Gold, Silver, and Dry Powder

There are a couple of  differences between silver and gold  that may have an effect on the prices in the next few months. Both metals appreciate when people become less confident in currencies and more fearful of governments, but silver may have  some  particular advantages when people get really scared. It is cheaper. If people with more modest incomes and portfolios get worried enough to want to own some metals, they will find they can buy a little silver here and there for less money than even a small gold coin. Also silver can be and traditionally has been used instead of gold for small and day to day transactions.  People in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries  usually did not buy groceries, work shirts, or lunches with twenty or even five dollar gold pieces. They  used silver dimes, quarters, halves, and, for bigger purchases, dollars.

If more people get more concerned  - perhaps by a big monetary crisis in Europe or if Obama were  re-elected – there may be vigorous or even frantic demand for silver as a possible currency of last resort for ordinary expenses. Gold and silver could both go up in prices, but silver might go up faster. If there is some movement toward economic and political sanity – say an Obama defeat and a decline in government spending – silver might go down faster than gold as its fear premium faded and smaller investors lost interest. My  guess is that whatever happens in the next year, silver will move faster  than gold.

Irrespective of my guess a person should own some of each. They are part of a diversified portfolio and these days, more than at any time since  January of 1981, they  have important value as insurance. In many ways we have been replaying the disastrous 1970’s with Bush as Nixon and Obama as Carter.  The nation was spared a second Carter term by Reagan’s victory in 1980. We do not know now if we will be so lucky again. One should imagine how bad things would have gotten in a second Carter administration and recall that Obama’s record, associates, ideology, and predilections are if anything worse than Carter’s were in 1980. That should make the case for holding some gold and silver as insurance fairly strongly. They are some of the powder we all should be keeping dry.

Pravda, the Volkische Beobachter, and Us

Last week as the investigation into possible crimes and cover ups by members of the Obama administration in the Fast and Furious  fiasco reached the point of a likely contempt of congress citation against the attorney general of the United States and claims of executive privilege by the president, various organizations in the traditional media found it necessary to mention  the issue for the first or almost the first time.  A few days before, they had virtually dropped coverage of various leaks from the administration on issues of national security , despite  these leaks dwarfing in importance the Valerie Plame story that they obsessed over for months during the Bush administration. Other examples of bias are readily available. It has almost reached the point with these organizations that  people who lived under the Soviets mention with regard to Pravda: one had to guess what was really happening not only by what was printed but by what was oddly never mentioned. Nor does their idolatry and cult of personality for  their chosen leader fall very much short of what was presented as news in the Beobachter of the 1930’s.  

None of these observations is news, of course. That most  members of the major traditional media in the United States are both very biased and often quite  dishonest about it seems to me to be sufficiently clear that any  claims they make of a lack of bias can be viewed fairly as further  evidence of a lack of honesty. They favor the  left  as to  politics, the bureaucratic as to social organization, the Northeast coast as to region,  post modern Europe as to ideal, and almost any thought or action of Barack Obama’s as to divinity.  They are contemptuous of limited government in politics, individualism and spontaneity  in social organization,  every region of the country between the Hudson River and the San Andreas Fault (except for Chicago and sometimes  the Ninth Ward in New Orleans),  and any notion of American exceptionalism.  They tend to be very charitably disposed toward  anti-American foreign dictators and wary and suspicious of America’s armed forces.   Christian conservatives claim they  are also hostile to religion, and many probably are. However  given their swooning  over Islam and  fawning embracing of any left wing clergyman they can find anywhere on the planet, anti-religious sentiment seems less consistent than their other prejudices and  perhaps mainly only  part of a general hostility to anything viewable as traditionally American.  

There has always been bias in the American press. Before World War II there were known Democratic newspapers and known Republican newspapers, and they  placed their straightforwardly partisan slant on their reporting.  (It is said that to get an accurate version of what was  said in the Lincoln-Douglas debates, one would have to go to a Democratic paper for Lincoln’s statements and a Republican paper for Douglas’s, because papers  on each side cleaned up their guy’s diction and syntax to make him sound better.)  A difference  that makes the bias of America’s present traditional media so unpleasant is the way it is coupled with pervasive dishonesty . They pretend to be objective and seem to expect people to be foolish enough to take them at their word. That insults people’s intelligence and should make them angry.

Giving Back

Every so often people write articles about  trite, over used, syrupy, or simply annoying words or phrases they would like to see fall into disuse. I would like to nominate “giving back” as in “giving back to the community” or “giving back to his fans” or “giving back to the people of _________”   for dishonorable retirement, not only because it has become such a hackneyed phase and one so often uttered with such mush mouthed piety,  but also because of the assumptions behind its use.  

When one hears talk about giving back or the need to give back to the community, there is usually an at least implied sense of some sort of obligation or even of some level of guilt to be assuaged. Yet a person who came by his success honestly and fairly  has no such obligation and should feel no such guilt. He  would be quite right to reply to a claim that he is obligated to give something back by simply stating that no he isn’t, because he never took anything  that did not belong to him. In fact a person who acquires wealth honestly by selling his goods and/or services has already given back every time he did so by giving the people he sold to something they valued enough to pay him for it. There is no obligation beyond that. Giving charitably to people or organizations that he wants to help or support is a fine thing for a successful person to do - “giving”,  without the “back” and its implications of guilt and obligation. That is the clean way to do it.

Of course there are people who are obligated to give something back. They are the  thieves and con artists of the world, and their form of giving back has a precise name. It is called restitution. The rest of us should do our giving freely, because we want to, not because of any obligation or a need to appease someone.  

Richard Halliburton

Last week I discovered  the author Richard Halliburton. Debby has liked his works for years and has several of his books in our library, but I had never looked at one.  I picked up Glorious Adventure and was hooked. It is a splendid book – well written and thoughtful, enthusiastic without being gushing, witty and clever without being snarky. It covers the author’s attempts to follow the supposed path of Odysseus in the Odyssey with side trips for such things as climbing Mount Olympus, going to Delphi, swimming the Hellespont, and visiting the grave of Rupert Brooke.  

It is also a profoundly old fashioned book, not only because of its obvious place in the genre of 19^th and early 20^th century exotic travel and adventure books, but because with its reverence for beauty and wisdom, its sense of the  greatness and continuity of its civilization,  and its belief in the possibility and glory of adventure it displays  some of the best values and attitudes of the confident, cosmopolitan, European and particularly British led world that had been wounded in 1914 to 1918 and finally blew itself away between 1939 and 1945.  It is a very pleasant, happy, light hearted book, but it is hard for someone stuck in 2012 not to be a bit rueful as he reads it and contemplates what has been lost. It not that no one feels or thinks that way anymore. Many certainly do, but the cultural atmosphere is quite different. Halliburton was famous, and his books sold very well. It’s fairly hard to imagine books with anything like their  viewpoint doing  so these days. 

Reading the book made me curious about the author. I found that he was born in Tennessee at the turn of the century and died young, lost at sea in 1939 in an attempt to cross the Pacific in a Chinese junk. He spent most of his adult life travelling the world. He never married. As with various other  talented, accomplished bachelors who had close male friends, there are now unsubstantiated claims that he was a homosexual, just as there used to be unsubstantiated claims of often fervid deathbed conversions by talented, accomplished freethinkers. People with axes to grind will grind them. In reality what matters is  the books and the life of adventure, not whether the author liked the girls or the boys or both or neither. I recommend the book highly.

Class, Grace, or Their Lack

People are right to criticize Obama’s comments at the recent event for George W. Bush at the White House. In the context of a ceremony to honor a former president on the occasion of the hanging of his portrait at the White House, his remarks were rude, petty, self serving, and offensive, whether or not intentionally so. This is unfortunate but not surprising. Irrespective of what one thinks of Obama’s  politics, it seems clear that as a human being he is an arrogant, narcissistic, and graceless jackass. From his  jaw jutting posturing, his rewriting of White House biographies of former presidents to feature himself, his shameless stealing of the credit from the actual participants in the mission to get Bin Laden, and many other examples, we have been given a fairly good look at this side of his personality.  People generally say with good reason that he is another Jimmy Carter.  However in this respect he calls to mind more a Lyndon Johnson without the political skills or perhaps a Douglas MacArthur without the courage.