Alternate histories posit Ulysses S. Grant was the last valid American president in 1871 and Pius XII the last valid Catholic pope in 1958

If real history is said to repeat itself, perhaps there is no reason that conspiratorial alternative histories shouldn’t either.

Some members of American sovereign citizen movements and QAnon believe Donald Trump will be “re-inaugurated” on March 4 as the 19th president of a “restored” United States of America. Others of us apparently mistakenly believe Trump served validly, if treasonably, as the 45th president from Jan. 20, 2017 to Jan. 20, 2021.

Prices to rent a room at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C on March 4 have been hiked to $1,331, more than double the $596 price for a guest room for most of that month and nearly triple the lowest cost.

“They believe that March 4, 2021 is the start for the new Republic. March 4 was the start date of the new President until it was changed in 1933,” Marc-André Argentino, a researcher who studies QAnon, tweeted on Jan. 13.

The basis of the sovereign citizen movements and QAnon claim comes from the District of Columbia Organic Act of 1871, which established D.C. as a municipal corporation that is organized as a federal territory, but which they believe didn’t just create a municipal corporation, it turned the United States into a corporation, which apparently is secretly controlled by international bankers and so forth. In reality, the District of Columbia Organic Act of 1871 simply repealed the individual charters of the City of Washington and the City of Georgetown and established a new territorial government for the entire District of Columbia. By doing this, they created a single municipal government or municipal corporation.

Not good enough for the sovereign citizen movements and QAnon, who now claim every president after 1871, when the incumbent was Ulysses S. Grant, who has led the Union Army a few years earlier as commanding general of the United States Army in winning the American Civil War, and later became the 18th president on March 4, 1869, was illegitimate. Does that mean Donald Trump was a poser between 2017 and 2021?

Soon after taking office Grant took steps to return the nation’s currency to a more secure footing, including committing the United States to the full return to the gold standard within 10 years. During the Civil War, Congress had authorized the Treasury to issue banknotes that, unlike the rest of the currency, were not backed by gold or silver. The “greenback” notes, as they were known, were necessary to pay the unprecedented war debts, but they also caused inflation and forced gold-backed money out of circulation; Grant was determined to return the national economy to pre-war monetary standards.

On March 18, 1869, he signed the Public Credit Act of 1869 that guaranteed bondholders would be repaid in “coin or its equivalent”, while greenbacks would gradually be redeemed by the Treasury and replaced by notes backed by specie. This followed a policy of “hard currency, economy and gradual reduction of the national debt.” The classical gold standard existed from the 1870s to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. “In the first part of the 19th century, once the turbulence caused by the Napoleonic Wars had subsided,” says the London-based World Gold Council, “money consisted of either specie (gold, silver or copper coins) or of specie-backed bank issue notes. However, originally only the UK and some of its colonies were on a gold standard, joined by Portugal in 1854. Other countries were usually on a silver or, in some cases, a bimetallic standard.

“In 1871, the newly unified Germany, benefiting from reparations paid by France following the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, took steps which essentially put it on a gold standard. The impact of Germany’s decision, coupled with the then economic and political dominance of the UK and the attraction of accessing London’s financial markets, was sufficient to encourage other countries to turn to gold. However, this transition to a pure gold standard, in some opinions, was more based on changes in the relative supply of silver and gold. Regardless, by 1900 all countries apart from China, and some Central American countries, were on a gold standard. This lasted until it was disrupted by the First World War. Periodic attempts to return to a pure classical Gold Standard were made during the inter-war period, but none survived past the 1930s Great Depression.

“During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, one ounce of gold cost $20.67 in the United States and ₤4.24 in the U.K.,” Michael Klein, professor of International Economic Affairs at the Fletcher School of Tufts University, just outside Boston, wrote last year.”

This meant that someone could convert one British pound to $4.86 and vice versa.

“Countries on the gold standard – which included all major industrial countries during the system’s heyday from 1871 to 1914 – had a fixed price for an ounce of gold and thus a fixed exchange rate with others who used the system,” writes Klein. “They kept the same gold peg throughout the period.

The gold standard stabilized currency values and, in so doing, promoted trade and investment.

Sovereign citizen movements and QAnon believe the U.S. has been run by a group of shadowy investors since 1933, when Franklin D. Roosevelt ended the gold standard. The date of presidential inaugurations was also changed from March 4 to Jan. 20 in 1933.

When it comes to questioning the legitimacy and validity of its number one office holder, some who identify as Catholics long ago had a head start on those from sovereign citizen movements and QAnon waiting for a “re-inaugurated” Donald Trump on March 4 to become president of a “restored” United States of America.

A minority group within the traditionalist movement, sedevacantists claim the Holy See has been vacant, due to the Roman Catholic Church’s espousal of what they see as the heresy of Modernism and that, for lack of a valid pope, the Holy See has been vacant since the death of Pope Venerable Pius XII on Oct. 9, 1958.  The term “sedevacantism” is derived from the Latin phrase sede vacante, which literally means “with the chair [of Saint Peter] vacant.” Sedevacantism as a term in English appears to date from the 1980s.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

Mandelaed: What if it never appeared on TV in Flash Gordon in the 21st or Buck Rogers in the 25th century?

Has metal bucket head man “Mandelaed” me?

What if metal bucket head man, as I like to think of him, never actually appeared in the 25th century Buck Rogers black and white TV series in 1950 or 1951, or in 1954 or 1955 in an episode of Flash Gordon from the 21st century?

What if … none of it was real, or at least that there was no metal bucket head man (it’s hard to describe the appearance of the character exactly, but over his head, if he had one, or in lieu of one if he didn’t, appeared to be something reminiscent of one of those upside down old silver metal wash pails or buckets, yet the rest of him looked more humanoid than like a robot, although he didn’t speak in either case), but I remembered him from my childhood as real?

Well, never fear, the explanation may simply be that I was mandelaed and am displaying a classic case of the “Mandela Effect,” as it is called, although in my case it may or may not be a case of being privately mandelaed, rather than the collective misremembering of common events the phenomenon is usually identified with.

“This form of collective misremembering of common events or details first emerged in 2010, when countless people on the internet falsely remembered Nelson Mandela was dead,” notes Neil Dagnall, reader in applied cognitive psychology at Manchester Metropolitan University in England, in a Feb. 12 piece in The Conversation, based in Toronto. “It was widely believed he had died in prison during the 1980s. In reality, Mandela was actually freed in 1990 and passed away in 2013 – despite some people’s claims they remember clips of his funeral on TV.”

Paranormal consultant Fiona Broome, discussing the possibility of alternate memories and alternate realities, was one of the two people who coined the phrase “Mandela Effect” during a conversation in Dragon Con‘s “green room” in late 2009 to explain this collective misremembering, and then “other examples started popping up all over the internet,” Dagnall says. “For instance, it was wrongly recalled that C-3PO from Star Wars was gold, actually one of his legs is silver. Likewise, people often wrongly believe that the Queen in Snow White says, ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall.’ The correct phrase is “magic mirror on the wall.”

In an Oct. 13, 2016 article, BuzzFeed staff writer Christopher Hudspeth, lists 20 examples of the Mandela Effect, ranging from the common misspelling of Oscar Mayer, the famous brand of hot dogs and lunch meat, as Oscar Meyer, to the Monopoly board game mascot, Rich Uncle Pennybags, having a monocle, when he doesn’t.

In a similar vein, as I wrote here in a March 25, 2015 post headlined “If there was a biblical equivalent to a mondegreen, it might well be the famous 45th verse from the fifth chapter of the Gospel of St. Matthew” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/03/25/if-there-was-a-biblical-equivalent-to-a-mondegreen-it-might-well-be-the-famous-45th-verse-from-the-fifth-chapter-of-the-gospel-of-st-matthew/) when you “mishear the lyrics to a song it is called a mondegreen, which is a sort of aural malapropism. Instead of saying the wrong word, you hear the wrong word. The word mondegreen is generally used for misheard song lyrics, although technically it can apply to any speech. A mondegreen is a mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase as a result of near-homophony, in a way that gives it a new meaning.” Hudspeth cites the example of “We Are the Champions” by Queen where “many of those familiar with the song remember the final lyrics being ‘No time for losers, ’cause we are the champions … of the world!’ Guess what? There is no ‘of the world!’ The song just ends, and it’s driving people crazy because they feel 100% sure that they’ve heard otherwise in the past.”

Broome explains the Mandela Effect s differences arising from movement between parallel realities (the multiverse). This is based on the theory that within each universe alternative versions of events and objects exist.

“Broome also draws comparisons between existence and the holodeck of the USS Enterprise from Star Trek, writes Dagnall. “The holodeck was a virtual reality system, which created recreational experiences. By her explanation, memory errors are software glitches. This is explained as being similar to the film The Matrix.”

Broome has described the Mandela Effect this way: “The ‘Mandela Effect’ is what happens when someone has a clear, personal memory of something that never happened in this reality.

“Many people – mostly total strangers – seem to remember several of the exact same events with the exact same details. However, those memories are different from what’s in history books, newspaper archives, and so on.”

Other theories propose that the Mandela Effect is evidence of  changes in history caused by time travellers.

The X-Files, appropriately enough, had a fine real-time nod to fake news and the Trumpocalypse, while at the same time staying campy and conspiratorially self-referential in its treatment of the Mandela Effect this year in season 11, episode four, “The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat,” which aired Jan. 24. Writes Brian Tallerico on Vulture, the culture and entertainment site from New York magazine: “We’re introduced to the Mandela effect through the story of Reggie Something, played by Brian Huskey. We meet him in full Deep Throat mode, chewing sunflower seeds in a parking garage, having a clandestine meeting with Mulder. He knows he’s going to seem crazy, so he gives Mulder a very personal example of the Mandela effect, revealing to him that his favorite episode of The Twilight Zone, “The Lost Martian,” doesn’t really exist. Of course, we know it doesn’t, but Mulder is convinced that he saw it when he was a kid. He rummages through his belongings to find it, leading to the great line when Scully suggests it might be a different series: “Confuse The Twilight Zone with The Outer Limits?! Do you even KNOW ME?!?!”

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

 

Closing Time: Last hoist for Thompson’s Birchtree Mine

On the surface, it was an unseasonably warm and brilliant orange early autumn day. Underground, it was closing time. Not last call, but rather the hard rock mining on-the-job equivalent: last hoist.

This day has almost come for Birchtree Mine in Thompson, Manitoba before. In fact, the day did come for Birchtree for most of a decade in the 1980s, as the mine was on “care and maintenance” because of unfavourable market conditions from December 1977 through 1989.

And on Oct. 18, 2012, Vale had announced care and maintenance was being considered for Birchtree Mine in 10 months time in August 2013. After finding $100 million in cost savings at its Manitoba Operations, bringing its cost per metric tonne for finished nickel to under US$10,000, Birchtree Mine would receive on May 6, 2013 a reprieve that lasted almost 4½ years. Until now.

As well as nickel, Birchtree has deposits of copper, cobalt, gold, silver, platinum and palladium. Re-opening of Birchtree was considered in 1981, but was deferred in favour of development of the Thompson open pit mine. Care and maintenance is a term used in the mining industry to describe processes and conditions on a closed minesite where there is potential to recommence operations at a later date. During a care and maintenance phase, production is stopped but the site is managed to ensure it remains in a safe and stable condition.

Preparation to place Birchtree on care and maintenance again some 28 years after its last mining production 12-year hiatus begins two days hence on Monday. Asset recovery is expected to be complete by mid-November, and the plan is for the mine to be officially on care and maintenance by Dec. 31. The current life of mine plan has long anticipated the closure of Birchtree Mine at some point around now. Vale, however, could, as was the case with Inco in 1989, reopen Birchtree Mine should nickel prices rebound more strongly than forecast in the next few years, and the company has said it believes there is a future for the mine.

The current London Metal Exchange (LME) price of nickel per pound would likely have to at least double from US$4.72 to make reopening Birchtree for a second time economically viable. While Thompson is noted for its high quality 99.9 per cent pure electrolytic nickel that is almost free of contaminants such as lead or zinc,  resulting in it often commanding a higher price than the LME price, Birchtree has relatively lower nickel grades. Nickel prices peaked at $25.51 per pound on the LME in May 2007, just months after Vale, the Brazilian mining giant, bought Inco in a $19.9-billion all-cash tender takeover offer deal in October 2006. Nickel prices have fallen nearly 70 per cent in the past six years as international supply far outstrips demand.

The nickel find near Manasan Falls, four kilometres east of Birchtree Lake and about five kilometres southwest of Thompson, that would become Birchtree Mine was first announced publicly to the world on April 22, 1964 by Henry S. Wingate, chairman of the board of the International Nickel Company of Canada (INCO) Limited.

There are several other key dates in Thompson’s early mining history: Borehole 11962 – the so-called “Discovery Hole” at Cook Lake, a diamond drill exploration hole – was collared Feb. 5, 1956 and assayed positive for nickel.

There’s also the Dec. 3, 1956 signing of the founding 33-page typewritten double-spaced agreement creating Thompson between the Province of Manitoba’s F.C. Bell, minister of mines and natural resources, and International Nickel Company of Canada Limited’s Ralph Parker, vice-president and general manager, and secretary William F. Kennedy. As well, there was Manitoba Liberal-Progressive Premier Douglas Campbell driving the last spike in the Canadian National Railway (CNR) 30-mile branch line from Sipiwesk to Thompson Oct. 20, 1957, and March 25, 1961, when Progressive Conservative Premier Duff Roblin cut the nickel ribbon to officially open the $185-million smelter and refinery, set to close also next August, as the world’s first fully integrated nickel operation, and with its 1,800 employees, second in size in the “free world” at the time only to Inco’s Sudbury operations. Vale’s Thompson operations, landholdings or mining rights, consist of at least 2,947 order-in-council (OIC) leases, mineral leases and mining claims “negotiated as part of an agreement entered into in 1956 between Vale Inco and the Province of Manitoba covering the development of the Thompson nickel deposits,” noted filings by the company in 2004 and 2008 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Thompson, originally a townsite within the newly-created 975-square-mile Local Government District (LGD) of Mystery Lake, within the Dauphin Judicial District, from 1956 to 1966, became a town on Jan. 3, 1967 and a city just 3½ years later on July 7, 1970.

Wingate, a lawyer, was born in Talas, Turkey, the son and grandson of American missionaries, and was raised in Northfield, Minnesota. He was with the New York law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell from 1929 to 1935, when he joined INCO as assistant secretary. The sinking of the Birchtree Mine development shaft began on Ink 6 in 1964. The three-compartment shaft was completed to 1,373 feet a year later.

Birchtree began production in 1966. Between 1965 and 1967 the production shaft on Pip 301 was sunk to 2,800 feet, with levels between 300 and 2,300 feet at 200-foot intervals. Inco announced plans in 2000 to move ahead with a $70.4-million deepening of Birchtree Mine to be completed in 2002 and help extend the mine’s life by at least 15 years. In its Exploration and Development Highlights 2001 report, the Manitoba Science, Technology, Energy and Mines Department estimated the shaft deepening would access proven reserves of 13.6 million tonnes of 1.79 per cent nickel and “extend Birchtree’s production to 2016.”

As a result of the Birchtree Mine closing, about 200 high-paid jobs are expected to disappear from the local economy over the next few months – a very big though by no means fatal hit to the local economy – including not only Vale employees but other mining sector contractors and support service positions.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

Will we see the return of Inco Ltd. to TSX next summer as Vale re-thinks base metals?

Iron ore accounts for three-fourths of Brazilian mining giant Vale’s revenue.  With economic growth in China slowing and iron-ore production from Vale’s rivals in Australia speeding up, the benchmark price for the steel-making material has fallen to around $70-$75 per metric ton recently, little more than one-third of the 2011 peak of around $190 per metric ton. Mining analysts estimate that it costs Vale $67 to produce a metric ton of iron ore and ship it to China, making for a very tight profit margin at current commodity prices. Vale’s shares as of last week had fallen 42 per cent year-to-date. What to do?

Vale CEO Murilo Ferreira, in an annual presentation to investors Dec. 2, said the company is considering selling shares of between 30 per cent and 40 per cent of its base-metals division. The division is made up primarily of copper and nickel mines in Brazil, in Indonesia’s island province of Sulawesi, an hour’s flight north of Bali, on the southern tip of Grand Terre, the main island in New Caledonia, an overseas territory of France, east of Australia, and Canada, including nickel mining, milling, smelting and refining in Thompson, Manitoba, where copper and cobalt, along with associated gold, silver, platinum, sulphur, selenium and palladium deposits, are also mined.

The Initial Public Offering (IPO) would be intended, Ferreira said, to “unlock” value in the base metals division, although specifics haven’t been worked out nor has the sale been proposed to Vale’s board of directors. The Thompson smelter and refinery, which opened March 25, 1961, was the free world’s first fully integrated nickel operation and built at a cost of $185 million. Mining analysts believe Vale’s base metals division may be worth $30-billion to $35-billion, including the assumption of debt.

Rio de Janeiro-based Vale has mining operations on five continents in 38 countries. Its base metals business is headquartered in Toronto. Vale is the second largest mining company in the world by market capitalization, surpassed only by Melbourne, Australia-based BHP Billiton Ltd. (BHP), and the second-largest nickel producer after Moscow-based OAO GMK Norilsk Nickel. About 75 percent of Vale’s nickel production comes from Canada. Vale is the world’s largest iron-ore producer.

Ferreira said an IPO would hinge on a “fair price” for the base metals shares. Thompson Reuters data suggests such an IPO could  raise $5-billion to $8-billion, making it the biggest in Canadian history, eclipsing Manulife Financial Corp.’s record $2.12-billion IPO in 1999.

Vale would use the money realized from an IPO pay for key projects in the midst of sliding iron ore prices. While the base metals business is highly profitable for Vale, analysts see it as a lost division with the larger company focus on iron ore.

Nickel prices peaked at $25.51 per pound on the London Metal Exchange (LME) in May 2007 just months after Vale bought Inco Ltd. in a $19.9-billion all-cash tender takeover offer deal in October 2006.  In December 2008, nickel briefly dipped below $4 per pound and was $4.31 per pound on March 9, 2009 when the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at a 12-year low of 6,547.05 – its lowest close since April 1997, losing 20 per cent of its value in only six weeks.

Scotiabank said in mid-April it now expects nickel to average $7.66 (U.S.) per pound this year. At the beginning of 2014, nickel was about US$6.50 per pound, compared to just under US$8 per pound a year earlier. The LME price today is $7.43 (U.S.) per pound, with the price being supported less by demand than supply restrictions because Indonesia, the world’s largest nickel producer, last January 2014 banned all exports of unprocessed nickel ore. Indonesia’s Constitutional Court recently upheld the legality of the ban. Nickel has risen 19 percent this year, the most among six main metals traded on the LME and has made the third-biggest gain in the Bloomberg Commodity Index of 22 raw materials.

The Wall Street Journal’s Paul Kiernan reported Dec. 2 Vale “failed to round up buyers for some nickel operations in Canada, according to two people familiar with the matter. Last year, Vale tried to get a partner to buy into the sprawling operation at Thompson, Manitoba, which includes two mills and a refinery, and this turned into an attempt to sell assets, one of the people said.” Vale’s Chief Financial Officer Luciano Siani is reported in the same story to have said the “Thompson complex isn’t for sale.”

Jennifer Maki, a chartered accountant who joined Vale in Canada almost 12 years ago in January 2003, was named Nov. 14  as Vale’s executive director of base metals as Peter Poppinga replaced long-serving José Carlos Martins as executive director for ferrous minerals.

Poppinga, who had replaced Tito Martins as chief executive officer of Vale Canada and executive director of base metals and information technology in November 2011, led 16 operating sites around the world and in Vale’s quest for asset base optimization over the last three years.

Maki, who has an undergraduate degree in commerce from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, has served as executive vice-president and chief financial officer of Vale Canada since September 2007. Before joining Vale as an assistant controller for financial planning in 2003, she had worked as a chartered accountant for PricewaterhouseCoopers for almost 10 years.

In a March 2013 interview with Upfront, the in-house magazine of PricewaterhouseCoopers, her former employer, Maki observed, among other things, that Vale’s “workforce in Brazil, for example, is much more mobile and they’re much more willing to pursue opportunities outside of their home cities and towns than people are in Canada.” Maki, commenting on how Inco’s culture changed after its 2007 merger with Vale, said, ” We’ve probably become more performance driven by key performance indicators and metrics. You see it right through Vale from their compensation packages to how people are rewarded. I think part of that is coming from a country like Brazil, where there’s a very hungry group of people who have grown up in a developing country. I think they’ve instilled that here and made some major changes across our Canadian operations.”

Since last January, Maki has been the chief financial and administrative officer for base metals, as well as participating in the management of base metals businesses outside Canada. She has been a member of the Board of Commissioners of PT Vale Indonesia Tbk (PTVI) since 2007 and recently became its president commissioner.

Poppinga was born in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. He holds a master’s degree in business administration from Fundacao Dom Cabral in Brazil. He received a degree in geology from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in 1980 and Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg in Erlangen, Germany and a post-graduate degree in geology and mine engineering from Clausthal University of Technology in Clausthal-Zellerfeld Germany in 1984, with specialist diplomas in geo-statistics from the Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto in Minas Gerais, Brazil, and strategic mega trends from Asia Focus, Kellogg Singapore.

He speaks four languages including Portuguese, English, German and French. He worked for S.A. Mineracao da Trindade (SAMITRI) from 1984 until it was acquired by Vale in 1999, when he joined Vale as commercial director and general manager of the iron ore business in New York for Vale subsidiary Rio Doce America before moving to Rio Doce International, Belgium where he led Vale’s market and sales activities in Europe from 2000 to 2004. Between 2005 and 2007, he was president of Vale International S.A. in Switzerland, and from 2008 until the end of 2009 he was executive vice-president human resources at Vale (then Vale Inco) in Toronto.

In January 2010, Poppinga moved to Australia when he was named vice-president for base metals operations for the Asia and Pacific region where he was responsible for operations in Indonesia, New Caledonia, China and Japan.

Ferreira is a former CEO of Vale Canada, serving almost two years as the top Vale official in Canada, starting when the Brazilian mining giant finalized its purchase of Inco in January 2007. He had originally joined Vale in 1977. In 1998 he was appointed executive officer of commerce and finance at Vale do Rio Doce Alumínio S.A.-ALUVALE, a holding company of Vale that was merged into Vale in December 2003. Much of his experience is in aluminum and ferroalloys.

He was chief executive officer of Vale Inco, currently known as Vale Canada, in Toronto and executive director of nickel and base metals sales of Vale when he left the company for personal reasons at the end of 2008 and was replaced by Tito Martins. Ferreira rejoined Vale and replaced Roger Agnelli as CEO on May 22, 2011.

Vale is controlled by Valepar SA, which is owned by Previ, the employee pension fund of state-controlled Banco do Brasil SA; Bradespar SA, an industrial holding company; Mitsui & Co, Japan’s second-largest trading company; BNDES Participações SA, or BNDESpar, and Elétron – and the Brazilian government owns 12 so-called “golden shares” in Vale that gives it veto power over corporate decisions. Created on June 1, 1942 by the Brazilian government, Vale was privatized on May 7, 1997.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22