Tyler Durden has a field day with yesterday's jobs numbers. He posts four most excellent graphs that shows that the numbers published yesterday were a real sleight of hand. There's only one paragraph of text...and the four graphs. It's worth a minute of your time...and I thank Australian reader Wesley Legrand for sending them along. The link to this short zerohedge.com piece is here.

Detroit lost a quarter of its population in the past decade, it may go broke by April and fall under state control, and Frances Lockett has a hard time getting to her job 10 miles from home.

She rises at 4:45 a.m. to get to work by 7:30 cleaning homes in suburban Grosse Pointe Park. It’s a 20-minute car ride that takes her 90 minutes on two buses, with a half-hour wait between. A few years ago buses ran more often, she said.

“It wears on you,” said Lockett, 62. “Some times it’s worse than others.”

The reliable unreliability of public transit -- on average one-third of the 305 scheduled buses are off the road for repairs each day -- exemplifies the crisis that threatens the 18th-largest U.S. city with bankruptcy or state takeover. Lost revenue from plunging property values and a dwindling, poorer population have nearly broken its ability to deliver basic services in a city receding amid swaths of vacant land.

This Bloomberg story from Thursday was sent to me by reader Matthew Nel...and the link is here.

Reiterating how critical the psychology of today's situation, Bass goes on to debunk the optimism of globalization (at least for the Western world), destroy the myth of a 50% greek write-down solution, Japanese xenophobia and savings losses, structural versus cyclical implications for US equity deterioration, US deficits and housing's bottom, global debt saturation and how this tearing at the social fabric of the world will lead to - war.

This very long video runs 1:06:54...and I haven't had a chance to watch it myself. I thank West Virginia reader Elliot Simon for digging this up on our behalf. It's posted over at zerohedge.com...and the link is here.

Yesterday, The New York Sun noted that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke remarked nine years ago that the Fed had promised Congress that it would not bail out foreign governments, even as the Fed now seems to have undertaken to do just that and become central bank to the world. This is, the Sun says, a pretty big policy question, in which Congress, except, of course, for Ron Paul, seems oblivious.

I borrowed the story...and the introduction...from a GATA release yesterday. The Sun's editorial is headlined "Bernanke's Forgotten Footnote" and the link is here.

As more debt is offered as the only solution to impossible indebtedness, GoldMoney founder and GATA consultant James Turk reflected this week on what he called "The Transatlantic Panic." With negative interest rates and bailouts stretching ahead as far as the eye can see, Turk writes, gold's bull market has just as far to go.

This is another story I borrowed from a GATA release yesterday...along with Chris Powell's introduction. The story is posted over at the goldmoney.com website...and the link is here.

The world economy is facing a worse crisis now than in 2008 and stimulating growth should be a priority for global policymakers, a Chinese vice finance minister said on Thursday.

The comments by Zhu Guangyao marked the latest grim warning from a Chinese official over the state of the world economy. Vice Premier Wang Qishan said in November that a chronic global recession was certain.

"At that time (in 2008), the world economy maintained overall growth and the governments, especially G20 countries, were still able to implement fiscal and monetary stimulus measures," Zhu told a forum.

"But now, to be honest, some countries have very difficult fiscal situations, and there is limited room to adjust monetary policies."

This Reuters story came from yesterday's edition of the King Report...and the link is here.

China's vast military machine grows by the day. America's sending troops to Australia in response. As tension between the two superpowers escalates, Max Hastings warns of a terrifying threat to world peace.

This longish piece appeared on the dailymail.co.uk website last weekend...and I thank Washington state reader S.A. for sending it along. The link is here.

The EU tightened sanctions against Iran Thursday, but stopped short of imposing an oil embargo against the country. Meanwhile, pressure in the US Congress mounts for stricter penalties on Iran. German commentators weigh the options against Iran Friday, concluding that none of them are promising.

The tightened sanctions come in the wake of the storming of the British Embassy in Tehran on Nov. 29, in which protesters tore down the British flag, set fire to a car and caused what some eyewitnesses say is considerable damage to the compound. In response, the British government withdrew its diplomats from the country and expelled Iranian diplomats from London. Several other European countries moved to withdraw their ambassadors from Tehran as a result of the storming, which many believe had the backing the Iranian government, angry over further sanctions against the country following a report from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on its nuclear program last month.

This Roy Stephens offering showed up posted over at the German website spiegel.de yesterday...and the link is here.

The debate also has left many Americans scratching their heads as to whether Congress is actually attempting to authorize the indefinite detention of Americans by the military without charges. But proponents — led by Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) and Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee — say that is exactly what the war on terror requires. They argued that the bill simply codifies precedents set by the Supreme Court and removes uncertainty, which they said would better protect the country.

This is a depressing read. What happened to habeas corpus? This item is posted over at the washingtonsblog.com website yesterday...and is another Roy Stephens offering. The link is here.

Market analyst Chris Martenson made an absolutely brilliant and eloquent presentation to the Spanish Precious Metals Association's conference in Madrid on November 16, emphasizing the exponential growth of debt in Western economies amid a worsening depletion of crucial natural resources. GoldMoney's ever-adept video crew was there to capture it, and while it is an hour and 11 minutes long, there's not a wasted moment in it.

Yes, the video is really that long, but Martenson's speech only lasts 40 minutes...and the rest is a Q&A session. This is an absolute must watch...and quite likely the most important item I have posted in this column during all of 2011.

It's posted over at the goldmoney.com Internet site...and I borrowed both the story and the introduction from a GATA release on Tuesday. The link to this must watch video is here.

In normal circumstances, European leaders are happy to wait until the day of a Brussels summit to meet one another, leaving any preparations in the hands of their officials. But there is nothing remotely normal about the meeting that is to take place next Friday. It comes at a time of mounting catastrophe in the international markets, as the eurozone faces potential collapse. And if European leaders make a mistake, it will not just be the eurozone countries that face upheaval and devastation.

All of Europe, including Britain, will be plunged into a banking crisis which can only lead to financial catastrophe. Already the contagion is spreading across the globe. Credit markets are even tightening in China, which has so far been immune from any jitters. And this week the United States was panicked into leading a huge intervention into international money markets to rescue the tottering global banking system, amidst rumours that a major European bank was on the edge of insolvency.

This story was filed in The Telegraph yesterday evening...and it's another story that you can add to your must read list. I thank Roy Stephens for sharing it with us...and the link is here.

The cabinet agreed to transfer the assets from four of Portugal’s biggest banks to the state balance sheet.

The assets will be used to bridge a gap needed to meet the fiscal deficit target of 5.9pc of GDP set by the terms of the country’s €78bn bail-out from around 10pc in 2010.

"This measure is more than sufficient to meet the budget deficit goal in 2011," said Helder Rosalino, secretary of state for central administration, on Friday.

This is another Roy Stephens offering from The Telegraph. It was posted late last night on their website...and the link is here.

Edward Jay Epstein’s report, What Really Happened to Dominque Strauss-Kahn published in The New York Review of Books this weekend, has the set the French political world afire, renewing speculation that Strauss-Kahn’s arrest for raping a chambermaid was part of a conspiracy to take him out of the running for the 2012 presidential race.

Epstein’s 4,000-plus-word forensic report is a tick-tock of what happened at the hotel shortly before and after the alleged attack. (Prosecutors later dismissed all charges against Strauss-Kahn, saying that the alleged victim, Nafissatou Diallo, had repeatedly lied to them.) In researching the story, Epstein, an investigative journalist, had access to a trove of electronic information that has not been made public before: “Sofitel electronic key swipe records, time-stamped security camera videotapes, and records for a cell phone used on the day of May 14 by John Sheehan, a security employee of Accor, the company that owns the Sofitel hotel,” according to the report.

This story was in The Washington Post last Sunday and is a very interesting read. As I [and many others] said when this story first broke a few months ago, it had all the hallmarks of a 'honey trap'...and my opinion still stands.

I thank Washington state reader S.A. for bringing it to my attention. It's worth your time...and the link is here.

I posted the King World News blogs of these interviews in my Friday column. Eric sent me the audio tracks in the wee hours of this morning. The Nigel Farage interview is linked here...and Rick Rule's interview is linked here.

Walter de Wet, head of commodities research at Standard Bank Plc, talks about the outlook for precious and industrial metals amid a weaker global economic outlook. He speaks with Francine Lacqua on Bloomberg Television's "The Pulse."

This 4:42 Bloomberg video out of London was done on Sunday. I thank reader Ken Metcalfe for sending it to me...and the link is here.

Here's a GATA release from yesterday...and rather than cut and paste what Chris has to say...and then provide the link, I'll leave it up to him to do the honours. It's well worth the read...and the link is here.

Fund manager Greg Weldon told King World News yesterday what he thinks is the magic number for gold's breakout in U.S. dollars. Reaching it, he says, is a matter of central bank efforts to persuade the markets that they'll succeed in reflating -- that is, devaluing currencies. (Gold is always ready to help them. All the central banks have to do is get out of its way.) An excerpt from Weldon's interview is posted at the KWN blog here...and it's certainly worth reading.

As I had hoped, a part of what Ted Butler wrote to his paying subscribers in late November was posted in the public domain yesterday.

Without doubt, Ted is...and has always been...the world's preeminent silver analyst...and has been for over twenty-five years. I first stumbled across his work back in 1999...and knew instantly from not only what he wrote, but how he wrote it, that this was a silver analyst that still has no peer to this day.

I thank West Virginia reader Elliot Simon for digging this up on your behalf. It nearly goes without saying that this is a must read. It's posted over at the goldsilver.com website...and the link is here.

Is there a connection between Human Freedom and A Gold Redeemable Money? At first glance it would seem that money belongs to the world of economics and human freedom to the political sphere.

But when you recall that one of the first moves by Lenin, Mussolini and Hitler was to outlaw individual ownership of gold, you begin to sense that there may be some connection between money, redeemable in gold, and the rare prize known as human liberty.

Also, when you find that Lenin declared and demonstrated that a sure way to overturn the existing social order and bring about communism was by printing press paper money, then again you are impressed with the possibility of a relationship between a gold-backed money and human freedom.

Howard Buffett, the US Congressman from Nebraska, wrote this essay on June 5, 1948...about four months before I was born. It's a very long read, but from what I've read so far, I'd guess that a large portion of Alan Greenspan's famous essay Gold and Economic Freedom that ended up in Ayn Rand's classic 1967 tome Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal was plagiarized from this essay.

For all you newbie gold and silver bugs out there, this is another must read...and it wouldn't hurt the rest of us to read it, either. I'm sure that Howard would be horrified to see how his son has turned out...now completely consumed by the dark side of The Force.

I thank reader Kenneth Beckman for finding this gem...and the link to the pdf file, which is posted over at the fame.org website, is here.