An open letter to "Occupy Toronto"

Dear "Occupy Toronto":

I guess you've named yourselves "Occupy Toronto" to associate yourselves with "Occupy Wall Street". So first, I'd like to suggest you change your name to something like "Take Back Toronto". By calling yourselves "occupiers", you're encouraging a subtext that suggests you're a foreign force, invaders perhaps, admitting you have no right to be where you are.

I'm an outsider to all this, but I was under the impression that the "Occupy" movement was formed after people finally got fed up with the fact their countries have been taken away from them. American citizens are now nothing more than serfs, owned and traded by a kleptocratic ruling class: by "occupying" Wall Street, they wanted to bring attention to this and start taking their country back.

That's what I thought, anyway.

But I think calling yourselves "occupiers", you're involuntarily suggesting you have no legal right to your country. Calling yourselves "Take Back..." carries a better subtext, which suggests you have had your rights to your own country taken from you, and you are now demanding your country back.

After all, even "Wall Street" shouldn't be the enemy of the people. In an ideal world, "Wall Street" would raise funding for the businesses that you work for, invest the pension plans that are supposed to support you, and give you somewhere to put your own earned savings so that you can provide more for yourselves and your families. It should, ideally, give enough people jobs that they can pay the taxes that fund the provision of government services to the people. The problem is, "Wall Street" has been taken away from the people, by a kleptocratic ruling class that has now completely captured the government that, in a democracy, should have the people's best interests as its only concern.

Now I know Canada's nowhere nearly as kleptocratic as the USA. But we do still have our own ruling families who purchase government for their own ends. Our new Conservative government is working with Sun Media and various Canadian Republican pundits to try to defund and dismantle the CBC. And Ontario's "Liberal" government even went so far as to pass a secret law (Regulation 233/10) to suspend all civil liberties during the G20 summit in Toronto, probably under the direction of the kleptocratic ruling elite at the summit who oppose any attempt by any country's citizens to voice their opinions in the view of the world media.

Calling yourselves "occupiers" thus further suggests to me that you're the same bunch of York University Marxists that purports to speak for "the people" at every event they control. I have no problem with York University Marxists exercising their right to speak and protest; but I have a tremendous problem with them purporting to speak for me. I vote for a country where York Marxists are allowed to exist; I don't vote for a country where York Marxists rule over me.

That might suggest why there's this big debate within the "Occupy..." movement around that famous press question, "what is your one demand?" You don't know what your "one demand" is, because you're blinded by your individual political positions. The press always see this and conclude you're an amorphous mass that has no idea what it wants.

Well, in an ideal world, you would be an amorphous mass. (By the way: Anonymous has absolutely no interest, in any circumstances, in "collective action through consensus-building". That is their strength. The point of Anonymous is, anyone who decides to join in on an action does so in their own way. Anyone who's not interested in that action, they are free to take part in some other action. "Consensus-building" is an invention of Marxist fascists - the "consensus" reached is always theirs, they make sure of it. That's how I know you have nothing whatsoever to do with Anonymous. Fakers.)

But whatever individual demands the various factions within the "Occupy..." movement have, you do all have one thing in common. You want to take back your country. I'm amazed you haven't realized it yet!

So imagine if the press were coming up to you and asking "what is your one demand?" and you could simply reply: "We want to take back our country." Look at what that accomplishes:

• That begs for a whole ream of clarification questions from the press: you're now awarded more than a 10-second sound bite. You might even get documentaries aired about you.
  
• Every individual voice within that movement can now give their own explanation of how their country has been taken from them: now you have a real democratic movement, instead of some Marxist plutocrat-controlled movement.
  
• There is no way for any politician to co-opt your movement: the only way for anyone to placate you will be for them to give you back your country.
• Everyone watching will be on your side. Because you're not "occupiers", you're just helping the people "take back" what should be theirs.
• Anyone who stands against you (e.g. the police) will thus identify themselves instantly as an enemy of the democratic masses.
• Best of all, all the people of this country who are watching this go on will be introduced to that most revolutionary and dangerous idea of all: that the people actually have the right to rule their own country, not simply to be serfs ruled by a kleptocratic elite.
  

Who knows? Maybe you'll accomplish something. I plan on being there next Saturday, if I can. I would like to check it out to see if it's just the same annoying York Marxist bunch that likes to show off everywhere, or if instead you really do intend for nothing more than for us citizens to get our country back.

Friday Videos, Saturday edition

While on the topic of dark ambient, I've found a couple videos of Voice of Eye.

First, here's a live performance:



And next, I guess this is a video based on one of their songs:



And then we can go on to Nordvargr:



But then, moving on to more mainstream gothic sound, here's a fan video for a song by Of the Wand and the Moon:



And another one:



This all has nothing to do with anything, by the way. I post these videos because I also like this music, and maybe you'd like it too if you'd heard it.

Friday Videos - too many people are reading my blog again edition

I personally am a very big fan of the music of Finnish (?) dark ambient band Karjalan Sissit.

Stuff like this is so underground that it's amazing to find a live video with half-decent sound.

So here we go again, scaring away the normals.



I'm also a big fan of Kerovnian, a Croatian post-metal dark ambient composer. I think this is just a fan video for "The Godless Keep", but it's still good quality, and one of my fave songs:



Some Coph Nia, while we're at it:



And finally, here's Tangerine Dream, playing music in 1975 that flies above the heads of the kids of today. No wonder you guys don't deserve any flying cars!

What you really should know about the world economy and the markets

I disagree.

1) Is the USA in recession?

Answer: No. Auto sales are strong. I'm betting earnings won't horribly disappoint. All you can say is the US has been in a recession since 2008, but now the monetary stimulus that goosed the market has dried up; so the markets are now forced to face the same reality that workers in the US have faced for years.

Seriously. The fruitcake pundits on TV who are saying "a recession is upon us" should be forced to live like the working people. The US recession has been constant. It never ended. Only someone who used the stock market as his only connection to reality will say "oh look, market's down, must be a new recession."


2) Will the Occupy Wall St movement achieve anything? Answer: No

Yeah, I gotta agree with you there. But at least it's nice that finally there's someone in the US willing to lay all the blame at the feet of the kleptocracy on Wall Street. And it's getting sympathetic media coverage. The "official" (media/government) narrative in the US has til now completely ignored the kleptocracy; you have to read about it on Denninger's blog or in some smarmy pundit's books. Now it is finally being made part of the "official" discussion. Maybe it helps, somehow. A Wall Street protest is better than no Wall Street protest.


3) Will The Euro/The Eurozone implode?

Answer: what's "implode" to you? Greece mathematically must default. The Eurozone has to muddle through for now to buy enough time to recapitalize the banks enough that a Greek default (and subsequent run on Italian and Spanish sovereign debt) doesn't take down the system. The banking system could implode, but ultimately that rapes the very bond vigilantes that are causing the trouble. I frankly could care less. It doesn't affect the working class.

Always, when reading this economic news junk, remember that you're usually just reading the kleptocratic ruling class talking to itself. To me, anything that hurts them is good. They fucked everything up, it's time they paid to fix it instead of destroying seniors' pensions and investments, or taxing the workers' asses off to raise free money to give to the banks.

In conclusion,



Be very afraid, bankers. When those cops in the yellow pinnies see how you've raped their pensions, suddenly they'll realize they've been protecting the criminals from the people, and switch sides.

Then who'll be your war dogs, eh? Gonna hire Blackwater to protect you?

doom or glory, there is no between

Feel free to make note of this. I'm calling the gold miner crash over, we can all go all-in now. So feel free to egg me for it if a new crash ensues.

Actually, I bought $10K each of SBB, AR and MFL today. As far as I recall the last two are producers, and the first one is supposedly hideously undervalued. AR hasn't reached the EMA(8) yet but I'd bet Gary Tanashian would call it slightly oversold, or "de-risked". SBB and MFL have both advanced past their EMA(8) today, the day after a strong upmove.

So I'm going to try wading back in.

You want to caution me with cries of "doom doom doom"? Yeah, I've gotten bored of that crap. Also, I see no reason why Euro crises should kill precious metals or the companies that mine them profitably. What we saw over the past 3 weeks? Pure panic dumping. Pure and simple. Especially, as I already said, Monday's action.

Can things go pear-shaped again? Yeah. So I'll keep my trigger finger itchy.

I'm maybe feeling overly cocky right now. Some looney's paint-taping of REG at the close has gotten me back to breakeven on the year - an important milestone point for me, which I'd just given up on achieving a few days ago after working my ass off to get there for months.

I'm sure REG will go back down to the 80s. But for now my portfolio looks frickin' sweet, I have yet more cash to commit, and am diversifying out from my tightly-held core.

Except GOZ, which again isn't moving and is mired in the 70s. Pathetic.

quick comment

Posting will be light to nonexistent for a few days as my sister has died and I seem to be the guy taking care of the burial.

But remember Tuesday? All those stocks that went down 10-20%? They've all bounced back strongly. It looks to me like Tuesday was a capitulation day for gold miners. Certainly the intraday action was one big tremendous towel-throwing-in - if you watched the L2 you'd have been amazed at how perfectly good (or at least not horrid) companies like Keegan and Sabina were getting relentlessly dumped into the bid at stupid prices.

Even Alcoa dumped below $9, if I remember. That's a stupid price for Alcoa, even though they have a rep for disappointing at every earning and people are scared of China and blah blah. Car manufacturing numbers are great (dunno where I read it - maybe Bonddad Blog, go read him every day, he's brilliant) so I'm certain the "double dip" talk will be gone in days or weeks.

So if you like American stocks, there's my suggestion. Wade into the waters with Alcoa if you'd like. $9.89 as of now. Not above the EMA(8) yet, but it was $16 in July so it's more damaged than most miners you'd want to buy, yet larger.

If I didn't have this family stuff going on, I'd be thinking about buying back into the miners right now. Zero cash all stock. Probably a good idea not to, just yet... who knows what's next? Do you think you're man enough to hold through the weekend? Not me, with this crap.

I'm still happily holding GOZ (some of it at .70), GPM (some of it at 0.26), a bit of RIO (dumped some at $2.60 yesterday, down to 1/6th of my portfolio, doubt Goldfields is buying anyone while copper's at $3 so no point in buying or holding too much), and REG. I won't vventure out into the other stocks right now, though I was looking very wistfully at BTO, SBB, AR, and several other good producers who dig up pure money.

MFL's already above the EMA(8), at $15.14 this minute. Good price if you missed out on $14 this week, I guess. Maybe I'll take $10K worth of that this aft.

Anyway, I think I will let the magic EMA(8) guide me. $HUI is bouncing up against it right now, which may just mean this is the end of a short rally before another crash. I want to see it break past EMA(8), pass it, then retest it and hold, before I buy back in.

Note though that GDXJ and SIL have already broken through their EMA(8)s as of 1:50 this afternoon. So we might not only see miner strength after today, but also junior and silver leading the $HUI, which would be nice as you and I don't hold the good $HUI stocks, do we now? We have the dinky little ones who underperformed all this summer.

Morans at Zerohedge inadvertently call a market bottom

Without meaning to, the morons at ZeroHedge have just called a market bottom.

Read this (pathetic excuse for an) article.

Actually, no forget it, their pathetic spin on the data will make your head sore. Just look at this chart.



There you go. Short interest is highest since the March 2009 lows.

If you're a contrarian, right now you should be buying everything you can get your hands on.

Now for an alternate point of view....

The weirdos on ZeroHedge were screaming mad after yesterday's close... the thing all of a sudden deviated from the script. Monster faceripper rally.

Funny thing was, when I saw SPY's support was broken, I went in and shorted. Gave it up after a while (just a small loss) when the chart started to suggest that everyone else was trying to short the market too - but it wasn't moving.

Then you get the faceripper rally, on FT news that Euro countries are actually moving towards recapitalizing their banks.

ZeroHedgers called it a before-close story plant, as if the Lizard People wanted to burn all the shorts by planting a hopeful story in the Financial Times.

I dunno... to me, everyone wanted the market to fall, but it didn't. That makes me think we're now highly de-risked. As Jeff Miller at a Dash of Insight says in a post last night, "It is obvious that the market is priced for disaster, since even a hint of progress can stimulate a wild, short-covering rally like today."

He basically feels that all the badness and fear is now priced in - I guess that should be obvious, since it's now even on the shitty local news. Go read his post and see if you can disagree with his reasoning.

Now, Trader Mike offers balance: "Volume was massive across the board which suggests at least a temporary bottom may now be in place." - that's the good. But he also says "Overall however the damage has been done as all major key support levels have now fallen and any rally will most likely be sold into and thus limiting upside potential. A week or so break from the selling would not be unexpected at this time."

As for the second part, that's just falling back on the technical analysis bullshit. I'm sorry, but the key support levels being broken were supposed to make the market crash yesterday, okay? Everyone agreed and we all piled in short. But the market didn't move. And then it rebounded in a half an hour, 4%, on "massive volume".

So maybe the doom is overdone now.

Feel free to use me as a contrary indicator.

And of course none of this really applies to the gold miners, which all look like utter hell right now.

example of utter destruction

Here's some random "today's action" numbers for you, as of five minutes ago anyway:

ATC -23%
KAM -14%
GPR -19%
BTO -14%

Thankfully I don't own any of them. I've got RIO, GOZ, GPM and REG as my only crosses to bear.

But with GDX down 6% today, and $HUI collapsing below 500, who'd buy any gold miner or exploreco?

doom - or, not.

I dunno. What's your interpretation?

If you think the green line holds, then we get a rebound.

If the red line scares you, $VIX is about to explode and - in the words of Ozzy - "Satan laughing spreads his wings."

A very interesting point made on Stockhouse

I was reading the Sabina board at Stockhouse and saw that someone actually made a very insightful and interesting point, spelling errors his, emphasis mine:

---

You are correct, this is not a replay of 2008. That started with the banks owning huge quantites of Mortgage paper of unknown value. A complete breakdown of inter-bank lending occurred which brought short term funding to a complete halt. It began here and infected European banks to a much lesser degree. The banks did not trust each others financial status for no one knew what was on the others books. Huge uncertainty. The response of injecting liquidity into the banking system was slow which fed the panic. Here we have a sovreign debt problem. Where a number of european countries government debt is considered to be junk with an impact this time on mostly european banks. The problem is out there and known....

---

To me, the interesting point that this guy makes is that Lehman (and the greater MBS fiasco) crept up on people. It was disbelieved, by most, and so the market just crept higher - and thus had harder to fall, faster.

(Yeah, there were people warning about MBSes and CDOs in 2006; they're called "permabears" and are useless because the opinion they provide is utterly unactionable. Just like I was reading all sorts of crap last year about the impending collapse of the US commercial property mortgage market: hasn't happened, must happen soon I guess, but I don't give a flying fuck because nobody can tell me when. Similarly, by the way, an asteroid is guaranteed to strike the earth and wipe out all life: but it's not part of my investment thesis because we don't know how many millions of years we have until the asteroid hits.)

The Euro crisis, however, is so publicized that it's now being mentioned on shitty local news programs up here in Canada. I really gotta shake my head now. Is any of this supposed to be a surprise? And if it's not a surprise, it can't be the source of a major market correction any more - it's already been priced in by every dolt who watches the news.

The fear, then, for me, is about whether or not the dumps in gold/silver/copper (and not cotton/corn/livestock) indicate the dumping of collateralized commodities due to a wave of small-business collapse in China. (And whether or not it's going to continue, or even get worse.)

Because you wouldn't dump some, and not others, if you were only worried about a global recession. Copper and silver charts should resemble the slow decline of the tin and aluminium charts, and not the chart of the China small-cap ETF. In fact, copper did resemble tin all year; up until just a few weeks ago, that is.

And the guys dumping can't be the hedge funds, I think, because I can't figure why hedgies would have positions needing liquidation in copper & silver but not coffee nor cocoa nor hogs nor aluminium. What, you wanna tell me that hedgies only stay in one small corner of the Comex? Can you explain why a distressed hedge fund wouldn't be dumping, say, the grains?

Again, make of that what you will. I could be wrong, but I suspect I'm right.