XIAM007

Making Unique Observations in a Very Cluttered World

Sunday 23 September 2012

At least ten more fake 10-ounce "gold bars" filled with Tungsten has been discovered -

At least ten more fake 10-ounce "gold bars" filled with Tungsten has been discovered - 



A few days ago, our report on the discovery of a single 10 oz Tungsten-filled gold bar in Manhattan's jewelry district promptly went viral, as it meant that a tungsten-based, gold-counterfeiting operation, previously isolated solely to the UK and Europe, had crossed the Atlantic. The good news was that the counterfeiting case was isolated to just one 10 oz bar. This morning, the NYPost reports that as had been expected, in the aftermath of the realization that the sanctity of the gold inventory on 47th Street just off Fifth Avenue has been polluted, and dealers promptly check the purity of their gold, at least ten more fake 10-ounce "gold bars" filled with Tungsten has been discovered.

The Post has learned as many as 10 fake gold bars — made up mostly of relatively worthless tungsten — were sold recently to unsuspecting dealers in Manhattan’s Midtown Diamond District.

The 10-oz. gold bars are hugely popular with Main Street investors, and it is not known how many of the fake gold bars were sold to dealers — or if any fake bars were purchased by the public.
As is to be expected, the Post story is weak on details: after all, any dealer who admits to having allowed Tungsten to enter his or her inventory can kiss their retail business goodbye, as customers will avoid said Tungsten outlet like the plague, for the simple reason that suddenly counterparty risk has migrated from Wall Street to the Diamond District. The one named dealer is the same one who already made an appearance in the previous story on Tungsten in gold's clothing.

One gold dealer discovered that four of the 3-inch-by-1-inch gold bars he bought — worth about $72,000 retail — were counterfeit.

“It has the entire street on edge,” said Ibrahim Fadl, 62, who has been the owner of Express Metal Refining, a Midtown gold-refinery business, for the last 11 years. “I and the others on the street work off of trust; now that trust is strained.”

Fadl, a Columbia University graduate with a master’s degree in chemical engineering, and who has more than 40 years in the industry, purchased the four fake bars from a well-known Russian salesman with whom he has done business.
Ah yes, those pesky Russians: always happy to do the Fed's bidding, because who really gains from the loss of confidence in physical gold?

Fadl became suspicious when he offered the salesman a deep discount for the investment-grade gold bars and he quickly accepted it, a source tells The Post.

Fadl said he did his due diligence “by X-raying the bars to ascertain the purity of the gold and weighing the bars, and the Swiss markings were perfect.”

Tungsten is an industrial metal that weighs nearly the same as gold but costs a little over $1 an ounce. Gold closed Friday at $1,774.80 an ounce.
We wish Fadl all the best in his liquidation sale. Others, for logical reasons, are far less willing to step forward:

A second 47th Street refiner, who wished to remain anonymous, said he was burned recently when he bought six gold bars that turned out to be mostly tungsten, with just a gold veneer. He would not comment, though, on who sold him the bogus bars.
The counterfeiting so far appears to have impacted solely PAMP (Produits Artistiques Métaux Précieux ) gold bars, madeby MTB, whose CEO can hardly be too happy that some "Russian" has made it a life mission to destroy the credibility of any gold stamped with the PAMP stamp.

Raymond Nassim, CEO of Manfra, Tordell & Brookes, the American arm of the Swiss firm that created the original gold bars — with their serial number and purity rating stamped clearly into them — said he reported the situation to the US Secret Service, whose jurisdiction covers the counterfeiting of gold bars.

He said his company “is supporting and cooperating with authorities any way we can.”

Nassim thought the culprit must be a professionally trained jeweler to have pulled off the caper.

“The forger had to slice the original bar along the side, hollow out the gold and insert the tungsten ingot, and then reseal and polish the bar, Nassim said.
The case of gold counterfeiting has already taken NYC by storm:

At an industry dinner Thursday night hosted by Comex, the New York-based metals exchange, the room was abuzz with talk about the bogus gold bars, according to Fadl.
Which was also to be expected. What is also to be expected is that as more and more stories of Tungsten making it into broader gold circulation, that retail sales of physical gold will certainly be impaired as end consumers become far more cautious about what they buy.

And while we await more information, especially from the Secret Service, who is "on top" of this case, which we assume implies that gold is after all money, we leave readers with our conclusion from Tuesday: "with false flags rampant these days, we would not be surprised if this is merely yet another attempt to discredit gold, this time physical, as an undilutable medium of warehousing wealth. So buyer beware: in a time when everyone is broke, triple check before exchanging one store of wealth for another."

For those curious what a fake 10oz bar looks like, here it is again:










Read more -
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-09-23/gold-counterfeiting-goes-viral-10-tungsten-filled-gold-bars-are-discovered-manhattan

More Americans now commit suicide than die in car crashes as miserable economy takes its toll -

More Americans now commit suicide than die in car crashes as miserable economy takes its toll - 



Suicide is a bigger killer than car crashes, according to an alarming new study.
The number of people dying from suicide has drastically increased, while car accident deaths haven lessened, making suicide the leading cause of injury death.
Suicides via falls or poisoning have risen significantly and experts fear there could be en more going unrecognised, specifically in cases of overdose.

'Suicides are terribly under-counted,' said Ian Rockett, author of the study, published on Thursday in the American Journal of Public Health.
'I think the problem is much worse than official data would lead us to believe. We have a situation that has gotten out of hand.'

He added that his goal is to see the same attention paid to other injuries as has been paid to traffic injuries.
The results were compiled using National Centre for Health Statistics data gathered from 2000 to 2009. 
Researchers noted a 25 per cent decrease in car accident deaths, medicalxpress.com reported, while deaths from falls rose 71 per cent, from poisoning 128 per cent and from suicide 15 per cent.

Former U.S. Senator Gordon Smith spoke at a news conference to launch the suicide prevention programme
Higher automobile standards were credited for the traffic deaths drop, with harsher penalties for underage drinking and failing to wear seat belts named as contributing factors.
Previous research has suggested that suicide rates go up during recessions and times of economic crisis.
'Economic problems can impact how people feel about themselves and their futures as well as their relationships with family and friends,' Feijun Luo of CDC’s Division of Violence Prevention told Bloomberg.
'Prevention strategies can focus on individuals, families, neighborhoods or entire communities to reduce risk factors.'
The shift makes suicide the most frequent cause of injury deaths, followed by car crashes, poisoning, falls and murder.
The study also looked at gender and race, concluding that fewer women die from the top four causes than men, while Hispanics have fewer car crashes and suicides than whites but a higher murder rate.
In 2009, more than 37,000 Americans took their own lives, a number that the government and private groups such as Facebook are fighting to lower.
A suicide prevention programme is being launched under the Garrett Lee Smith Memorial Act, backed by $56 million of federal money. 
The Act was signed by George Bush in 2004, in memory of suicide-victim Garrett, son of former U.S. Senator Gordon Smith.
Speaking at a September 10 news conference Smith said: 'Our goal is, in the next five years, we will save 20,000 human lives.
'This issue touches nearly every family. It is something we can do something about. It's the work of angels.'
Lanny Berman, executive director of the American Association of Suicidology, said while much is known about how to prevent suicides there are 'centuries of stigmatic attitudes' that need to be overcome. 
'Both global and national increases in the number and rate of suicides should concern all of us,' he added, pushing for a 'collaborative effort to turn these many lives from despair and hopelessness to ones of meaning and brighter futures'.

Read more -
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2207089/56-million-suicide-prevention-programme-launched-study-reveals-Americans-lives-die-car-crashes.html


Facebook: Snitchgate! - Facebook Tries To Make People Snitch On Their Friends -

Facebook: Snitchgate! - Facebook Tries To Make People Snitch On Their Friends - 


A story about Facebook went around twitter last night that provoked quite a reaction in privacy advocates like me: Facebook, it seems, is experimenting with getting people to ‘snitch’ on any of their friends who don’t use their real names. Take a look at this:

Facebook Tries To Make People Snitch On Their Friends


Facebook has had a ‘real names’ policy for a while: this is what their ‘Help Center’ says on the subject:


People in my field have known about this for a long time – it’s been the cause of a few ‘high profile’ events such as when Salman Rushdie had his account suspended because they didn’t believe that he was who he said he was – but few people had taken it very seriously for anyone other than the famous. Everyone knows ‘fake’ names and ‘fake’ accounts – my sister’s dog has a Facebook account – so few believed that Facebook was going to bother enforcing it, except for obvious trolls and so forth. Now, however, that appears to be changing.

Initially, I wondered if this was just a fake – the screenshot could easily have been faked – but there seems now to have been confirmation. It has been covered in the TMP Idea Lab (here), where they say that Facebook has confirmed that they are doing it, and the German online magazine Heise Online (here, in German) where they report that it is a ‘limited test’. Given that this kind of a test fits in with the official strategy, it seems likely that it is indeed true.

So what’s wrong?

There are lots of argument against the whole ‘real names’ policy to start with – it was a trigger for the ‘nymwars’. Many people can only really function online with the ability to remain pseudonymous, from bloggers like Nightjack to whistleblowers, from victims of abuse to people living in oppressive regimes. When their pseudonymity is ‘broken’, the result can be catastrophic – when Nightjack’s cover was blown, his blog ceased to exist and a valuable and entertaining source of information was lost. Mexican bloggers have suffered much worse – a number have lost their lives in the most gruesome way when the drugs cartels have been able to find them. The link between the ‘online’ and the ‘offline’ personality is one that can often need to be protected. When the ‘real names’ policy is enforced, protecting that link becomes much, much harder.

This, of course, is Facebook, which is just one service, rather than the net as a whole – but it’s a crucial service, with close to a billion users around the world, pretty close to ubiquitous. And, just as importantly, where Facebook leads, other services can and do follow. If the ‘real names’ policy becomes accepted on Facebook, it may become the norm. For some people, that sounds like a good thing – catching paedophiles and terrorists, making sure children don’t get access to ‘inappropriate material’ and so forth – but the reality is very different. The real ‘bad guys’ will find a way around the system – as so often, it will almost certainly be the innocent that get caught up in the messes.

Snitching

What’s worse, the whole idea of snitching is highly dodgy. There’s a good reason that ‘telling tales’ is looked down on – and a good reason why it’s generally only been oppressive regimes (both real and fictional) that have encouraged people to report on their neighbours – from the worst of the Roman Emperors such as Tiberius and Caligula to the KGB, the Stasi and so forth. It’s creepy – and it helps build at atmosphere of distrust, breaking down the very things that make social networks good. The social relationships that are the heart of Facebook are meant to do ‘good’ things – not be a route by which bad things are spread.

Taking it a step further, look at the nature of the questionnaire. You’re being asked to report on a ‘friend’. If you say ‘I don’t want to answer’ that will be recorded – that’s the whole nature of Facebook – and it’s not hard to see that there could be a list of ‘people who don’t want to answer about their friends’. Indeed, under the terms of the Snoopers Charter, it wouldn’t just be Facebook who could access this kind of information: the authorities could potentially set up a filter to gather data on people who don’t confirm the names of their friends. It could be viewed as suspicious if you don’t answer – or even suspicious if you are friends with people who don’t answer. Again, this is the nature of Facebook’s social data – and how it could be misused.

And, as anyone who reads what I write about the Snoopers Charter etc will understand, though this may just be set up to catch paedophiles and terrorists, it can equally be used for all kinds of things. Potential employers who want to see whether their applicants are ‘open and honest’. Insurance companies for the same ‘reason’. Facebook is now in a situation where it needs to generate income – the failure of its IPO has made this even more crucial than before – and will be looking for ways to squeeze out as much revenue from their data as possible.

That, ultimately, is what lies behind this kind of thing: Facebook wants to make money. If it knows exactly who you are, it thinks it can make more money from you – by selling things to you, or by selling your details to others, or by targeting you more accurately in some other way. That’s perfectly understandable – indeed, from a business sense pretty much inevitable – but it does have consequences, particularly when the other uses that their data can be put are understood.

Oppressive regimes understand some of those uses – which is one of the reasons that the erstwhile Tunisian government, prior to the revolution, hacked into the Facebook login page in order to be able to access possible revolutionaries’ accounts. They knew how that information could be used…

What should be done?

Well, the first thing to do is make it clear that you don’t like this kind of a system. The whole idea of snitching should not be something that’s encouraged – indeed, the whole ‘real names’ system should be discouraged, but it seems hard to put that genie back into Facebook’s bottle. Ultimately, I suspect there’s only one answer: many people should simply leave Facebook. Find other ways to do the things you want to do, other ways that don’t require ‘real names’ and don’t use such sneaky and creepy tactics as snitching. Communicate by email, by twitter. Share your photos on other photo sites. Play games directly, not over Facebook. There’s always another way.

Read more -
http://paulbernal.wordpress.com/2012/09/21/facebook-snitchgate/

Potty Mouth TV chef Paula Deen Lets Loose In Secret Blooper Reel - “You ever smelled a stinky coochie?” -

Potty Mouth TV chef Paula Deen Lets Loose In Secret Blooper Reel - “You ever smelled a stinky coochie?” - 



That’s the question TV chef Paula Deen asked on the set of her show Paula Deen’s Home Cooking in a secret blooper reel that has surfaced.

In the tape obtained by The New York Post, the Southern cook turns her nose up at a dish she’s cooking, proclaiming it smells like “stinky coochie.”

Deen’s naughty quote is just one in a series of X-rated comments she makes on the tape.

And while she can be heard screeching the words “sh**” and “motherf***er,” she is also seen simulating oral sex with a chocolate éclair!

The two-minute tape was all too much for one man – Gary Ravet, the president of Celebrity Chefs Tour, which puts on a series of live events featuring TV cooks.

Potty-mouthed Deen had contracted to go out on the tour and put together the blooper reel to be played for the live audiences as an introduction before each of her appearances.

But Ravet rejected it saying: “We found it to be unacceptable because it’s certainly not family content.”

Deen ultimately backed out of the 10-city tour and then sued the company for $1.25 million claiming a check they gave her bounced.

Ravet countersued for $40 million citing breach of contract. He argued the chef was required to provide a “blooper reel” but they were disappointed her film was “laced with expletives.”

The lawsuit was settled last week and a judge ordered the cheeky tape be returned to Deen. The terms are confidential but Ravet tells The Post the TV chef “paid a lot of money.”



Read more -
http://www.radaronline.com/exclusives/2012/09/paula-deen-swears-uses-obscene-gestures-camera-video