"In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect

savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of

value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding
illegal, as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for
example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any
other good, and thereafter declined to accept checks as payment for
goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-
created bank credit would be worthless as a claim on goods. The
financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for
the owners of wealth to protect themselves.

This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against

gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of
wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as
a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no
difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold
standard." - Greenspan 1966

"The world will soon wake up to the reality that everyone is broke and
can collect nothing from the bankrupt, who are owed unlimited amounts
by the insolvent, who are attempting to make late payments on a bank
holiday in the wrong country, with an unacceptable currency, against
defaulted collateral, of which nobody is sure who holds title."

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick

society

Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man's

inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary. - Niebuhr

You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train

“Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t

want to know.” - Huxley

Everything that the government provides, it must first confiscate from

the private sector.

We don't need tablets administered to us ten at a time in tablet form

on pain of death to be able to have a moral argument.

You have controlled your fear well, now release your anger.

Success is getting what you want - happiness is wanting what you get.

The only way you generate wealth is you make it, you mine it or you
grow it. Just exchanging things back and forth, services, it doesn't
generate wealth. It just moves it, and I think there's starting to be a
realization of that.

* Find at least one (and preferably several) places outside of your

home country to escape to. Strongly consider buying property there.

* Consider a second citizenship program; at a minimum, set up residency

in another country.
* Store physical and paper assets outside of your home country, and
outside of the electronic banking system.

* Demand privacy.

* Keep some investment capital at the ready so that you can jump on
phenomenal deals as they arise

* Look for opportunities for additional income that are not constrained
by your geography

I swear by my Life and my love of it that I will never live for the
sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for the sake of mine.

"The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public

debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered
and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed
lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work instead of
living on public assistance." - Cicero, 55 BC - NOT - Taylor Caldwell's
fictionalized account of the life of the senator...

"The love of money as a possession--a distinguished from the love of

money as a means to the enjoyments of life--will be recognized for what
it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal,
semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shutter to
the specialists in mental disease." - John Maynard Keynes

Wine is sunlight held together by water.

Awareness itself is ultimately destructive.....

The (true) function of government is to coordinate, carry-out, and

cover-up globalism and enterprise corruption.

The perfect is the enemy of the good.

it is easier for the world to accept a simple lie.. than a complex truth

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
 The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

This divide-and-conquer principle is true of any large system. The way

it plays itself out in any culture is to bestow on some few individuals
favor, on some few - grief, and to approach the large middle with a
carrot in one hand, a stick in the other with these dismal examples
illuminating the discourse. In simple terms, some are bribed into
loyalty, but seldom so securely they become complacent; others sent
despairing, but seldom without hope since a crumb might eventually fall
their way. Those whose loyalties are purchased function as spies to
report defiance or as cheerleaders for new initiatives.

Information is not reality.

A working definition of immaturity might include an excessive need for

other people to interpret information for us.

Might not the problem of good and evil, our faculty for telling right
from wrong, be connected with our faculty for thought - Hannah Arendt

In the hold of every sunken ship, you will always find a chart

Infinity, paradox, harmony, action...

One of the most important of all secrets is that there are no future
facts.

“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they
go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one
by one.”

I’d bet on the prepared realists over the blind optimists every time

“We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to high office.”
– Aesop

"It maketh the flowers grow, and thus we call it good."

Capitalism loves competition, as long as, A: it is the people’s capital

involved, and B: it is not the capitalists doing the competing.

When you have diarrhea, every fart is a dangerous undertaking.

meaning is a human construction

"and the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more
painful than the risk it took to blossom" - Anais Nin

“Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more
popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew
last year. Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned
full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with
information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of
motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort
don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or
sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.”

Although all people have the power to control the outcomes of almost
any situation, only the people that have already learned about their
power of control bother to use it, i.e. we’ve believe we have no
control unless we have been previously taught that we have. We are not
helpless, its not pervasive.

In the twentieth century, sovereignties began to reassert their

monopoly of money, and under the pretext of assuring full employment
through the manipulation of the interest rate, have used their power
for the spread of statism, the socialization of activity, the
annihilation of private property, and the extinction of individual
liberty.

What is money? Don’t list attributes … money should only be one thing -
“A Carrier of Value, a Safeguard of Wealth.” Fiat is neither…

modern banking seeks to convert our debts, our lack of wealth, our
promises to pay from proceeds of wealth which is still unproduced and
still in the future, into money.

I remember when I lost my mind

There was something so pleasant about that place.
Even your emotions had an echo
In so much space

And when you're out there

Without care,
Yeah, I was out of touch
But it wasn't because I didn't know enough I just knew too much

Does that make me crazy?

Probably

And I hope that you are having the time of your life But think twice,
that's my only advice

Come on now, who do you think you are,

Ha ha bless your soul
You really think you're in control

Well, I think you're crazy

Just like me

My heroes had the heart to lose their lives out on a limb And all I
remember is thinking, I want to be like them Ever since I was little,
it looked like fun And it's no coincidence I've come And I can die when
I'm done

Maybe I'm crazy

Maybe you're crazy
Maybe we're crazy
Probably

Infinite is infinite.

Understanding is infinite.

Truth exists, only falsehood has to be invented.

Inspiration is everywhere. If you are ready to appreciate it, an ant

can be one of the wonders of the universe.

Victimless crimes are the lifeline of the RIGHT virus. And there is a
growing recognition, even in official quarters, that victimless crimes
should be removed from the books or subject to minimal penalties. Those
individuals who cannot or will not mind their business cling to the
victimless-crime concept, equating drug use and private sexual behavior
with robbery and murder. If the right to mind one's own business is
recognized, the whole shit disposition is untenable and Hell hath no
vociferous fury than an endangered parasite.

A paranoid man is a man who knows a little about what's going on. -
Burroughs

You are a Shit Spotter. It's satisfying work … We have observed that
most of the trouble in the world has been caused by ten to twenty
percent of folks who can't mind their own business, because they have
no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus. Now
your virus is an obligate cellular parasite and my contention is that
evil is quite literally a virus parasite occupying a certain brain area
which we may term the RIGHT center. The mark of a basic shit is that he
has to be right. And right here we must make a diagnostic distinction
between the hard-core virus-occupied shit and a plain, ordinary, mean
no-good son of a bitch. Some of these sons of bitches don't cause any
trouble at all, just want to be left alone. - Burroughs

Capitalism is about one thing: aggregating the surplus productive value

of the public for private interests…

“The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man's rights,

which means: to protect him from physical violence...The only proper
functions of a government are: the police, to protect you from
criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the
courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by
others, to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective
law.”

"THESE are the items that matter for economic growth: jobs and income"

Sure, but how do you get companies to start hiring and paying their
employees better ?
With a typical cyclical recession, the recipe involves cutting
corporate and income taxes. But that's not the beast with which we are
now dealing…this is going to be a very long cycle of deleveraging.

On the way up of the debt bubble during the last 30 years, we have been
pulling forward demand that would otherwise have come later. On the way
down, it's the opposite effect, we are pushing away demand that would
otherwise have come earlier. And that's true whether the deleveraging
comes from paying down debt, restructuring debt, or defaulting. That
deleveraging from households and businesses will take decades, and
that's if the government doesn't mess around and tries to slow down the
process. In that case it could take much, much longer.

Aggregate demand = GDP + change in debt

On the way up at the top of the bubble in 2007 we were adding $5

trillion in increases in private and public debt to aggregate demand,
so aggregate demand was $19 trillion.

With deleveraging we are now dealing with a negative change in debt.

Last year change in debt was negative 800 billion and that's despite
the government raising its debt by almost $2 trillion. When the private
deleveraging is in full swing and the government won't be able to raise
its debt anymore, we'll be subtracting $5 trillion to aggregate demand
which will be less than $9 trillion, compared with $19 trillion in
bubblicious times. Now we already have overcapacity today so just
imagine what it's going to be like when aggregate demand is half of
what it was like before.

So what miracle do you think is going to induce companies to start

hiring and paying their employees better?

Monetarists like Bernanke don't even understand what is going on. They
are looking at Money Supply M2 which is a tiny fraction of our total
outstanding debt level ($7 trillion versus $52 trillion) and think they
can inflate the economy with homeopathic doses of a trillion QE per
year. They'd have to do TEN times more if they wanted to get back to
the level of aggregate demand of bubble times. Needless to say, if they
did that, the dollar would stop being accepted internationally and we'd
get a full blown currency crisis engulfing the whole OECD.

There is NO SOLUTION other than a very, very long depression. Forget

the government whatever it does can only prolong it even more.

Captain Renault: What in heaven's name brought you to Casablanca?

Rick: My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.

CR: The waters? What waters? We're in the desert!

R: I was misinformed.

"You can shear a sheep many times, but you can skin him only once."
Is it progress when a cannibal uses a knife and fork?

Once you sacrifice liberty to the state, the state will not restore it
without a fight

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us
with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

“The very word 'secrecy' is repugnant in a free and open society; and
we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret
societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long
ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of
pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify
it. ”

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the
dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words
had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright Their frail deeds might
have danced in a green bay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, And learn, too late,
they grieved it on its way, Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight Blind eyes could
blaze like meteors and be gay, Rage, rage against the dying of the
light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless, me now with
your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Some people never go crazy, what truly horrible lives they must live.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. –

Clarke

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can

only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves
largess of the public treasury. From that time on the majority always
votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public
treasury, with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose
fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of
the world's great civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have
progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; from
spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty
to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to
complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependency;
from dependency back again to bondage.”

In a purely fiat regime, the question of a general (monetary) deflation

and inflation is a policy decision. Anyone who does not understand this
does not understand the modern mechanism of money creation. As the
pundit said, "The mind rebels..." - Jesse

Health Care: If your only objective is minimizing cost, let everyone

die untreated…

Chocolate rations have been increased to 20gr/week

It sates itself on the life-blood

of fated men,
paints red the powers' homes
with crimson gore.
Black become the sun's beams
in the summers that follow,
weathers all treacherous.
Do you still seek to know? And what?

Speculators are often reviled, but unlike professors, journalists,

bankers, bureaucrats and others, they (particularly those without the
free option of society's bailout) bear the costs of their mistakes.
Speculators embrace the “moral hazard.”

Like sands in the hour glass, so go the days of our lives.

I shuffle money around, there are rivers of it, creeks, streams, lakes
and oceans. I get wet every now and then, get wet...

the only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look

respectable.

Can't change the world until you change yourself…

Heals to Jesus and twenty toes…

Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be
dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War
is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes … known
instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.… No
nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare. -
James Madison, 1795

But it is the Western mind that is so incapable of seeing the many

shades of gray in every situation, the subtle gradations in a range of
choices that I believe Others not only sees but are already actively
pursuing.

Some things take care of themselves

Most propaganda is not designed to fool the critical thinker, but only
to give moral cowards an excuse not to think at all.

Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and
find your liberty. (In – Dependence)

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old
ones.

In the absence of a gold standard, there is no way to protect savings

from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value.
If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal,
as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for example, to
convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good and
thereafter decline to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits
would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit
would be worthless as claims on goods. The financial policy of the
welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to
be able to protect themselves.

This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against

gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of
wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as
a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no
difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold
standard. – AG ‘66

If righteousness is not made profitable, then corruption will prevail.

“Those who don’t build must burn.”

In these sentiments, Sir, I agree to this Constitution with all its

faults, if they are such; because I think a general Government
necessary for us, and there is no form of Government but what may be a
blessing to the people if well administered, and believe farther that
this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, (but) can
only end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the
people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being
incapable of any other.

Dick sucking powder...

"It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from
falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the
government from falling into error"

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence…

Extraordinary lies require extraordinary cover up…

And homeless near a thousand homes I stood, and near a thousand tables
pined and wanted food.

"You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its
charter, I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true,
gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin
fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of
vipers and thieves."

Whenever possible, you oppose the forces of entropy and thwart their
relentless derangement.

Gilbert: [hesitating before killing Simonson] Uh... they told me to

uh... to say that they were sorry, but that you had become...
unreliable.
Simonson: That's true.
Gilbert: They can't risk, uh... catastrophe, they say.
Simonson: They're right.
Gilbert: Then, uh... this is right?
Simonson: No, not right... Necessary.
Gilbert: To who?
Simonson: To... God.

Keep calm, nothing to see here, carry on, move along…

Bankers own the earth; take it away from them, but leave them with the
power to create credit, and with the stroke of a pen they will create
enough money to buy it back again.

Hyperinflation => Monetary panic in the face of crushing inflation

Deflation => A prerequisite and cause of hyperinflation

Deflation => Balance sheet repair thru reduction of nominal debt levels

I'll allow prayer in schools, but you have to let me teach biology and
algebra in church.

Corruption is a tree, whose branches are of an immeasurable length:

they spread everywhere; and the dew that drops from thence hath
infected some chairs and stools of authority.

I'm so against working I wouldn't even take a blow job...

There's letters seal'd, and my two schoolfellows, Whom I will trust as

I will adders fang'd— They bear the mandate, they must sweep my way And
marshal me to knavery. Let it work; For 'tis the sport to have the
enginer Hoist with his own petard, an't shall go hard But I will delve
one yard below their mines And blow them at the moon. Hamlet

Ignorance is Strength, Freedom is Slavery, War is Peace

In the long run, the aggregate of decisions of individual businessmen,

exercising individual judgment in a free economy, even if often
mistaken, is less likely to do harm than the centralized decisions of a
government, and certainly the harm is likely to be counteracted faster.
When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you. Nietzsche

…and we looked into the abyss ... and decided that we liked what we saw
in there.

You want the world to be fair, so you pretend it is…

(…people who have a strong tendency to believe in a just world also

tend to be more religious, more authoritarian, more conservative, more
likely to admire political leaders and existing social institutions,
and more likely to have negative attitudes toward underprivileged
groups.) (Just World Fallacy)

Be careful. People like to be told what they already know. Remember

that. They get uncomfortable when you tell them new things. New things…
well, new things aren’t what they expect. They like to know that, say,
a dog will bite a man. That is what dogs do. They don’t want to know
that man bites a dog, because the world is not supposed to happen like
that. In short, what people think they want is news, but what they
really crave is olds…Not news but olds, telling people that what they
think they already know is true - Terry Pratchet (Conformation Bias,
Punditry)

In our personal lives we tend to come up with a hypothesis and then

work to prove it right instead of working to prove it wrong. Once
satisfied with rightness, we stop searching for proof…In science, we
move closer to the truth by seeking evidence to the contrary. Perhaps
the same method should inform our opinions as well.

Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's
greed. - Ghandi

It's better to be single and wish you were married, than to be married
and wish you were single.

The coldness of the unenlightened human heart and the obtuse vanity of
people in wishing suffering on others, with a kind of perverse self-
righteousness, is sometimes a wonder to be hold.

A Great Place to Work

Empowered to Lead

Power of Collaboration

Freedom to Create Ideas

Building Consensus

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it
watching TV. http://www.herecomeseverybody.org/2008/04/looking-for-
the-mouse.html

To abandon oneself to principles is really to die - and to die for an

impossible love which is the contrary of love. Camus
“I am not a Democrat, because I have no idea what their economic
policies are; And I am not a Republican, because I know precisely what
their economic policies are.”

Our life must have meaning for us to value it.

Imagine an HR department within the US Executive Branch which would,

“oversee the appointment of the entire U.S. cabinet, state governors
and their deputies, the mayors of major cities, the heads of all
federal regulatory commissions, the chief executives of GE, Exxon-
Mobil, Wal-Mart and about fifty of the remaining largest U.S.
companies, the justices of the Supreme Court and every other Jurist
across the nation, the editors of the New York Times, the Wall Street
Journal and the Washington Post, the bosses of the TV networks like FOX
and CNN and all the cable stations, the presidents of Yale, Harvard,
Princeton and the UC System and other big universities, and the heads
of think-tanks like the Brookings Institute and the Heritage
Foundation. Not only that, the vetting process would take place behind
closed doors, and the appointments announced without any accompanying
explanations why they had been made.” Incomprehensible?

Allow me to issue and control a nation’s currency, and I care not who
makes its laws. Mayer Rothschild

Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men,
undergo the fatigue of supporting it. Thomas Paine

Allen: That's quite a lovely Jackson Pollock, isn't it?

Museum Girl: Yes, it is.
Allen: What does it say to you?
Museum Girl: It restates the negativeness of the universe. The hideous
lonely emptiness of existence. Nothingness. The predicament of Man
forced to live in a barren, Godless eternity like a tiny flame
flickering in an immense void with nothing but waste, horror and
degradation, forming a useless bleak straitjacket in a black absurd
cosmos.
Allen: What are you doing Saturday night?
Museum Girl: Committing suicide.
Allen: What about Friday night?

One ounce of gold with a one carat diamond in a platinum setting with a
silver chain…

"Contempt for Workers is the Religion of Elites"

Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present
controls the past

Competency has been replaced with authority

love is merely an emotional adaptation...to a physical necessity

All your base are belong to us. You have no chance to survive make your
time
When people lose it all, they LOSE it.

Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of joy you
must have somebody to divide it with. - Twain

“…take the blue pill and….the story ends, you wake up in your bed and
believe whatever you want to believe", or take the red pill, where "you
stay in wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes."

On a long enough timeline the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the

Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the
Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my
own church. - Paine

The first rule of hypnotism is: “In the battle between logic and
emotion, emotion always wins.”

I'd buy that for dollar.

But let us be generous. We will not shoot them. We will not pour salt
water into them, nor bury them in bedbugs, nor bridle them up into a
"swan dive," nor keep them on sleepless "stand-up" for a week, nor kick
them with jackboots, nor beat them with rubber truncheons, nor squeeze
their skulls with iron rings, nor push them into a cell so that they
lie atop one another like pieces of baggage - we will not do any of the
things they did! But for the sake of our country and our children we
have the duty to seek them all out and bring them all to trial! Not to
put them on trial so much as their crimes. And to compel each one of
them to announce loudly: "Yes, I was an executioner and a murderer."
ASol

Chip, dips, chains, whips…candle wax on the nipples…

He missed an excellent opportunity to keep his mouth shut.

Bring out ... the comfy chair.

If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without
bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not
too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with
all the odds against you and only a small chance of survival. There may
even be a worse case: you may have to fight when there is no hope of
victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves. - Paine

I reject your reality and substitute my own.

"When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to
remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for
the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them
to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not
ask, 'Who is destroying the world? You are.”

“It has always seemed strange to me… the things we admire in men;
kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling,
are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we
detest; sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-
interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality
of the first they love the produce of the second.” - John Steinbeck

“The problem is debt, and you don’t cure debt with debt.”

"Everyone has a plan until they get hit" - Mike Tyson

How are the mighty fallen, and the weapons of their warfare perished. 2
Samuel 1:27

"Every thing secret degenerates, even the administration of justice;

nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and
publicity (the light of day)." John Emerich Lord Acton

3 minutes at 355 degrees, no, not Jews you anti-Semites, this is for
Lays Potato Chips.

That is a strong pain reaction…

You are literally too stupid to insult...

Charles Bukowski

there is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the
slow movement of the hands of a clock

people so tired
mutilated
either by love or no love

people just are not good to each other

one on one

the rich are not good to the rich

the poor are not good to the poor.

we are afraid

our educational system tells us

that we can all be
big-ass winners

it hasn't told us
about the gutters
or the suicides

or the terror of one person

aching in one place
alone

untouched
unspoken to

watering a plant
Gold is the 'mirror' of fiat currencies. Are governments and central
banks doing a good job of protecting and maintaining the value of their
currencies. Is spending well in balance with taxation? Gold is the
barometer of profligacy and corruption. This is why corrupt statists
fear and despise it.

Citizens increasingly hiding transactions positively correlates with

government corruption.

When central banks can digitize unlimited dollars to buy precious

metals, then the dollar value of the metals will increase.

Silver has become too valuable to use as money. President Lyndon Johnson

History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse,
intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control
over governments by controlling money and its issuance - James Madison

The refusal of King George III to allow the colonies to operate an

honest money system, which freed the ordinary man from the clutches of
the money manipulators, was probably the prime cause of the American
Revolution - Ben Franklin

Can't say nobody warned you…You were warned when the Patriot Act
passed. You were warned when Total Information Awareness was quietly
refunded. You were warned when the Office of Homeland Security was
created. When the government coerced the telecoms into tapping your
calls and recording your conversations, you were warned. You were
warned when an American citizen was arrested on American soil, denied
his habeas rights, tortured to madness and then sentenced to life in
prison. You were warned when 'protest zones' were instituted, when
loyalty oaths were demanded to attend campaign speeches, and citizens
with the wrong tee shirt or bumper sticker were visited and questioned
by the FBI. We lost our freedoms *years* ago, while half the nation hid
under the bed with their six pack, duct tape and plastic wrap and the
other half wept from feeling the pain of the unfairly demonized...

The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names. Ancient

Chinese Proverb

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. (Bible - Prov. 1:7)

The beginning of wisdom is a definition of terms. Socrates

“When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion —
when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission
from men who produce nothing — when you see money flowing to those who
deal, not in goods, but in favors — when you see that men get richer by
graft and pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against
them, but protect them against you — when you see corruption being
rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice — you may know that your
society is doomed.” Ayn Rand

ABUNDANCE EXISTS

CREATE
KEEP IT SIMPLE

HAVE FUN

SMILE

BE COURTEOUS

DEMAND GOOD SERVICE

PROVIDE GOOD SERVICE

DANCE

BE WISE

EMBRACE SOLITUDE

MAKE YOUR SPACE YOURS

BE YOUNG

DRINK GOOD BEER

TURN OFF THE TV

WALK

BE WELL

FACE REALTY

SAY, "I DON'T KNOW."

LISTEN

WONDER

PUSH BOUNDARIES

BE PEACEFUL

QUACK

NEED LITTLE

WANT LESS

BE STRONG

LOVE MORE

SING

KEEP IN TOUCH
BE WELL

EAT GOOD FOOD

DRINK GOOD WINE

MAKE NEW FRIENDS

DISBELEIVE

BE SKEPTICAL

EMBRACE CHANGE

Increase in Currency => Increase risk of Inflation

Increase in Wealth => Increase risk of Deflation

Gold does not go up based on inflation or deflation it is a hedge

against government stupidity. When people loose confidence in
government it is the alternative money. It will continue to go up until
the confidence is regained.

We love the tangible, the confirmation, the palpable, the real, the
visible, the concrete, the known, the seen, the vivid, the visual, the
social, the embedded, the emotional laden, the salient, the
stereotypical, the moving, the theatrical, the romanced, the cosmetic,
the official, the scholarly-sounding verbiage (b******t), the pompous
Gaussian economist, the mathematicized crap, the pomp, the Academie
Française, Harvard Business School, the Nobel Prize, dark business
suits with white shirts, ties and Ferragamo shoes, the moving
discourse, and the lurid. Most of all we favor the narrated.

Alas, we are not manufactured, in our current edition of the human

race, to understand abstract matters — we need context. Randomness and
uncertainty are abstractions. We respect what has happened, ignoring
what could have happened. In other words, we are naturally shallow and
superficial — and we do not know it. This is not a psychological
problem; it comes from the main property of information. The dark side
of the moon is harder to see; beaming light on it costs energy. In the
same way, beaming light on the unseen is costly in both computational
and mental effort. Nassim Nicholas Taleb; The Ludic fallacy in The
Black Swan

"It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from
falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the
government from falling into error" – United States Supreme Court
decision in American Communications Association v. Douds

"To stand in silence when they should be protesting makes cowards out
of men." - Abraham Lincoln

"Those who give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary

safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Ben Franklin

"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson

"Dissent is the highest form of patriotism." -Thomas Jefferson

"It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human
history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to
improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends
forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million
different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current
that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance."
- Robert F . Kennedy

"It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate,

tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds." - Samuel
Adams

"Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by

the president or any other public official save exactly to the degree
in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support
him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not
to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he
fails in his duty to stand by the country." – Teddy Roosevelt

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that

we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only
unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American
public." – Teddy Roosevelt

“The citizen who sees his society’s democratic clothes being worn out
and does not cry it out, is not a patriot, but a traitor.” - Mark Twain
"Liberty has never come from government. Liberty has always come from
the subjects of government. The history of liberty is a history of
resistance. The history of liberty is a history of limitations of
government power, not the increase of it." - Woodrow Wilson

"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience

to remain silent" - Thomas Jefferson

"This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit
it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can
exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their
revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it." - Abraham Lincoln,
First Inaugural

"In this point of the case the question is distinctly presented whether
the people of the United States are to govern through representatives
chosen by their unbiased suffrages or whether the money and power of a
great corporation are to be secretly exerted to influence their
judgment and control their decisions." - Andrew Jackson

"I am more than ever convinced of the dangers to which the free and
unbiased exercise of political opinion -- the only sure foundation and
safeguard of republican government -- would be exposed by any further
increase of the already overgrown influence of corporate authorities."
- Martin Van Buren, Eighth President of the United States
"As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the
existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is
struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron
heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures
of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the
people's masters." - Grover Cleveland, 22nd and 24th President of the
United States

"I again recommend a law prohibiting all corporations from contributing

to the campaign expenses of any party.… Let individuals contribute as
they desire; but let us prohibit in effective fashion all corporations
from making contributions for any political purpose, directly or
indirectly." Teddy Roosevelt added, "The fortunes amassed through
corporate organization are now so large, and vest such power in those
that wield them, as to make it a matter of necessity to give to the
sovereign -- that is, to the Government, which represents the people as
a whole -- some effective power of supervision over their corporate
use. In order to insure a healthy social and industrial life, every big
corporation should be held responsible by, and be accountable to, some
sovereign strong enough to control its conduct." - Theodore Roosevelt

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition

of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-
industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced
power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this
combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should
take nothing for granted." - Dwight D. Eisenhower

"It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these
new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control
over government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in
the robes of legal sanction. ...And as a result the average man once
more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man.... - Franklin
Roosevelt

"A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete
control over other people's property, other people's money, other
people's labor -- other people's lives. For too many of us life was no
longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the
pursuit of happiness." - Franklin Roosevelt

"These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the

institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek
to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions
requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide
behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget
what the flag and the Constitution stand for." - Franklin Roosevelt

"Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible

government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to
the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy
alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first
task of the statesmanship of the day." - Theodore Roosevelt

"We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created
equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable
Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of
Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted
among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends,
it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to
institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and
organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely
to effect their Safety and Happiness." --Thomas Jefferson, American
Declaration of Independence