hand-wavers tried. The Lutherans tried. Even the black church tried. (The most frightened I have ever been in my life is when the leader of the black church ladies’ group that I was invited to pulled a bottle of Wesson Oil out of her purse. I was doing a tactical assessment of the exits at that point.) The only ones who never, ever tried were the Catholics. Typical.

The reading of orthodox Christian apologetics began at age 22 with C.S. Lewis and “Mere Christianity” - a gift from my orthodontist, of all people. Lewis (Anglican) led to Chesterton (Catholic convert). Uh-oh. Chesterton led to Newman (Catholic convert). Then Hahn (Catholic convert). Uh-oh. Hahn led to Keating. Keating led to Ratzinger. (Uh-oh) Ratzinger led to Augustine. Augustine led to re-reading the Bible. John 6. Luke 24. Matthew 26. Ephesians 5. The entire book of Revelation. The entire book of Leviticus. UH-OH. Then, the coup de grace, the Church Fathers. Clement of Rome. Ignatius of Antioch. Justin Martyr. Irenaeus of Lyons. Cyprian of Carthage. UH-OH.

At this point, I am 26 or so, and the writing is spray-painted on the wall in neon orange. But here’s the problem, and I’m dead serious here. This is LITERALLY what went through my mind over and over again:

“BUT TED KENNEDY IS A CATHOLIC. I need to read some more.”

And so I did. For three more years.

At the top of the list of individuals who have done the most damage to the Church you have Martin Luther, King Henry VIII, John Calvin, Ulrich Zwingli, Annibale Bugnini and the KENNEDY FAMILY. In the 20th and 21st centuries, Bugnini and the Kennedy family are personally responsible for driving away hundreds of millions of Catholics and potential converts worldwide, with the Kennedys’ damage being mainly focused in North America. The Kennedys merely contributed to DELAYING my conversion. But I’m still bitter.

And that brings us to the point. Like the guy in the “I hate religion but love Jesus” video, I was making the mistake of confusing Jesus with the people inside of the Church. And this is, in a nutshell, the main problem with post-Vatican II Catholicism AND Protestantism in all its forms. BOTH. What is going on in these liturgies and services is NOT the worship of God. What is going on is the WORSHIP OF THE GROUP. Christ is merely the meme, or excuse, that these people are using in order to get together and WORSHIP THEMSELVES. The focus is ENTIRELY on the people.

For you Catholics who aren’t attending a pre-Vatican II Tridentine Latin Mass, think about it. Who is the physical focus of the Mass? It is probably the priest, interspersed with lectors, a cantor, the choir and musicians (up front so everyone can SEE THEM!) and Eucharistic ministers. Where does the priest sit? Probably with his back to the Tabernacle, if the Tabernacle hasn’t been moved off to the side or into a sacristy completely. Which direction is the priest facing? WHO is the priest addressing? Towards the PEOPLE. Everything is physically oriented not towards Christ, but towards the people. By setting up a second altar (in the case of an old church that has a high altar, sitting unused) or by having a table-style altar in a new-construction church, with the priest on one side and the people on the other, what has happened is that the people have literally turned their back to God and have instead formed a circle of self-absorbed, self-regarding self-worship. Don’t get me started on Catholic Churches that are built in the round. The only answer for that mess is a D-10 Caterpillar.

Now think about Protestant Churches, especially the new super-fun rockband mega-churches. There isn’t even an altar. The vast majority of the ones I have seen don’t even have a Cross. Anywhere. It is just a stage for performance, entertainment and self-worship. Look at us! Aren’t we great! Isn’t the band fabulous? Isn’t the video and light show amazing? Isn’t the preacher great? It’s all about US and WHAT WE DO, and the more applause we get, and the more money we raise, the better we feel about ourselves. YAY US! YAY ME!

Aside from the obvious problem of worshiping one’s self, there is a massive, massive problem here, and it is the very problem that the “I hate religion” guy has, and that I used to have myself.

If a religious group worships itself in any way, then it is positively doomed to failure. Why? Because every single person on earth is a horrific sinner. Everyone is flawed. Everyone is a personal failure to one degree or another. Therefore, at some point, a serious-minded person inside one of these churches will look around and begin to analyze the PEOPLE around him, and will inevitably find those people lacking if not outright frauds. Since these churches and parishes are essentially worshiping the PEOPLE and not Christ, the serious-minded person will be rightly repulsed by the fact that he is worshiping something which does not deserve to be worshiped.

The kid in the “I hate religion” video is RIGHT to be repulsed – but he doesn’t understand that the error is HIS in that he thinks that the self-worshiping paradigm is what the church is, has always been, and ever can be. He doesn’t understand that the thing that he has rightly identified as disordered is in fact a relatively modern heresy and that true Christian worship in the form of the Mass, properly said, is 100% focused on Christ, and His Sacrifice. Even the priest is supposed to be “liturgically transparent”, acting not as himself, but as a vicar of Christ, standing as a representative of the people facing Christ in the Tabernacle and upon the altar with the people behind him (yes, the priest should have his BACK to the congregation!!), who are in turn charged with uniting themselves in prayer with, and elevating and magnifying the prayer of their liturgical representative at the altar of God, the priest.

The best image of the Church is the three crosses on Calvary.

In the middle is Christ, surrounded by criminals. On one side is the Good Thief who acknowledges his sin and throws himself upon Christ’s Mercy. On the other side is the Bad Thief who refuses to repent and mocks Christ to the end. Both of those men were criminals. Both were guilty. The only difference is how they related to Christ. And this is the Church. Christ is in the middle, and every single person there present is guilty. If you’re looking for that “perfect church” filled with all of those “perfect people”, you reject Calvary itself, because all you would ever be able to see are those two criminals. You would be so fixated and repulsed by the two criminals that you would reject Christ Crucified by association and proximity. And that is EXACTLY what satan wants you, and the kid in the video, and everyone else to do. DON’T LOOK AT HIM. DON’T LOOK AT CHRIST. LOOK AT ONE ANOTHER. WORSHIP YOURSELVES, AND THEN LEAVE WHEN YOU REALIZE THAT EVERYONE AROUND YOU IS A CRIMINAL.

Furthermore, this feeds the heresy of moral relativism through the sin of pride. If we spend all of our time worshiping and fixated on the people, we start to feel superior to those around us. One of the seminal moments in my conversion was hearing a longtime friend and anti-Catholic say, “The reason I never go to church is because I have yet to find a church that is worthy of my presence.” Hearing that abject arrogance and pride – and then realizing that that sentiment was actually my position too, only dared to be spoken aloud - was like getting punched in the stomach by Mike Tyson. Yeah, I’m cool with Ted Kennedy being Catholic, because at the end of the day, I’m Ted Kennedy too. No, I never raped anyone, and I never killed anyone like Ted Kennedy did, but my ass is just as guilty as Teddy’s, and if they’ll let me in the door, I’ll strive to be the Good Thief, because I’d rather die on Calvary with Christ than live without Him. And now for a statement which will probably be posted all over message boards and forums all over the interwebs by those many, many people who hate me. Have at it, kids. I care not. Get ready to highlight, copy and paste, y’all! This is the answer to the scads and scads of emails I get from people saying, “Well, what about all of those pedophile priests?”

If you told me that every single person in the Catholic Church today, besides me, was secretly a child molester, I WOULD STILL BE CATHOLIC, because the Catholic Church is the pillar and bulwark of Truth (1 Tim 3:15). I don’t worship those people, I worship Christ, the same Christ who was crucified in the midst of criminals and FOR criminals, and Christ is the Head of the Catholic Church, and the Catholic Church is the Bride of Christ. That is where Christ is - both spiritually and physically. He is among the sick and the guilty. If the Truth isn’t in that Tabernacle and on that altar, then there is no truth. To paraphrase Peter, where else would I go? Besides, if Christ is being surrounded and attacked by “bad thieves” within the Church, isn’t the onus upon me, an aspiring “good thief”, all the more to STAY WITH HIM? The only possible way I could ever leave is if I stopped worshiping Christ and started worshiping other people, or myself – and Dude, that ain’t NEVER gonna happen.

Finally, the argument that Christ didn’t establish or ordain ANY liturgical action at all. Well, aside from the entire Old Testament detailing architecture and extremely specific liturgical actions which Christ, the Church and the Mass fulfill and utterly perfect; and the contradiction that if God didn’t want liturgy, then God, who is eternal, transcendent and UNCHANGING, apparently CHANGED HIS MIND and hates the very thing He established and commanded throughout the Old Testament, we have the words and actions of Christ Himself at the Last Supper, which was the first Mass:

DO THIS IN COMMEMORATION OF ME.

Do this.
Do this.
Do this.

Don’t waste your time writing up some big, massive email explaining how “Do this” actually means “don’t do this” or “I really don’t want you to do this ever again.” And likewise spare yourself the timesuck of writing emails that try to argue that “This is My Body” actually means that “this isn’t really My Body”, or “My Flesh is True Food and My Blood is True Drink” actually means that His Flesh is NOT true food and His Blood is NOT true drink. And spare me the emails about how “You must eat My Flesh and drink My Blood” means that you must never eat His Flesh or drink His Blood. And finally, PLEASE abort plans now to email me explaining how “and upon this rock I will build My Church” actually means that there is no church at all. Here’s a tip: if you find yourself arguing EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE of the plain, direct, clear and straighforward words of Christ, then you are wrong. Step back, stop worshiping yourself, and reset. I did.

For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen †

1. The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower Federal Court decision which overturned an Oklahoma law banning Sharia law.

HOTLINK CITATION HERE.

Well, now at least we know that the three members of the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals are traitors and seditionists against the United States and its Constitution. Great. We also know that jurists are, exactly like the broad population, stupid and too lazy or simply too deluded to do even the tiniest bit of research.

This all goes back to the false premise that islam is a religion. I can't overemphasize this enough. So long as Western Civilization continues to fall for the lie and stone-cold con that islam is a religion and not a totalitarian political system, then we will lose. You CAN NOT build anything, much less an entire civilization, upon a false premise. If you start from a false premise, then you will end up with a false answer that *appears* to be true. Arguing that islam is a religion is like starting a mathematical proof from the premise that 0 = 1.

*If islam is a religion, then it is constitutionally protected. Since the core tenet of islam is the overthrowing of all secular governments, the Constitution of the United States itself demands that musloids be permitted to wage war against the United States and its Constitution with NO RESISTANCE. In other words, the Constitution demands its own destruction.

0 = 1.

*If islam is a religion, then the free exercise of islam is constitutionally protected as a fundamental human right. Since a core tenet of islam is the genocide and total extermination of the Jews, the constitution demands that musloid extermination of the Jews is a fundamental human right of the musloids. In other words, killing Jews is a constitutionally protected activity and human right, while the Jews have no right to exist.

0 = 1.

*If islam is a religion, then free exercise of islam is constitutionally protected as a fundamental human right. One of the core tenets of islam is the subjugation of non-muslims by either execution or the paying of a tax. The constitutional guarantee of equal protection under the law, confirmed by the words of the Declaration, "all men are created equal" is thus self-nullified by the First Amendment which guarantees muslims the right to free exercise which requires societal superiority of musloids and the required deprivation of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness of all non-musloids.

0 = 1.

------------------------------------------------

2. On the other hand, the SCOTUS ruled UNANIMOUSLY this week that the goverment could NOT tell religious groups who they could or could not hire as clergy. The Obama regime was trying to force the elimination of the "ministerial exception". The endgame for the Obama regime is to force orthodox Christians to hire homosexual and/or pedophile school teachers, and to force the Catholic Church to ordain women. This has been long in the works, first explicitly betrayed by Hillary Clinton and Obama in 2009 when they started using the phrase "freedom of worship" instead of "freedom of religion". They are ultimately going to attempt to take over all Christian churches by suing them for "discrimination" and "hate speech". The fact that this SCOTUS decision was unanimous, meaning that Elena Kagan was on board too, is stunning. In fact, it is so stunning that it almost makes me circle back around and get nervous. Kagan is a HUGE traitor and seditionist against the U.S. via her massive support for islam and sharia. Is she laying the groundwork for protecting musloid "clergy" engaged in overt war against the United States? Hmmmm. It all bears close watching. Here's the URL:

http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/constitution/10525-supreme-courts-qministerial-exceptionq-ruling

--------------------------------

3. The MF Global trustee this week hinted strongly that the MF Global customers will not receive any more restitution of their stolen funds, and that $1.2 billion will indeed be the amount confiscated by Corzine in cahoots with the CME, CFTC, SEC, DOJ and the judiciary. Here's the URL:

http://www.cnbc.com/id/45973377

--------------------------------

4. Remember our discussion and tracking of George Soros aggressively buying up grain elevator capacity? Well, it looks like he has been very aggressive in Australia, and is indicating his strategy in the U.S.:

URL here:

http://stage.fw.farmonline.com.au/news/nationalrural/agribusiness-and-general/finance/broker-makes-it-easy-for-the-buyer-too/2416815.aspx

MULTINATIONAL grain giant Gavilon once had plans to own the entire AWB trading and storage network in Australia but now is happy to outsource much of its grain accumulation activities to a third party like Agfarm.
"We're still assessing our options, but we've had very good support from Agfarm, which makes us question what resources we need to put in the bush ourselves," said Gavilon Australia's origination general manager, Matt Rutter.
"Considering the time it takes to set your own people up in a new regional location and build relationships it's better for us to leverage off the existing network that Agfarm has via its own offices and its local CRT ties."
"One benefit of buying through Agfarm is its people know what specific quality and stocks are available out there, and what deals will work with sellers.
"Quite often we can target a specific region for an export parcel because of the feedback we've gained from Agfarm."
Mr Rutter felt buying through Agfarm's grass roots-based broking service would help Gavilon build longer term credentials with rural communities, and "return something to individual businesses" in Ruralco's independent farm services network.
Although making earlier moves to set up base in Australia two years ago, including buying into port facilities in Brisbane and making an unsuccessful bid for AWB Ltd, Gavilon only became a serious grain buyer during the recent harvest.
The US-based commodities trader, formed in 2008 after spinning off from agribusiness giant, ConAgra, has its Australian base in Perth and a small Melbourne office from where it has concentrated primarily on obtaining wheat, barley canola and sorghum for export to Asia.
Its buying focus has been largely in Queensland, northern NSW, South Australia and Western Australia.

So, the Soros strategy is not to build new capacity, but to acquire existing capacity. Hmmm. And what would grease the skids in terms of buying up U.S. grain storage capacity? I dunno. How about having grain elevators' equity stolen, and thus financially crippling them via a confiscation of customer segregated funds held with Futures Commission Merchants with the blessing and protection of the Exchange, regulatory bodies, judiciary and Department of Justice? Yes, that might "enhance the liquidity" of the U.S. grain storage market considerably. And drop the price of said grain storage capacity market, too.

1. Ann,

Could you please stop posting the Lord's Prayer every day? It significantly reduces the number of visible posts.

Signed,
Reader

Dear Reader,
Congratulations! You win this month's "Way to Completely Miss The Point" award! And given the nature of the award, here is the requisite excruciatingly direct answer to your question: Uh, no. I cannot stop posting the Lord's Prayer every day. Mmm-kay? Yeah. Thanks.
Repetitively,
Ann

------------------------------

2. Ann,

I thought you hated all secular music. You're always complaining about "rockband church", and then you post Elvis and try to make some connection to God. You need to make up your mind.

Signed,
I Don't Understand Context

Dear I Don't Understand Context,

Let's say your best friend has been arrested, tried in a kangaroo court and sentenced to execution for a crime that YOU committed. Before the actual execution, your best friend is tortured, whipped until skinned, and then led through the streets being mocked, pelted and spit upon by huge crowds. He finally gets to the place of execution and is stripped naked and then NAILED hand and foot to two beams to hang and slowly asphyxiate. Amazingly, your best friend does all of this willingly, and is even CONSOLED by the fact that you are present at his execution. What is the proper, moral and dignified way for you to behave while you hold vigil at the place of execution while your best friend dies in agony on your behalf?

A.) "Day-um. This is SO FLIPPING BOOOORING. This is SOOO STUPID. I can think about my friend at home just the same as here. AND I can do chores or watch the football game at the same time! I'm out. Peace, yo."

B.) "I'll hang around, but there better be a kick-ass rock band, a PowerPoint show and a stand-up comedy routine or else I AM OUT. If I'm not seriously entertained, then forget it. Oh, and if ANYONE brings up the fact that my friend is dying on my behalf for crimes that I COMMITTED and tries to lay some sort of guilt trip on me, I'm just going to leave. Screw that."

C.) "I'll go, but they had better let me talk and sing and be an on-site usher or else I AM OUT. I'm not going to go and just be anonymous and ignored, because if you think about it, this really is ALL ABOUT ME."

D.) On knees, SILENT, head covered, SILENT, mortified, SILENT, begging in prayer for your Best Friend to forgive you, and telling Him how much you love Him and His Sacrifice of Himself for you. Oh, and SILENT.

The correct answer is . . . D.

When you are at the foot of the Cross at Mass (because that is what the Mass is - the bending of time in order to touch today to Calvary 1979 years ago), you SHUT YOUR MOUTH, GET ON YOUR KNEES and PRAY, just exactly as The Virgin Mary, St. Mary Magdalene and St. John did. They didn't talk. They didn't sing super-fun songs in order to entertain themselves or the others there present and show off their musical abilities. They didn't laugh, or relax or have fun. They got on their knees, beheld the Crucified Christ, and wept and PRAYED. Christ Crucified is NOT ENTERTAINING. Christ Crucified is not "fun". You don't play secular music, or music that is trying to sound secular and thus be "entertaining", AT CALVARY. To do so is, frankly, narcissistic to the point of being utterly deranged.

It is called CONTEXT. If you don't have it, get it.

In keeping with the situation,
Ann

3. Dear Ann,

Could you please explain the Trinity?

Signed,
Unreasonably High Expectations

------------------------------------

Dear Unreasonably High Expectations,

In a word, no. No one can. It is a mystery. And I find this consoling. Frankly, the fact that the Church says straight-out that there are certain things which are simply unable to be comprehended by human beings is a testament to the legitimacy of the Church as a teaching authority. Never trust any human being or group of human beings who claim to "know everything". Anyone who claims to know everything is, by definition, a liar right out of the chute, because only God knows everything.

There are several huge mysteries of faith: the Trinity (one God in Three Divine Persons), the Incarnation (Jesus Christ being both fully God and fully human) and the Eucharist (bread and wine being transubstantiated into the physical Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus Christ).

How can God be One in Being, but Father, Son and Holy Ghost? I dunno. It's a mystery.

How can Jesus be both fully God and fully Man? I dunno. It's a mystery.

How can something that was bread a few minutes ago, and still looks like bread, and still smells and tastes like bread actually be God? And how did that change occur? I dunno. It's a mystery.

Regarding the Trinity, here is what we do know. The entire point and revelation of God in the Old Testament is the reality that there is not a "pantheon" of many gods, but that there is, in fact, only ONE God. If you had to pin down what the point of the Old Testament is - that's it in a very, very simple nutshell. GOD IS ONE.

The Torah, or the first five books of the Old Testament, were written by Moses. The entire point of Moses' life was to bear witness to the fact that there is only ONE GOD. There was absolutely no ambiguity about this. None. But, if we look at literally the FIRST CHAPTER of the book of Genesis, we see something amazing. Verse 26:

"And He said: Let Us make man to Our image and likeness: and let him have dominion over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and the beasts, and the whole earth, and every creeping creature that moveth upon the earth."

Moses spent most of his adult life in interface with and witnessing for The ONE TRUE GOD. And yet he can't get more than a couple hundred words into his written record and he is using PLURAL PRONOUNS - "Us" and "Our" - when quoting the ONE TRUE GOD.

SURELY Moses, of all people, wouldn't make the sloppy mistake of using plural pronouns. SURELY someone around Moses, and for the centuries upon centuries afterward, would say, "Hey! You've got plural pronouns here! Shouldn't we fix that? Afterall, it completely undercuts the whole "GOD IS ONE" thing we are trying to communicate here."

Nope. Not only did Moses write it that way, but it STAYED that way for all of these centuries.

About the most that can be said about the Triune Godhead is this: God is RELATIONAL to Himself. God is Love - and what is love? Love is the complete giving of one's self, and love is the act of fully RECEIVING and then returning love. Soooo . . . if God were NOT relational to Himself, how could He have existed as existential love before the creation of the universe? Who was He loving? Was He sitting around pondering Himself? How does inward-turned naval gazing constitute a GIFT of self? What love was He receiving? How could God receive love if He was the only thing that existed?

Because God is, in Himself, able to relate to Himself. Christ revealed to us that God is Three Divine Persons, all distinct but yet completely One in Being. Got your head around that? No, of course not. We can't FULLY grasp that existential reality any more than we can grasp and explicitly describe what a fifth dimension would look like. But Christ did give us names for the Three Persons in Matthew 28:19 so that we could relate a little bit to the Trinity. Those names are: Father, Son and Holy Ghost. The words "Father and Son" are not a perfect analogue because the Father did not exist before the Son, as in the human case. The Three Divine Persons of the Trinity are co-eternal. No one can explain that. No one can explain eternity. All we can do is name it, and then get on with living. Also, there is the issue of gender, which is another post, but suffice it to say that God contains "femaleness" and women are not a foreign mystery to Him.

So, God the Father gives Himself fully to God the Son. God the Son then fully receives that love, and then returns it to God the Father fully. This infinite back-and-forth of love is so existentially perfect that it yields a Third, which Jesus taught us to call "The Holy Ghost". The big human clue-in to all of this is human procreation. A man loves his wife and gives himself to her fully and completely. The wife loves her husband and thus receives his gift of himself in the form of his DNA and offers her own DNA in return. The two gifts of self are so perfect and complete that they actually become a third person.

Thus, the Triune Godhead is the foundational reality, and human procreation is the DERIVATIVE, which points back to the underlying reality of the Trinity. And yes, eventually every derivative expires, and upon expiry there is a delivery and the books get settled and squared. That would be "death" and "judgment". As a (former) futures broker, I like that part. :-)

Here is a classic song that touches on the crux of what real, Trinitarian love is: "Nature Boy", best performed by Nat King Cole.

"The greatest thing you'll ever learn,
Is just to love, and be loved in return."

For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen †

I read somewhere that there are over 35 HOURS of content uploaded to YouTube EVERY MINUTE. I believe it. After posting the Elvis song yesterday, I came across a song that Elvis performed in his '68 Comeback Special that I just have to post.

The first reason I want to post it is just because of Elvis himself. After watching this clip . . . Hooooo boy. I have no idea what exactly you call it, but Dude, ELVIS HAS IT, and he has it in QUANTITY. It isn't sex appeal, because I know you men will see it and appreciate it too. It is far more transcendent than that. The best word I can come up with is "amplitude". Watching this clip, you know - you just know - that you are watching a man in his prime.

The other thing this reminded me of was a completely theoretical and speculative bit of eschatology. It is speculated that people in heaven after the resurrection will physically exist at the human "prime" age. Guess what age that is? It is 33 - just like the age of Our Lord at His Passion and Resurrection. So, it is speculated that parents of children who died as children may get to see, know and love their children in their maturity, which is a lovely and consoling possibility. I have no idea if that is right. It's just a speculation, but I do concur with the thought that human beings reach their physical and mental prime, as a general rule, in their early thirties, and 33 sounds about right.

Elvis was born in 1935, so he was exactly 33 when the '68 Comeback Special was recorded. :-)

The second point is a common topic around here. The best secular love songs are the songs that CAN be heard as mankind singing to God, OR as God singing to mankind. The truth is that a person should never say anything to their spouse or beloved that they wouldn't say directly to God. This song, "I've Been Trying To Get To You" is one of those examples of man singing to God, and when you hear it, it becomes extremely powerful.

As an adult Catholic convert, I hear these lyrics with a deeply Eucharistic undertone. At every Mass, walking down the aisle to the communion rail is literally "running all the way, Baby trying to get to You." The "loving letter" references are, of course, scripture. See if you can hear it. And yes, I think that a person can call Jesus "Baby" and other terms of sweet affection if done in the proper mindset and never forgetting that in addition to being our Friend, Brother and Spouse that He is also our Creator, King, Judge and Crucified Savior.

You gotta keep your eyes peeled. These little nuggets are all around us. You just have to pay attention. Who knew that Elvis sang a love song to Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament in the '68 Comeback Special?

I've been traveling over mountains
Even through the valleys, too
I've been traveling night and day
I've been running all the way
Baby, trying to get to You.

Ever since I read Your letter
Where You said You loved me true
I've been traveling night and day
I've been running all the way
Baby, trying to get to You

When I read Your loving letter
Then my heart began to sing
There were many miles between us,
But they didn't mean a thing.

I just had to reach You, Baby,
In spite of all You put me through.
I kept traveling night and day,
I kept running all the way,
Baby, trying to get to You.

Well, there's nothing that could hold me
Or that could keep me away from You
When Your loving letter told me
That You really loved me true

Lord above me knows I love You
It was He who brought me through,
When my way was dark as night,
He would shine His brightest light,
When I was trying to get to You.

For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen †

Well, someone up in Montana has filed a class action lawsuit against Jon Corzine personally and some of the other top brass like Abelow on behalf of all 38,000 MF Global customers. Also named in the class action suit are PriceWaterhouseCoopers and J.P. Morgan. Beautiful. I hope the plaintiffs' attorneys have their stuff together and accept outside help. There are some mighty large personal estates there. I think Corzine is worth $600 million alone. J.P. Morgan also has a few dollars laying around, too. But I reckon most of Corzine and Abelow's wealth has probably already been moved into Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates. But, I'm glad someone is finally going after those jackals.

HERE'S THE LINK.

Which reminds me . . . I'm a big Elvis fan. Elvis had a MASSIVE catalog that was split into three distinct categories: Pop, Country and Gospel. Elvis' early gospel catalog in particular is outstanding. This song comes from his mid-career, is a little more "rock-and-rolly", but still features the Jordanaires. The Jordanaires MADE Elvis. They also MADE Ricky Nelson. If it weren't for the Jordanaires Elvis would have died a truck driver in Memphis. And that's a fact.

Quick Elvis story, and my favorite. I think this happened in the late 60's around the time of Elvis' Comeback Special when he was very thin and fit and was just starting to play Las Vegas. A bunch of girls went to an Elvis concert and sat all along one row. They brought with them a huge banner. In the middle of the concert in a lull between songs, these girls stood up, unfurled their banner, and all together screamed their banner's message to Elvis: ELVIS, YOU'RE THE KING!

Elvis stopped dead. The entire arena fell silent. Elvis pointed at the girls and their banner and said, "No, Jesus Christ is the King." The girls dropped their banner, fell silently into their seats and then shrank like wool sweaters in the dryer.

That's just cool.

Anyway, this one's for Jonny Corzine, Bradley Abelow and the rest of the boys. "Run On".

You may throw your rock and hide your hand
Working in the dark against your fellow man
As sure as God made the day and the night
What you do in the dark will be brought to the light
You may run and hide, slip and slide
Trying to take the mote from your neighbor's eyes
As sure as God made the rich and poor
You gonna reap just what you sow

You may run on for a long time,
Run on for a long time
Let me tell you God Almighty's gonna cut you down
Go tell that long tongued liar, oh well well
Go tell that midnight rider, oh well well
Tell the gambler, the rambler, the back-biter
Tell them God Almighty gonna cut them down

For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen †

Allegory: 1. a representation of an abstract or spiritual meaning through concrete or material forms; figurative treatment of one subject under the guise of another.

For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen †

As a contrast to the post below, here is a great medley of songs; one about Christmas and one about Epiphany. The song about Christmas is "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" and the song about Epiphany is "We Three Kings". This is by the tragically-named Canadian band The Bare Naked Ladies (sigh) with the Canadian songstress Sarah McLaughlin. Remember, this song is great for recreational listening, but arrangements like this ARE NOT APPROPRIATE FOR THE LITURGY. But they're great while working, or in the car.

God rest ye merry gentlemen,
Let nothing you dismay,
Remember Christ our Saviour
Was born upon this day;
To save us all from Satan's power
When we were gone astray.

[Chorus]
O tidings of comfort and joy,
Comfort and joy,
O tidings of comfort and joy!

From God our Heavenly Father
This blessed angel came;
And unto certain shepherds
Brought tidings of the same;
How that in Bethlehem was born
The Son of God by name.

[Chorus]

O, star of wonder, star of night,
Star with royal beauty bright,
Westward leading, still proceeding,
Guide us to thy perfect light.

Born a king on Bethlehem's plain;
Gold I bring to crown Him again;
King forever, ceasing never,
Over us all to reign.

[Chorus]

Glorious now behold Him arise,
KING AND GOD AND SACRIFICE,
Alleluia! Alleluia!
Worship Him, God most high.

--------------------------------

For my atheist readers who like to claim that all religions are the same, just repeat over and over until you get it:

KING AND GOD AND SACRIFICE.

God Himself is The Sacrifice to atone for the sins of mankind.
God Himself is The Sacrifice to atone for the sins of mankind.
God Himself is The Sacrifice to atone for the sins of mankind.

All religions are exactly the same? Uh, no. I don't think so.

I was utterly disgusted when Beck accused anyone who would vote for Gingrich over Obama of being racist a few weeks ago. Utterly disgusted.

But, I have to post the link to this Beck video clip from today, because I agree with every single word. Every single syllable. Every single phoneme. Fair is fair.

CLICK HERE AND WATCH EVERY SECOND OF THIS VIDEO TWICE.

Many of you put signature footers at the bottom of your emails. I would recommend putting this Osama Bin Laden quote on your emails, on your websites, where ever. Post this quote on ANY thread that a RonPaulbot tries to hijack. Because at the end of the day, this quote from Bin Laden himself is the absolute simple quintessence of the totalitarian political system that is islam. Here it is:

"Our talks with the infidel West and our conflict with them ultimately revolve around one issue—one that demands our total support, with power and determination, with one voice—and it is: Does Islam, or does it not, force people by the power of the sword to submit to its authority corporeally if not spiritually? Yes. There are only three choices in Islam: [1] either willing submission [conversion]; or [2] payment of the jizya, through physical, though not spiritual, submission to the authority of Islam; or [3] the sword — for it is not right to let him [an infidel] live. The matter is summed up for every person alive: Either submit, or live under the suzerainty of Islam, or die."
--Osama Bin Laden
(The Al Qaeda Reader, p. 42)

Beck mis-read the word "suzerainty" as "scrutiny". Wrong. "Suzerainty" is a French-origin word ("suzerain") that means "overlordship". Google it and look it up for yourself. Bin Laden uses exactly the right word in this context.

Please note that Bin Laden confirms my premise that islam is NOT a religion, but a completely earthly totalitarian political system:

"force people by the power of the sword to submit to its authority corporeally if not spiritually"

"payment of the jizya, through physical, though not spiritual, submission to the authority of Islam"

Thank you. Musloids do not give a flying flip if you actually believe any of their pseudo-religious crap. Hell, only the inbred mentally retarded ones actually believe any of that nonsense themselves. Why don't they care if you actually believe any of it? Why are they satisfied with mere physical submission without any spiritual "submission"? Why are they satisfied with "infidels" merely paying a tax (jizya)?

BECAUSE IT ISN'T A RELIGION AT ALL. Islam isn't about "allah" or "paradise" or "prayer" or "spirituality" or how human beings should relate to one another or how human beings should relate to a "god" or the eternal fate of the human soul. THEY DON'T CARE ABOUT ANY OF THAT. Islam is about acquiring physical, earthly territory and installing a totalitarian government over the earth that provides a cadre of "elites" masquerading as some sort of "clergy" with massive decadent wealth and as much twisted perverted sex as they want, including homosexual and heterosexual pedohilia, ephebophilia, concubinage, incest, bestiality and necrophilia. There is nothing new under the sun. They want power, they want money and they want sex. The "religious" aspects are a stone-cold con, which Bin Laden himself declared in no uncertain terms.

Spread the word.

For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen †

This is a little more technical and "wonkish", but I think both Warren & I did a good job of explaining things and keeping it accessible for the Average Joe. I would also encourage those who have the ability to mirror this YouTube to go ahead and do so, as we get into some pretty hard-core territory that "the powers that be" definitely don't want people to be aware of much less understand.

Ann Barnhardt and I (Warren Pollock) have an open conversation organized to provide background to this crisis, the setting of legal precedent, netting, settlement, and future trends including a potential bank holiday. We talk about MF Global as it applies to savings and commercial banking, brokerage, insurance, and commodities. We talk about numeric impossibility of solving the problem, incest between government and finance, having the victim of the crisis pay rather than the fraudster. We explain how the MF Global bankruptcy process will define how customer funds will be treated in a bank holiday. We talk about the idea of having an honest bank holiday to root out fraud vs an economic crisis which plays to looting and criminal activity of vested interest.

For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen †

I did my second interview with Jim Puplava at FinancialSense.com yesterday and it posted this morning. I think I was actually meaner in this one than I was in the first one. I'm doing my second chat with Warren Pollock tomorrow morning, and will post that as soon as it is up, too.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN

It is absolutely amazing to me, and frankly awful, that these interviews I do are so popular. Most interviews or radio programs I do wind up being the most popular (or top-three) for their respective program or host. And we talked about my "Going Galt" letter being #6 for ZeroHedge yesterday. Don't think for a second that I relish in any of this. The truth is, I find it very, very disturbing, as should all of you, that I, relatively insignificant me, am apparently one of the only people in Western Civilization who has the stones to simply state the OBVIOUS OBJECTIVE TRUTH. I am a minor cultural phenomenon because I basically say that one plus one equals two, and I can say it clearly and directly without a bunch of "uhs" and "ums" and "you knows".

Really? So all a person need do in this culture to be some sort of a hero is be able to string three articulate sentences together which state the obvious? God help us.

I have many detractors who say, "Who the hell is this chick and why the hell do we care what she says?" Yep. I'm right there with you. Where are the billion-dollar fund managers (excepting perhaps Kyle Bass)? Where are the captains and titans of industry? Where are the so-called "leaders"? WHERE IS THE CLERGY??? I'm cynical, but SURELY there must be SOMEONE ELSE who has a brain in their head and a pair in the bag who can speak proper English above a mumble besides me. Anyone? Anyone? My 15 minutes are surely winding down. Someone else is going to have to step up here.

-----------------------------------------------------------

Well, as we all knew and expected, the Squid has its rows of suckers and beaked gaping maw all over the MF Global collapse. It turns out that on October 27th Goldman Sachs bought hundreds of millions of dollars in securities from the imploding MF Global. I'm shocked. Are you shocked, because I'm shocked. I guess Lloyd Blankfein must have just FORGOTTEN TO MENTION IT to anyone. I mean, it's not like $1.2 billion in "missing" customer seg funds, and a multi-hundred million dollar firesale of paper the day before the customer funds went "missing" is any big deal or could possibly be connected or relevant or anything. Nah.

JP Morgan held the paper, and apparently, if I'm reading this right, the securities changed hands and went to Goldman, but the payment never made it into the MF estate. JP Morgan just "took care of it", or something. In other words, it's just a big, incestuous orgy of cephalopod-human psychopathy.

Here's the URL. Copy and paste into your browser's address bar:

http://tinyurl.com/6st5f9s

And just because it is good to have dreams and goals, here is a tutorial on cleaning and gutting a squid:

Chef Roble:
"And here you have a completely cleaned and disassembled squid. That wasn't so hard, was it?"

For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen †

Here's Warren Pollock having a pow-wow with one of his brokerage firms, Fidelity.

For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen †

Here is another interview by Warren Pollock and the Roy Orbison dude who is representing about 8000 of the MF Global customers, James Koutoulas. Mr. Koutoulas criticized me on November 18th immediately after my "Going Galt" letter announcing the closure of Barnhardt Capital Management was picked up and went viral.

(Quick aside: ZeroHedge.com was the first outlet to post my letter, and from there is was picked up by Limbaugh and Beck, which sent it into the stratosphere. ZeroHedge posted their top 20 stories of 2011 by page view count, and my letter was ranked #6 with over 101,000 reads at ZeroHedge. Bizarre. Truly, truly bizarre. BUT, I am the living proof that people of good will are absolutely obliged to ACT. The argument, "I can't make any difference. I'd just be pissing into the wind." has been totally, completely and officially destroyed forever and ever by yours truly. Call me "The Angry Little Pissant Who Could." Instead of the mantra, "I think I can!", the new mantra is, "By God, I've had just about enough of this crap!" To quote Ste. Jeanne d'Arc: ACT, AND GOD WILL ACT. Ooh-rah.)

The entire interview is worth a listen, but I want to zoom in on the portion beginning at 13:47. First, here is the relevant excerpt from my letter of 11/17/2011:

EXCERPT FROM ANN'S LETTER:
I now suspect that the reason the Chicago Mercantile Exchange did not immediately step in to backstop the MFG implosion was because they knew and know that if they backstopped MFG, they would then be expected to backstop all of the other firms in the system when the failures began to cascade – and there simply isn’t that much money in the entire system. In short, the problem is a SYSTEMIC problem, not merely isolated to one firm.

Okay, now Koutoulas speaking with Warren Pollock a few days ago beginning at 13:47:

Well, I've met with [CME Chairman] Terry Duffy on this several times, and, um, he makes some really good arguments. He's like, "Listen. Could we make this go away? Yes. But, if we do that, there's $185 billion dollars in seg funds out there. We set a precedent that says we have to back $185 billion, and that is a much higher bar." Can they back $185 billion? No. They can't. And his point of view is that not one penny of money that was actually held by CME is lost or missing.

So, if Mr. Koutoulas is accurately recounting the words of Terry Duffy, and I have no reason to think that he isn't, I was exactly right in my letter. The CME has an $8 billion default slush fund which could have made the MF Global situation go away INSTANTLY. The CME could have stepped in, essentially taken over the firm, squared the books, and then sold the firm intact with customer integrity completely maintained. They have done it before. Many times. In fact, that is the base, root function of the CME. It is also their moral and legal obligation because the CME was the entity that was charged with auditing oversight of MF Global. MF Global was under the regulatory auspices of the CME on the private side, and the CFTC on the government side. The CME was liable and thus failed, and failed CRIMINALLY in their fiduciary duty.

But why? They had the money ready to go in a reserve slush fund for a situation EXACTLY like this. Why didn't they do it? Because they KNEW and they KNOW that MF Global is, as I said, the mere tip of the iceberg. They KNOW that all of the other firms are doing the same damn thing, and are exposed to exactly the same risk, albeit probably not as insanely leveraged as Corzine had MF. Corzine is a psychopath.

Terry Duffy and the rest of them know that this is a SYSTEMIC PROBLEM, and not just a one-off. Think about it. If this really was just a one-off, the CME would have done what they always do. They would have backstopped, kept everything running smoothly and this would have all been forgotten literally by the end of the first week of November. Instead, they have essentially destroyed the entire marketplace. Why? Because they figured that there were at least some sort of odds that the CME corporation would survive this, even if those odds were slim, provided that they set a precedent of NOT BACKSTOPPING ANYONE. But if they set the precedent of backstopping now with MF Global, when the inevitable total systemic collapse comes (which will be four minutes after Europe collapses), the CME corporation will absolutely be destroyed with a 100% certainty IF THEY ARE NOT ABLE TO LAY THE BURDEN OFF ONTO EITHER THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT (aka the taxpayers, aka us) OR ONTO THE CUSTOMERS THEMSELVES (aka the taxpaying public, aka us). So either way, the precedent has now been set and ratified by the corrupt government, CFTC, SEC, DOJ and judiciary that when the come-apart happens, WE THE PEOPLE are going to pay for it, one way or another. And the CME mafia will walk away scott-free and largely intact.

Why Koutoulas can't see this and moons over Duffy is simply beyond me. Oh, wait. No it isn't. Mr. Koutoulas, like pretty much everyone else in this culture, is totally and completely incapable of detaching himself from his wealth and his business. He can't let go, and thus is completely deluded into believing that this is all going to work out and everything is going to go back to normal in a few months. The chairman of the CME apparently told Mr. Koutoulas TO HIS FACE that the CME would no longer fulfill their fiduciary duty and that Mr. Koutoulas' clients would have their wealth confiscated AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN. And he calls that "a really good argument." The mind reels.

The only argument that makes is the argument that ANY financial market fiduciary is now 100% obliged to shut their firm down and protect their clients. If a client asks a broker, "Will my money be safe with your firm?" the only honest answer is "No", which then demands that the fiduciary decline to open the account, and close all of his existing accounts. If the fiduciary answers, "Yes, your money is safe" then the fiduciary is LYING to the customer, which is a criminal breach of fiduciary duty.

It's over. It's a catch-22. The only honorable way out for ANY broker in the United States is to shut down and protect his customers.

War is hell. This is war, ergo, welcome to hell.

And for the record, I take zero satisfaction in being right on this point. This is like being proved "right" in declaring that your house is on fire. I don't want the house to be on fire, but it is, and so I'm going to go ahead and speak up about it instead of worrying if the people sleeping in the burning bedrooms might think me a self-righteous know-it-all. The house is on fire. I'm telling you, THE HOUSE IS ON FIRE. GET THE HELL OUT. NOW.

First, a letter from a farmer in the central U.S.:

>> Ann,
You're exactly right about a farmer such as myself being caught in the middle if an elevator I do business with gets its balls in a vice in a collapsing futures market. The problem is, I don't need to have forward contracted my grain to the elevator to be destroyed in this scenario.
If the elevator where I hauled my grain goes belly-up, for any reason, the doors are closed and locked, and I, as an unsecured creditor, go to the back of the line in terms of being paid back. I can't show up in my truck and demand my grain back. My grain, be it contracted or not, becomes part of the bankruptcy estate. So, now, my entire harvest is in jeopardy from the moment I deliver it, until I sell it and the check clears the bank.
What the hell can I do about that? I guess I'll have to build enough on-farm storage to hold my entire anticipated harvest and just deliver it a bit at a time to the end users. Don't think I haven't lost sleep thinking about this since the MF Global crap came up.
Signed,
Farmer Ted

Farmer Ted answered his own question, and this goes for ALL farmers out there. If you have some cash that you are looking to allocate into something other than paper, YOU SHOULD INVEST IN ON-FARM GRAIN STORAGE CAPACITY. Our rule about not actually owning something unless you can roll around naked on it (with an assault rifle) applies to grain elevators too. Warehouse receipts are (altogether now!) PAPER, and the worth or value of any paper instrument is directly correlated to the underlying morality, integrity and adherence to and enforcement of the Rule of Law in the nation in which it was issued. The MF Global fraudulent bankruptcy theft (and really, the GM and Chrysler bondholder thefts before that) prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that the Rule of Law no longer exists in this country. Therefore, gentlemen, ON-FARM STORAGE. ON-FARM STORAGE. ON-FARM STORAGE.

And don't forget long guns and many, many thousands of rounds of ammo.

For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen †

I’m out of pocket for a few days, but K.D. over at Market-Ticker.org ran THIS PIECE on Wednesday, and I just wanted to chime in and expand the concept at bit. First, I absolutely, totally, completely and 105% confirm that the futures markets are withering and dying on the vine AS WE SPEAK. I’m hearing for every single one of my contacts, both floor guys (in both Chicago and NY) and introducing brokers (as I used to be) all over the country, that business is totally evaporating. And we’re not talking the normal Christmas season slowdown. No. We’re talking people explicitly stating that they are done trading and hedging with futures, both speculators and hedgers. It’s over. No mas. See you later, Alligator. Buh-bye.

This was going on to some extent before the MF Global rape/theft. The markets had grown thinner and thinner, ironically on more net volume, but the volume increases were due to the veritable fungal infection of the market that is the high frequency algorithm trading systems. Furthermore, any short hedger with a brain in their head over the last 18 months has known that short hedging in an inflationary environment is and would be needless suicide. Why IN THE WORLD would you SHORT an inflating market? If Mrs. Reggie Love is printing money a trillion at a pop, and I think Mrs. Love’s debasement will be at $8.5 TRILLION in a few weeks after the debt ceiling is raised yet again, isn’t it obvious that currency debasement is happening and that physical commodity prices are going to necessarily inflate? At this point, anyone who actually believes any statistics that come out of the federal government or the Federal Reserve (there’s no inflation!) has got to be mentally disabled. Literally. Mentally disabled.

But I want address another issue that I don’t think many people are aware of yet. I taught one of my Level 2 Cornerstone Cattle Marketing schools a couple of weeks ago and we talked at length about cascading counterparty risk. Not only are producers not using the futures themselves, but they are also VERY keenly aware of the fact that if they enter into a private treaty forward delivery contract with a grain elevator or a feedlot, that they would STILL be exposed to the futures market, and to the risk of a futures market collapse, or even just another wealth confiscation. Yes, even though the producer was not engaged in the futures markets himself, if his counterparty turned around and laid off the risk on their private treaty forward contract using the futures, if their private counterparty were to be caught up in either a single-firm collapse OR a total system collapse, it is highly probable that the effects of that would cascade back to them. For example, if a rancher forward sells his calf crop to a feedlot and locks in his price with the feedlot on a purely private basis, if the feedlot then turned around and SOLD futures to offset the private forward BUY of the rancher’s cattle and then got caught up in a futures market confiscation or collapse, the feedlot might be so financially hamstrung that they might then DEFAULT on the PRIVATE contract with the rancher. This same dynamic could also happen with grain farmers who forward sell grain to an elevator on a private contract. Or it could happen to a feedlot that forward buys feed grain from an elevator. It could also happen in the petroleum markets, and on and on.

I just want to remind people that there are lots of private treaty forward contracting going on, and always have been. In fact, I have almost always advocated to my clients that they look to a private treaty “cash market contract” with feedlots or elevators first before using futures, because that way the feedlot or the elevator is the entity carrying the hedge in the futures market, and thus posting margin and meeting margin calls. For my guys, it was frequently worthwhile for them to cede a few cents on their side in exchange for not having to tap a line of credit for margin calls, and have that cash available for other uses, or to just have the ease of mind that comes from NOT having one's interim cash flows exposed dollar-for-dollar to market movements.

But, it was fair to say that whenever a private treaty forward contract was entered into, EVENTUALLY someone laid that risk off on the futures market. Some big players are still so attached and dependent on the futures market, and simply can not comprehend or execute a paradigm shift – which betrays a massive weakness of intellect – that they are still trying to operate as usual, with their brokers, likewise in denial, telling them that “everything is just fine”. The sensible players and producers are wising up, and are now even shunning private treaty forward contracts in fear of counterparty risk should a cascading collapse occur.

This MF Global situation isn’t just about a few bucks being stolen from a brokerage firm. Both the scope and cascading consequences of Corzine’s actions put this firmly in the domain of economic treason – as in an act of economic war upon the United States and her people. This is why I told Peter Schiff that execution should be on the table for Corzine. Treason, in whatever form, is a capital offense. If Schiff hadn’t cut me off, I would have explained this. Capital punishment is serious, solemn business. It’s not an inflammatory rhetorical tool. If execution is ever put on the table, there had better be a solid, well-thought out justification for it. In this situation of massive economic treason, it would be fully justified.

I continue to marvel at how the cash cattle marketing skillset that I was taught and continue to teach is EXACTLY the remedy for what is happening around us. The answer is not in ever more complex derivatives, but in the simple, millennia-old arithmetical art of physical commodity arbitrage. It truly is amazing how the Lord works and moves.

For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen †

1. Q: Ann, good heavens, why do you have your address and driving directions to your office/home on your website????

A: So that anyone who wants a piece of me can COME AND FRICKING GET IT.
I aim to please. (And please to aim, as it turns out.)

2. Q: Ann, it seems to me that you are just a publicity whore who is trying to make money off of other people's suffering.

A: Well, obviously. You can tell that by all of the ads that I place here on my website. Now that I am ranked as the 25,000th most viewed website in the United States (I was at 17,500 right after the Puplava interview), up from 30,000,000 or higher a year ago, I'm really raking the dough in on all of the ads I run. Oh, wait. Sorry. THERE ARE NO ADS ON THIS WEBSITE. I'm not making a dime.

But, you have got me stone cold in that I opened dozens of futures accounts as a direct result of my notoriety, which commenced after my Lindsey Graham/Koran BBQ videos went viral back in April (available for viewing on my YouTube channel. Look for the videos with the six-figure view counts). I have had a steady stream of people BEGGING to open accounts with me and even offering to give me managerial discretion over their accounts. Oh, wait. Sorry. I turned all of them down except for TWO. Yes, that's right, I only opened TWO futures accounts from "fans" and declined ALL THE REST - DOZENS AND DOZENS OF THEM, and one of the two was an MF Global transfer in mid-October. And then I shut my brokerage firm down on November 17th. So, no. No windfall for me.

3. Q: You must have made a killing when you sold your book, though, right?

A: I didn't sell my book. I liquidated all of my customers, sent their funds home and closed all of the accounts clean. Selling my book would not have protected my customers, it would have just enriched me at their expense. In order for what I did in shutting down my firm to have any real integrity, I had to get my customers completely out of the market. Selling my book would not have done that. It would have just moved them to another broker and clearing firm, but they still would have been completely exposed to the system itself. That would have been the epitome of selfishness and callous indifference had I done that - just taking MY money and running and leaving them to get greased in the eventual collapse. I have no idea what books are worth, but I had between two and three hundred open accounts, so it would have been a non-trivial sum, and I had always planned and assumed that upon retirement that I would sell my book. It wasn't to be. Morality and simple human decency prohibited it.

4. For the record: I have personally written EVERY SINGLE WORD on this website, and that ever has appeared on this website, and on my YouTube videos, and it will be a cold day in hell before you EVER see me denying full, total and complete responsibility for everything I have written, or see me walking back ANYTHING outside of pure factual errors, which I always endeavor to correct as soon as they are pointed out to me. Unlike some people. Oh, and also for the record, I don't wear eyebrow toupees. Unlike some people. Oh, and also for the record, yeah, if I had been the President during WWII and I had knowledge of the Nazi concentration camps and the "Final Solution", I would have unleashed military aggression in scope and power that would have made Patton blush like a schoolgirl in order to stop it. Unlike some people.

5. My take on Ron Paul? If I suddenly have the urge to vote for an islam-appeaser who wants to see Israel wiped off the map, has no problem at all with a nuclear weaponized Iran, and thinks that the United States is an imperial force of evil in the world, I'll just vote for Obama, because at that point, the less-crazy metric points to the guy who DOESN'T wear eyebrow toupees.

(Just kidding. If it came down to Obama or Paul, I'd vote for Bill Still. I would never, ever vote for Obama.)

6. And now, just because it's so choice, Jimmie Rodgers FOR THE WIN. Old-school excellence. I was born in the wrong decade. Sigh.

TURN IT UP AND DANCE.

This is a poor-quality excerpt. I had to turn my volume WAY up to hear it, but it is worth a listen. This is from just last month, November 6-8, AD 2011.

Four percent delivery demand would implode the COMEX. Truth be told, I doubt seriously that it is that much. And based off of what he said about his firm's audit of the physical in storage, it sure sounds like it is possible that COMEX could be multiple-issuing vault certificates and bar serial numbers.

When Mr. Bass quotes the COMEX as saying "price will solve everything", please remember what I wrote about "decoupling". If the trade loses faith and trust in the exchanges themselves (cough, already happening, cough) then no arbitrageurs will step in to force convergence between the futures price and the cash price, and thus COMEX basis convergence would not happen. In other words, the "price solves everything" argument only happens in a sound, integrated market wherein the Rule of Law is in full force. The Rule of Law is to the marketplace as gravity is to the universe. Take gravity away from the universe and everything instantly dissolves into disorganized heat energy. Take the Rule of Law away from the markets and they dissolve into the simplest possible form - pure physical commodity-driven barter. Fiat currency, contracts, stocks, bonds, derivatives - all these things are wholly contingent on the collective character and integrity of the society that produces them. Why do I post incessantly about religion? Because morality and integrity are the foundation upon which the entire marketplace is built. Morality and integrity are the canvas upon which the tableau of the marketplace is painted. I'm hard-pressed to think of two concepts that are more closely, thoroughly and inextricably tied together. All of you militant atheists are about to learn that lesson - if you haven't already.

Just to reiterate, as I saw a witty person post on some long-lost thread somewhere, if you can't roll around naked on top of it, you don't really own it.

(Um, I'd like to exempt livestock from that rule and modify it to something like "streak in front of it" or perhaps merely "moon it". Heh.)

However you manifest your nekkid personhood to your property, be sure that you also have your assault rifle close by, too!!

For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen †

Christmas is about the Incarnation, and I think that the Incarnation is one of the most under-appreciated and glazed-over concepts in Christianity. God became a man. The Second Person of the Holy Trinity took on human flesh. Jesus is fully God and fully Man. Born in a manger. Sweet Little Baby. Angels. Shepherds. Wise men. Presents. Isn't that nice? Moving right along . . .

Not so fast. In order to really enter into Christmas and shake the secular cultural disaster of consumerism and greed that it has become, one needs to ponder the Incarnation. Deeply. And it seems to me that the key to understanding the Incarnation, and thus Christmas, lies not in the manager in Bethlehem. No, the keystone that ties it all together and allows us to begin to grasp the infinite terror and majesty (yes, I use the word "terror" very thoughtfully) of the Baby laying in a feed trough is actually 33 years later in the Garden of Gethsemane. If you really want to understand what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown, look in the Garden. But I warn you, it isn't happy. If you like Christmas as it is and just want it to remain a secular gift exchange with tacky sweaters and delicious baked goods, STOP READING. Because my intention is to plant concepts and images in your mind and soul that you will never be able to remove. Every time you see or hear anything that reminds you of Christmas, I want these seeds to flare up and burn your soul. Not all burning is bad. Burning purifies. Purification makes us better. If you're not interested, STOP READING RIGHT HERE. Merry Christmas!

______________________

The key to beginning to understand the Incarnation, God becoming Man, is Christ's agony in the Garden of Gethsemane. If you recall, after the Last Supper in the Upper Room, Jesus and the apostles, except for Judas who was on his errand of betrayal already, went to the Garden of Gethsemane. John tells us that Jesus went there with the apostles frequently to pray, and thus it would be one of the first places Judas would have known to look for Him. The wheels of the Passion are in motion. Jesus knows exactly what is coming, and that it is coming within a matter of hours. He withdraws a short distance from the apostles to pray, but close enough that they can still see Him. He asks the apostles to simply stay awake (because it is now the middle of the night) and to watch and pray. Jesus withdraws and begins to pray. But what the apostles see is horrifying. Jesus isn't calmly and serenely kneeling in prayer. Jesus is literally laying on the ground, curled up in a ball, writhing in agony. Jesus is a quivering, trembling, sobbing mess. Jesus is in such stress and agony that the capillaries in the sweat glands in His scalp and forehead are bursting, and there is blood in the sweat that is running down His face, mingling with His tears, and dropping on the ground. Sobbing and shaking, Jesus BEGS the Father to let the events of the next twelve hours pass from Him if at all possible, but resigns Himself to the will of the Father. Reading this, some may be unimpressed with Jesus. Afterall, many, many men and women have gone to their torture and execution fully aware of what was coming, while managing to maintain their composure. Some men, especially, might be tempted to view Jesus and being somewhat cowardly in the face of His Passion, and thus be a bit turned-off by the whole scene.

Yes, Jesus is terrified. He is more terrified in this moment than all of the terror felt by mankind in all of history combined, rasied to the power of infinity. His terror is literally testing the limits of the human body. If any of us felt anything even close to the sort of fear that Jesus felt, we would drop dead. People can and have died purely of fright and/or intense psychological stress, usually by means of a heart attack precipitated by massive adrenaline production.

But the real question is, "What is He afraid of?" His terror and agony are NOT centered around the physical means of His death. He is not trembling and sobbing because he is thinking of the pain of being scourged, or the pain of being crucified. He is curled up in a ball crying so hard that He is sweating blood because He is thinking about WHO is going to torture and kill Him. When God took on human flesh, He took on EVERY ASPECT of our existence. He experiences things exactly the same way that we do - except at an infinitely amplified level. And that includes love. And being that He is also completely God, He is in Himself infinite knowledge and infinite love. In a nutshell, this means that Jesus went through His entire life on earth completely in love with every single person. Every person He saw or passed on the street He had known from all eternity; He had created that person atom-by- atom accordingly in the fullness of time; He had intimate knowledge of that person's every thought, desire and deed; He was infinitely in love with that person.

Have you ever been in love - as in completely CRUSHING in love? Do you remember the feeling when your beloved person would first come into view? Walk into the room? Can you remember the rush of adrenaline and joy you would feel just to SEE that person? Can you remember having to supress and contain the urge to smile, jump, clap, run around the room, tackle and kiss to death said person? Remember that feeling? Bring back happy memories? Experiencing it now? Understand that this was and is Jesus' experience with every single person. Yes, both male and female. Remember, He is God, so His love is completely pure and perfect. He FEELS love in His body (adrenaline, etc.) without ANY impure or sinful nature. BUT, He knew that He couldn't simply run up to every person and kiss and hug them. He couldn't grab someone, look in their eyes and say, "It's ME! Here I AM! I love you!" It wouldn't have worked. He had to hold back and simply admire from afar. Can you imagine what life was like for Him for those 33 years? Can you imagine what simply going into town and walking through the market must have been like? Every face He passed was His beloved. Every person who brushed by Him was a souce of simultaneous joy and the pain of unrequited love. Every laugh He heard was a laugh He wanted to share, and every whimper of sadness was sadness He wanted to share, every struggle was a struggle He wanted to help, and every bit of pain was pain He wanted to soothe. And not in an abstract, altruistic way. He wanted to engage these things personally, as we would with our intimate beloved. But He couldn't. Can you imagine having all of that love pent up inside of you, with your beloved so near, and have to hold it all inside? It couldn't have been fun. Are we starting to get an idea of how terrible and wonderful the Incarnation is? Remember all of this.

Let's go back to the Garden. Jesus takes a couple of breaks from His prayer to go back and talk to the apostles, who are His best friends. Yes, He loves everybody, but the apostles are different. They know, to a small extent, who He is. They have spent many days and evenings together working, playing, eating and just talking. Jesus has told them who He is, and He has told them in no uncertain terms that He loves them. And they have assured Him that they love Him too. Their relationship is not one-sided. Jesus has finally gotten to experience reciprocal human friendship and love, lopsided though it may have been.

Jesus has just spent a considerable amount of time in agony a stone's throw away from His beloved friends, and when He comes back to them, He finds them all asleep. He is dying. (My soul is sorrowful even unto death.) He asked them, His beloved best friends, to simply stay with Him, watch, and pray. And they couldn't even stay awake. And this happened twice. Heart. Ache. This is the reality of the Incarnation.

Now here comes Judas. As with every other person, Jesus is completely in love with Judas. Judas is the person Jesus loves most in the world (and that goes for every person because Jesus is God and has infinite capacity.) And Judas has sold Him out. It is one thing to be betrayed by an enemy. It is quite another to be sold for 30 pieces of silver (which assuming one ounce pieces would equate to just under $1000 today) by the person you love most in the world. And just to make it as terrible as possible, Judas has told the guards that the man he kisses is Jesus. And so when Judas kisses Him and Jesus says to Judas, "You betray the Son of Man with a kiss?" there is agony there that can not be described. This is the reality of the Incarnation.

The guards. Every single one of them is the object of Jesus' infinite love. All Jesus wants to do is say, "It's ME! Here I AM! I love you!" And they despise Him. Jesus could have stopped it all at any time, not by some act of miraculous violence, but by asking the commanding guard if he remembered that certain tree he used to climb as a child, or that certain toy. He could have frozen them in their tracks by simply reminding them of their own experiences and feelings - which He had already shared with them because He had been with them the whole time. But He didn't, because He couldn't. If He didn't let them kill him, there would be no hope of ever being with them in heaven. Agony. This is the reality of the Incarnation.

Now before the High Priest Caiaphas. Same thing. Except Caiaphas, and the rest of the Sanhedrin, have been as their entire vocation and purpose in life, praying for the coming of the Messiah. They have been praying to Jesus (unwittingly) for Jesus (unwittingly). And Jesus has heard their prayers, and the prayers of all of the priests for generations past, and is finally, finally now standing in front of them. And remember, He is personally in love with them. They look Him up and down and utterly reject Him. "No, no. You're all wrong. You're not what we want. We want a big macho-man king to vanquish the Romans and sit on the throne. LOOK AT YOU. YOU'RE ALL WRONG. WE DON'T WANT YOU. Go to hell and good riddance." (But it's me. Here I AM. I love you.) Agony. This is the reality of the Incarnation.

Pilate. Selfish indifference. "Look man, I neither know nor care who you are or who you say you are. I have a lot on my mind and I simply can't deal with crap like this." (But it's ME. Here I AM. I love you.) Agony. This is the reality of the Incarnation.

The Roman scourgers. Jesus was whipped and flagellated until most of His skin was gone by men whom He loved infinitely and intimately. Can you imagine how He felt as he walked to the pillar, turned and saw the faces of his scourgers, and seeing the face of every human being looking back at Him? Can you imagine being slowly and brutally whipped to the brink of death by the person you love most in the world? Say your spouse or best friend? It would be one thing to be whipped by a total stranger. But to be tortured by the person you love most in the world? (But it's ME. Here I AM. I love you.) Unfathomable agony. This is the reality of the Incarnation.

The crowds. Everywhere there were crowds of people looking on - the scourging, the trial, the streets he walked while carrying His Cross to Calvary. Every single face was intimately loved. And every single face, excepting Mary, John, Mary Magdalene and a few other women, were either viciously hostile or completely indifferent. I wonder which was worse? The reason I ask is because the opposite of love is NOT hate, as most would assume. The opposite of love is indifference. There is no greater blow that can be made to a human soul than indifference. How many people saw Jesus that day - locked eyes with Him - and honestly didn't give a rat's @$$ either way. "Live. Die. Whatever. Just don't bother me. You're messing up my plans. Now I'm going to have to go completely out of my way to get around You and this damndable mess You're making." (But it's ME. Here I AM. I love you.) This may have been the worst agony. This is the reality of the Incarnation.

Almost everyone treats Jesus with indifference to one degree or another. We are all inflicting that agony on Him. How, you ask? By sinning. We know that our sins hurt Him infinitely, but we commit them anyway. Few people sin because they actively HATE Jesus and want to hurt Him. A few do, but not too many relative to the broad population. No, most people are just indifferent. There He is at the pillar, and our sin is the next lash. And we do it anyway. CRACK! Because we're indifferent. And again, and again. "Live. Die. Whatever. Just don't bother me. You're messing up my plans. Now I'm going to have to go completely out of my way to get around You and this damndable mess You're making." (But it's ME. Here I AM. I love you.) "That's your problem, Buddy." Agony beyond words. This is the Reality of the Incarnation.

That is why Jesus was sobbing in agony in the Garden. He didn't fear the physical pain. He feared being utterly, completely and totally rejected to the point of toture, execution and the indifferent witnessing of this by the person He loved most in the world, which is YOU. And ME. He feared not being tortured and killed, but being tortured and killed by the person He loved most in the world. And despite this, He still chose to go through with it all. He went all the way to the end, just so there would be a CHANCE that one day we might knock on HIS door and say, "It's me. Here I am. I love you, too."

So while you're opening your presents and unstuffing your stockings tomorrow morning, be sure to think about that Sweet Little Baby and the infinite agony of love that He has signed up and gone all-in for by being born in Bethlehem, because that is what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.

"Fear not, for behold, I bring you tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the City of David, a Savior, which is Christ the Lord."

For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen †

Bravo to the many folks who picked up on exactly the remark by Mr. Schiff that will be the subject of tonight’s essay. You all will TOTALLY get this – you’re already most of the way there. We just need to flesh it out a bit.

And seeing the multitudes, He went up into a mountain, and when He was set down, His disciples came unto Him. And opening His mouth, He taught them, saying: Blessed are the poor in spirit; for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Matthew 5: 1-3

The First Beatitude is another grossly misread and misunderstood verse, with the misunderstanding being a recent phenomenon, spurred by a conscientious perversion of the meaning of the verse by Marxist infiltrators beginning in the 20th century.

Most people read this verse and see the words “blessed” and “poor” and think that Jesus is saying that poor people are morally superior to rich people. You can see why Marxists jumped all over this verse. They have twisted it into a class warfare battle cry. Other people see the words “blessed” and “poor” and also the prepositional modifier “in spirit”, have no idea what to make of it, glaze over, start thinking about football or Zumba class, and just smile and nod like the Stepford Christo-zombies that they are.

I’m a huge fan of punctuation. Especially properly-utilized apostrophes. But I’m also a fan of ellipses and the humble comma.

(“Let’s eat Grandma!” or, “Let’s eat, Grandma!” PUNCTUATION. SAVES. LIVES.)

I think that we can understand the First Beatitude with far more ease if we slip a set of ellipses in between the subject, “the poor”, and the prepositional phrase, “in spirit.” Thus:

Blessed are the poor . . . in spirit.

Does that help? Jesus isn’t saying that poor people are by definition morally superior to rich people. Not at all. What He is saying is that a person who is detached from their wealth and is willing to “push their chips all-in”, to use a poker metaphor, is truly blessed. So, given this, ANYONE within the wealth spectrum, rich or poor, can possess this virtue. This also means that anyone within the wealth spectrum can LACK this virtue. There are two separate classifications that we need to address and combine in order to understand this dynamic: poor in spirit and poor in fact, and their antipodes, rich in spirit and rich in fact. If we form a matrix of these characteristics, there are four possible output combinations. Let’s go through each.

Poor in spirit and poor in fact: This is a person who does not have any great wealth, but is also content and still maintains a spirit of generosity and gratitude. This condition is exemplified by the parable of the Widow’s mite in Mark 12: 41-44. The poor widow gave the smallest tithe, but it was greater than the tithes of the rich because, “she of her want cast in all she had, even her whole living.” The widow was detached even from what little she had, even though on a percentage basis it far, far exceeded what the rich tithed. The widow was both poor in fact, and poor in spirit.

Rich in spirit and poor in fact: This is the person who lives beyond their means and is preoccupied with the APPEARANCE and ACQUISITION of wealth. (Cough, cough. Ring any bells? Ahem.) This is the person who leverages himself out the gazoo so that he can have the 4000 square foot house and the luxury car . . . even though he only makes $65k per year. This would also be the welfare denizen who scoffs at honest work and lives off of the government, but has a 55” LCD TV and PlayStation, and has multi-thousand dollar hair extensions and intricately manicured fingernails. No. Way. Girl. I did NOT just go there. Oh yes I did.

Rich in spirit, rich in fact: This is the rich person who is very much attached to their wealth, and places the preservation of their wealth as their top priority. And as so many of you picked up on in the Peter Schiff interview below, this is Mr. Schiff’s failing. If you scroll down and fast-forward the video to the 15:43 mark, here is the exchange that utterly exemplifies this condition:

Schiff: Let me ask you, your call for a strike, what exactly does that entail? If people wanted to follow what you’re saying, how would we have a strike? What would people do?
Ann: Close all of your securities accounts, bring all of your money home and stop trading all markets: futures, stocks, everything. Man up, act like you’ve got a pair and shut it down.
Schiff: Well, that would put me out of business. I mean, if all of my customers would close down their . . . .

And there you have it. Peter Schiff, like almost everyone else in our culture, can’t fully acknowledge the objective reality of what is happening, and thus can not respond in a fully virtuous way because he is, first and foremost, attached to his wealth and simply can not bring himself to push his wealth “all-in” in service to justice and truth. If we take him at his word in the video clip below, he will not tell his clients that they are at risk, recommend that they liquidate, or shut down his firm because he is attached to and has defined himself by his firm and the wealth that it generates for him.

Now please understand the distinction here: Schiff’s firm and the wealth it has amassed Mr. Schiff is not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself – no more so than my firm and the wealth that it generated for me over the years was “bad”. Not only are these things not necessarily bad, they actually have the potential to be good! What IS bad is the inordinate ATTACHMENT and unwillingness to LAY DOWN that “good thing” in service to a GREATER GOOD, which in this case is justice and truth. I was willing to lay my “good thing” down because I understood the First Beatitude and the promise of Christ that in laying down my “good thing” I might later inherit a far better thing, namely a wee little corner of the Kingdom of Heaven. As a trained arbitrageur, I recognize a good swap when I see it. Wink.

This is what Christ meant when He said, “And again I say to you: It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven. And when they had heard this, the disciples wondered very much, saying: Who then can be saved? And Jesus beholding, said to them: With men this is impossible: but with God all things are possible.” Matthew 19: 24-27

Jesus isn’t saying that the rich are intrinsically evil purely because they are rich. That is what the Marxists want you to believe. He is saying that it is EXTREMELY difficult for wealthy people to maintain DETACHMENT from their wealth, and the richer people become, the more attached they tend to be to their wealth. But He goes on to say that there is hope! All things are possible through Him! Let’s all pray that Peter Schiff, and all wealthy people of good will, by the power of the Holy Spirit, are able to detach themselves from their wealth and shove that camel through that needle, because IT CAN BE DONE.

Poor in spirit, rich in fact: Very simply, this is a person who is at any level of financial comfort above “poor” who is willing to push their wealth “all-in” if that is what is required to follow Christ fully. I’ll not bore you with any examples. You get it.

And that, ladies and gents, is how Peter Schiff, with an assist by the Holy Spirit, taught you all about the First Beatitude. The Lord truly does move and work in mysterious ways.

(I think maybe Mr. Schiff is the guy in the lower-left with his head down in his hand. "Oh, what He's saying is HAAAAARD.")

For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen †

I did the Peter Schiff radio show this morning and here is the YouTube of the video of that interview. Mr. Schiff actually said something that sets up an essay I have been wanting to write for quite a while now, so please do watch, and that essay will be written and posted tomorrow.

There is some new territory covered here, and he asked me in particular about the fallout of the MF fraud on the agricultural sector, which I greatly appreciated.

Perhaps the most noteworthy moment? I would guess that would be the point where Mr. Schiff asked me what punishment Jon Corzine should receive for his crime. I answered his question. Bluntly.

For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen †

I have received a few emails asking if I was still content with my decision to shut down my brokerage. Not only am I content, but after seeing the news that broke over the weekend, I am of the considered opinion that the entire financial blogging community should formally call for a general financial market strike. And I’m not kidding. A couple of things have happened regarding the MF Global mess that I don’t think got the attention they should have because they broke over the weekend. So let me fill you all in.

First, all notions of personal property rights were essentially destroyed when the MF Global “trustee” began seizing customers’ gold and silver bullion held in storage if that bullion was purchased through contracts brokered by MF Global. In case you’re not following, let me restate. MF Global customers who traded in precious metals and actually took delivery and OWNED bullion, as in outright, free and clear OWNERSHIP, complete with a warehouse receipt (aka title) with SERIAL NUMBERS designating exactly which physical bars they OWNED, and were PAYING RENT to STORE their own property in a “secure” VAULT, complete with statements indicating that these storage fees were paid in full, are having THEIR PROPERTY THAT THEY OWN AND ARE PAYING RENT TO STORE CONFISCATED by the MF Global trustee in order to feed the gaping maw that is the MF Global “estate”.

This would be EXACTLY like if you rented a little storage space at one of the thousands of storage facilities that dot this nation, and stored a car there. I used to do exactly this when I had multiple cars. Imagine the owner of the storage facility went bankrupt. Now imagine that a “trustee” SEIZED YOUR CAR, sold it, and used YOUR PROPERTY to feed the storage franchise owner’s BK. Nevermind that you had an explicit RENTAL AGREEMENT and that you had receipts proving that you were paying monthly rent on said storage space, and that you could produce clear title to the car showing that you owned it, and that the VIN numbers matched.

Do you understand what is happening now? This is outright confiscation of personal property. After having their money stolen out of their accounts and being locked out of their accounts, unable to trade or even liquidate WHILE THE MARKETS CONTINUED TO TRADE, these people are now having their PERSONAL PHYSICAL PROPERTY stolen and redistributed to the MF Global estate, in order to feed Corzine’s gambling debts – MADE ILLEGALLY WITH FUNDS STOLEN OUT OF THE CUSTOMER ACCOUNTS – to repay counterparties with J.P. Morgan at the fore.

So guess what? This is now establishing the precedent that ANY property held by a third party can be seized and confiscated to feed a bankruptcy of said third party. This includes BANK DEPOSITS. Now, please consider that all of the major banks in the United States are insolvent, and insolvent MULTIPLE TIMES OVER. Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citi, all of them. When these banks collapse – and they WILL collapse - any deposits they are holding WILL BE CONFISCATED and redistributed to their counterparties. Citation URL here at Market-Ticker.org:

http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=199356

Oh, but there’s more.

Also announced over the weekend was the jaw-dropping, yet illuminating fact that the MF Global bankruptcy was fraudulently, nefariously and illegally drawn up as a Chapter 7 BK for a SECURITIES DEALER and NOT a commodity brokerage as it should have been. Look, MF Global was the second-largest non-bank FCM in the United States next to NewEdge which is the old FIMAT. If MF Global wasn’t an FCM, then there are no FCMs. Of course it was an FCM. It had $7.2 billion in customer seg funds as of August 31, 2011. And yet MF Global was immediately, from the get-go, put into Chapter 7 BK as a SECURITIES FIRM. This is fraud. MF Global’s BK should have OBVIOUSLY been established under Subchapter IV of the Chapter 7 code as a COMMODITY BROKERAGE.

Why wasn’t this done? Because in a Subchapter IV liquidation of a commodity brokerage firm, guess who is absolutely and unequivocally at the front of the line? You guessed it: the CUSTOMERS. In the Chapter 7 liquidation of a securities firm, guess who goes to the front of the line? Uh-huh. The “creditors”, aka the counterparties on the firm’s proprietary positions. As in . . . J.P. Morgan, et al.

Now we know why this unprecedented action of raping the customers has happened. It was set up that way. Now are you telling me that NO ONE at the CFTC appreciated the difference between the BK subchapters? Are you honestly telling me that Terry Duffy and NO ONE at the CME understood the difference between a securities firm liquidation and a Subchapter IV commodities firm liquidation and the massive consequences to the customers? Not a single one of them understood this massive difference? Bullshit. Of course they knew. They set it up that way from day one. And they continue to know. And this fricking charade just keeps going and going, and the rape and confiscation of the customers' property continues apace. The fix was in on the customers and J.P. Morgan was put at the front of the line willfully, intentionally and with extreme malice aforethought by all those parties concerned. Citation Hotlink here:

Click Here to read the ZeroHedge reportage.

And this is why I am now formally calling for the financial industry blogging community to officially push for and declare a general market strike. I call for all decent people of good will to withdraw ALL FUNDS from the financial markets and cease to trade in solidarity with the MF Global rape victims until such time as the MF Global BK is properly filed as a Subchapter IV commodity brokerage liquidation and their private property is FULLY RESTORED.

If this is how they’re going to play, I say let’s shut the whole damn thing down. Let’s show these rat bastards how we do things in the Civilized World. Molon Labe.

For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen †

As expected, the “hiss out of hell”, to quote Chesterton, came streaming out of my inbox with regards to the Immaculate Conception piece. But, there were just as many lovely emails, too. Thanks to all. One that stood out in particular relates directly to vomiting. The writer, a man, tried to take the tack that I was some sort of a fascist for, well, ACTUALLY BELIEVING in a doctrine or premise. His take – and this is EXTREMELY COMMON across our culture today – is that I have “my truth” regarding Mary and he has “his truth” and in the end it is all the same and doesn’t really matter.

Oh, hells no. Here is where I GO OFF.

That “your truth – my truth” bullshit is one of the single most evil concepts in the universe. It is satanic and it is exactly the tool that is being used to destroy civilization and humanity. Rustle up a cup of cocoa or a glass of port and settle in, because this is going to go in-depth.

First, to the actual vomiting itself. For that we go to the words of Our Lord in Revelation chapter 3 verses 15-16.

And to the angel of the church of Laodicea, write: These things saith THE AMEN, the faithful and true witness, who is the beginning of the creation of God: I know thy works, that thou art neither cold, nor hot. I would thou wert cold, or hot. But because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold, nor hot, I will begin to vomit thee out of My mouth.

In this context “THE AMEN” is used as a name of Christ Himself. “The Amen” means the Truth Itself, which is God Himself, specifically referring to the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, Christ. So Christ, who is Truth, says that He would rather people be either hot or cold, but lukewarmness He will VOMIT out of His mouth. That’s astounding at first read. In other words, He is saying, look, either believe something or don’t. Don’t come at me with this godforsaken “church of Oprah” bullshit about “your truth and my truth”. Christ would rather a person be an atheist than one of these wretched “hey, whatever” types, and I can actually see exactly what He means. If you asked me who I would rather have a conversation with: an atheist or a “my truth your truth bullshit” pseudo-Christian, I’d take the atheist, without hesitation every time. You can have a productive, informative conversation with an atheist. An atheist actually believes something. He has a premise, and he believes in his premise, and is probably able to defend his premise in a rational way. In other words, there’s some meat on those bones.

In contrast, the “my truth your truth bullshit” (MTYTB) pseudo-Christian is a vapid, inane empty shell. The lights are on, but Dude, NOBODY’S HOME. To wit, Oprah Winfrey. But more importantly, the MTYTB pseudo-Christian commits a blasphemy that even the atheist does not commit. The MTYTB person is actually denying that there is any such thing as Truth at all, and remember, the Truth isn’t just a mere intellectual or philosophical construct. Intellectual and philosophical constructs exist only in the mind of man. The Truth is completely external to all of us, and is not made by us or contingent upon us, our existence, or even our recognition of the objective reality of Truth. The Truth just IS. It EXISTS. IT IS WHAT IT IS, or to quote God Himself speaking to Moses in Exodus 3:14, I AM WHO AM. 1+1 equaled 2 from all eternity, and 1+1 equaled 2 before any human being had yet pondered the question, and 1+1 will continue to equal 2 forever. Even if every person falls into some mathematical stupor or heresy and collectively become convinced that 1+1=5, 1+1 will still equal 2. That will never, ever change.

The Truth is a PERSON, more personal and more real than you or me. His name is Jesus Christ. What the MTYTB pseudo-Christians are actually doing is denying the existence of God and instead setting themselves up as “god” because they cast themselves as the arbiter and standard of “truth”. Hence, “my truth”. What utter, abject evil. Even the atheist does not do this. The atheist still maintains that there is an exterior truth to himself, and that the truth is that there is no God. The atheist is WRONG, but at least he doesn’t deify himself and still acknowledges that there is an external, referential matrix. The supreme irony and joke about the atheist is that he unknowingly PROCLAIMS GOD’S EXISTENCE by insisting that there is no God as an absolute. Any absolute requires an external existential reality to serve as the supporting matrix of that absolute. Guess who that “external existential reality” is? Yep. If the atheist REALLY wanted to stick it to God, he would adopt the reciprocal of the very common pseudo-Christian super-fun rockband church position of, “Hey, there’s no God in my truth, but maybe there is a God in your truth.” That’s about as bad as it gets.

So back to our question of Mary’s sinlessness. Either she was or she wasn’t. This is a binary question. Either I am right and you are wrong, or I am wrong and you are right. Period. Mary was and is a real person. She isn’t a fiction or a philosophical construct. And neither is Christ. Either Christ is the Second Person of the Holy Trinity who died for the sins of man and rose from the dead, or He was just another insane person. Either Jesus Christ is the Truth, or He was the biggest liar in history. Either the Eucharist is the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus Christ under the appearance of bread and wine, or it is a ridiculous, meaningless wine tasting, and in that case, to quote Flannery O’Connor, to hell with it. Pick your side, but spare me, and more particularly, spare Christ this “my truth your truth” pantheistic Oprah Winfrey slackjawed bullshit. Let the sifting of the wheat from the chaff commence. Ooh-rah.

Why does this matter? Because this satanic evil is what is being used to destroy civilization and humanity through the broad culture. We have been taught over the last 50 or so years that one of the worst cultural sins a person can commit is to ACTUALLY BELIEVE SOMETHING. What our culture says is, “Yeah, yeah, you can go to church and all that, but DON’T YOU DARE actually believe any of that shit.” I’m a great example of this. People see my videos and are REPULSED by the intensity of my delivery and by my “crazy eyes”. What the “crazy eyes” are is the physical manifestation of righteous anger rooted in a belief and recognition of objective truth, and the world’s ever-more severe incongruence with that objective truth. This culture has been so whipped by the satanic denial of objective truth, and the constant shaming and ridiculing of any belief in objective truth in the name of “tolerance” and “ecumenism”, that the mere sight of a person witnessing to the Truth without bracketing every sentence with an apology and qualifier is now repellant and rage-inducing to the average person.

Think about politicians. Obama, Clinton, the Kennedys, and most of the so-called “Republicans” too; these people pay LIP SERVICE to religious belief, but it is all done with a wink and a nod. “Yeah, we go to church once or twice a year, but we don’t actually BELIEVE any of that shit. You know how it is.” And sadly, it isn’t just the politicians anymore. That is the mindset of most people today. “Yeah, I’m Christian, but I don’t think Christianity is the only truth. It’s just MY TRUTH.”

Here is where this gets extremely problematic. If a culture subscribes to the “my truth your truth” line, then what inevitably happens is that the people who have the coercive power in a society begin to impose “their truth” upon everyone else. In other words, whoever has the guns and the power to imprison becomes “god” and sets the standard of “truth” in a society. We are watching this happen right now before our very eyes. The Obama regime is telling Catholics that they WILL provide contraceptives and abortions because these things are “rights” according to “their truth”. They are also telling Catholics that they WILL place adoptive children with homosexuals, and very soon they will also demand that Catholic priests marry homosexuals, because homosexuality is “normal” according to “their truth”, and they have the power to destroy people via the IRS and other governmental bureaucracies, so therefore “their truth” wins. They are telling the MF Global customers that the expectation of respect of property rights and the enforcement of contract law is unreasonable and that confiscation and theft of property by their cronies is now permitted according to “their truth”.

These psychopaths will go to any lengths, any extreme, to deny an external standard of truth, because as long as they can delude themselves and their followers into believing that lie, they set the rules, and the world and everything in it is theirs for the taking.

THIS is why Christ said that he would VOMIT the lukewarm out of His mouth, because the “my truth your truth” bullshit leads directly to hell, even though it promises to deliver a “tolerant, ecumenical utopia.” When a society falls to that evil philosophy and no one will stand and fight with “crazy eyes” for the Truth, then people will suffer and die by the millions. The ecumenical utopia you are waiting for can never and will never exist because, unlike you, the forces of evil actually believe in their satanic philosophy with a burning passion and thus will never, ever compromise or rest until they either fully infiltrate and take over or are utterly defeated. There is no third way.

Crazy eyes? You better know it. Hot, burning crazy.

For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen †

Here’s your Christian catechesis for the weekend. First, who exactly is “the Immaculate Conception”? Most Catholics today are so incredibly ignorant and poorly catechized in their faith that a sickening number would say that Jesus is who the term “Immaculate Conception” is referring to. That would be wrong. Mary is the Immaculate Conception.

And here is where all of the non-Catholics begin to feel a distinct tightening in the solar plexis, a rush of blood to the face, a clenching of the jaw and a grinding of the teeth. Why? Because any mention of Mary other than as a human brood mare – and only around Christmastime - engenders RAGE amongst the Protesters. Why? Because, apparently, Mary draws people’s attention away from Jesus instead of pointing people TOWARD Him. Because, apparently, Jesus takes absolutely no delight in any of us, most especially His own mother, is insanely jealous of His own creation and thus hates His own mother, and demands that nobody EVER so much as LOOK at her, much less LOVE her, because Jesus is extremely insecure and just can’t handle people observing, loving and appreciating beauty in HIS OWN CREATION, even though everything in the universe was made by Him and through Him.

So every time a parent looks at their child in love, Jesus gets pissed. And every time a man looks at his wife in love, Jesus gets pissed. And every time a son looks at his mother in love, Jesus gets pissed. And every time a man looks at the mountains, or a sunset, or up at the stars in loving wonder and appreciation, Jesus gets pissed. And every time a person looks in loving appreciation at a beautiful painting, or building, or reads a beautiful bit of prose or poetry, or gazes upon a particularly elegant bit of mathematics or even computer programming code . . . JESUS GETS PISSED.

Do I have that about right, y’all? Snorf.

Anywho, back to the Immaculate Conception. This doctrine and non-negotiable tenet of Christianity teaches that Mary was, by the grace of God, prevented from carrying the stain of Original Sin from the moment of her conception. Mary was saved from sin by her Son, like all of the other faithful, it is just that the timing of her salvation was different from everyone else. This is why Mary calls God “my Savior” in her Magnificat in Luke 1:46-55. Instead of letting Mary fall in the mud puddle of sin like the rest of us, God stuck out His Arm back through time from the Cross and kept her from falling in the mud puddle – but if it wasn’t for God’s positive action of reaching out across time from the Cross and holding her from falling, she would have fallen. This is called “grace”, and is what the Angel Gabriel was referring to when he greeted Mary at the Annunciation with the words, “Hail! Full of grace! The LORD is with thee. Blessed art thou among women.” Luke 1:28

Full of grace means FULL. OF. GRACE. How full is full? Full is totally full. To the brim. Full does not mean half-full or mostly-full. Full means full. Mary was FULL OF GRACE. And because Mary was FULL of grace, there was absolutely no room for sin. Mary didn’t sin because God her Savior had filled her with grace and therefore she just COULDN’T sin. Most of us reading this have a tiny taste of what this is like. For example, I’m guessing that everyone reading this would be incapable of killing a baby. We just COULDN’T do it. No matter what threat was made against us, no matter what the adverse consequences to our own lives might be, we would take any adverse consequence before killing a baby. We are simply incapable of performing that act. Why? What is that internal force of energy that prevents us from committing acts of evil even when under intense duress and threat? It is grace. Pure and simple. Sadly, most of us have a little grace, but are not in any way FULL of grace. I am personally much closer to being full of crap than of grace (which many of you have already pointed out to me – thank you very much), hence the daily, persistent, repeated sinning on my part. And I suspect it is a similar situation with you, dear reader, with the grace-to-crap ratio being much higher for you than for me. I really am quite full of crap.

With Mary there was no crap because God her Savior had FILLED her with grace, and thus there was no room for crap, and thus there was no sin. It’s really just 2nd grade math if you think about it. But WHY? Why was it essential for Mary to be sinless and sinless from the moment of her conception? That’s where the science comes in.

There are two phases to Mary’s existence. The first phase was from the moment of her conception until the Annunciation, which is when Jesus was conceived in her womb. The second phase was from that moment of conception forward for all eternity. Each phase has its own physiological delight attached to it which required Mary to be a sinless vessel for Our Lord.

First, the pre-Annunciation period. As it turns out, all baby girls have all of the eggs that are ever going to be in their ovaries fully formed not just at birth, but fairly early in their fetal development phase. Unlike men who are continuously producing new sperm, a woman’s eggs aren’t created and formed with each menstrual cycle. All that is happening during a cycle is that an egg, which has been fully formed in a woman’s body since she was a pre-born fetus, is released into the reproductive tract. What this means theologically is that the egg containing the 23 chromosomes that God would miraculously fertilize with 23 chromosomes that He miraculously supplied (including a Y chromosome) to become the Word Made Flesh, Jesus Christ, was physically present inside Mary’s body from the time that Mary was inside of her mother’s womb. That egg, and those chromosomes, that physical constituent of Our Blessed Lord was present inside of Mary’s body, waiting to be . . . if I may use the word . . . consecrated. The word consecrate, when broken into its Latin components means:

Con: With
Secr: Holy
-Ate: Territory of a Ruler

And so, Mary was, from the time she was inside St. Ann’s womb, already carrying a portion of Our Lord’s physicality, namely 23 of His chromosomes. And thus Mary was, from her very beginning, already a tabernacle, already the Ark of the New Covenant, carrying within her what would be consecrated into The Law Incarnate, The High Priest, and The Bread of Life – just like the Old Ark, except perfected and fully fulfilled as God Incarnate. And as we know from the book of Exodus, the Old Ark had to be “perfect”. And thus, the Ark of the New Covenant was also perfect, except this perfection was a perfection that only God Himself could accomplish: the perfection of Mary, full of grace and thus saved from all sin.

The second phase is actually broken into two sub-phases. The first sub-phase is when Mary was pregnant with Jesus and His entire body was inside of hers. The second phase is that phase from the time of Jesus’ birth forward into all eternity. Jesus is STILL physically inside of Mary in a unique way. It was discovered just a few short years ago that immune cells pass from a pre-born child to the mother across the placenta. Not only do these immune cells, which are the child’s and thus carry the exclusive DNA of the child, pass across the placenta, but they persist in the mother’s body for the rest of her life. A woman who has carried a son has immune cells with Y-chromosomes in her bloodstream that can now be filtered out of her blood and observed. Female children also pass cells to their mothers. Thus, a woman truly does carry her children around inside of her, with their DNA coursing through her heart, for the rest of her life. That isn’t just a sentiment – it is a physiological fact.

Thus, Mary continued and continues to this day to be a perpetual, living tabernacle of her Son, as she carries cells with His DNA in her bloodstream. And so now we see why Mary had to be filled with grace and thus saved from the stain of sin from the moment of her conception eternally forward – because she was and is a perpetual Ark of the New Covenant.

This also explains why Mary’s body was assumed into heaven immediately at the end of her earthly life, because her body literally contained living cells of Our Lord and thus her body could not remain on earth in physical death to decay in any way. She simply was afforded the same physical resurrection that all of the faithful will receive, albeit instantaneously for her, given her very special state, both spiritually and physically. This is what is doctrinally referred to as “The Assumption”.

Finally, if you are reading this and it has made you the least bit angry, you need to sit down and ask yourself one excruciatingly simple question: WHY?

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen †

1. Corzine and Abelow testified again before the House Financial Services committee, and it was another nausea-inducing spectacle. Today's questioning was actually WORSE, because Terry Duffy had lobbed the committee a grapefruit on Tuesday regarding Corzine's knowledge of the customer seg funds being raided and sent off to Europe. (OF COURSE HE KNEW. BACK OFFICE TREASURY DATAPUNCH CLERKS DON'T SEND CUSTOMER SEG FUNDS TO EUROPE OR ANYWHERE ELSE OF THEIR OWN VOLITION.) But, of course, none of the congresscritters were even remotely smart enough to ask about any of that. In fact, one chick congresscritter was fawning over Corzine so hard, I honestly thought that she was going to come down off the dais, crawl in Corzine's lap, push back his greasy mullet, and start blowing in his ear. Her line of questioning - if you can call it that - was along the lines of, "Mr. Corzine, is it possible that no one within the company notified you of any problems because you are so brilliant and awesome and thus people find you intimidating?"

2. The best part of the whole day was Corzine getting served with a big ol' lawsuit as he walked out of the hearing room during the break. A commodity trading advisory service who is hung out to dry for into the NINE FIGURES is suing the top 20 or so executives in the company. AWESOME. Here's the video:

3. Finally, a very simplistic explanation of how the cash commodity markets are soon going to decouple from the futures markets. This is a little complex, but stay with me. I think this is important to understand because none of us who have lived our whole lives in the U.S. have ever seen a market disintegrate.

The threat (or promise) of delivery upon expiration is what keeps the futures markets tethered to the cash markets. Up until now, if an unreasonably wide spread between the futures price and the underlying physical commodity market got too out of whack, a process called "arbitrage" would kick in. Arbitrage is when a party simultaneously buys and sells on two separate but related markets in order to capture an inefficient spread between those two markets.

I'm going to use precious metals as my example commodity because there are alot of metals guys reading this, and because the metals markets will be the big tell in term of when decoupling and thus total futures market disintegration is upon us. But these examples apply to all of the physical commodities.

Let's say that the physical silver market is trading far lower than the silver futures price. This is what is called a WEAK BASIS. The BASIS is the relationship between the cash market and the futures market and is very simply defined as (CASH minus FUTURES). If cash silver can be bought at $25.00 per ounce and the futures are at $30.00 per ounce, the cash is $5.00 under the futures. When cash is under the futures, this is called a WEAK basis.

Up until now, what would a metals trader do? In very simple terms, he would buy the cash silver at $25.00 per ounce and then simultaneously sell the futures at $30.00. Because he has short-sold the futures, he could hold the contract to expiry and then deliver the $25.00 cash silver he bought to make good on the contract and receive his $30.00 price. So his simple net profit would be $5.00 per ounce. As many traders saw this spread and simultaneously executed this same strategy of buying the cash and selling the futures, what effect would this have? Right. It would cause the cash-futures spread to move back in toward convergence by pushing the futures price down (lots of sellers) and propping the cash market up (lots of buyers).

Now the opposite scenario: a STRONG basis. Let's say cash silver is trading at $32.00 and the futures are trading at $28.00. A trader might take physical silver that he has in inventory and sell it in the cash market, and then immediately take those proceeds and buy back and equal number of ounces in the futures market and take delivery. Since the same number of ounces in the futures market cost $4.00 per ounce LESS, he would end up with the same number of ounces in his inventory PLUS $4.00 per ounce in CASH in his pocket. If he and many other traders saw this condition and they all sold cash silver and bought the futures, this would, again, converge the spread between the cash market and the futures market.

The lynchpin that is holding this dynamic together and keeping the futures markets tied to the underlying cash market is the fact that the futures contracts are deliverable, and a trader can either deliver or take delivery of actual physical silver via his futures position.

Are we seeing a problem yet? The futures markets have lost their viability and trustworthiness because of the MF collapse and theft. At some point in the not-too-distant future, people everywhere are going to realize that the delivery mechanism is not reliable. Heck, just holding cash and/or positions in a futures account is no longer reliable. The the market itself is not reliable, traders will no longer attempt to arbitrage these basis spreads because the risk to the trader that the rug will be pulled out from underneath them is simply too great.

And in the metals markets, the delivery process itself is . . . um . . . shall we say, easily corrupted? When you "take delivery" of physical metals, it doesn't get sent to your house. All you get is a certificate saying that X number of ounces are being held in a certified vault somewhere with your name on them. After the MF collapse, that sounds like a joke, right? A CERTIFICATE with my NAME ON IT? Yeah. That really is how it works.

When the arbitrageurs finally lose all confidence in the markets, the cash market will decouple from the futures because no one will be willing to take the risk of having their money, positions and/or physical metals stolen/confiscated. If no arbitrageurs are willing to trade these spreads - no matter how wide they may become - and thus there is no force causing the cash and futures to converge, we will see the basis spreads become extremely wide. As people flee the futures markets, the futures prices will drop, while the cash markets hold steady or even diverge and actually rise as all of the former paper players realize that physicals are the only remaining game to be played.

Watch for this. Watch for the gold and silver futures to sell off as people walk away from paper while the online cash dealers, seeing that market demand for their physical inventory is robust, begin to ignore the futures prices and hold their prices steady or even raise them. When you see this basis decoupling and absence of arbitrage, lo, the end is nigh. A parabolic spike is coming.

For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen †

1. Here is my interview with Warren Pollock from earlier this week:

2. Duly noted on the "jarhead" nomenclature. Thank you. I did not know that was a word for a U.S. Marine. I just thought it was a person with a head like an empty jar. I have upticked my physical training regimen to hopefully approach something befitting the USMC (pudgy old chick batallion). I start olympic-style weightlifting training next week. Might as well, right? Old and busted: size 2 jeans. New hotness:

3. Just so you all know that I'm not alone in my sentiment and actually am speaking on behalf of other folks and brokers in the industry who simply don't have the soapbox that I have, here is an email from a second-generation floor trader in Chicago:

Ann Barnhardt,
Thank you for speaking up and calling it like it is. My father joined the Chicago Board of Trade in 1979. I joined the CBOT in 2009. We are customers of MF Global. The day they told me my money had been frozen I declared the futures industry completely dead. I grew up in the industry. I knew there were always thieves, mobsters even, in the business and I saw it from day 1 on the trading floor. But the depth of deceit has reached new lows.
MF Global and the CME violated the only principle that mattered in futures and anyone watching the farmers and ranchers testify yesterday should've seen that something has been broken beyond repair for them: TRUST! If the hedgers like you and your customers won't use the market then what are the speculators like me supposed to do? Well, I believe we're seeing it. The big specs have completely captured the trading venue through High Frequency Trading and are using it to fleece as many people as foolishly remain in the game where no bona fide hedgers operate anymore. The inmates not only run the asylum, they've set fire to it.

For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen †

1. Is it a sin to watch evil men turn on each other and enjoy it? Can I indulge just a little schadenfreude? Pleeeeease? The boys at the Merc must be finally starting to realize the irrevocable damage that has been done. Corzine, his eunuch man-slave Bradley Abelow (President & COO) and the South African man-child, Henri Steenkamp (bat boy & CFO) testified - check that - lied and bee-essed their way through another round of utterly inept senate questioning today. I don't think one intelligent, useful, probing, informed, incisive question was asked of any of them all day.

The last panel was the CFTC chick (TOTAL affirmative action hire. Sommers should be fetching coffee and making copies for people who actually understand the business.), Giddens the bankruptcy trustee, and Terry Duffy from the Merc. Well, ol' Terry is no doubt watching real volume at the Merc dry up before his very eyes, and FINALLY threw Corzine under the bus. Apparently one of the Merc's auditors was told directly by a high-level MF employee that Corzine knew all about customer seg funds being sent to counterparties via the broker-dealer wing of the company, and the Merc was further told by MF employees to stop looking for an accounting error, as the customer seg funds were raided and sent to MF's counterparties on their proprietary trades. Duffy set Corzine and his boys up for a perjury charge. Oh, wait. Nevermind. I forgot. In order to have perjury, there has to be a rule of law. Silly me.

Oh, and Terry, it's too late for you and the Merc. When you made the brilliant decision to lock the MF customers out of their accounts FOR AN ENTIRE WEEK, you ate your nine. You can't come back from that. It's been over since November 1st. Everything else is just academic. Decisions have consequences, Terrence.

Interestingly, when Duffy threw Corzine under the bus, all that happened was that the grease from Corzine's filthy physical person caused a momentary loss of traction on the rear axle of the bus. There was a wee fishtailing, but nothing more. Apparently a net worth in excess of $400 million does not translate into good personal hygiene. Corzine's hair is so greasy that it darn near drips. You can smell his filthy b.o./Axe Body Spray stench THROUGH THE INTERWEBS. I guess you can take the scumbag out of Jersey, but you can never take the Jersey out of the scumbag.

2. I literally started screaming when the Arkansas doofus asked one of the members of the first panel, which was comprised of farmers and agriculture professionals, if they realized that risk was part of the futures market. This jarhead literally didn't know the difference between MARKET risk and risk of having a scumbag steal your money out of your account and sending it to Europe.

3. The Fishwrap of Record has a piece today citing MF employees who say that Corzine was so heavily involved in personally trading the house accounts of MF that he would literally sit in meetings and trade on his Blackberry, and would be constantly running in and out of meetings to check the markets. Good grief this guy is pathetic. CITATION HERE.

4. Oh, and as expected, we now have both Soros AND J.P. Morgan getting uber-sweetheart deals on buying up the remnants of MF, specifically Italian sovereign paper. ZeroHedge posted a story today showing that JPM bought some of MF's Italian paper at fully 5% below market price at the time - 89 vs 94. That difference is a HELL of a lot of money that could have and SHOULD HAVE gone back into the MF estate and then out to the MF customers. Oh, and it is also wicked illegal. MF sold $2 billion in this same Italian junk paper to none other than Soros. I'm telling you, it does not require any sort of tinfoil hat to see what is going on here. Corzine scuttled the company with the blessing of the Obama regime and Holder Justice Department in order to effectively launder money to Soros and J.P. Morgan. This is why Corzine is testifying before Congress. He knows that he will never be prosecuted, so he isn't worried about "self-incrimination" or perjury. I also expect the Squid (that's Goldman Sachs, y'all) to make a similar appearance as a beneficiary before it is all said and done.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/who-gave-permission-bankrupt-mf-global-sell-italian-bonds-jpm-5-discount-market-value

5. Now a quick shout-out to my atheist readers who are here reading me, and just can't resist, but are soooooo pissed off because I can't get through a single post without getting all pew-jumpin'-for-Jesus up in here. Yeah. Sorry to bust your little bubble that all Christians are witless, humorless, slack-jawed mouth-breathers. Alas, you have prided yourselves all this time on being free thinkers, but it turns out that you too have fallen for the propaganda, just like good little sheeple.

But I propose a momentary truce wherein we come together and relish in this very, very humorous situation. Gentlemen, consider this: who is one of the most publicized people tearing these degenerate jackals a new one, publicly shaming them, and doing it BY NAME? Who is it that is blowing open the whole sordid mess and rhetorically exposing the reality of this situation in the blogosphere? Who is it that is FINALLY calling these thieving low-rent carney hacks out as the psychopaths that they are? That's right. It's a chick, (former) one-man IIB, specializing in commercial hedging of cattle and grain (Hicksville, right?), who has a redneck little website wherein the Lord's Prayer is posted on a near-daily basis, and there are essays on Christian theology.

Okay, you know how much that pisses YOU off, Mr. Atheist Reader. CAN YOU IMAGINE how pissed off THEY are? I mean, really. Can you think of a more thoroughly humiliating person for these Demon Squid Spawn to be ruthlessly dressed-down and called out by than ME? Little pew-jumpin'-for-Jesus cattle IIB girl? Mwah-ha-ha-ha. What this proves is that God does exist, and He has an absolutely SCATHING sense of humor. YOU GOTS TO BELIEVE!!!

Now go pour yourself a bit of smooth, tawny port, and let us together, in solidarity, raise our glasses to the sense of humor of "My Friend In The Sky", as you call Him.

For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen †

“Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called children of God.”

Well, according to all of the readers out there who attend the United Church of Insipid Music, General Dumb@$$ery and Worshiping of Our Own Self-Esteem, this Beatitude guarantees me a special place in hell involving a spit, a large fire of the “bon” variety, and a pack of starving hyenas. I certainly may spend eternity roasting on a spit being eternally consumed by hyenas, but it won’t be because of my failure to act as a peacemaker.

While it seems deeply counter-intuitive at first blush to think of an assault rifle-wielding wench who spends her spare time giving rowdy musloids driving directions to her home in a decidedly Dirty Harry-meets-Loretta Young pose as a “peacemaker”, the truth is, that is exactly what I’m doing.

In order to understand this, we have to get beyond Pastor Ashton, his super-fun rockband, and his Crackerjack chickenpoop “seminary training”. Dude, if those seminary curricula get any shallower, we are going to have bacteria beaching themselves en masse. I’m convinced that the totality of most modern Christian theological training consists of training Pastor Ashton and his ilk to figure out a dozen different ways of taking six minutes between the rockband and the “interpretive dance” number (barf) to tell people that they need to “learn to seek and feel the presence of the Holy Spirit in their lives.” Uh, okay, Thomas Aquinas. Would you mind explaining just what EXACTLY that MEANS? Seriously. That’s like handing me a clod of dryer lint and a darning needle and telling me to go make a Blu-Ray player. I’ll get right on that. You betcha.

The problem we have here with this Beatitude is that the meaning of the word “peace” has been distorted over the course of the 20th century. Hold on to your britches, because here comes the truth:

PEACE IS NOT THE ABSENCE OF WAR.
PEACE IS THE FULL APPLICATION OF JUSTICE IN CHARITY WITHIN A SOCIETY.

Let’s use North Korea as our object lesson. North Korea has been in a state of armistice since July 27, 1953. But, the people of North Korea have been enslaved under a despotic, and frankly bat-poop crazy dynastic dictatorship ever since. The North Korean people are held in slavery to this nutty regime by a combination of engineered starvation, brainwashing, and concentration camps. If you go to North Korea it is very, very quiet and very, very orderly. But is that PEACE? Absolutely not. PEACE can only come to the people of North Korea if they rise up – with help – and overthrow the Kim family and the human slime that enable them in the North Korean government and military, throw open the 38th parallel and reunite with their fellow Koreans on the Southern half of the peninsula. In other words, the only way the North Koreans can ever have peace is by the forcible application of JUSTICE upon the Kim regime. And that would involve war against the Kim regime.

So yes, you are hearing that right: sometimes peacemaking requires insurrection or war. Sometimes the only way to achieve the full application of justice in charity is to gear up and kick some @$$.

Conversely, the refusal to live up to one’s responsibility to see justice done is a failure in charity to one’s community, nation or society. Refusing to enforce justice actually causes the LOSS OF PEACE and tranquil order, and thus pacifism, like all lies, actually yields exactly the opposite of what it promises. Pacifism doesn’t yield peace, it yields WAR, DISORDER, TUMULT and SUFFERING. This is the meaning of Amos 5:15

Hate evil, and love good, and establish judgment in the gate: it may be the Lord the God of hosts may have mercy on the remnant of Joseph.
Amos 5:15

The phrase “judgment in the gate” means justice in the courts and seats of authority. In other words, do your duty in charity to God and your fellow men, both the innocent and the guilty, by enforcing just laws and waging wars of self-defense and defense of allies when necessary.

This is why law enforcement officers are called “peace officers”. That isn’t irony, it is truth. The very men who are trained to use billy clubs and firearms against criminals are trained and called to do so in order to see justice done in charity and thus MAINTAIN THE PEACE. Wyatt Earp was gifted a revolver by the people of Dodge City with a plaque on the butt with the word “Peacemaker” engraved on it. This wasn’t snark or irony on the part of the citizens of Dodge City. It was a statement of truth. Peace is the state of applied justice in charity within a society, and thus it is completely appropriate to emblazon a gun with the word “peacemaker”.

Does this sound familiar at all? Can you think of any examples whereby a nation failed to enforce its own laws in a spirit of “tolerance” and “pacifism”, and eventually sloth and callous indifference, and in that failure to see justice done upon criminals, both within and without, allowed a cancer of crime, theft, terrorism and general evil to metastasize and destroy said nation, and eventually an entire civilization? Hmmm?

So as much as some folks don’t want to hear this, every time I call out musloids and psychopath politicians and crony oligarchs, what I am doing is trying in my strange way to inspire a shift towards JUSTICE and the craving and demanding of justice in our nation, society and world, so that in that application of justice there can be the ultimate harvest of true, lasting, genuine PEACE. I am not so stupid or deluded to think that laying low and going-along-to-get-along is going to lead to anything except an escalation of injustice, suffering and eventual violence and death at the hands of the very people that our sick culture demands we “tolerate”.

This stupid nonsense all started decades ago when so-called Christian clergy began to twist and pervert the words of Our Lord in the Beatitudes into the lie of pacifism and touted effete weakness as a virtue and masculine strength as a sin. Today’s ministers are just too stupid, intellectually lazy, cowardly and money-obsessed to preach the truth. And so all they can say between rockband numbers is, “Always be nice!” while civilization crumbles around them. Fools.

Possession is nine-tenths of the law.

Judging from my email inbox, many of you are realizing EXACTLY what that old adage means right about now. Many of you have requested to liquidate your 401k accounts, and your employers won’t let you do it. I had no problem doing it because I am self-employed and thus I was my own “plan administrator”.

So, this nasty business brings us around to a very nasty, but inevitable question. Was that money ever yours, or has the entire 401k fiasco been nothing more than an underhanded, stealth confiscatory tax for the vast majority of folks who have participated in it over the years? I’d have to say, “affirmative” to the latter. If you are denied access to “your money”, then honey, it ain’t “your money” and never was. Many of you have been conned into working for a salary that was x percent less than what you were told, with “x” being the percent “contributed” to “your” 401k account. That "x percent" should be added to your marginal tax rate, because it is probably going to end up in the coffers of the United States Treasury by way of J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, or HSBC, or one of the other big crypto-fascist banks, by way of London, just like the MF Global money.

If you're wondering to yourself who EXACTLY is going to "bail out Europe", or at least make a pathetic attempt at the mathematically impossible so that your friendly neighborhood American oligarchs have enough time to get themselves pre-positioned for the collapse, YOU ARE, MY LITTLE CHICKADEES.

If you are one of the many, many people, or as TPTB call you, "bourgeois, bitterly clinging trash", stuck in this con, the only things you can do are:

A.) CEASE ALL NEW CONTRIBUTIONS IMMEDIATELY.
B.) If there is a loan option attached to your 401k program, take out the maximum possible loan and set up the SLOWEST possible repayment schedule.
C.) Never again enter into an arrangement wherein “your money” is unavailable to you and is anything less than completely liquid.

Possession truly is nine-tenths of the law, and under a lawless Marxist-Communist-Fascist government where the rule of law no longer exists (such as we are in now), possession is closer to ten-tenths of the law.

For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen †

I didn't know the exact mechanics as laid out in the ZeroHedge piece linked below, but I had been told a month ago that the entire US banking and brokerage/clearing paradigm was massively and inextricably tied to Europe, and thus the fuse on the whole thing was already lit and burning down quickly, and it was and is just a matter of time until the fuse burns down to detonation. When Europe goes, we go too. This combined with being notified of the risk of clawback actions to clients are the two top reasons why I pulled the plug on BCM. I reiterate, if we make it past Christmas it will be a miracle.

Here it is.

And here is the URL to the Market-Ticker.org piece addressing the same thing:

http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=198790

MF did its shady deals through London because the UK has basically no oversight or regulation on these exotic derivatives, and thus allows infinite layers of derivation and leverage. Lever the lever of the lever of the lever of the lever, etc. Don't think this is exclusive to MF. It is NOT. I know this for a fact. IT IS NOT LIMITED TO MF.

Here's the money quote:

virtually unlimited leverage via the shadow banking system, in which there are practically no hard assets backing the infinite layers of debt created above, and which when finally unwound, will create a cataclysmic collapse of all financial institutions, where every bank is daisy-chained to each other courtesy of multiple layers of "hypothecation, and re-hypothecation."

I'm out of town for a few days.

For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen †

The Congressional Ag Committee keeps asking about what are appropriate investment vehicles for FCMs to park customer seg funds. And there is all kinds of bee ess being bandied about. Let's cut through this and answer the damn question.

THE ONLY APPROPRIATE INVESTMENT VEHICLE FOR CUSTOMER SEGREGATED FUNDS IN A FUTURES COMMISSION MERCHANT IS

UNITED STATES TREASURY PAPER, with the specific Treasury product being:

90 DAY T-BILLS.

This is the decades-long convention, it is COMMON KNOWLEDGE, and it is JUST COMMON SENSE. The entire interest dynamic for FCMs and IB's was based on one metric and one metric only: 90 DAY T-BILL RATES.

I don't give a CRAP how low interest rates are, and how much revenue has been lost to FCMs due to low rates of return on Treasury paper over the last 3-4 years. IT IS IMMORAL TO EXPOSE CUSTOMER SEG FUNDS TO ANYTHING MORE RISKY THAN THE EXTREMELY LOW-RISK U.S. T-BILL MARKET.

As an IIB, I wasn't making any interest return on my posted escrow capital that I had to carry with my FCM over the last two years. When I first started BCM in 2006, the 90-Day T-Bill yield I was earning on just my escrow accounts paid my entire quote system expense. When the Fed synthetically suppressed interest rates down to next-to-nothing, that revenue to me went away. So . . . does that mean that I then was allowed to trade illegally in my customers' accounts and gin up fraudulent commissions in order to make up for that loss of revenue?

HELL NO. My loss of interest income was MY PROBLEM, not my customers' problem. And in the same way, the FCM's loss of interest income did NOT give them the right to raid customer seg funds and "invest" those funds in uber-leveraged, uber-risky bets.

One last point: REMEMBER, if the bets that Corzine made with the customer seg funds had actually "worked" and paid off, the CUSTOMERS WOULD NOT HAVE RECEIVED OR SHARED IN ONE RED CENT OF THAT PROFIT. That profit would have been kept in total by the FCM, and the customers would have never known that THEIR SEGREGATED FUNDS were the funds used to make those bets. The psychopath Corzine was willing to make the uber-risky, suicidally leveraged bets because HE WAS PLAYING WITH OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY.

90-Day U.S. T-Bills always have been and always will be the ONLY acceptable investment vehicle for customer seg funds in an FCM.

Oh, and Jon Corzine is a miserable liar and a sociopath who should spend the rest of his life in prison.

In anticipation of Jonnie Corzine's appearance tomorrow before the House Ag Committee, I just HAVE to post this. It really is funny.

Q: Why do you not advocate for free speech within the Church? Why do you celebrate St. Nicholas punching Arius? Hypocritical much?

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A: Great question. And I have a great answer.

The Catholic Church isn’t a democracy or a political system. It is a monarchy (Christ is the King), organized as a magisterium (The Holy See), administered by a regent vicar (the Pope), in faith, hope and charity (love). It is not an earthly, secular political system or means of civilian governance. It operates separate from and alongside secular governments, hopefully informing them through the individuals who comprise those governments, be those secular governments monarchy, parliamentary republic, representative republic, etc.

So no, there is NOT freedom of speech within the Church. And anyone who does not subscribe to or believe in what the Church, through the Magestirium, proclaims and teaches, is FREE TO LEAVE. There is zero coercion. BUT, at the same time, the Church is free to defend itself and not permit false teaching inside of itself. No religious group in a free society is obliged to commit de facto suicide by being forced by a secular government to admit members and proclaim teachings that dissolve the essence of the group itself. (Does this dynamic sound familiar or ring any bells?) To do so would be RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION.

The Arian heresy utterly dissolved Christianity by denying the Incarnation and the Trinity. No Incarnation, no Trinity, no Christianity – just a watery false philosophical construct doomed to swift evanescence.

Your local atheist coffee klatch is not compelled to admit me, because if you did, you would no longer be an ATHEIST coffee klatch. Nor would I ever dream of attempting to force myself or my views and faith upon you. (Remember, you come here and read me of your own free accord. I'm not forcing anyone to read me.) That is the domain of the psychopath.

And in this distinction we see the truth about our mutual enemy, islam. Islam is a totalitarian political system that demands that all people outside of it be forced and coerced to submit to it or die. It also rejects ALL secular governance and demands that all governments be overthrown and the entire planet be submitted to Sharia under the Caliphate.

For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen †

Today is the Feast of St. Nicholas, who died on December 6, AD 343. Saint Nicholas is well-known by his Dutch moniker, "Santa Claus". Don't be fooled by the crass, commercialized image. Saint Nicholas was a stone-cold butt-kicker for Christ and His Church.

Early in the Fourth Century, there was a terrible heresy in the Church put forth by a very persuasive man named Arius. Arius contended that Christ was not fully divine, but a creature, created by the Father. This heresy was threatening to schism the Church. (Back then everyone understood this to be totally and completely evil and thus unacceptable - the Church is ONE. Christ has ONE Bride, not a harem. There is ONE Truth. Not multiple "truths". As soon as you start saying that there are "multiple truths", what you have done is denied Truth Itself, of which there is only ONE.) So, the First Council of Nicea was called in AD 325 to hash this out and put the Arian heresy down once and for all.

Arius was at the Council, of course, and was called upon to defend his position on the inferiority of Christ. Being a bishop, Nikolaos of Myra (in present-day Turkey) was naturally in attendance. Arius' nonsensical, destructive and insulting lying contentions about Our Lord became too much for Bishop Nikolaos, who stood up and proceeded to haul off and go all Manny Pacquiao on Arius with a left jab directly to Arius' piehole.

Everyone was alarmed by Bishop Nikolaos' violent outburst, and he was immediately summarily stripped of his bishopric. In those days, the two things that designated a man a Christian bishop were a personal copy of the Gospels and a pallium, which is like a stole. Now you may taken aback by the "personal copy of the Gospels" thing. Well, of course! How could a bishop NOT have the Gospels? But you must remember that the printing press wasn't invented until AD 1439. Before that, if you wanted a book, it had to be written out BY HAND. And what were you going to write on? Try vellum. Every piece of vellum had to be harvested from an animal and made. So you see, for a man to have a personal copy of any written text was a HUGE, and frankly EXPENSIVE, deal. So, poor Nikolaos was stripped of his Gospel and his pallium AND thrown in the hoosegow.

Now here is where it gets really good.

While Nikolaos was in the clink, he received a visit from both Our Lord and the Virgin Mary. Jesus asked Nikolaos, "Why are you here?" And Nikolaos replied, "Because I love You, my Lord and my God."

At this, Jesus then presented Nikolaos with his copy of the Gospels, and Mary put his pallium back on him, thus restoring his rank as a bishop. When Nikolaos was discovered sitting calmly in his cell, still under guard, with his Gospel and his pallium, which the other bishops had locked away themselves far from Niklaos' prison cell, Nikolaos was released, welcomed back by his brother bishops, and rejoined the Council. The heresy of Arianism was struck down once and for all, and the Nicene Creed (which we still recite today) was authored. The anti-Arian part is this:

". . . Et in unum Dóminum Iesum Christum, (And [I believe] in one Lord Jesus Christ)
Fílium Dei Unigénitum, (the only begotten Son of God)
Et ex Patre natum ante ómnia sæcula. (And born of the Father, before all ages.)
Deum de Deo, lumen de lúmine, (God of God: Light of Light:)
Deum verum de Deo vero, (true God of true God)
Génitum, non factum, consubstantiálem Patri: (Begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father)
Per quem ómnia facta sunt." (by Whom all things were made.)

I post this because it speaks directly to our question of love and defense of Truth and defense of those we love. Arius was attacking Christ and His Church with his heresy just as viciously as if he had been leading an army - and Nikolaos stepped into the breach to defend his Beloved. PHYSICALLY. The reason Nikolaos stepped in was because Arius was attacking CHRIST, and His Bride, the Church, which is made up of Niklaos' fellow human beings - whose immortal souls were being put at risk by Arius. We are in no way taught by Christ to stand by and watch as our loved ones are attacked. The miracle in Nikolaos' cell is proof of this. Nikolaos did the right thing by going all Pacquiao on Arius and dropping him on his heretical keister before God and everyone.

"Why are you here?"

"Because I love You, my Lord and my God."

Go Santa.

Bishop Nikolaos (left) in righteous anger borne from intense charity for mankind which sprang from his intense love of God, delivering a powerful left jab to a rather terrified-looking Arius, who totally had it coming.
DOWN. GOES. ARIUS! DOWN. GOES. ARIUS!