PMs rising sharply - Iran war alert

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I'm assuming this is the reason for the sudden sharp uptick in the metals:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/iran-moves-forces-war-alert
 
Ah, I was wondering about this little spike over the past half hour or so. But, ZH and Drudge have been all over this for a few days... I´ll go take a look around and see if I come up with anything.

But, I am distracted by trying to write some SQL code on the OTHER computer down here (to show me sales of Japanese bearings ONLY over the past three years)... And surfing the ´Net...

:flail:


¨Multitasking in Peru¨ -- a haiku by DoChenRollingBearing

I move this mouse here,
and nothing even happens.
Oh, wrong computer!
 
This shit is starting to get a little bit too real. a war in the ME is baaaad juju. Sure, commodities may spike, but at what price? This rhetoric needs to get calmed the hell down and right soon that. I'm reading commentary from some of the posters on a pro Israel site and they're advocating dropping nukes on Iran. Are these people really that stupid?
 

There is going to have to be a war.. I've pretty much come to accept that as a certainty. It's just a matter of where it's going to be fought...
 
I see a four front war with Iran, Syria, the Iraqi border provinces and Israel. Hell, Pakistan and Afghanistan my just step in to help their "brothers" if Israel makes the first strike.
 
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ancona said:
I see a four front war with Iran, Suria, Tthe Iraqi border provinces and Israel. Hell, Pakistan and Afghanistan my just step in to help their "brothers" if Israel makes the first strike.
Click to expand...

We just need to make sure China and/or Russia isn't involved.. That would probably be enough for me to relocate elsewhere.
 
I doubt they will sit on the sidelines while the West plunders Iran.
 
I don´t really know if there will be a war or not. One thing I certainly would think is that there will be NO land war against Iran. We simply could not do it, and there would be horrific damage and casualties in such a land war.

Airstrikes on the Iranian nuke and missile facilities, sure that is very possible. Take out the their navy, possible as well. Take out their ONLY refinery (Esfahan), and Iranians WALK everywhere before long. No gasoline, no diesel.

My GUESS is that the USA would not start such a conflict. If Israel strikes, then who knows what will happen. Shut down the Straits of Hormuz? That might get the US involved should oil then go to $250 / barrel. Ships, planes and drones... No troops, except maybe Special Forces operations...

ANY war there would be very bad. But, I think we could prevent China and Russia from coming in (full bore anyway) by NOT attempting to occupy anything.

I really hope these nuts in Iran come to their senses, and that Israel does nothing stupid.
 
I PM'd PMBug some interesting background on this one I can't publicly put out there just now - good people would get in trouble around that.

Let's hope we can find a non-war way out of this. Hopefully the PTB can find another compelling distraction.

DoChen, their nuke facilities, the ones we care about, are buried deeper than any conventional weapon can reach. We can at best bar the doors. At a very great cost.

This is a war that no one wins - it's more stark than most. Let's don't go there.
 
Hi DCFusor. I read an article in ¨Popular Mechanics¨ some three years ago (?) about a simple kinetic weapon. No explosion needed!

We could take some shaped tungsten rods up into space (well could have via the Shuttle). Say maybe 10 - 20 tones each. And then just DROP them from 50 miles up (whatever) onto any facilities of interest deep underground in Iran. The article claimed that not only would the tungsten hold its shape on re-entry into the atmosphere, but that the kinetic energy released by those rods slamming into even solid rock very deep down would be tremendous. It would destroy things even quite deep (hundreds of feet down).

I of course have no way of intelligently commenting on that idea, other than the article said the Pentagon was looking at the idea.
 
Gold is going bananas right now:

Eurozone stock markets experiencing heavy volatility
 
Headlines crossing that ECB will loosen collateral for loan criteria.
 
Brent and WTI are also outperforming stocks, not as massively as gold, though.
Anyway, given the DXY strength this is impressive.
 
swissaustrian said:
Brent and WTI are also outperforming stocks, not as massively as gold, though.
Anyway, given the DXY strength this is impressive.
Click to expand...

Pull up a daily chart and compare the action of UUP vs gold since october. People keep saying that gold trades inverse to the dollar right? Looks to me like both have been pretty strong.
 
dereksatkinson said:
Pull up a daily chart and compare the action of UUP vs gold since october. People keep saying that gold trades inverse to the dollar right? Looks to me like both have been pretty strong.
Click to expand...
It´s not a 1:1 correlation, but since the bull market started in 2002/3 you can identify it. After 2008 it changed significantly, though. People in the hedge fund community started a long gold / short EURO trades which proved to be very successful. Another trade was long physical / short miners.
 
The point i was trying to make was that gold can go up while the dollar goes up. We've seen that scenario play out many times in the past during BIG runs on gold.

The short the miners/ long the physical game is going to start being a losing trade. The spread chart has turned in favor of the miners and broken a nearly 1 year consolidation. So miners should start to outperform on the next leg. It's just a matter of when that leg finally happens.

I think the way the mining community is starting to respond is actually pretty smart. Most of the large miners are starting to increase their dividends and/or tie them to the price of gold. The way the juniors are going to get out of their rut is through mergers and acquisitions. JAG having multiple bids thrown at them and still trading 20% below the buy out price for example, shows how poor sentiment is. That will change and shorts will get creamed.
 
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DoChen, they did look at it - *I* was the advocate. If I wanted to go to Gitmo, I could name the other names - but I don't see the point in that, they were good honest people, just misguided. They ditched it favor of developing nuclear bunker-busters as pork to certain congressional districts. There is an article I'll try to find in Physics Today about it a few years back that makes the quite flawed and circular argument why a fragile nuclear warhead was suited for that task rather than a straight kinetic or K+HE kill approach (there are wrinkles on the latter that allow for multiple shock waves to converge on the underground facility - any miner who uses dynamite knows the trick). I shouldn't talk too much about this one, as that was one of the things I was supposed to keep secret from when I left work for the gov. But as it stands, we have no workable/usable standoff solution to their versions of Cheyenne mountain. I tried, and I lost the fight. "Wiser heads" prevailed.

Their argument was laughable and circular taken at face value. Since a nuke is pretty fragile and can't be used in a shock-based deep penetration weapon - it must be detonated before it gets bent up, you therefore need a nuke to have enough power to do the job! That things like TATB (a nifty conventional HE) don't have this problem was conveniently ignored. The kinetic kill was dissed as untested - as if nukes were tested. Once you get to a point in policy rationality is gone beyond hope. What good is a weapon you can't use? First-use doctrine says we can't start off with nukes. This was a game of brinksmanship also played out in NATO-Europe by declaring that if our weaker forces were overrun by the superior Soviet tank forces we'd have to nuke them - a MAD game.

If we were smart (oh well) we'd simply play them back the intransigence they've been rope-a-doping us with (their diplomats been caught laughing about how stupid we are on video tape). You know, demand conditions to come to the table, and if they agree, demand more - and so on, delay forever. That's one part of a coordinated plan.

The other part is already happening, but I doubt we were smart enough to do it on purpose. So, now they are going all defcon. This costs them serious money, and attention span. They can't keep it up forever.

A side benefit is that by moving all their missiles from known locations to secret ones, we find out where all the secret locations are - we have 24/7 space-based "technical means" observation of their entire country in place, and enough computers to make the analysis of what went where doable by a finite amount of human analysts. Bye-bye anything they thought they were keeping secret! Score one for us.

We should do nothing. Let them tire of this, and make them look stupid for wasting time and energy. Make it a psyop. It will discredit their leadership and of course, make their people even more unhappy with it. Then once they stand down, stimulate it again, and again, till we've got the "you're just crying wolf" meme firmly in place with the people who will chafe at the new limits on their prosperity and the waste of their time and energy.

Then strike, if we must.

Some people will say that takes too long. As if we hadn't already been taking too long since we lost our puppet-Shah - and with him, all our radio listening posts for Russian missile telemetry (I was in electronic warfare/SIGINT business at the time...). I think we still have time here, not forever, but a decent amount.

The true worry is what Ama-needsAshave-realbad will do as his grip on power continues to weaken - a wounded animal is more dangerous. He can make plenty of non nuclear troubles if he thinks that's going to help his case. He could get distracted by any number of things - trying to increase influence in Iraq comes to mind, or messing around with the situation in Syria. Our recent actions in Libya and elsewhere have handed him all the political ammo he needs to have a "demon" to "be strong" against, speaking of unintended consequences.

It's up to we big boys (who we could hope will act like adults) to get the fight between the children phrased so that first, they fight each other, not us, and second, no one gets too badly hurt in the schoolyard brawl that seems inevitable. We did manage to mostly stay out of Iran-Iraq - maybe we can pull that one off again.

Now, they are following the classic pattern of nervous leadership - demonize some other powerful party so that you can drive support to yourself as the "Strong leader needed to save the country".

This is always the first part of war preparedness but is also used in peacetime to cement power to a nervous leadership who is in danger of losing it. A recent example was the Bush-Putin dustup over us putting anti-missile bases in the old Sov Union. They claimed it was a threat to them, when anyone who knows the physics knows that you don't catch missiles in a stern-chase, and that these would only be good for ones from N Korea.

But it cemented Putin in power, and gave Bush a refreshed enemy to help him stay in power - they must have laughed their asses off over drinks about it, and in this case, no war was required to obtain their mutual goals. Until Bush got 9/11 and didn't need to play that game any more.
(But we still give Putin a case for himself over what we do with the world's reserve currency)

"Never let a good crisis go to waste" wasn't an idea invented by RahmE, you know, it's been around awhile.

This is how the game is played internationally, and by viewing through this lens, a lot of other things might be analyzed more sensibly. Like the old book "Games people play" it turns out that while they look irrational on the surface, the players are actually doing a fair job of getting to their unstated (and maybe not well understood by them) goals...Stated goals are almost always not the real ones - whether the speaker realizes it or not.

I think we can force themselves to spend into bankruptcy here, like we did with our mostly-fake "star wars" program and the Soviets. Reagan used it as an excuse to keep all the best tech teams funded and together, should we need them (it's been a problem, we forgot how to make those neat missles after we used them up in the first Iraq adventure), while flooding the Soviets with reports on things to worry about. Meanwhile we perfected a really-neat ground-based point defense for our silos, that didn't need to abrogate the anti-missile treaties. Essentially a huge shotgun that shot straight up from the silo location when a range-only doppler radar saw something incoming at speeds only attained by a missile. Just a 12 foot square bundle of one-shot .50 cal rifle tubes all fired at once. We managed to keep that completely secret until the final implementation, and Ronnie got to make that phone call - we got the drop on ya boys - and that was the end of the cold war. Only an actor (or consummate liar) could have pulled it off. Oops, was I supposed to reveal that? Bad thing about this business - you're not allowed to brag when you win, because then you can't use that trick again. You can only take crap for failing. Helps to have the enemy underestimate you. FWIW, that study was commissioned and funded by my boss at the time - Jimmy Carter. Reagan just ran with it. Jimmy loved to study things...but never had the balls to do them.

At any rate, that's the take of this old cold warrior who was there at one time, at the highest levels of intelligence (well, what passes for that in government), and policy making.

A common misunderstanding is that while we think of ourselves as adults, and individually might be - governments world-wide behave at best like hormone driven teenagers - "gimme what I want or I'll beat the snot out of you and take it anyway". Our so-called civilization hasn't reached past that yet, even though quite a few of the individuals have. Failing to recognize that one is an error in judgment not borne out by history.
 
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Something to laugh about:
the TEPIX (Teheran Stock Price Index) is up almost 30 % since January 2011. This isn´t really a surprise because it´s basicly a derivative of crude oil.
 
DCFusor said:
I PM'd PMBug some interesting background on this one I can't publicly put out there just now ...
Click to expand...

DoChenRollingBearing said:
... I read an article in ¨Popular Mechanics¨ some three years ago (?) about a simple kinetic weapon. ...
Click to expand...

DCFusor said:
DoChen, they did look at it - *I* was the advocate. ...
Click to expand...

:rotflmbo: I must say that when I read DCRB's post right after reading DCF's PM, I was beginning to wonder if DCF & DCRB were the same person playing an elaborate joke on me. I'll chalk this one up to the great minds think alike and new wave theories of harmonious convergence for attracting same to play (talk) in the same playground (pmbug).
 
We're not the same guy, but we met and are friends from awhile back.

Now if we really want to mess up the Islamists, we could start pointing out how hypocritical their nationalist governments all are - their book preaches no borders, and that all Islam should be one, under religious rule. Their people, when they think about this, reject that out of hand, of course, having been trained in nationalism by their hypocrite leaders since birth, as a way to cement power over them...and people like their freedoms, which would completely go away under such a regime.
 
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Wow! PM's are getting bitch slapped right now. Simultaneously of course. Move along now, nothing to see here.
 
Seems like the gold market is illiquid today One large buying order and two large selling orders moved the market arround. HFTs seem to be abstaining from gold today.
Brent crude traded totally weird aswell.
 
Ha ha ha, re DCFusor and I being the same guy! The way I see it, he is an order of magnitude smarter than I am! I just read a lot... He also has impressive ¨hands-on¨ skills that this Bearing does not...

Although it seems that DCF and I worked for somewhat similar guys in a roughly similar time frame, I looked at pictures, and was a low level desk jockey, who got no respect from my ex-Marine boss. Playing office politics was one of my non-skills...

DCFusor, your meditative piece (last page) re playing mind-games with A´hmaDinnerJacket and the Soviets was really pure poetry. Nicely done.

Now don´t get yourself in trouble with .gov, last I read all that TS SI/TK stuff stays that way a long time. I am glad to see that I was captivated enough by that article on tungsten rods that it really MAY INDEED have been a useful weapon.
 

That would have the same effect that dropping them from ten thousand feet would have. Terminal velocity is still the same. thirty fet per second per second is the max, irrespective of mass. If they put a rocket engine on it then dropped it straight down, that's another story.

http://microgravity.grc.nasa.gov/education/rocket/termvr.html
 
The problem with implementing the tungsten rod weapon is that all the tungsten is being used to counterfeit gold bars in Ft. Knox. :rimshot:
 
Ancona, you're incorrect about that. Terminal velocity is a function of wind resistance, density and other things, as well as time of fall.

Gravity accelerates something at ~32 feet per second -- per second, not just 32 ft/sec (you're leaving out the last term there - seconds is squared) from infinite height - the speed keeps going up till wind resistance limits it.

Else you could jump off the Empire state building without a chute and survive - that's only about 21.8 mph at 32 ft/second. It would hurt, but not kill you.

The sectional density of a tungsten (or tungsten carbide, which is what they were talking about) is much higher than a human body, the latter reaching about 120 mph or so terminal velocity at density roughly one, and wind cross section about a square foot (head on, you can slow to about 70 or less, much less with a "squirrel suit").

Tungsten is a bit denser...about 12x, and would be assumed to be less than a square foot across if ballistically designed (like a big bullet).

The link you gave doesn't allow drag coeff as good as this would have, but at its limit it gets 15k feet per second from orbit. That's one fast bullet. I don't trust their math, having worked the much more complex stuff for hypersonic projectiles they left out, but at any rate - it's fast as heck.

Lets assume we have a tungsten rod - say 10,000 pounds or so (about the size of a phone pole I'd guess). At that weight, the old Space Shuttle could carry 6 of them, and some retro rockets to de-orbit them. Now we want to lift it to low earth orbit. That's going to take 10k foot pounds per foot we lift it (and we get that back when we drop it!).

Ok, LEO is about 90 miles. ~475200 feet. Times 10k. Or, 4.752e+9 foot pounds of energy - on each one. (For reference, a .223 bullet is about 1100, a .308 about 2500, and a .50 BMG about 20,000 fp).

This is neglecting the other energy you have to put into it to keep it orbiting, which is also huge - there's a big difference between reaching space and getting a parking orbit. Depending on how shallow a re-entry we can tolerate, we can keep a bunch of that energy on our projectile too, when we drop it, as sideways motion.

A foot pound is 1.355781 Joule, or watt-second. Or in more interesting terms,
2.939635 *10-10 metric ton of TNT. So this multiplies out to about 1 ton of TNT.

But unlike TNT, which sends energy in all directions - very little goes into say a 1 degree solid angle, this is all going one way, and it's going much faster than the speed of sound in rock, which makes the rock look like a liquid to it. Try this on your shooting range - any bullet over about 2800 fps goes though steel - even a plastic tipped varmint bullet, and leaves it splashed up on *both* sides like that stop motion picture of a milk drop we've all seen, whereas you can shoot one the same foot pounds, but slower, and all it does is dent it (Say, .223 45 gr varmint vs 454 casull heavy bullet, and 3/8" thick steel). it turns out the that average speed of an iron atom in molten iron is just 2780 fps...

So over TNT we get a huge concentration of energy all in one direction - hundreds to one. So the target sees hundreds of tons of TNT energy per thingie...that's a lot.

So taking all these effects into account, yes, a tungsten phone pole dropped from space will indeed penetrate 100's of meters into rock, "melting" it as it goes, even if the projectile itself is destroyed in the process - no fragile warhead required. And the resulting shock wave will pulverize any open cavity underneath. This has been tested now...but we've given up the capability to put them up there at this point, though you could just use the Shuttle engines without the Shuttle, as NASA has proposed for other missions.

I guess they were afraid of what would happen if they lost control of one out there in space...could make quite a mess, in a very small area.

NASA does understand hypervelocity stuff and the nonlinear effects of a fast projectile though. You muzzle velocity lovers, read and weep.
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/wstf/laboratories/hypervelocity/gasguns.html
 
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@ DCFusor, thanks for the math methodology re dropping tungsten telephone poles! I am glad I never tried to take a crack at that one! I would have come up with a number 10 * as large (or would that be 10 * as small?) as yours, LOL...

@ PMBug, you see? DCFusor can actually DO the math!

@ PMBug again, indeed, why would we want to waste perfectly good fake gold?
 
Iran has closed the strait of Hormuz for a military exercise according to zerohedge:
WTI Crude oil

Gold
 
If you want to play this story in stocks, buy Norwegian Statoil or Brazilian Petrobras, i´ve bought calls on them in mid october. They´re not involved in the Middle East.
The biggest looser will be Italian Eni, imho. I´ve shorted them yesterday.
 
Intesting development in the UAE:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/busin...ing-date-set/2011/12/05/gIQAVSgPVO_story.html
 
Just now refuted by Iran.

Dollar just shot straight up and PM's just fell out of bed. Someone's using those Chinese algorithms again.
 
Other good oil stocks to play a quick rise exist. I like BTE a lot myself (Canada), but I think it's on the high side to buy and hold it right now. It generally takes it a few hours to follow an uptick in crude prices - so you get a free leading indicator. Nice monthly dividend too. It was a major money maker for me, bought near March '09 -

I ditched oil holdings some months back, as they were no longer a good source of alpha compared to the other things I was trading. That could change again of course, but any big sustained rise in oil from here just ruins the economy and the value of the dollar. At that point, other strategies seem better.
 
I continue to wonder why the US does not use some of its abundant natural gas reserves to power some vehicles. Here in Peru, one of our own delivery vehicles has two ways it can be powered: gasoline and NatGas. We converted it into the Peruvian version of a ¨hybrid¨ (NatGas instead of electricity) a few months ago. We run it on Nat Gas as much as possible because it is CHEAPER, but sometimes on gasoline as not every gas station has a NatGas fuel. And LOTS of the small car taxi fleet runs on NatGas only! And Peru (compared to the USA) is POOR!

NO ONE has explained to me why we cannot do the same in the USA! At least for low-hanging fruit (city delivery trucks, city buses (although I HAVE seen some buses saying they run on NatGas) and even tractor-trailer rigs running long distances on the Interstates).

I do know there would be upfront costs, but it seems so obvious that we would save money and lessen our dependence on foreign oil imports some.

What am I missing here?
 
What you're missing DoChen, is that Natgas needs serious compression to liquefy, and is extremely dangerous in a crash. Our bubble wrap government therefore makes it so expensive (and therefore the vehicle heavy) that there's not much point in using it here.

It's also a chicken and egg issue - how do you sell the first telephone? There's no one to call - same issue on filling stations. It works out OK for a city, and in fact many who do public transport seriously do it, since they can amortize the cost of one station for the city to use.

A sudden increase in demand for Natgas would of course raise the price correspondingly - frakking isn't getting approved quite so fast now that the fearmongers have a new issue to work with.

"A rhetorical fire eater will eat fire, even if he has to kindle it himself" - Isaac Asimov

Another reason - no engine gets anywhere near the power output on gaseous fuel as it does on liquid fuel, no matter the octane. This is because the total energy per cycle is more or less how much air you can consume. A liquid fuel is dense and takes very little space, so the displacement is all air - not so with a gas. Direct port injection of liquid methane or propane would get around that, but it's not cheap to do, and forget a retrofit. (Might be possible in a diesel) We Americans want our performance, damnit - even in my Volt! In Peru, where it's most likely to have walking with a load on your back as an alternative - it's more attractive as an option.

Right now, the hot demand for natgas is power plants....they get a pass on some pollution regs for using it, and it's a lot cheaper capex plant.

I don't know what Martensen thinks, but unlike with oil, "peak gas" is the instant you tap the well - it's all downhill from there. So for example if you want to resist a natgas pipeline project, all you have to do is cause a 6 month or year delay, and it's toast - there's no gas left after that to pump (not enough to pay for the pipeline anymore, at any rate, and I know this from personal experience)...it's a crap bandaid on the energy problem, in other words. Makes strip-and-move-on mining look like it's friendly to the environment - just not quite as ugly on the surface.
 
Well said DCF. Well said.

It's all about hydrogen density in the hydrocarbon you are consuming. Here at NASA, we have natgas cars lined up in a pretty row outside of the O&C Bldg. and in front of Headquarters. They cost a fortune and are not all that great to ride in. The same goes for the electric fleet. Sure, they look cool with the thin cell panels laminated to the roof of the car, but you can only go about 35 miles between charges. The point here is that while these vehicles serve a purpose, they are not necessarily any better than the gasoline units we drive today. Same goes for hydrogen, unless you hav a LOX tank to inject massive amounts of pressurized oxygen in with the hydrogen, you will never get the energy density needed to store a significant enough quantity of fuel.

Wood gas is the only alternative I have found that allows you to take any type of combustible wood and convert the hydrogen in the wood to fuel. I have seen several trucks that have been converted. The system is clunky, but it works.
 
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