• Prices Of Paper Gold And Silver Plunge As EUR Reaches 15 Month Lows

• Eric King interviews Rick Rule

• Mish 2012 Predictions; 2011 Year in Review with Max Keiser

• Sorry Ron Paul, “End the Fed” Is Just Another Republican Plan to Help the Financial Sector and Hurt Everyone Else

The fact is, tightening monetary policy doesn’t make the dollar ‘stronger’ at all: it just increases the dollar’s value against foreign currencies.

I’d like to see Peter Schiff pummel this idiot in a parking lot somewhere until blood pours out of his ears.

• King World News: Pass the Kool Aid. Seriously, I Loves Me the Kool Aid.

Some additional thoughts: Eric King’s “KingWorldNews” gets my nod for ‘blog of the year.’ Last year he started out on the Alexa rating at around 100,000; now he’s solidly in the top 10,000, ahead of Ritholtz.com (13,000), globaleconomicanalsis.blogspot.com (MISH) (20,000), and MaxKeiser.com (18,000). At the top of the heap and deservedly so is zerohedge at 1,800 on Alexa – truly a great achievement – but KWN is the stand out performer for the year (Jim Puplava eat your heart out).

Book of the year: A tie, “CurrencyWars” by Jim Rickards and “Debunking Economics: Updated Edition” by Steve Keen.

What do you think? Leave some comments…

• Italians Cut Spending in Worst Christmas in 10 Years; Debt in Spanish City of Gandia 50% Higher than Previously Reported; Harsh Times Ahead for All Europe

• Did Bankers Deliberately Crash MF Global to Crash Gold and Silver Prices?

• Israelis march against ultra-Orthodox segregation campaign
  

Thousands of Israelis gathered Tuesday night to protest against ultra-Orthodox extremists whose campaign for gender segregation has erupted into verbal and physical abuse against women.

• Technology, specifically sensors, must become disposable and ubiquitous. Companies need to hire game designers and put them in charge of marketing schemes.

The future: we will still shop, eat cereal, brush our teeth and watch TV. But everything we do and (more importantly) all the information we attend to will win us points and benefits across a vast incentives network engineered by corporations and government entities.

• Who Will Be The First Politician To Be GoDaddy’d?