Gold market secular update

After a gold dull market from 2011 until june 2019, with an intermediate top in august 2016, due mainly to the market manipulation and the bitcoin market appearance, currently , the gold market could be ready for the start of a huge bull market for the next two or three years, as a minimum.

The current inversion of the bond yeld curve as a precursor of a coming deep economic crisis, the negative yeld in the bond market, a series of excesses in the central bank quantitative easing since 2008,strong inflation, the presence of negative real interest rates, a number of important geopolitical crisis and an irrelevance and absence  of the EU as a political powerhouse will be the major reasons of the start of the next bull market in gold and gold stocks.

Beware the digital Stasi in your pocket

I like very much ;"THE STASI IN YOUR POCKET",in the Financial Times , 9 october 2109:
 

_The last time I stood inside the complex of drab communist-era buildings on Normannenstrasse, a riot erupted around me.That was mid-January 1990, when I was travelling through newly freed eastern Europe with the photographer Justin Leighton. We had heard that crowds were storming the Stasi headquarters in a cheerless suburb of East Berlin. By then, two months after the opening of the Wall, it was clear that the game was up. Communist dictatorships were collapsing one after another. Locals feared that East Germany’s ruling powers would try to destroy the files. As the crowd surged in we followed in their wake. The narrow corridors were strewn with documents and half-destroyed papers. The protesters were right — but the Stasi’s shredding machines had broken down.Run by Erich Mielke, a veteran communist, the Stasi was one of the most effective secret police forces in history. It recorded conversations, opinions, medical histories and, especially, any contact with foreigners, in millions of carefully numbered, classified files. It even archived the smells of dissidents. The Stasi left behind 160km of files, dossiers and tapes on about 6m people. Hannah Arendt, the writer and philosopher, coined the phrase the “banality of evil” to describe Nazi totalitarianism, but it could just as well be applied to the Stasi.Today, the Normannenstrasse complex is a fine, if thoroughly chilling, museum. So it was with relief that I stepped outside and walked towards the U-Bahn station in the bright late summer sunshine. How wonderful that the era of mass, intrusive surveillance is over, I thought as I took out my iPhone to check Google Maps.And then it hit me. That era wasn’t over at all. Rather, it had escalated to a new level of data volume, speed, efficiency and, most surprising of all, wilful mass compliance. Now I — and everyone with a smartphone — was carrying a digital Stasi in my pocket. Not only was I willingly feeding more personal data than Mielke could have dreamt of, and to who knows where, I had paid several hundred pounds for the privilege.For all its efficiency, the Stasi was an analogue organisation. The demonstrators who trashed the headquarters 30 years ago were not after computer software or even floppy disks. They wanted to preserve handwritten or typed files.My iPhone was sending hour by hour details of my location and journeys, my telephone calls, my internet browsing history, my contacts, friends, examining my files and who knows what else. The services provided by the apps were convenient and free. But as the saying goes, “If you are not paying for the product, then you are the product”.We have been commoditised, and happily. Hands up who has ever actually read a privacy policy on a telephone app? I thought so. You may feel comfortable enabling location services, for example, but that app may be bundling and selling that information on. Do you really want a data services company to know that you visited a certain kind of legal or medical specialist? Or that while you profess to be a vegan you sometimes sneak a McDonald’s? Probably not.So what can we do to avoid the Stasi in our pocket? Consider switching to a non-smart phone. Before you install a new app, read what permissions it is requesting. Does that fabulous new game with amazing graphics really need to access your private messages? Or is it really a front to hoover up your data and sell it without you realising? Ditch Google Maps, or at least minimise your use, especially on foot. Learn how to use the privacy settings on your phone to control which existing apps can use location services. The instructions are easy to find on the internet. But don’t use Google or Chrome, Google’s own browser, to find out how to avoid Google and Chrome. Instead, purchase a VPN service to encrypt your activity and cover your digital tracks. Use a free privacy browser app like DuckDuckGo that doesn’t track you.We cannot storm into Silicon Valley, Normannenstrasse-style, to demand our data back. But we can take some simple steps to take control of the Stasi in our pocket.

The writer, Adam Lebor, is the author of ‘Kossuth Square’, a crime thriller._

The article above is taken from an english newspaper; in Italy the situation linked with privacy violations is even worse, with , for example, recorded conversations and data collected by public officials without the permission of the italian magistrature.

THE SEMMELWEIS REFLEX

I like very very much by HUGO SALINAS PRICE , published on 27 september 2019:

"As an illustration of the enormous harm that is done to humanity by conceited men and women who think they own the Truth, I present to you the case of Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis.

In 1847, Dr. Semmelweis worked in the Vienna Hospital for women about to give birth. The Hospital's death rate for women in childbirth, caused by puerperal fever, was horrendous - so terrible that many women opted for giving birth at home, with a midwife, rather than facing the prospect of death at the Clinic where Dr. Semmelweis practiced.

I'll shorten the story for you - you can read more at wikepedia.org.

The death rate for women in childbirth, at the Vienna Hospital, in April, 1847, was: 18.3%!

But something happened that changed Dr. Semmelweis's career: During an autopsy being performed upon the corpse of a recently deceased woman, the student doing the examination happened to turn to an accompanying doctor, and inadvertently poked him with his scalpel. A few days later, that doctor was dead, and all the symptoms pointed to puerperal fever, which was killing so many women.

Dr. Semmelweis surmised that some "cadaveric substance" had been transmitted to the deceased doctor, by the scalpel that broke his skin, and forthwith, he instituted the practice of washing the hands with a solution of chlorinated lime. (At this time, there was no knowledge at all, of the transmission of disease by germs.)

The result was, that the next month, in May 1847, the death rate never rose above 5%, and in following months was as low as 1%. Again, in 1848, the death rate never rose above 5%, and there were two months when there were no deaths at all.

Dr. Semmelweis organized a conference, to which he invited all the prestigious doctors of Vienna; his message to them was "Wash your hands!" His recommendation was taken as an insult, by the prestigious doctors!

Dr. Semmelweis's success saved the lives of countless women over the years, yet his recommendation of scrupulous cleanliness was studiously ignored by all doctors and in fact, all Academia; the record of his success in saving the lives of so many women, was disregarded. The priggish self-importance of those with accredited credentials caused their refusal to consider facts.

It is not hard to imagine the hatred that Dr. Semmelweis faced, for daring to suggest that cleanliness was of the highest importance, when dealing with women in labor. Because today, those on the side of the "status quo" in other fields, regularly refuse to deal with facts that disturb their preconceived ideas.

So great was the hatred, that he left Vienna and returned to his place of birth, Budapest, Hungary in 1850, to work in the same field, obstetrics. During the period 1851-1855, only eight women under his care died from childbed fever, out of 933 births (0.85%).

Eventually, as a result of the hatred he faced, and of the willful disregard of his successful experience in dealing with women giving birth, Semmelweis suffered a nervous breakdown, and his behavior became anti-social. On July 30, 1865, at the age of 47, he was lured to a visit to a Vienna insane asylum. Once there, he was detained. On the 15th of August - fifteen days later - he died of an infection from a wound on his hand. It is suspected that the wound was caused by a struggle on his part, to free himself from captivity in the insane asylum.

Wikepedia.org says: "The rejection of Semmelweis's empirical observations is often traced to belief perseverance, the psychological tendency of clinging to discredited beliefs. Also, some historians of science argue that resistance to path-breaking contributions of obscure scientists is common, and "constitutes the single most formidable block to scientific advances."

And further: "The so-called Semmelweis reflex - a metaphor for a certain type of human behavior characterized by reflex-like rejection of new knowledge because it contradicts entrenched norms, beliefs, or paradigms - is named after Semmelweis, whose ideas were ridiculed and rejected by his contemporaries".

*****

Our world is very sick. If a cure is not applied, it will most likely fall into a state of chaos, during which an appeal to world war will be made, in order to channel political discontent into destructive activity; the cause of the breakdown of peace, and knowledge of the alternative that might have restored some order in the world, will be forgotten. A new Dark Age will have arrived.

The cause of puerperal fever in Vienna, in 1847, was sepsis, i.e. infection due to unclean hands of the doctors.

The cause of the imminent breakdown of the economies of the world in 2019, is fiat money - false, fake money, accepted by virtually all accredited economists.

The Presidents of this world, and their Central Bankers, Ministers and Secretaries of This, That and the Other, all with Cum Laude Degrees in Economics, will not, under any circumstances, by any means, listen to the plea: "Give us real money to work with - gold, or silver, or both - but give us real money, not your garbage fake money!". They will not listen, any more than the big, fat PhD Viennese medical doctors were willing to wash their hands, and stop killing their patients, in 1847."