Globalist Financiers Fleece Greece

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Greece was brought to her knees at the hands of its corrupt political class elites with the full support of an avaricious international banking cabal. Please don’t put the blame on the little old lady pushing her Gyro cart up the steep streets of Kolonaki. She was perfectly within her rights to assume that the leadership of her country knew what the hell they were doing whilst managing her distinguished nation’s finances.

Yet today, she has taken the full brunt of the fiscal pain, while those most responsible for this massive over leveraged abomination, namely the Greek political family dynasties and their complicit int’l banksters, continue to bask in the sun off of Mykonos on their luxury yachts.

Along with the privilege of leadership comes responsibility, it’s way too easy to simply blame the little people. (more…)

The Time Warp Again

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A little over thirty years ago, I made my first trip to Palo Alto. I lived in a little town called Moraga in the East Bay, and some friends of my girlfriend (now my wife) were going to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I had never seen the movie (and if you know Rocky Horror, you know that you don’t really just sit there and watch it), and I had never been to Palo Alto. So, one night during a senior year in high school, off we went.

The place where they showed the movie was the Varsity theatre, a venerable cinema on University Avenue which had been there for decades. I had a great night, and I was practically rolling with laughter in the aisles from the movie. It was a very positive introduction to the town that would later become my home.

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Gold: Value, Re-Propositioned

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Last weekend, in a segment titled Gold Obsession & Ephemeral States of Mind NFTRH 330 talked about a growing presence that seems to follow Martin Armstrong’s anti ‘gold promoters’ theme. This theme seems to be – coming as it does in a gold bear market – something of a promotion itself; just as the over-the-top inflationist gold bug stuff was during the bull market.

Please understand, dear followers of Marty, I am not at all calling him a promoter. He is the originator of ideas, thoughts and analysis that while not all my cup of tea, is interesting enough that it is linked at NFTRH.com and Biiwii.com. But behind this mindset that is solidifying in the public consciousness, is a growing cadre of gold bugs – some of whom benefited from the notoriety lavished upon them by the likes of Mr. Gold, Jim Sinclair – that seems to be taking things over the top*, as always seems to happen with humans and in markets. Every mental elastic band seems to stretch too far.

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Forecast 2015 — Life in the Breakdown Lane

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Note from Tim: about a week ago, everyone’s favorite Sloper BDI encouraged me to read an entry on his Stealthflation blog, which I did. The article, by James Howard Kunstler, was so indecently rich, I felt like a starving man who had just been handed five superbly-crafted cheesecakes. There is so much rich goodness in it, it’s almost impossible to believe. I’m leaving this post up all day. Please read it. It is superb, and I thank BDI for getting permission from Mr. Kunstler to republish it here on Slope:

Submitted by James Howard Kunstler – KlusterFuckNation

“Don’t look back — something might be gaining on you,” Satchel Paige famously warned. For connoisseurs of civilizational collapse, 2014 was merely annoying, a continued pile-up of over-investments in complexity with mounting diminishing returns, metastasizing fragility, and no satisfying resolution. So we enter 2015 with greater tensions than ever before and therefore the likelihood that the inevitable breakdown will release more destructive energy and be that much harder to recover from.

I don’t know how anyone can trust the statistical bullshit emanating from our government reporting agencies, or the legacy news organizations that report them. Yet the meme has remained firmly fixed in the popular imagination: the US economy has recovered! GDP grows 5 percent in Q3! Manufacturing renaissance! Energy independence! Cleanest shirt in the laundry basket! Best-looking house in a bad neighborhood…!

¡No hay problema!

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A Christmas Memory

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I grew up in the deep south of the United States, and as such, I have a certain allegiance to Truman Capote. Here, in its entirety, is his short story, A Christmas Memory. Merry Christmas, Slopers.

Imagine a morning in late November. A coming of winter morning more than twenty years ago. Consider the kitchen of a spreading old house in a country town. A great black stove is its main feature; but there is also a big round table and a fireplace with two rocking chairs placed in front of it. Just today the fireplace commenced its seasonal roar. (more…)