Libertarian Leanings

First Blog Posts

Today Sissy Willis tweeted a link to her very first blog post.

In her first blog post Sissy said, "We wish you a Merry Christmas!" 

I met Sissy and a group of New England bloggers a few years after that, in March of 2006 actually.  Sissy described us as "Bloggers sub rosa":

Speaking of teaching methods, there's still no better pedagogy than the School of Hard Knocks. We have a cabal of graduates of that venerable institution blogging undercover right here in mostly blue-state New England, and not a groupthinker among them.

[...]

Many came of age as truth-seeking liberals until 9/11 came knocking. A group of them met recently in a seminar room at Boston University to share fear-society horror tales. Miss Kelly sums it up nicely:

Kind of nice to sit around a table with smart, opinionated people and hear how others got started, what motivates them, how they find time to blog.  I was a little surprised that we're all "of a certain age." I was expecting at least a few young punks.

Like the heart that loves, the punk that blogs is ever young. The list:

Augean Stables
Libertarian Leanings
Miss Kelly
neo-neocon
Squaring the Boston Globe
Solomonia

And ourselves, of course. Lots of blogfood for thought. Now off to update our blogroll.

Visiting Sissy's first post set off an attack of nostalgia, so I went back to look at my own first blog post. April 25, 2004.

Dems heed the words of Vince Lombardi

Vince Lombardi once said, “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” This could be the motto of the Democrats today, as they fight to regain their former position of dominance in American politics. Their fight apparently has no rules. Nothing is out of bounds.

Al Gore lost the 2000 election, but it was not until after he retracted his concession and sent the lawyers into Florida, in an attempt to overturn the election results on unfounded charges of racism, intimidation, and voter confusion. This has been a favorite strategy of elitist Democrats. They seem to think they should not be constrained by election results or conventionally enacted law. When democracy’s results displease, it’s off to the courts, in search of a venue where law can be enacted on the fly from the bench.

Feels like I could have written that yesterday, except that this time, with a fortunate miscalculation, Democrats came in with a plan to fix election laws ahead of time instead of trying to overturn them after the fact.  Covid gave them pretext for extending deadlines and allowing mail-in voting, but they got those changes through court challenges and administrative edicts.  Their problem is that according to the U.S. Constitution, setting the rules for voting falls to the state legislatures. Legal challenges have been filed.

And then Democrats misjudged the extent of Trump's popularity, and in he wee hours of the morning they realized that they were short on the phony ballots that mail-in voting was supposed to provide,.  That's when counting stopped, simultaneously, in key battleground states and Democrat poll workers frantically worked to fix their problem.  Legal challenges and affidavits have been filed.

And here we sit, waiting for the challenges to make their way through the courts.  We must wait until then before conceding that Democrats have successfully stolen this presidency.

Biden Magic

Biden's "victory" in the 2020 election was surely magical.

Candidate Joe Biden was so effective at animating voters in 2020 that he received a record number of votes, more than 15 million more than Barack Obama received in his re-election of 2012. Amazingly, he managed to secure victory while also losing in almost every bellwether county across the country. No presidential candidate has been capable of such electoral jujitsu until now.

While Biden underperformed Hillary Clinton’s 2016 totals in every urban county in the United States, he outperformed her in the metropolitan areas of Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Even more surprising, the former VP put up a record haul of votes, despite Democrats’ general failures in local House and state legislative seats across the nation.

If Biden is inaugurated on January 20, 2021, that's when the real magic will have to start.  That's when he needs to convince the majority of American voters that he's the legitimate President of the United States.  They don't believe it right now.

Facebook Is Censoring Me

I'm so honored!

Industrial Scale Fraud

On election night Fox News called Arizona for Joe Biden with only about 75% of the votes counted.  In the meantime, Fox refused to call Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Georgia where 99% of the votes were counted and Trump seemed to be substantially in the lead.  Speculative on my part to be sure, but how did Fox News know which states not to call with so much of the vote already counted?

For me that was an early sign, but quite obviously, I'm not alone in thinking that massive election fraud was going on.

In the early day, which is now, there is a human tendency for many not to believe their lying eyes.  The media, all in on this, promote that the Liz and Bernie equivalents are nice people, there is no proof of fraud.  That's what Markopolos and Carreyrou heard too.

Witnesses were threatened.  Attorneys attacked for probing.  Carreyrou saw a bit of that.  Even after Carreyrou published his first story about Theranos fraud, the Wall Street Journal management had Liz at one of their events.  This is how this stuff works!

In the end, which is not far out, it all comes apart.

Commitment To Hatred

'Drop And Roll' Vote Switching

Patrick Byrne is the founder and former CEO Of Overstock.com.  According to Byrne vote fraud in the 2020 election was accomplished in what he calls "drop and roll."

The Ruling Class Has Evolved

From Ruling Class to Oligarchy

By Angelo Codevilla

For four decades beginning in the mid-1960s, a class of rulers grew in America. They became ever more uniform socially and intellectually, ever more opposed to the rest of Americans, and ever more powerful. This happened as government took upon itself the tasks of eliminating poverty and harmonizing the races, and as it controlled ever greater shares of the national income. 

Increasingly, their powers were based on claims of expertise coming from the universities

In 2010 Professor Codevilla published a predecessor discussion to the article linked above in which he described an America divided into Ruling Class vs. Country Class entitled America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution.  It is well worth the time to read it.

Analysis of Pennsylvania Ballots

In sworn statement, prominent mathematician flags up to 100,000 Pennsylvania ballots

Williams College Professor Steven Miller, a Yale and Princeton trained math expert, said he analyzed Pennsylvania ballot data collected by former Trump campaign data chief Matt Braynard as well as 2,684 voter interviews conducted by a phone bank and found two concerning patterns.

In his sworn statement Professor Miller asserted:

Thus I estimate that the number of ballots that were either requested by someone other than the registered Republican or requested and returned but not counted range from 89,397 to 98,801.

Speaking of an "Orderly Transition of Power"

Kaleigh leaves them speechless.

Media Celebrates after Trump’s Pro-Gold Fed Nominee Gets Blocked

The following article was provided by Stefan Gleason, President of Money Metals Exchange.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It was only after he entered politics that President Donald Trump began to fully grasp the bias, dishonesty, and fakeness that runs throughout the so-called mainstream media.  But gold bugs and sound money advocates have long known to distrust the reporting of establishment news sources.

Journalists’ anti-gold and anti-Trump biases converged this week as the Senate took up President Trump’s nomination of Judy Shelton to the Federal Reserve Board.  Shelton, a fierce Fed critic and past supporter of a gold standard, drew intense opposition from Senate Democrats. She also faced opposition from Republicans Lamar Alexander, Susan Collins, and Mitt Romney.  A path to her confirmation appeared to exist earlier this week, but that path was blocked, at least temporarily, on Tuesday.  Two Republican Senators had gone into quarantine and Democrat Kamala Harris shuttled in from her Vice President in-waiting training to cast a “no” vote.  Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell took procedural steps which enable him to bring Shelton back up for another vote when the two quarantined Republicans return.

But that didn’t stop the press from pronouncing her nomination dead.  “Kamala Harris Rushes Back to Washington to Block Trump From Putting a Crank on the Fed Board,” blared a headline from Slate. The article smeared Shelton as a “crank who wants to return to the gold standard and get rid of deposit insurance.”  NPR, somewhat more diplomatically, derided Shelton for “her unorthodox support for the gold standard, a theory long discarded by mainstream economists.”  Meanwhile, NBC News also parroted the party line about Shelton. She is, we are told, “known for her unorthodox support for the gold standard, an archaic policy concept to which no developed economies today adhere.”

For those of us in the precious metals community, it’s all too familiar – the personal attacks, the equating of gold to a “barbarous” relic of the past, the invocation of “mainstream economists” as authority figures, etc.  The vast majority of financial journalists lack the intellectual curiosity to seek out the actual views of sound money advocates. Those who tread too indelicately on the gold-suppressing banking cartel are simply blacklisted by major media outlets – as has been the fate of the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee.

A classical gold standard does have potential drawbacks, to be sure.  For one, it would empower the government to “fix” the price of gold in terms of U.S. currency and enable it to cheat the system by subsequently raising the gold price – devaluing the dollar – as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt infamously did.

Many sound money advocates believe gold and silver should instead be allowed to circulate freely as money without any tax impediments so that they can find their true free market value.  Precious metals, along with cryptocurrencies and other alternatives, would have the opportunity to supplant government-issued fiat currencies that are mismanaged.  Judy Shelton as a lone voice at the Federal Reserve would obviously lack the ability to reshape U.S. monetary policy on her own. But the keepers of the prevailing Keynesian, inflationist orthodoxy want to make sure no dissenting voices have a seat at the table. 

Otherwise the media might have to actually take their perspectives seriously.  Journalists constantly condition the public to trust the “experts” – no matter how often reality proves them wrong or how often they give contradictory advice.  For example, the top health experts have proven themselves to be clueless when it comes to forecasting or mitigating the spread of the novel coronavirus. 

First they said travel bans were a bad idea. Then they said masks were a bad idea. Then they said we had to lock down the economy and be forced to wear masks. Now they can’t seem to point to compelling evidence on the region-by-region case trendlines that any of their policy recommendations where adopted have been effective.  But no matter what, the media tells us the anointed public health authorities have to be believed and the skeptics dismissed, demonized, and censored.  After months of fomenting economically crippling virus hysteria and pushing inflammatory racial narratives that led to rioting and crime spikes in cities across the country, the mainstream media managed to sink its credibility to even lower lows on election night. 

Fox News joined other networks (though not all) in prematurely calling states for Joe Biden and falsely projecting that Democrats would increase their majority in Congress.  In fact, President Trump is still contesting some of those states and Republicans defied the media’s faulty polling models to shrink Nancy Pelosi’s majority and pick up at least nine seats in Congress.  The biggest source of election-related misinformation in 2020 was the fake news pumped out by the legacy media and their pollsters. 

Regardless of how President Trump’s policy successes and failures are ultimately judged, one of his most significant accomplishments was to single-handedly discredit the media in the eyes of much of the public.  The public should also know that financial journalists are just as biased and error-prone as political journalists. They seem to have a special disdain for precious metals.  Many openly sneer at the sorts of people who buy gold and silver coins instead of entrusting all their wealth to banks and brokerages.

Investors would be wise to seek out a true market of information, including from alternative, non-“mainstream” sources, when it comes to deciding where to allocate capital. The most successful investors are often contrarians – selling what everyone else wants to buy, buying what everyone else wants to sell.

The fact that sound money principles are so out of favor among policymakers and economists may be a contrarian signal that they are needed now more than ever.

 

  

 

About the Author:

Stefan Gleason is President of Money Metals Exchange, a precious metals dealer recently named "Best in the USA" by an independent global ratings group. A graduate of the University of Florida, Gleason is a seasoned business leader, investor, political strategist, and grassroots activist. Gleason has frequently appeared on national television networks such as CNN, FoxNews, and CNBC and in hundreds of publications such as the Wall Street Journal, The Street, and Seeking Alpha.