Sunday, March 11, 2012

Glenn Beck Works For Goldline?


I've never paid much attention to Glenn Beck. I never needed to. I've had much better sources of information without the showmanship anyway.

Yesterday I was listening to one of my podcasts when I heard this bit of information. Then it came back at me this morning, along with this Daily Show clip.


At one point, I believed the "buy gold" mantra. I do no longer. Let's take a quick look at this. For one thing, nowhere in history during an economic collapse can we find an account of people running around with gold. For another, consider this question: what do you actually need the gold for? Chances are, you're hoping to store value in the gold to use when currency collapses.

But at that point, you have to convert the gold back into currency to use to buy things you need. Why not just buy what you need now? When you convert gold back into currency, you might trigger taxes. If you just go out and buy a year or two worth of food and other items you may need in a collapse, you pay only sales tax.

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Kissinger, Cheney, and Rumsfeld Neutered the Professoriate

I was going through some old posts I'd starred in Google Reader, and came across this from four years ago. I vaguely remember reading it. Which is good, because I don't remember having subscribed to that blog.

As the story goes, the author, R.R. Reno, has a friend who must remain unnamed who knows some "conservative power brokers" in D.C. This friend related a story to the author about how some Nixon era "conservative" leaders managed to neutralize the "liberal" educational establishment.

As interesting as I find the concept (I love conspiracy accounts), in order to accept it on anything more than apparent circumstantial anecdotes, I need more than an author relaying a third party account from an unnamed source who in turn is relaying a third party account from another group of unnamed sources.

I placed the binary political labels in quotes because I find them meaningless.