Thanks for all of your patience as I have made it through the busiest time of year for my business. I am beginning the 2012 Outlook and will also do a post on the 2011 Review in the coming days and weeks. Before we get to that, I want you to take a moment and read or listen to the interview between Jim Puplava and Ann Barnhardt.
Ann Barnhardt was a commodity futures broker that was quite successful that suddenly quit her business in November as MF Global collapsed. The fall of that company and the theft of client funds to her was the final straw that indicated that our financial system was a complete sham and would result in losses of her customer's money. With the release of an open letter, she wrapped up the firm and quit the business.
Jim's firm runs the amazing website www.financialsense.com and I highly recommend their work. As I've mentioned often, Jim's son, Chris Puplava is one of my favorite bloggers and I read him every Friday without fail.
Please use the following link to read the transcript of the interview between Jim and Ann; other than some of the Kyle Bass interviews I've posted, this has to be the best of 2011.
AWESOMENESS - BEST INTERVIEW OF 2011
To hear the interview, you can go to the site and select the player you desire or download it in mp3 format.
HEAR THE INTERVIEW
If you don't want to click away, I have cut and pasted the text of the interview here, please note this is the property of www.financialsense.com and not the work or product of Goatmug.
Transcript for Ann Barnhardt Interview
Jim Puplava: Joining me as my special guest on the program
today is Ann Barnhardt, formerly of Barnhardt Capital Management. And Ann, you
were a commodity broker for eight years and then you formed your own independent
brokerage for six years. A couple of weeks ago you made the painful decision to
shut your doors because you felt your clients’ money and positions were no
longer safe. What led you to draw those conclusions?
Ann Barnhardt: Well, obviously, it was the MF global
collapse and more specifically the fall out after the MF Global collapse and the
reaction by the CFTC, the SEC and most especially by the Chicago Mercantile
Exchange [the “Merc”]. The actions, specifically by the Merc after the MF Global
collapse were unprecedented, unfathomable and completely and totally
intolerable. The Merc itself basically did the equivalent of sticking a nine
millimeter in their mouth and pulling the trigger by not stepping forward,
backstopping the MF Global client accounts and at the very least, the Merc
should have allowed the MF Global customers to liquidate their accounts and then
transfer to other firms. What the Merc did was the worst possible thing—they
froze those people out of their accounts and didn’t allow them to liquidate
while the markets continued to trade. And I cannot over-emphasize the importance
of that, the risk that those people were exposed to in the cattle business (and
my forte is cattle. I am actually a cash cattle person. My brokerage business
was geared almost exclusively towards livestock and grade. I have a lot of
contacts in the cattle industry who didn’t necessarily do their futures business
with me but were contacts of mine who did do business through brokers that
cleared through MF) who lost tens of thousands of dollars on hedge positions
that they wanted to get out of but could not get out of in the week and a half
after the MF Global collapse.
This has never happened before. This was a complete breach of fiduciary duty
by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange itself to the point that it literally has
destroyed the entire paradigm. I got to the point where I could no longer tell
my clients that their free cash customer funds, not even exposed to the market
place—just their cash sitting in their account, non-margined—was not safe. I
couldn’t tell them that their money was safe. At that point it was morally
incumbent upon me to get my client out of this completely dysfunctional,
basically destroyed marketplace. Get them off of those railroad tracks and get
them away from the risk. Now, I didn’t clear through MF, but with the European
collapse and knowing what we know about how these financial entities are
leveraged in European paper and the cascading nature of all of this I had to act
before the proverbial poop hit the fan because if you sit around and you wait
until after the poop hits the fan it is too late. You wouldn’t get anybody out.
To me, it wasn’t really a painful decision. It was a complete no brainer.
Jim Puplava: In the past, when firms went under customer
funds were intact and the exchanges would step in, as you mentioned earlier, to
backstop everything to keep customers 100% liquid. And normally, a quick
transfer from the bankrupt firm, the bankrupt firm would be immediately
replaced. Why do you think they did not allow that to happen this time?
Ann Barnhardt: You tell me. I will use the word again, it is
suicidal. What they did was suicidal. So you are absolutely right. Up until last
month on Friday, October 31st, the customer segregation of funds rule
was utterly sacrosanct. Even when Refco imploded and imploded quite dramatically
in 2005, no customer funds were gone. It was on the prop trading side of the
company but the customer funds were there, were accounted for, and it is the
onus of the Mercantile Exchange to audit these FCMs [Futures Commission
Merchant]. MF Global was under the auspices and under the supervision, of the
auditing supervision, of the CME. And I believe that MF was audited not just
annually, but quarterly. Also, there is the question of how in the world can the
Merc miss the margin being posted. The Merc is supposed to be moving equity and
doing margin wire transfers twice a day every day. How could those customer
funds be “missing”. They aren’t missing. They were stolen. They were stolen by
Jon Corzine and his cadre of associates at MF Global. So yes, again, to your
listeners who may not fully appreciate the gravity of this, this has never, ever
happened before. Nothing even close to this has ever even happened before and it
is the function of the Mercantile Exchange itself—the reason why the exchanges
exist is that they stand in the middle of every transaction and they act as the
de facto counterparty to every single transaction so that, for example, my
clients never had to worry about the credit worthiness of the other individual,
whoever it might be, who is on the other side of any trade that they did.
Now, for every buyer there is a seller and it is a one-for-one, zero-sum
game; but to ensure the credit worthiness and the integrity of the market, the
function of the Mercantile Exchange itself is to stand in the middle of every
transaction and be the guarantor. So a year ago when Terry Duffy held a press
conference [watch it here] and said never in the history of the
Mercantile Exchange has a customer ever, ever lost funds resulting from the
collapse of a firm, he was telling the truth a year ago. Everything changed on
Halloween of this year though. And that's why I had to shut the doors of my
brokerage because I could not in good conscience continue forward knowing that
the Mercantile Exchange was no longer going to fulfill their fiduciary duty.
Jim Puplava: In the futures market, which is highly
leveraged, if you open up a futures contract you are usually leveraged 10-to-1,
so they require an exceptional firm base on which to function. And the major
integrity of the whole system is the segregation of customer funds. That was
breached by MF Global. And let’s not sugar coat this, Ann, basically management
stole all of the non-margin cash, invested it in highly speculative securities
and what has astonished me has been the reaction of the exchange and
regulators—where is the investigation into Jon Corzine?
Ann Barnhardt: Well that is the point of this. We are now
living in a lawless, Marxist, Communist, usurped, what used to be a
representative republic but is no more. This is no longer a nation of laws. This
has now transformed into a nation of men. It doesn’t matter what crime you
commit. In the case of Jon Corzine, this man has stolen in excess of a billion
dollars. I think by the time it is all panned out it is going to be closer to $3
billion of customer funds that he stole. Why did he do it? Is he stupid? Well,
of course he’s not stupid. This is a former head of Goldman Sachs. This man
doesn’t have a low IQ per se. Why in the world would a man wake up in the
morning one day and say you know what, I think I am going to steal all the
customer seg funds in this FCM that I’m running, which is the biggest FCM in the
country. Yeah, that sounds like a good plan. No. Why would a man like that even
engage in a nefarious plot like this? Because he knew going into it he could get
away with it. And the reason he could get away with it is he is in tight with
the Obama regime. He is one of Obama’s highest fundraisers. Earlier this year
Jon Corzine had a fundraiser dinner at his New York City apartment for Barack
Obama where it was charged at $35,000 a plate. Okay? He bundled high six figures
for Obama in one evening! He is a crony of the regime. This is Marxist
Communism. There is no rule of law. And these people, these poor MF customers
are just sitting out here helpless to do anything because there is no law
enforcement because this is no longer a nation of laws. The rule of law no
longer exists. There is no longer justice in this nation. And no nation, no
culture, no society can survive if there isn’t a foundation of justice. That is
why we are teetering on the precipice of collapse and I foresee civil war coming
within the next several years.
Jim Puplava: You know, we had Gerald Celente on this program
and he had an account with Lynn-Waldok, which was eventually taken over by MF
Global, and he's been trading futures in gold. He had a plan when he built up
enough he would eventually take delivery. Well, they stopped him out of his
trade, sequestered his margin (or his cash) and forced him out of a trade and
closed his account.
[Click here to listen to Gerald Celente's MF Global
experience]
So what you are talking about—because the exchange did not backstop and then
froze customer accounts—is they forced, would you say, millions if not hundreds
of millions of dollars of losses on these customers?
Ann Barnhardt: Absolutely. If we are talking several billion
in customer seg funds then the losses that were incurred could easily by the
customers in that week, week and a half that they were frozen out could easily,
easily get into the hundreds of millions it might even breach into the low
billions. No question about that. And yeah, and even with options. You know, I
talked to cattleman who have put options on as hedges to put a floor underneath
the price of the cattle in case—so imagine this, you buy a put option four
months ago, you pay the premium. You post that money. Then this happens, you are
frozen out of your account. Your account gets transferred to another firm,
without your consent. By the way, none of the customers were allowed any input
into this. Their accounts were just sent to RJ O’Brien and other firms like that
without their consent. And then once the positions were transferred, even if it
was a risk limited position like a long put option, then the new clearing firm
called them the next morning after the trade settled and said there was no
equity in your account because all that money got stolen. So you are going to
have to pay the premium for this put option again. So it's doubling the cost
essentially for a lot of these people out here who are dealing in what is
supposed to be the very risk limited paradigm of long options. The entire
situation could not have been handled any worse. In fact, I would take it a step
further. It was handled so poorly I can’t imagine that these people are that
stupid at the Merc and at the CFTC and so forth. I can’t believe that the
bankruptcy trustee is that stupid. This almost seems like it was so bad that it
had to have been nefarious.
Jim Puplava: You know, Ann. You believe that MF Global is
just the tip of the iceberg. That there is massive industry exposure to European
sovereign debt. In fact, the day you and I are doing this interview the Fed just
engineered a major swap with central banks. It was a central bank love fest on
Wednesday of group money printing. That tells me that central banks acting in
unison the way they did shows they are afraid that there's something big out
there that is about to happen and that they are trying to maybe plug a hole in
the dyke.
Ann Barnhardt: Well, if anybody out there understands fourth
grade arithmetic you know from metaphysical certitude that Europe is done.
Europe is mathematically impossible. It cannot be saved. You want to make a
start. You even want to make a start at trying to bail out Europe we are talking
$25 trillion just to start. And it would then—if you were going to bail out the
entirety of Europe—you would now be talking about hundreds of trillions of
dollars. Okay, people, there isn’t that much wealth or money on the surface of
the earth. The total gross domestic product of the entire planet earth is I
think just under $70 trillion. And we are talking about in excess of $100 trillion to bail out Europe? This is now mathematically
impossible. These people have so leveraged themselves and so leveraged these
governments in these countries giving their brain dead citizenry free hand outs
and entitlements that it is now mathematically impossible to save the paradigm.
It's not a matter of if the global financial system is going to collapse. Oh,
it's going to collapse. You better trust and understand that. It's just a matter
of when. And these piddling little maneuvers that these people are making that
the Fed is doing. Oh, we are going to give Europe some money. Okay. What I saw
this morning, what the Fed is getting ready to do in terms of Europe, is keep
Europe going for another seven days. Well, fantastic. Thanks for that. That is
literally the brain dead mindset of these politicians. All they are doing is
looking to kick the can down the road. At first it was kick the can down another
10, 12 years. Then it is kick the can down the road for another year. And then
it was well, let’s kick the can down the road for another few months. Now we're
literally to the point where all we can do is kick the can down the road for a
matter of a few days. It's not going to make it. I will be very surprised if we
make it until Christmas.
Jim Puplava: You know, one would have thought Ann, after the
30 to 40:1 leverage leading up to the financial crisis of 2008, pre-Lehman, that
financial firms would have learned. And especially a guy like Jon Corzine that
saw Goldman have exposure to AIG with $13 billion in credit default swaps which
we bailed him out 100 cents on the dollar. Apparently, this lesson was not
learned at MF Global because the leverage, what was the figure? I think it was
100:1—it was just astounding.
Ann Barnhardt: The only lesson that these criminal
degenerates learned from the 2008 situation was that they could do anything they
want and that pimp daddy government would bail them out. You have to understand,
people like Jon Corzine, these are evil, evil people. He went into MF Global
looking to rape that company personally for his own good. And that's what the
motivation of a lot of these people are. You have to get your heads around this.
You have to get your heads around the fact that there are truly evil people in
the world who do not give a crap about anyone or anything except themselves,
their own personal wealth and their own personal power. And they would sell
their grandmother to the Nazis for a nickel without hesitation if they thought
they could get away with it. It's the same with people like Jon Corzine, and
then we have talked about the fact that Jon Corzine is tied into the Obama
regime. And we now know that the government is absolutely stuffed to the gills
almost exclusively with this same type of moral degenerate culture. These people
that are in the government—not just the Congress and Executive Branch but also
in the bureaucracy—they are in it for themselves. They are in it for the money.
And two weeks ago when we had the 60 minutes exposé on the insider trading,
those of us who have been in the business have known intuitively that that was
going on for a very, very long time. We knew that there was front running going
on by politicians. A great example of this is someone like Harry Reid. When he
entered Congress, Harry Reid had a low six-figure net worth. He now has an
eight-figure net worth. And he's never done anything except be a United States
Senator. The salary I think of which is something like $170,000 a year. How does
that happen? How does a man with $170,000 a year salaried position go from
having a six-figure net worth to an eight-figure net worth? That doesn’t make
any sense unless he is doing nefarious, illegal, insider trading type deals.
It is obvious what's been going on. You have to start acknowledging these
people for what they are, and that is moral degenerates who are basically
sociopaths and psychopaths. Meaning they don’t feel any sympathy or empathy for
other human beings. The only thing they care about is themselves. They will do
anything. They will steal. They will lie. They will cheat. They will lie to your
face. They will look in the camera with this tremendous earnestness and lie with
fork tongues through their teeth in order to advance their wealth and power. And
if we, as a people, don’t get real about this, if we keep having these Pollyanna
visions that these people are all on our side and they are really looking out
for us. And they are doing the best they can. We will be cork screwed into the
ground and this nation will be reduced to a smoldering rubble. You've got to
wake up.
Jim Puplava: I would like to go back to MF Global for a
second. There is something even worse as you look into the details—it's been
hinted and that there could be possible clawbacks. I’m wondering if you might
explain that possibility and what a clawback means for, let’s say you had an
account at MF Global and, I don’t know, you didn’t feel comfortable with the
commodities market—the volatility. So you pulled the money out. There is a
possibility they can go after you.
Ann Barnhardt: Oh, absolutely. Clawback is a fairly common
tactic in bankruptcies. And what it is is looking at the bankrupt entity and
looking at the money that went out of that entity in the time period immediately
preceding the collapse. And I don’t know what time frame they would look at MF.
I don’t know if it would be 30 days or 60 days or 90 days—I have no idea. But
the trustee has in the last two weeks said that yes, clawback is on the table.
So what that means is, let’s say for example, you are a savvy individual and you
are a good steward of your money. And you are doing business with a firm that
clears through MF Global. You are looking at MF Global’s publicly available bond
yields. And you see in the six weeks before the collapse that their bond yields
spiked parabolically [see chart here]. They went from 6% to 18%.
That is a sure, sure sign of massive trouble. And so being an intelligent,
informed, aware person who is a good steward of their wealth, what do you do?
You say I’m getting out of this company. I am getting my money out of MF Global
because something bad is about to happen looking at these bond yields. You can
also do the same thing looking at the stock price. You could do the same thing
looking at downgrades by the ratings agencies. There's all kinds of ways that
you can come to these conclusions.
The other thing is if you're a hedger. If you are a bonafide hedger—if you
had positions on and the market moves in favor of your hedge position on the
futures side, you don’t leave that equity sitting in your account. What your
broker like me does is they wire that money home because you are using that
money probably to either offset a cash transaction or to pay down a revolving
line of credit. You're not getting any interest on your money sitting at MF
Global so you might as well get that equity out of there, send it home and pay
down your line of credit so you are not paying interest on that money. So there
would organically have been lots and lots of money flowing out of that company
in the period immediately before the collapse. Either due to natural hedges,
organic in and out functions or due to intelligent people looking at the bond
yields and saying uh oh we better get out of here. The bankruptcy trustee can
legally claw that money back. Say okay, I am going to go and I am going to dive
into your pocket now. And I am going to claw back your money which you, in your
responsibility and in your good stewardship pulled out of a company that you
knew to be in trouble. Oh yeah, so these MF customers will essentially be raped
three times—they will have their cash stolen out of their accounts, they were
then locked out of their position so they couldn’t trade and were fully exposed
to market risk, paralyzed, unable to do anything for excess of a week. And then,
number three rape, is having the bankruptcy trustee come back and literally
seize money out of your own personal checking accounts and business accounts and
so forth. And clawing it back to feed this bankrupt entity. And you know what
the cherry on top of the sundae of all this is? And this is what blows my
mind—the bankruptcy trustee, right now, as this is being recorded on the
30th of November. The bankruptcy trustee is still allowing MF Global
to trade proprietarily for itself, for the company proper.
It is unbelievable. The rule of law is dead in this country.
Jim Puplava: You know, adding to this just prior to that was
the restructuring of Greek debt, where the derivatives association announced
that it was a voluntary restructuring so therefore the bankers didn’t have to
pay out on credit default swaps. So what you have here, Ann, I believe is a
system where the government is protecting the too-big-to-fail at the expense of
the customers. And with it, the rule of law is thrown out to protect Wall
Street, what does that say about the integrity of the system? It is no wonder
people are losing faith.
Ann Barnhardt: There is no integrity in the system. And
let’s make it simple—it is not just about the government protecting the “too big
to fail banks". It is about criminal oligarchs as individuals protecting each
other. They don’t give a crap about the customers of JP Morgan or you know, Citi
or Goldman or anything. What they care about is each other. The Obama regime is
protecting Jon Corzine proper, the individual. Because he is one of them. He is
one of these criminal oligarchs. And for your listeners who may not remember,
Jon Corzine is a former congressman. But immediately preceding MF Global he was
the Governor of New Jersey and he just cork screwed Jersey into the ground. It
is Chris Christy who beat Jon Corzine to become the governor of New Jersey. So
yes, this Republican, Chris Christy, was elected in New Jersey—uber liberal,
blue state New Jersey—because Corzine financially destroyed this state. And
again, this guy Corzine is former head of Goldman. He is not stupid. You have to
stop thinking that these people are just misguided or that there is some sort of
a difference of opinion on economic theory. These people are nefariously trying
to destroy everything in this country. It's called the Cloward-Piven strategy. Go in and destroy and
collapse the entire economy, everything and then rebuild a new Marxist,
Socialist, fascist state out of the burning rubble of this destruction. This is
intentional. This is nefarious. This is not a function of incompetence. It's a
function of malice of forethought and conscientious theft and destruction.
Jim Puplava: What would you advice? I am a long term
believer in the bull market in commodities, but how do you play commodities when
the futures market is no longer secure? And what does this do to the proper
functioning of the markets? In other words, now that you've closed your firm
because you don’t believe in the integrity of the system and we just listed a
series of reasons why—not honoring contracts, appropriating funds, not allowing
trades to go off. Not one investigation, in fact, this goes even further than
that. We had Bill Black on the program recently, who helped make prosecutions in
the S&L scandal. And at that time, 2,000 individuals went to jail. There has
not been one criminal charge brought by the justice department since the 2008
crisis. So given that this is where we are, what do you advise and what will you
do personally?
[Listen to Bill Black's tell-all interview on why no one has gone
to jail]
Ann Barnhardt: Well get the hell out. Get out of all paper
and it's not just the commodities markets. This is going to cascade through
everything. It is going to get into the equities. It is going to get into 401ks
and IRAs, it is going to get into pension plans and so on and so forth. Total
systemic collapse. Get out! I don’t know how I can be anymore plain about this.
I say this over and over and over again and then I get scads of emails saying,
well I can’t get out of my 401k. Yes, you can. Yes, you can. Take the penalty
and get the hell out of there. What would you rather do? Would you rather pay
the 10% penalty or would you rather have it all go up in smoke? Because that's
what we're staring down the barrel of. Number two, we seem to have this
backwards. In terms of what I do, cattle and grain specifically, the futures
markets are the derivatives. The futures markets are derived from the actual
cash commodity market. Now, I am blessed because my area of expertise is
actually in the physical cash market, actual cattle on the hoof. So I have a
consulting firm and I'll continue to teach cattlemen how to trade actual
physical cattle. But, yeah, to all the people out there listening—you are going
to have to get away from paper and get back into physical commodities, the real
deal. Anything that is on paper anything that involves a promise or a commitment
is no longer valid because as we said there isn’t a rule of law anymore. People
can steal from you. Your money can be confiscated. And think how easy now it is
to confiscate people’s wealth. Most of our wealth in this society exists as
zeroes and ones on a computer server. It takes no effort whatsoever to steal
zeros and ones on a computer server. So what I have been telling people is you
need to get into physical commodities. And the rule of thumb is if you can stand
in front of it with an assault rifle and physically protect it, then it's
real—it's a real commodity. That includes food, that includes water, that
includes long guns and ammunition. That includes fuel. That includes precious
metals—gold and silver coinage. Most especially silver coinage because silver is
the metal of barter and transaction and currency. Gold is the storage metal
because it's so valuable per ounce. And also, silver is extremely undervalued
relative to gold because that market has been synthetically suppressed for the
last several years by again, these nefarious actors. So yeah, reallocate into
physical commodities.
Jim Puplava: How do you know that somebody like just as we
saw in 2008 or recently with MF Global—that is somebody like a Goldman, a JP
Morgan that is writing credit default swaps on European debt—how do you know if
you have an account with this group that they pledge your assets for collateral
or they comingle them with the firm’s assets and then what do you do?
Ann Barnhardt: Oh, exactly. Corzine isn’t alone in this. The
reason the MF Global situation happened the way it did is as we eluded to
earlier because Corzine had that company just suicidally leveraged. He took
those customer funds and then leveraged it into European, sovereign, junk paper
at about 100:1 ratio. Massive. Massive leverage. That is why his collateral call
was the first one to come and why it took him out because he was so heavily
leveraged. Don’t kid yourself. These other entities are doing the same thing. It
is just that they are not as heavily leveraged as Corzine was. So yes, the
entire paradigm is no longer trust worthy. There is no meaningful government or
industry wide regulation and I have been saying this for years. That regulation
in the financial industry in the United States both government based and private
regulation—private industry regulation—is a monstrous, monstrous joke. The top
tier of those organizations are evil, nefarious people. The mid level are
halfway stupid, halfway evil who again, are just there to collect their salary
paycheck and will say and do anything that they are told and who really don’t
understand the business that they are trying to regulate. And then the lower
level, the grunts, the actual auditors who go out on site, a lot of those people
are super incompetent, affirmative action hires. And yes, I said it and I am not
ashamed of it. They are affirmative action hires. They have no business being
there doing what they are doing. They are also hiring a lot of kids 15 minutes
out of college who are literally reading off the script and couldn’t audit a
company if their life depended on it.
So what they do is they send these incompetent people out into the field and
into lower management. And then when the poop hits the fan, they blame them. It
is absolutely evil and it is a complete joke. And Madoff was the first proof of
that. There have been other ponzi schemes since Madoff happened that haven’t
gotten as much notoriety, but there was a big one in the futures industry that
all of the FCMs were invested in. And the regulatory body of the futures
industry the NFA, they audited that Ponzi scheme, they totally missed it. They
even admitted that they signed off on it because they really didn’t understand
what they were doing. I mean, that is the level of incompetence and evil that we
are talking about in terms of these regulatory bodies. The only way to fix this
is to shut the whole damn thing down and start from scratch. I am personally
looking in the next decade for the emergence of a new exchange within the United
States [that is, a replacement of the Chicago Mercantile Exhange]. Word on the
street is it might happen in Dallas and I would be fully in favor of that. Start
over from scratch.
Jim Puplava: Alright. Well the message: get physical and
protect yourself. We have been speaking with Ann Barnhardt, formerly of
Barnhardt Capital Management. Ann, I want to thank you for coming on the program
and sharing your thoughts.
Ann Barnhardt: Thank you for having me, it's been a
pleasure.
Hmmm, an industry pro completely shuts down their business and all they can say is buy physical commodities and get some guns and ammo. Makes you think that she is a nut job or she really knows something. I am betting against the former and wagering heavily on the second option.
Please check back soon, I am getting started on the other items as life has finally slowed a bit.
GOATMUG
Goatmug
is an investor that cares about you and your family. Goatmug's Blog - Financial
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