SOTT Focus:


Wall Street

SOTT Focus: Signs Economic Commentary for 26 December 2005

Gold closed at $505.90 an ounce on Friday, up less than 0.1% from $505.50 the week before. The dollar closed at 0.8425 euros last week, up 1.2% from 0.8323 at the previous Friday's close. That put the euro at 1.1869 dollars, compared to 1.2015 the week before. Gold in euros would be 426.24 euros an ounce, up 1.3% from 420.72 euros an ounce the Friday before. Oil closed at 58.43 dollars a barrel Friday, up 0o.6% from $58.06 the week before. Oil in euros would be 49.23 euros a barrel, up 2.1% from 48.23 euros a barrel the Friday before last. The gold/oil ratio closed at 8.66 Friday, down 0.6% from 8.71 at the previous Friday's close. In U.S. stocks, the Dow closed at 10,883.27 on Friday, up less than a tenth of a percent for the week from 10,875.59. The NASDAQ closed at 2,249.42, down 0.1% from 2,252.48 the week before. The yield on the ten-year U.S. Treasury note closed at 4.38%, down six basis points from 4.44 the week before.

Friday saw the release of the U.S. new housing sales numbers for November. The numbers were surprisingly bad:

Wall Street

SOTT Focus: Signs Economic Commentary for 19 December 2005

Gold pulled back last week, closing at 505.50 dollars an ounce, down 5.2% from $532.00 last week. The dollar closed at 0.8323 euros on Friday, down 1.7% from 0.8466 euros the week before. The euro, then, was worth 1.2015 dollars at Friday's close, compared to 1.1812 the previous week. Gold in euros, then, would be 420.72 euros an ounce, down 7.1% from 450.39 the Friday before. Oil closed at 58.06 dollars a barrel, down 2.9% from $59.76 at the previous week's close. Oil in euros would be 48.23 euros a barrel, down 4.9% from 50.59 euros the week before. The gold/oil ratio closed at 8.71, down 2.2% from 8.90 the previous week. The yield on the ten-year U.S. Treasury note was 4.44%, down nine basis points from 4.53 the week before. In the U.S. stock market, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 10,875.59 on Friday, up 0.9% from10,778.58 at the previous Friday's close. The NASDAQ closed at 2,252.48, down 0.2% from 2,256.73 the week before.

Another strange week. With the price of gold falling more than 5% and oil down about 3%, both markets that are susceptible to short term manipulation, it looks like they want us to keep our heads in the sand for a few more weeks or at least until after Christmas. But the people don't seem to be falling for it completely this time, as holiday retail sales are okay but not great, due to consumer anxiety:

SOTT Logo Radio

SOTT Focus: SOTT Podcast: Surviving the Economic Crash

SOTT Podcast Logo
A reader sent in an interesting article by Dmitry Orlov that compares the former Soviet Union to modern-day America, which is currently falling into an economic abyss. This week, we analyse and discuss the implications of Orlov's article. We also address one of the biggest questions people have about the economic crash: how can I prepare in order to survive the turmoil I see ahead? To answer this question, we expand on Orlov's historical observations to provide a solution that is surprisingly simple - and probably not what most people have in mind...

Running Time: 00:32:28

Download: MP3


Light Saber

SOTT Focus: Can Smoking be GOOD for SOME People?

John Lennon smoking
© David M Spindle
Many people send or give me their "stories" of [alleged] alien interaction. Very early in the Cassiopaean contact, I attended a party given by the owner of a local Metaphysical Book Store. As I was leaving, she gave to me a little folder of about 35 pages, saying that it had been left under a chair after a recent author seminar she had sponsored and held in her store. It had no identifying marks on it as to who wrote it or to whom it belonged, but it was certainly interesting.

This little booklet purported to be a true account of an abductee/contactee whose information, curiously, paralleled the Cassiopaean account of the alien abduction scenario/reality. At one point in this account, the writer claimed that he was told that the anti-smoking campaign and dietary improvement instructions given to many abductees by the Gray aliens who are then seen as "benevolent," was, in fact, due to the influence of the Reptoid aliens; and NOT because they had human interests at heart, but because they were interested in the diet of their food source! In other words, it was exactly the same as when humans put pigs or cows on a diet of corn for a period of time just prior to slaughtering them! Aliens don't like to eat folks who ingest chemicals, junk food, or who smoke cigarettes!

Well, I read this account to our group one night and, when I got to that part, every person in the room who was a smoker reached for their cigarettes and lit up, puffing vigorously as though to demonstrate their poor quality as "food." We all began to laugh hysterically at this semi-subconscious reaction!

Comment: We wish to emphasize a couple of comments from the above article. As Jeremy Narby noted, "Indeed, by one of those curious coincidences, tobacco, curare, and snake venom all fit into exactly the same locks inside our brains." [Narby, 1998] Consider this in relation to Andrew Lobaczewski's remarks about the effect of a psychopath on a normal human:
When the human mind comes into contact with [the psychopathic] reality, so different from any experiences encountered by a person raised in a society dominated by normal people, it releases psychophysiological shock symptoms in the human brain with a higher tonus of cortex inhibition and a stifling of feelings, which then sometimes gush forth uncontrollably. Human minds work more slowly and less keenly, since the associative mechanisms have become inefficient. Especially when a person has direct contact with [a psychopath] who uses their specific experience so as to traumatize the minds of the “others” with their own personalities, his mind succumbs to a state of short-term catatonia. Their humiliating and arrogant techniques, brutal paramoralizations, deaden his thought processes and his self-defense capabilities, and their divergent experiential method anchors in his mind. …
Laura commented as follows:

Now, it seems strange that these same receptors are stimulated by both nicotine and snake venom, though in opposite modes... hmmm... are we close to a "Reptilian" reason for the enormous campaign to stamp out smoking? And, further, are we close to the chemical condition of the "paralysis" induced in alien abductions? (See Delgado.)

We would like to speculate that we are also close to a "psychopathic" reason for the campaign to stamp out smoking. But then, maybe it's one and the same? As J. Reid Meloy, Ph.D., author of The Psychopathic Mind, writes:
"The other clinical observation that supports the hypothesis of a reptilian state among certain primitive psychopathic characters is the absence of perceived emotion in their eyes. Although this information is only intuitive and anecdotal, it is my experience in forensic treatment and custody settings to hear descriptions of certain patients' or inmates' eyes as cold, staring, harsh, empty, vacant, and absent of feeling. Reactions from staff to this percetion of the psychopath's eyes have included, "I was frightened... he's very eerie; I felt as if he was staring right through me; when he looked at me the hair stood up on my neck." This last comment is particularly telling since it captures the primitive, autonomic, and fearful response to a predator.

"I have rarely heard such comments as these from the same experienced inpatient staff during highly arousing, threatening, and violent outbursts by other angry, combative patients. It is as if they sense the absence of a capacity for emotional relatedness and empathy in the psychopathic individual, despite his lack of actual physical violence at the moment. ...

"I have found little in the research literature, either theoretical or empirical, that attempts to understand this act of visual predation in the psychopathic process. ... The fixated stare of the psychopath is a prelude to instinctual gratification rather than empathic caring. The interaction is socially defined by parameters of power rather than attachment."
As long as you can be shocked and "frozen in the headlights" by them, they can control you. And it very well may be that smoking is a major defense. As the C's remarked recently:
Some people are born to serve, others are born to be served...
[6 August 05]



Grey Alien

SOTT Focus: Aliens Don't Like to Eat People That Smoke!

Image
© Unknown
From recent news reports, it has come to our attention that smoking is a vice that "leaders" around the world are determined to stamp out. But why? The official story is that our ever benevolent governments wish to prevent "we the people" from damaging our health, and that of others (if you believe the "second hand smoke" fable. Those of a more cynical disposition claim that the truth has more to do government aims of cutting back on public health expenditure for preventable diseases like lung cancer.

Yet this explanation is relevant only for those few countries where public health care is free and is also contingent on the, as yet, missing evidence that smoking really is the number one cause of cancer, rather than the many other pollutants that we all inhale every day.

Given what we know of the contempt in which The Powers That Be hold most of humanity, and the lack of convincing evidence that even moderate smoking really is a risk to public health, we are forced to look for another reason for the increasingly world-wide witch hunt on smoking and smokers.

Comment: If reading e-books from a computer screen doesn't appeal to you, you can alternatively purchase the Wave Series of books from Quantum Future Publishing or from Red Pill Press.


Calculator

SOTT Focus: Signs Economic Commentary for 12 December 2005

Gold closed at 532.00 dollars an ounce on Friday, up 4.6% from the week before. The dollar closed at 0.8466 euros for the week, down 0.8% from 0.8534 at the previous Friday's close. That put the euro at 1.1812 dollars, compared to 1.1718 the previous week. Gold in euros would be 450.39 euros an ounce, up 3.8% from 433.86 at the close of the week before. Oil closed at 59.76 dollars an ounce, up 0.7% from 59.32 the Friday before. Oil in euros would be 50.59 euros a barrel, compared to 50.62 the previous week. The gold/oil ratio was 8.90 at Friday's close, up 3.9% from 8.57 the week before. The yield on the ten-year U.S. Treasury note was 4.53%, up two basis points from 4.51 the previous week. In the U.S. stock market, the Dow closed at 10,778.58, down 0.9% from 10,877.51 the Friday before. The NASDAQ closed at 2,256.73, down 0.7% from 2,273.37 at the previous week's close.

It's happening. Much of what we've been predicting for the past year seems to be taking place. The housing bubble has popped, gold and other precious metals are shooting up in price as those with money are rushing to seek shelter.

SOTT Logo Radio

SOTT Focus: SOTT Podcast: The Psychopath Next Door

SOTT Podcast Logo
The Signs of the Times editors invite Laura Knight-Jadczyk back to continue their discussion of Pyschopathology. Two weeks ago we discussed Psychopathology in general terms. One week ago we refined our discussion and looked at evidence of the hand of the psychopath in the world of global politics and big business. This week, we get a little more personal, and discuss "the psychopath next door".

Running Time: 00:41:46

Download: MP3


Magnify

SOTT Focus: Israel's 14 yr old bomber stunt backfires

In March 2004 16 year old would-be Palestinian suicide bomber, Husam Abdu, was arrested at the Hawara Israeli check point in the occupied West Bank. At the time, the incident was presented to the world as evidence of the "evil" that the Israeli government was confronting, yet BBC reporter Orla Guerin's description of the affair as "Israel's cynical manipulation of a Palestinian youngster for propaganda purposes" was much more accurate.

Heart

SOTT Focus: Where have all the Heroes Gone?

"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate...Returning violence for violence multiples violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that." - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Calculator

SOTT Focus: Signs Economic Commentary for 5 December 2005

Gold closed at 508.40 dollars an ounce on Friday, breaking the $500 barrier and closing up 2.3 percent, after rising 2.2 percent the week before. The dollar closed at 0.8534 euros for the week, down 0.2% from 0.8547 at the previous Friday’s close. The euro, in turn, closed at 1.1718 up from 1.1700 the week before. Gold in euros, then would be 433.86 an ounce, up 2.1% from 424.87 the week before. Oil closed at 59.32 dollars a barrel, up 2.2% from 58.03 at the previous Friday’s close. Oil in euros would be 50.62 euros a barrel, up 2.1% from 49.60 the week before. The gold/oil ratio would be 8.57 at Friday’s close, unchanged from the Friday before. In the U.S. stock market, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 10,877.51 on Friday, down 0.5% from 10,931.62 at the previous Friday’s close. The NASDAQ closed at 2,273.37 up 0.5% from 2,263.01 the week before. The yield on the ten-year U.S. Treasury note was 4.51%, up seven basis points from 4.44 the week before.