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2009-11-16T09:24:00.001-05:00

A flash update has just been sent with a brand new buy recommendation. Check your mailboxes.

Mike Kozak of Cormark, numerical dumbass

2009-11-16T07:30:00.003-05:00

One of the main qualifications of an equities analyst is being able know your ass from your elbow when it comes to numbers and stuff. Unfortunately Mike Kozak, analyst at Cormark, fails on this score in a rather epic manner.

Last Friday, Kozak published an analysis on Dynasty Metals (DMM.to) that was so full of elementary mistakes it was laughable. Here's a little chart that has just a few of them (not kidding, just a few of them):

Dynasty Metals & crap analyses, Cormark Edition
Mike Kozak vs Bleedin' Reality, November 13th 2009
	Kozak	Reality	Cormark result
52wk high	$11.18	$6.20	EpicFail
52wk low	$3.53	$1.09	EpicFail
Shares out	36.4m	37.64m	EpicFail
cash at bank	$18.8m	$10.75m*	EpicFail
mkt cap	$205.4m	$212.7m	EpicFail
source: Cormark report and bleedin' reality, mate

* approx, but way way closer than Kozak, I promise

Add to this things like assuming Ecuador's corp tax rate is 30% (it's 25%), overestimating insider holdings at DMM by what looks like a million shares, getting the gold resource number wrong by nearly half a million ounces....there's a whole bunch of other stuff. Maybe funniest of the lot was that, after getting so many asset parameters way way bad he decided to value DMM.to using a Net Asset Value calculation!

It's super-early to give out this week's coveted award, but surely nobody can beat this one. Therefore, Mike Kozak of Cormark, you win this week's coveted award. Your report on Dynasty Metals was the worst piece of rushed and sloppy analysis we've seen this year. Enjoy, dumbass:

Chart of the day is....

2009-11-16T07:19:00.003-05:00

...the Gold/Silver Ratio, year to date.

Metal fear is beating metal greed. The GSR isn't going to 50X folks, that's just a wet dream from those who prefer staring at shiny things more than learning about how the world works. Gold is better than silver. End of story.

Bolivia really is the miracle economy of South America

2009-11-15T21:27:00.005-05:00

This chart just blows me away. Feel free to take all your prejudices about left wing governments not being able to run an economy correctly and throw them out the window.

It needs some explanation for the 99% of human beings that are normal and are not into this wonky stuff, however. What we have here is the combination of two numbers.

The first number is Bolivia's M2, which is a term used by the bankypeople that basically means "the money in circulation inside a country".

The second number is the amount of international currency reserves held by Bolivia's Central Bank.

So what we can do with those two numbers is divide M2 by reserves. This is the result you see on that line above, and what it shows you ishow many Bolivian Pesos are in circulation compared to the number of dollars tucked away as savings.

Frankly, it's remarkable. When Evo took office, there were 15 Bolivianos for every dollar saved by the country. Now there are six for every dollar. What this means is that the Bolivian currency has become far stronger under the current government than it was before. This has many beneficial effects, not least of which is that inflation will be far easier to control in the country going forward.

Compared that to The USA, where the printing presses are rolling like never before and everyone fears the stoking of inflation down the line; Bolivia's monetary policy beats the Fed's hands down. I'm not exaggerating when I say that the above chart is a great visualization of the newly found financial security of Bolivia, a policy that will serve the country well into the future.

Ben Bernanke, consider yourself well and truly pwned by an ex-coca leaf grower.

You know it's true

2009-11-15T17:28:00.000-05:00

From here

Peru: Ufologists Claim Planet is “Monitored” by Extraterrestrials

LIMA – 8 Nov (Notimex) – International experts in the unidentified flying object phenomenon (UFO) stated that the Earth is “monitored” by extraterrestrials and maintained that this would be a source of “concern” for the world’s most developed nations.

Specialists participating this weekend at the 4th World Congress of Ufology, held in the Peruvian capital, stated that the Peruvian coastal region of Chilca, as well as extensive areas of Argentina, are under “constant monitoring” by aliens.

CONTINUES HERE

The IKN Weekly, out now

2009-11-15T14:01:00.004-05:00

IKN29 has just been sent to subscribers. Last week one subber found his Weekly had been shuffled off to his spambox for some unknown reason, so watch out for that one folks.

This week's Weekly has rundowns on company quarterly results, looks at the troubles New Gold (NGD) is having in Mexico, notes some interesting political developments in the LatAm region as regards mining and lots more besides.

Oh Noes! No War!

2009-11-15T11:51:00.002-05:00

From V-Anal

In response to Colombia’s complaint to the United Nations about Venezuela’s “threats of war” earlier this week, Venezuela reiterated its intention to promote peaceful international relations while defending its sovereignty against a potential attack from Colombia, which recently signed a military pact with the United States yada yada continues here

This is what I mean, Bennett

2009-11-15T07:41:00.003-05:00

People like this guy were right and I was way wrong.

Via Sketch, here are the words of Wilton Vought written in August 2008:

"Anyone who succeeds in becoming the presumptive Presidential nominee of either corporate party does so only with the blessing of the corporate interests who run those parties.

..........

"Expecting a front man for such interests to be a catalyst for substantive progressive change is akin to believing in Santa Claus. Fine for the kids, but it's time to grow up."

I believed in Santa Claus until Honduras. More fool me.

Your friendly LatAm tool announces....

2009-11-14T18:11:00.003-05:00

...that The Mex Files has a good post regarding the advantages (and some of the challenges) of locating your business in Mexico. Good stuff. Here's the link, go have a read.

ECU silver (ECU.to) third quarter results

2009-11-14T11:06:00.009-05:00

Yes indeedy that fun time has come around again, as ECU Silver (ECU.to) quietly publishes its 3q09 results. Once you look at them you understand why management never announces it has published results like any normal, respectful entity; it doesn't want to attract attention to this ongoing trainwreck of a financial situation. But never fear, IKN is here! Here are the charts that tell the story.

Let's start with the fact that, despite all the fanfare about higher production and doré bars and grades and stuff, it still managed to make a loss in the quarter

Assets are still held up by its ridiculously inflated fixed asset position that cannot be justified by any normal sentinent being. The company has little in the way of current assets.

In the quarter, ECU.to decided to sweep its debt problems under the carpet by booting a large portion of what it owes into the deeper future. The debt is still there folks, the only difference now is that it will be paying more interest on what it owes for a longer period of time.

But the funny thing is, even though silver shot up in price and even though ECU.to booted a large chunk of its debt load into the longer term future, the company is still running a negative working cap!

Meanwhile, its self-entitled management team decided that they were still worthy of stock options. That's now over $6m in stock based compensation in the space of two years.

And of course, who pays for all this incompetence? Yeah you guessed it.....more share dilution registered in the quarter.
ECU.to now has a deficit of over $100m. Assets-debt = $56m, it can't make a quarterly profit to save its life, it's heavy in debt, has negative working cap but somehow it has inflated itself to a current market cap of $254m.

Disclosure: now you know why I'm short ECU.to as of this week. DYODD.

The Friday OT: Rage Against the Machine; Bulls On Parade

2009-11-13T14:47:00.003-05:00

The track that sums up the state of The Americas, late 2009. The USA's attitude towards Honduras is a blast out of the 1970's. Barack Obama, you make me want to puke.

Play it loud.

reasons to love the interwebnetpipes

2009-11-13T14:45:00.000-05:00

H/T to Salmon for finding this wonderful visual learning tool. Called 'Cell Size and Scale' and put together by The University of Utah, it shows you the relative size of small things, starting with a coffee bean and finishing with a carbon atom (with many stops along the way) in the most elegant way I've ever seen.....just slide that bar underneath the picture and see for yourself. Gotta check this one out, so do it here.

Trading Post (tip your hand edition)

2009-11-13T14:39:00.003-05:00

All the following stocks will get a greater or lesser mention in IKN29, out Sunday.

B2Gold (BTO.to) down 1.1% at $0.88

Dia Bras (DIB.v) UNCH at 22c

Fortuna Silver (FVI.v) up 2.4% at $1.74

TVI Pacific (TVI.to) up 28.6% at 9c

New Gold (NGD) up 6.9% at $4.07

Dynasty (DMM.to) up 0.9% at $5.70

Amerix (APM.v) UNCH at 7.5c

Plenty more stocktalk on other companies, too.

IBM (IBM): Big Blue, Big Bribe

2009-11-13T11:11:00.007-05:00

It's taken 15 years, but finally executives of IBM have admitted to paying bribes to the government of Argentina in exchange for an oversized contract to supply its machines in the country.

The scandal started back in 1994, when Argentine journalist Santiago Pinetta reported that IBM had paid U$37m to government officials in bribes. In return, IBM was given the contract to supply 525 offices of state bank "Banco de la Nacion" under a contract that came to U$249m and is understood to have inflated prices by around 100% on the whole deal.

The legal inquiries have trundled on for what seems like forever since that time, but hot off the presses today the seven IBM executives under accusation copped a plea bargain, admitted guilt and will pay hefty fines in lieu of going to jail.

Another episode of The USA knows best in LatAm comes to an end.

UPDATE: A mail received from reader 'MP' follows. He's right bar one thing; should have written "South America" instead of "Argentina".

So that's how it works in Argentina. You bribe the officials to get the contract, and when you get caught, you bribe the officials so as not to go to jail!

Nice to know...

Yanacocha: A nice catch by Reuters

2009-11-13T09:30:00.005-05:00

Reuters is on the ball regarding Yanacocha and yesterday immediately noted a discrepancy between production estimates at South America's biggest gold mine for 2010. In the left corner we have Newmont (NEM) with upbeat estimates and in the right corner its JV partner at the mine, Buenaventura (BVN), with a negative outlook for production next year. Here's the excerpt from the note:

"This year, we're going to have something similar to 2008 production ... and for the next few years, we're going to maintain levels of around 1.8, 1.9 million ounces," Carlos Santa Cruz, Newmont's vice president of South American operations, told reporters.

His statement conflicts with one made last month by Roque Benavides, Buenaventura's chief executive, who said he expected to see production at Yanacocha falling roughly 25 percent to 1.5 million ounces in 2010, as lower ore grades are explored."

But hey...what's four hundred and forty two million dollars of gold between friends anyway, right?

Dead Animals

2009-11-13T09:05:00.003-05:00

Last week we ran this story on the sealions found dead on the Colán beach in northern Peru. This morning El Comercio reports the press conference held by Minister of Production (oh the irony) Mercedes Araoz who confirmed the obvious; the 263 dead animals had been poisoned. The method was to feed them fish laced with rat poison and the culprits were undoubtedly small fishermen that work out of the local harbour.

Sit this story alongside the recent one about the Mining Minister who refuses to control the sale of mercury inside Peru while condemning the artisanal mining in Madre de Dios that is wreaking environmental havoc. Spot any pattern yet?

TheNewCrystallex (EC.v) doing its thing

2009-11-13T08:52:00.004-05:00

You gotta hand it to these Ecometals (EC.v) guys, they do know how to press all the right greed buttons amongst the sheep:

But it's still untouchable by anyone with the slightest knowledge about its company history and current standing in both Ecuador and Brazil.

But hey.......capitalism never fails....

News roundup (Otto quotes people that actually know what the hell they're talking about instead of spouting garbage himself...then spouts garbage)

2009-11-13T08:13:00.006-05:00

From Tim's El Salvador Blog:

The tragedy of this week's floods and landslides is not just a natural disaster. It's a man-made disaster as poverty and marginalization lead people to build homes in at-risk areas and the government has failed for years to invest in risk mitigation projects. CONTINUES HERE

Otto sez: I think Tim deserves awards for what he does. My vote for the best English language LatAm blog. He doesn't get mixed up in partisanship, he doesn't scream and shout, he just produces articvle after article that captures his subject and educates his readers. If your interest is LatAm and you don't have Tim's El Salvador Blog on your radar, you're missing out.

From The Mex Files:

While Lou Dobbs’ use of neo-nazi source material in one broadcast was shocking, it was no more a manifestation of American Exceptionalism than was John Arivosis´contention in “Americablog” that the Honduran coup was justified to prevent “another Chavez”. As opposed, to say, another Pinochet? Or, rather, another Alvaro Uribe? CONTINUES HERE

Otto sez: Mex Files nails this subject once and for all.

From Bloomie:

Nov. 13 (Bloomberg) -- Venezuelans’ BlackBerrys buzz with urgent news on Twitter: an accident in La Trinidad industrial zone, a tie-up at the old toll booth on the mountain, a mudslide onto the Prados del Este highway.
Tweets flag potholes, warn of flooded roads and divulge police checkpoints on weekend nights. Politics laps into the Twitter alerts that Caracas drivers use to navigate traffic- choked streets, as posters rage at the government and stalled infrastructure projects.
Caracas motorists, burning the world’s cheapest gasoline and driving twice as many cars as roads can handle, may be global leaders in using Twitter Inc.’s social networking Web site to outflank traffic. CONTINUES HERE

Otto sez: Shome mishtake shurely ossifer!! Don't they get immediately arrested by the local Stazi for saying bad things about Glorious Leaders??? And how can a communist country have blackberries and interwebnetpipes?? Aren't they too busy queuing for black bread and rushing around on rumours of a supply of fresh apples?

From Commodity Online

When it comes to global manufacturing, Mexico is quickly emerging as the “new” China. According to corporate consultant AlixPartners, Mexico has leapfrogged China to be ranked as the cheapest country in the world for companies looking to manufacture products for the U.S. market. India is now No. 2, followed by China and then Brazil. In fact, Mexico’s cost advantages and has become so cheap that even Chinese companies are moving there to capitalize on the trade advantages that come from geographic proximity. CONTINUES HERE

Otto sez: This is what happens when you sign free trade agreements, Twobreakfasts.

Chart of the day is...

2009-11-13T08:11:00.002-05:00

...crude oil, December futures contract, daily candle.

That looks like a rollover to my uneducated charty eye. Care to tell me where I'm going wrong?

Trading Post (wake me up when it's all over edition)

2009-11-12T12:55:00.003-05:00

Nadagold (NG) down 4.8% at U$5.11. You have to feel sorry for the US investor in junior exploration golds, deprived ofthe chance to move on the hundreds of possibles and forced into considering crud like this simply because they have access to the US market.

Fortuna Silver (FVI.v) up 4.7% at $1.78 and bucking the trand of its peers today (though volumes not stunning). FVI.v is supposed to report today. The CC is definitely Monday 11am EST, though. DYODD.

Colossus Mineral (CSI.to) down 0.7% at $5.40. It's been funny to watch the market scratch its head over today news, trying to work out whether it's good or bad (handy hint: not good). Ask the house analysts about geology, rocks, grades, metallurgy or any of that malarkey and you'll get all these bullish sounds from them, but as soon as political risk rears its ugly head the silence is roaring. I wonder why........

B2Gold (BTO.to) down 4.4% at $0.88. BTO tried and failed to bust out over its resistance yesterday. No matter charties, it'll happen. According to sources the Limon strike is now over and they're all back working happily, but we're looking for news on Orosi at the end of this month to make the real difference.

Oro Silver (OSR.v) down 5% at $0.19 and I'm down on the small roll-da-bones position taken at 23c. So be it. I thought about selling and taking the loss today but volume dried to nothing, so better to wait and see. Hardly likely to turn out as my best ever trade, whatever happens.

more thoughts on remembering

2009-11-12T12:26:00.004-05:00

I received generous feedback from people over yesterday's rememberance day post. It's truly an honour to have contacted so many fine people via this blog during its time as a humble corner of cyberspace. I'd like to share with you one mail in particular from reader 'RB', received yesterday. I've been given permission to reprint here by the author, so here goes with no further comment from me.

Here's my regiment where I served for two years (reserve)

My father was a Major in the Highlanders, formerly a Lt. with the British Navy on HMS Constance, served in Korea. My mother was WRNS, which is how she met my dad. Grandfathers on both sides served in WWI & II.

There's a lot of remembering to do on Remembrance Day, so rather than spread myself thin, I focus on these guys who never came back:

I spent a day there back in 1992 on a family visit to Thailand. What struck me was how young most of them were - the average age was about 20. Everything they had and could have had was taken from them.

I'm not a religious man, but I'm not foolish enough to think that I know it all. Is there a divine force, do we have an eternal soul, are we judged at the end of our time? I have no idea, but I try to live as if it were true. You lose nothing from the effort, and in fact gain from it in this world, if not the next. For the sake of those young men, I hope that it is true. If anyone deserves eternal life it's them. That's my prayer for Remembrance Day.

Colossus (CSI.to): COOMIGASP mathematics

2009-11-12T09:33:00.004-05:00

So, Colossus (CSI.to) has to amend its original agreement with COOMIGASP to keep the locals from revolting. The main hush money is a U$206,000 monthly payment to its JV partner that get repaid as from year two of production... so let's see how that math works:

Monthly payment to COOMIGASP: U$206,000
Estimated membership of COOMIGASP (according to Brazil gov't): 45,000
Monthly amount paid to COOMIGASP per member: U$4.58

Thus CSI "gets to utilize the majority of its $90m treasury" while it hands out enough to make one feijoada a month to the thousands of locals around them. Oh yes.....that will keep everybody happy there for sure. Whatever makes you think there will be more amendments to the deal in the pipeline, Otto....?

Said it before and will say it again: Don't buy it, don't sell it, just avoid CSI.to.

Peru: Madre de Dios gold mining, as seen by Hambone

2009-11-12T09:05:00.004-05:00

The Amazon jungle, as seen by Peruvian gold mining
companies and ignored by its government

I've been given permission by the author to paste up part of chapter 17 of the great book 'Peruvian Plunge' by Sam 'Hambone' Mitchell (another excerpt is here, along with a link to get your own copy...only $5 and well worth your time) that covers the ecological disaster area known as the Madre De Dios gold mining zone (that we covered in this post earlier in the week).

We join our hero as he goes through a difficult waters moment while travelling on a boat up the Madre De Dios river. Read on.....

"....my bladder stretched to the bursting point by two cups of coffee, I begged the captain to pull over for a pit stop. “I know just the spot coming up,” Pablo – who spoke perfect English – assured me. Two minutes later, we drew near to what first appeared to be a rocky beach on the left shore. As we pulled up to it, however, I noticed that the “beach” had been stripped bare of all vegetation as if it had been grazed by a Brontasaurus (who knows, maybe it had); just a few yards back from the waterline, three boxcar-sized pyramids of loose gravel and slag had been heaped there by some unseen giant hand. No bird stirred and no grasshopper whirred in the eerily still, almost sterile air of the place. What the Hell?

“Your first Madre de Dios gold mine, but certainly not your last,” announced Pablo when the motor had died. He indicated the riverside wasteland with a dismissive wave of his hand and weary ironic smile. “This one was just abandoned; I wish I could say the same for the others.”

Thinking that the ruined crescent of beach was “all” there was to the abandoned mine, I scrambled out of the boat and up one of the thirty-foot high slag heaps to find a private place to pee, as no tree or bush remained standing on the waterline. Cresting the top of the pile of loose stones, my eyes were speared by a shocking sight: stretching several hundred feet back into the jungle behind the slag heaps was two to three acres of sun-blasted, scorched-earth wasteland. In the middle of this ruined barren moonscape, covering perhaps a quarter-acre, was a slimy pool of toxic sludge that looked more like anti-freeze than water. Scattered about were stray bits of rusted-out machine parts and plastic jetsam. I added my own stream of human waste to the decoupage of destruction, and retreated back to the boat rocking gently in the waters of the Mother of God.

“This was just a small-time operation, what they call a ‘pirate mine’ because it had no permits to operate by the Peruvian government,” Pablo explained as we waited for the other passengers to finish their business. I asked him if the government had shut this mine down; Pablo laughed a “yeah, right” snort. “The government has neither the money nor the will to shut these mines down. The miners move in wherever they want to, dig until they think they can do better somewhere else, then move further into the jungle. These guys are set up somewhere else by now.”

As I had read but never paid much attention to, the other problem with these mines, legal or illegal – besides the total destruction of the fragile riparian corridor – is the fact that the miners leach the sand and pebbles through mercury, which binds to the gold dust, allowing them to harvest the tiny yellow flecks that have been luring fortune-seekers to Peru for centuries. Once the gold is collected, the mercury is washed on down the river to poison the fish – and anyone who eats the fish, be it bird, otter or human – downstream. Out of sight, out of mind, like so much else in the jungle. With the Peruvian government’s full knowledge and cooperation, hundreds of gallons of the toxic metal are simply washed away down the river for someone else to deal with.

As Pablo knew from experience all too close to home, it wasn’t just the folks downstream from the mines who suffered. “My brother went to work in one of these mines. When he got there, there was no fresh water for the workers to drink. His boss told him, ‘Drink from the creeks and river like everybody else.’ Pretty soon he was sick, then in the hospital for six weeks. He’s better now, but he says he will never work in the mines again.”

Everyone back in the boat, we headed off again. We hadn’t gone a mile before the real nightmarish visions began. They started out small enough, with the one- or two-man small-potato operations. While one guy would shovel wheelbarrows full of sand and gravel to fill the gravel-washing sluices (themselves supplied by a gas-powered water pumps from Hell), his buddy would wash the material through the mercury, ever alert for the tiny flakes that were the ultimate goal of all this carnage. Working together in teams, these small-time Planet Nibblers might be able to destroy a few acres of riverside in a year.

As we chugged on downstream, we came to the next level of Planet Eating – huge dredges set on barges in mid-stream that sucked the river bottom off its bed like a giant vacuum cleaner sucking up dust from a dirty floor, coughing the sand and rock up onto huge conveyor belts that were combed through by several workers. The tons of mercury-stained silt were dumped directly back into the heart of the river.

But the true, undisputed winner of the Planet-eating blue ribbon prize for inflicting, hands down, the most harm against the Mother of God weren’t the small-potato pirates or the Idaho-baker barges, but the legal “official” gold mines operated with the full encouragement and permits of the Peruvian government. These full-scale assaults against Mother Earth – clearly paid for and operated by some mega-buck multi-national mining corporation – didn’t screw around with piss-ant little wheelbarrows and water pumps. To truly lay waste to a planet, you need bulldozers, front-end loaders, and dump trucks the size of houses to move that rock around. You could almost smell the mercury hanging in the air.

Staring dumbfounded at this unbelievable in-your-face carnage stretching for miles along both banks of the Mother of God River (and this was just the little bit visible from the boat), I asked myself over and over again: what is humanity getting out of this rotten deal? Except for the few guys at the head of the pack – who have probably never even been to Peru – who is the “winner” in this lose-lose situation? The ladies back in the U.S. with their gold jewelry? Are those little flecks of yellow worth this destruction, this needless swathe of death? Could humanity survive without the “precious metal” being ripped from our precious planet? How much insult could one Mother of God take?

Of course, all these miners and their poverty-stricken families needed somewhere to call home. The small-time “pirates” tended to call home tiny little shacks that were really nothing more than overgrown tents made out of bright blue tarpaulins, clinging to the muddy riverbanks in little clearings hacked out between the waterline and the jungle. As we passed these forlorn little bivouacs, packs of curious children would stare out at us; I would stare back at them, wondering what kind of life these kids had to look forward to (clearly not a life in school, as it’s hard to run a school bus up and down a river). I asked Pablo his opinion, and he said, dismissively and unconvincingly: “These people have a lot more money than you think. They don’t have to live this way; they want to live this way.” Whatever you say, amigo…

The really high-rollers in the Peruvian gold-mining game got to move to the downright posh community of Rio Colorado, where they could upgrade from tarp-covered tent to rough plank and tin-roofed hovel. A six-block unbroken line of these depressing miners’ shacks stretched along the right riverbank; perched atop every other one of them like so many invading flying saucers were shiny new satellite dishes, so the miners could come home from a hard day of poisoning themselves with mercury to watch the governor of California blow up terrorists.

Pablo explained that the Colorado River, a major tributary of the Madre de Dios, was being invaded by the miners at an alarming rate. They were pushing deeper and deeper into the pristine million-acre wilderness of the Amarakaeri Communal Reserve, dumping their silt and their mercury into the river, to wind up in the village. When I asked him why the natives the reserve was supposed to “protect” put up with this, he explained that most of the miners in the reserve were the natives! Whatever “noble savage” myth I was still suffering from at that point floated on down the Mother of God with the gallons of mercury dumped there by the Indians who for thousands of years have depended on the river for their food and water. I mean, be real: who would be crazy enough to live in some hut in the forest when you could live in a house in town with a satellite dish on the roof?

The biggest irony in all of this is that the gold miners are opposed to Hunt Oil’s petroleum explorations because they think, for some reason I can’t fathom, that the oil company will shut down their illegal gold mines. Of course, if that does happen, the gold miners can always go to work for Hunt Oil until the oil is gone, at which time they can go back to gold mining: money is money and Planet Eating is Planet Eating, what difference could it make?

Get your copy of Peruvian Plunge here

A big thank you to Doug Casey (this week's coveted award)

2009-11-12T08:45:00.003-05:00

Thank you for the laugh. I'm still chuckling full 12 hours after reading it.

A. Person sent me this thing called "Conversations With Casey" last night, which is an e-mail that has Doug Casey chewing the cud with some dude called Louis James. So yesterday's version (on line here) had the guy that is getting ripped off by his cattle ranch managers in Argentina (but he doesn't know that) talking about science fiction ('SF' or 'speculative fiction' if you like, Duggie) that includes this exchange:

Doug: Yes. I have little use for English professors. Their standard complaint is that SF isn't "great literature" – which is nothing more than a foolish and unsubstantiated opinion. The relevant fact of this matter is that a variation of Pareto's law applies: 80% of everything is crap. And of the 20% that's left, 80% of that is just mediocre. So, of course 80% of SF is crap – but so is 80% of everything else. And the best speculative fiction, the top 4%, is world-class literature. And it has much greater ideational content – by an order of magnitude – than any other genre of literature. That more than makes up for the lack of poetry in some of the prose.

L: What matters more; a book that challenges your mind to think in new directions, or onomatopoeia?

Doug: Exactly. No question. Anyone who wants to claim to be a well-read person has to read speculative fiction. In fact, my two favorite areas for reading have long been ancient literature and speculative fiction – bracketing the two ends of the spectrum of time, if you will.

L: Perhaps so, chronologically. But I suspect the ancients would have been looking around at a world that was new to them and full of mysteries and unexplained frontiers – just the sort of things SF authors tend to write about.

Doug: Yes, it's very interesting. Paradoxical, in some ways. The Greek and Nordic myths are actually a form of SF.

How anyone who claims to have read the classics can come out with a statement as crass as "the Greek and Nordic myths are actually a form of SF" is pretty impressive in itself, but to actually allow it to be published with his name at the side is another level altogether.

Anyone who has even scratched the surface of the subject will have heard of the mythos/logos issue. In fact, calling them "The Greek And Nordic Myths" as Casey does is a direct entry point to the mythos, as that's what the myths were based upon. The "mythos", the "myths" as manifested by the Greeks (and their Nordic counterparts) were not written or enacted by ancients trying to fathom the world as they see it. Myths weren't created to be 'reasonable'; that was left to the logos, which was the part of the Greek philosophy that has influenced western society to this day. The ancient myths were "mythos-to-logos" whereas a modern SF tale is "logos-to-mythos", when a writer (SF writers typically have strong scientific background) create their fantasy to explain where they see the future of their logical, scientific discoveries. Misunderstanding the mythos a freshman level error of judgement that has been refuted more times than can be imagined by those that really what the hell they're talking about.

Really there are reams that could be written on this one, but to cut a long story short taking a logos-based literature (SF) that has grown from modern society and saying that the mythos-based literature laid down all those years ago is the same thing would get you an immediate and unequivocal "fail" score in any classroom worth its salt. Any idiot can read the classics and go "oh, neat story dude". This is not about the validity or otherwise of Asimov (an extremely good read, fwiw) his peers or a literature such as SF; it's about a man called Casey that's spouting crap and trying to sound way smarter about a subject than he clearly and really is.

I always suspected there was intellectual mediocrity behind that facade of arrogance. Now the evidence is clear. Doug Casey, you don't have the slightest clue as to what you're talking about and therefore win this week's coveted award; enjoy, dumbass:

What you need to know about Dorato Resources

2009-11-12T08:24:00.004-05:00

1) It's getting pumped by the brassnecks at the can of corn. Twice this week the dog known as DRI.v has appeared in breathless notes in the 'Morning Coffee' publication, today's pearl using that wonderful "the next Aurelian?" line. Laughable.

2) It was the subject of this series of posts last year on how a gold mining stock with serious red flags is pumped to sheep. There's plenty on the subject of the Cenepa region in the series, including how Anglo picked over the concessions and handed them back. And the tens of thousands of landmines, too. But don't worry about your geologists getting blown up in the middle of the Peruvian jungle...doesn't happen often.

3) Right now, according to the Peru ombudsman "Defensor del Pueblo", Dorato is in social conflict with the locals around the project. And we're not talking about that lil village just down the road, either, we're talking about 55 separate communities of the Awajun-Wampum people that live there. Also, there is no dialogue currently going on between the two sides. You think they're going to get drill permits? Try thinking again.

The latest pump job might have something to do with the recent appointment of Gordon Neal to the board of DRI. Neal is also the VP Corp Development at MAG Silver, a company that has managed to screw up one of the better silver asset discoveries of this decade with inept corporate politics. He must have 'the Zeds'' phone numbers on his rolodex....