For whatever reason, the French newspaper, Liberation, chose to recall a grim event last week. On February 4, 1912 Franz Reichelt, also known as the ‘flying tailor,’ put on his contraption – a homemade outfit designed to work like a parachute – went up to the first observation level of the Eiffel Tower, hesitated…then stepped over the rail and jumped.

Alas, he did not fly. Nor even float. He fell “like a stone,” the paper reported.

Immortality was achieved, but not the way he had hoped. His stunt was captured by the new motion picture technology of the time. That silent film inspired the very popular Jackass videos, which show people engaged in reckless acts of mischief and mortality.

But we do not have to go to Youtube to enjoy the Jackass genre. We have only to read the news. All over the world the authorities are strapping on their absurd parachutes…and climbing

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TODAY: Biden in Georgia expresses support for freedom and territorial integrity; Russia-NATO Council meeting pragmatic.  Body of missing Russian activist  Andrei Kulagin found, second murder in a week.  Nobel laureates plead for justice for Estemirova; Russia says no to UN probe into her death. Mikheil Saakashvili wasted no words in condemning Russia in his meeting with US Vice President Joe Biden.  Biden pledged his support by sending out an 'unequivocal, clear message to all who will listen and some who don't want to', in an apparent tacit reference to the Kremlin.  'We refuse to recognise that Abkhazia and South Ossetia are not part of Georgia', Biden told the BBC.  Resurrected discussions of the expulsion ...

And it’s one, two, three, What are we fighting for? Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn, Next stop is Vietnam; And it’s five, six, seven, Open up the pearly gates, Well there ain’t no time to wonder why, Whoopee! We’re all gonna die.

– Country Joe & the Fish, “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ To Die Rag”

Robert McNamara must have been in a hurry too. He never had time to wonder why he was sending 500,000 American boys to fight a war when Lyndon Johnson was “publicly promising in campaign speeches not to ‘go North,’ not to send American boys to fight wars Asian boys ought to fight for themselves,” as an editorial appearing in the June 17, 1971 issue of The Washington Post put it.

Both the International Herald Tribune and the Financial Times describe the former Secretary of Defense as the “architect” of the Vietnam War. This is news to

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Bernie Madoff and his Finacial Crime.

Let the punishment fit the crime!

Poor Bernie. The man has been ordered to spend 150 years in the hoosegow. What for? Who did he kill? A century-and-a-half seems a little excessive for a financial crime. You could hold up three liquor stores and rape a whole convent and still not get 150 years. With a little good lawyering, a history of child abuse in the family and good behavior in the big house, you’d be back on the street in 18 months.

But all the papers seem delighted. “Locked up for Life!” says one of today’s headlines. The judge “threw the book at him,” says another. His victims wanted him to get no mercy. The judge gave him none, imposing the maximum sentence. He is “extraordinarily evil,” said the man on the bench.

Justice has been done. Right?

Here in the building with the gold balls, we’re not

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Deflation and the price of Gold. Give yourself an extra point for spotting the trick question. It’s already tripping up plenty of would-be answers. Because gold must fall during deflation, since it rose so much during the inflation of the 1970s – right? “Gold Prices, in real inflation-adjusted terms, unsurprisingly tended to increase during inflationary times,” nods one commentator, writing in London but posted at the strong>Business Times in Singapore. “Its purchasing power tended to sag during depressions and deflation.”

The source for this claim? Besides syllogism (”The ’70s gave us inflation and a gold bull market; ergo, the opposite must be bad for gold…”) it was apparently Roy Jastram’s The Golden Constant, that dry, dusty study of gold’s enduring stability across the very, very long run by the end of which we will all be deader than disco.

First published by Wiley in 1977, The Golden Constant has

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But for the many reasons we’ve described in these reckonings, we doubt that we’ve seen the last of this bear market.

“Either cuts in spending or increases in taxes will be necessary to stabilize the fiscal situation,” said Ben Bernanke in response to a question posed by a Member of Congress. Then, he added…

“The Federal Reserve will not monetize the debt.”

That last sentence has a ring to it. It reminds us of Richard Nixon’s “I am not a crook.” Surely, it is destined to make its way into the history books, alongside Bill Clinton’s “I did not have sex with that woman” and the builder of the Titanic’s “even God himself couldn’t sink this ship.”

Monetizing the debt is precisely what the Fed will do. But it will not do so precisely. Instead, it will act clumsily… reluctantly… incompetently… accidentally… and finally, catastrophically.

That’s our prediction, here at the Daily

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Alex’s Notes: Dont be fooled by the headline,  a “gold standard” is not inclusion in a basket of goods, it is the actual STABLE MEASURE behind a piece of currency. Anything other than that is simply asking for more governmental “cooking the books”. Just look at what the basket of goods concept has done to inflation reporting.

The main idea with the “basket of currencies” is to try and find some stability in value, because if you dont have a stable measure then trade is disrupted, no one knows what something is truly worth anymore.

This goes back to something I read recently “Unjust weights and measures are an abomination unto the Lord”.

Using a basket of currencies, or a basket of goods, is a desperate, and foolish, attempt to try and link a stable measure to a fiat currency that is currently in its final stages (the US Dollar).

Why is the world

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America is in a real pickle these days – but just how did we get here? Jim Amrhein reminds us, in signature pull-no-punches style, that the man who just left the White House had an eight-year hand in this mess…

“Farewell, fair cruelty.” – Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

Like the unceremonious dumping of a codependent spouse once a new lover has come of age, America’s mainstream media seems to have stuffed the entire George W. Bush presidency into a shoebox and crammed it into the back of history’s closet…

I guess this should come as no surprise. For better or worse, a new era of American leadership dawns. And it does not serve the architects of an emergent ethos and by “architects,” I mean the mainstream media — to glorify, or even acknowledge, the achievements of past leaders…

Especially when they’re Republican.

The

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Have you ever heard this phrase?

"The dollar is just paper, it has no value."

If you were old enough to remember Richard Nixon’s election, then you remember a time when the U.S. dollar was based on something real, something significant, namely… Gold. However, in 1965, Richard Nixon made what could soon be the most disasterous decision in the history of modern civilization; separating the value of cash from a real commodity.

For 30 years, the FED, the private establishment in charge of managing United States monetary policy, did a farily reasonable job of not over saturating the currency market with green backs.

However, in the past decade, something started going drastically wrong. This single string of events is the reason your parents and / or grandparents are able to retire, and it’s the reason why current generations require both parents to work in order to survive. It could quite possibly be the reason

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Christmas may be over, but Obama is keeping the ’season of giving’ going on the Hill…the next bubble will be in public debt… Stock prices are more ‘normal’ than they were a year ago…how many chickens can get in a plane engine? What is bad for GM is bad for America…just when you think you have things figured out, the facts change…and more!

After five straight days of losses, Wall Street managed to steady itself yesterday. The Dow rose only 12 measly points; but that was a relief for most investors.

Oil held steady too - at $35. And gold lost a dollar, to drop to $807.

The big question is a question of faith. How much faith do you have in the feds? They aim to get inflation fired up. They’ve got the fire-starters. They’ve got the matches. They’ve doused on the gasoline. But so far, the whole world economy is still

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