This post provides links to a number of interesting articles I have read over the past few days that you may also enjoy.

• Michael Lerner and Ethan Hill (GOOD.is): The new Nostradamus, October 1, 2009. Can a fringe branch of mathematics forecast the future? A special adviser to the CIA, Fortune 500 companies, and the US Department of Defense certainly thinks so.

• Paul Lim (The New York Times): 10 years later, a much less expensive Dow 10,000, November 14, 2009. Investors may take some comfort now that the Dow Jones industrial average is back above 10,000 after slipping to around 9,700 at the end of October. But the return to 10,000 also serves as a bitter reminder that stocks have gone virtually nowhere, on balance, for more than a decade. Look a bit

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As many readers are aware, the Russian government has been on a recent censorship tear, including talk of banning off-color and proudly offensive animated TV imports such as The Simpsons, Family Guy, and South Park (oddly, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez has already done the same).  No reason to stop at TV shows.  Today we're seeing reports that the government has ordered Russian retailers to pull the video game title Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 from its shelves while a ban on the game is considered.  The game, which pits players in bloody gunfights in a slew of imaginary international conflict zones, is already being called one of the decade's most successful product launches - hitting $310 million in one day alone....

Here are the stocks added to the Zacks #1 Rank ("strong buy") List today:

American Superconductor Corp (AMSC) AstraZeneca Plc (AZN) Balchem Corp (BCPC) Banco de Chile (BCH) RG Barry Corp (DFZ) Bio-Rad Laboratories Inc (BIO) CareFusion Corp (CFN) Chico's FAS Inc (CHS) China Green Agriculture Inc (CGA) Clearwater Paper Corp (CLW) CNinsure Inc (CISG) Conexant Systems Inc (CNXT) Corinthian Colleges Inc (COCO) Fossil Inc (FOSL) Genoptix Inc (GXDX) HSN Inc (HSNI) Information Services Group Inc (III) Keynote ...

This story about a kompromat sex tape made of a U.S. diplomat in Russia is spreading like wildfire across the internets.  Kyle Hatcher, a relatively young diplomat posted to the U.S. Embassy to liaise with religious groups in Russia, was allegedly filmed in a hotel room, and then the tape cuts to someone in the act with an alleged prostitute.  The full tape has lots of added extras, like alleged tapped phone calls and very bad synthesizer saxophone music to sleaze it up.So far, everything looks far from accidental.  The video was posted up to the same web site which had previously used a kompromat sex tape to discredit and eliminate James Hudson of the ...

Right when Dmitry Medvedev probably feels like he is riding high, earning the first major concession from the United States toward Russia in more than a decade with the withdrawal of the missile plan, acting the role of a democrat president at the UN and G20, and riding an equities boom, there just had to be something to come along and undermine.  That something is named Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen leader most recently seen in the news following the long series of unsolved human rights murders.Chechnya and the North Caucasus in general has been falling apart at a rapid rate over the past number of months, so one could understand that Kadyrov may be looking for a useful distraction or excuse for an expansion of state repression.  Why not default to the time honored tradition?"We're ...

There is suddenly a lot of interest in the idea that the federal government will make holding gold illegal, an example of which is “Is the Confiscation of Gold by Certain Central Banks Likely?” by Julian D. W. Phillips of GoldForecaster.com.

He reminds us that “in 1933 the US government banned the ownership of gold by US citizens and purchased all but rare gold coins from the US public. They did this, at $20 an ounce. Two years later they revalued gold to $35 an ounce, a 75% revaluation” which instantly gave the government a lot of new, but still 100% gold-backed money to spend!

What a blatant, brazen theft! And nobody says anything! But let me take a few bucks out of the employee pension fund, petty cash drawer or the coffee jar, then it is some kind of “big deal” around here and everyone wants me to get fired! What

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I was reading Michael J. Panzner’s book When Giants Fall, a scary-yet-scholarly look at how the hell we got into this mess, and I was impressed with how the title When Giants Fall so perfectly describes America (the heretofore ravenous, gluttonous engine of global economics based on the fraud of an expanding fiat currency) falling on its fat, stupid face.

And falling on its face, dead to the world, is what America so richly deserves, as it was built upon the idiocy of ignoring the Constitution (“Money shall be only of silver and gold”!), and then committing the folly of a fiat currency (“create as much paper money as the Federal Reserve wants!”) and insane degrees of fractional reserve banking (“we can loan as much as we want without limit!”) so that socialists and commie-think morons in Congress can deficit-spend us (“free lunches for everybody!”) into ruination.

For those who take everything

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Leon Aron at the American Enterprise Institute has a new brief out on Russia following the Summit.  Here's just one section from the report on the use of anti-American propaganda by the Kremlin.

The Kremlin's valiant defense of Russia against alleged plots from the outside evolved into one of the key legitimizing tools of the regime, and deafening and primitive anti-American propaganda became the staple of the state-owned or state-controlled national media. In the words of a Russian observer, the United States is "used as a bogeyman for domestic political purposes."[16] Presiding over the May 2007 military parade to mark the sixty-second anniversary of victory in the Great Patriotic War (World War II), Putin likened the unnamed perpetrators of "new threats" to Russia to the Third Reich

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Yesterday…we ventured into “Bubble World.”  “What’s going on? When will this be over? How bad do you think it will get? What can we do to turn this around?” Members of Congress have the same questions the rest of us have. They read the same claptrap in the newspapers. They hear the same balderdash explanations from economists and federal officials. They’re wondering what is really going on.

Not that we know. But they asked us anyway.

We report to you today from the banks of the Potomac. Our old friend, Congressman Ron Paul, organized an off-the-record discussion with several other members of Congress. The subject was the financial meltdown…and the bailout. We were there to talk, of course, but we were more interested in listening.

“You don’t understand,” said a Senate functionary we met later, “these people live in Bubble World. They’re protected from the real world by their staffs and by

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Well, with the US$ down a half a cent, and decent gains in both platinum and palladium, you have to be pretty much brain dead not to have seen the footprints of the Gold Cartel in the gold and silver markets yesterday.

It all started the moment that Sydney closed on Monday afternoon…1:00 a.m. Monday in New York. From that point on, only Hong Kong [and the New York Bullion Banks] is a player. As I’ve said before, the New York banks [or their agents] can, and do, enter the markets whenever they want.

Gold sold off about five bucks with a smallish rally starting shortly after 12:00 noon in London. That lasted until the equity markets opened at 9:30 in New York…and then it was lights out…as gold got hit for $11 bucks. Once London closed for the day, the pressure was on again [both in Globex trading and electronic trading

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