What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?

Speaker Johnson
Pinging you on January 6 Tapes

Just a friendly reminder Speaker Johnson. You’re doing some good things–or at least trying in the case of the budget–but this is the most important thing out there still hanging. One initial block released with the promise of more…and?

We have American patriots being held without bail and without trial, and the tapes almost certainly contain exculpatory evidence. (And if they don’t, and we’re all just yelling in an echo chamber over here, we need to know that too. And there’s only one way to know.)

Either we have a weaponized, corrupt government or we have a lot of internet charlatans. Let’s expose whatever it is. (I’m betting it’s the corrupt weaponized government, but if I am wrong, I’d like to see proof.)

Justice Must Be Done.

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

Small Government?

Many times conservatives (real and fake) speak of “small government” being the goal.

This sounds good, and mostly is good, but it misses the essential point. The important thing here isn’t the size, but rather the purpose, of government. We could have a cheap, small tyranny. After all our government spends most of its revenue on payments to individuals and foreign aid, neither of which is part of the tyrannical apparatus trying to keep us locked down and censored. What parts of the government would be necessary for a tyranny? It’d be a lot smaller than what we have now. We could shrink the government and nevertheless find it more tyrannical than it is today.

No, what we want is a limited government, limited not in size, but rather in scope. Limited, that is, in what it’s allowed to do. Under current circumstances, such a government would also be much smaller, but that’s a side effect. If we were in a World War II sort of war, an existential fight against nasty dictatorships on the brink of world conquest, that would be very expensive and would require a gargantuan government, but that would be what the government should be doing. That would be a large, but still limited government, since it’d be working to protect our rights.

World War II would have been the wrong time to squawk about “small government,” but it wasn’t (and never is) a bad time to demand limited government. Today would be a better time to ask for a small government–at least the job it should be doing is small today–but it misses the essential point; we want government to not do certain things. Many of those things we don’t want it doing are expensive but many of them are quite eminently doable by a smaller government than the one we have today. Small, but still exceeding proper limits.

So be careful what you ask for. You might get it and find you asked for the wrong thing.

Political Science In Summation

It’s really just a matter of people who can’t be happy unless they control others…versus those who want to be left alone. The oldest conflict within mankind. Government is necessary, but government attracts the assholes (a highly technical term for the control freaks).

His Truth?

Again we saw an instance of “It might be true for Billy, but it’s not true for Bob” logic this week.

I hear this often, and it’s usually harmless. As when it’s describing differing circumstances, not different facts. “Housing is unaffordable” can be true for one person, but not for another who makes ten times as much.

But sometimes the speaker means it literally. Something like 2+2=4 is asserted to be true for Billy but not for Bob. (And when it’s literal, it’s usually Bob saying it.) And in that sense, it’s nonsense, dangerous nonsense. There is ONE reality, and it exists independent of our desires and our perceptions. It would go on existing if we weren’t here. We exist in it. It does not exist in our heads. It’s not a personal construct, and it isn’t a social construct. If there were no society, reality would continue to be what it is, it wouldn’t vanish…which it would have to do, if it were a social construct.

Now what can change from person to person is the perception of reality. We see that all the time. And people will, of course, act on those perceptions. They will vote for Trump (or try to) if their perception is close to mine, and vote against Trump (and certainly succeed at doing so) if their perception is distant from mine (and therefore, if I do say so, wrong). I have heard people say “perception is reality” and usually, that’s what they’re trying to say–your perception of reality is, as far as you know, an accurate representation of reality, or you’d change it.

But I really wish they’d say it differently. And sometimes, to get back to Billy and Bob, the person who says they have different truths is really saying they have different perceptions of reality–different worldviews. I can’t argue with the latter. But I sure wish they’d say it better. That way I’d know that someone who blabbers about two different truths is delusional and not worth my time, at least not until he passes kindergarten-level metaphysics on his umpteenth attempt.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines,  here, with an addendum on 20191110.

We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.

(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)

(Paper) Spot Prices

Kitco “Ask” prices. Last week:

Gold $2,389.60
Silver $31.16
Platinum $1,038.00
Palladium $1,064.00
Rhodium $5,025.00

This week, 3PM Mountain Time, markets have closed for the weekend.

Gold $2,411.60
Silver $30.84
Platinum $1011.00
Palladium $992.00
Rhodium $4,950.00

Gold was over 2,420 on Thursday, and drew back a bit on Friday, still up for the week. Silver a bit down. Palladium took a beating Friday and is now lower than platinum. Both are down for the week any way you cut it.

I need to make a technical comment. The modern run of bullion coins, things like the Canadian Maple Leaf and American Eagle (and many others) are indeed coins because they have denominations on them. The denominations are absurd; the one ounce eagle has a $50 face value. (If anyone ever spends one of these things at face value, I hope I am the one who reaps the benefit of his/her ignorance.) But they will also state their gold content in either grams or troy ounces (a troy ounce is 31.1035 grams or 480 reloading-bench grains).

What can cause some confusion (and did last weekend) is that the coins are often stated as having that much “pure gold” in them, but that doesn’t mean they are made of pure gold. The Canadian Maple Leaf tries for ridiculous purity, less than 1 part per 10000 is something other than gold. Our gold eagle is 91.67 percent pure (22 kt) (with the balance made up of 3 percentage points silver and 5.13 of copper), so it isn’t made of pure gold, but it still contains an ounce of gold; if you removed the other stuff, you would indeed have an ounce of pure gold. They do this, of course, by making the coin weigh more than an ounce.

(Frankly going to eyestraining purity strikes me as a stunt. No one really cares if the coin is absolutely pure; they’re interested in the net weight of precious metal. In fact high purity can have negative consequences as a pure gold coin is soft enough that it might get a ding in it if you give it a harsh look.)

When it’s not absolutely pure, of course, you have to be sure how much gold (or whatever precious metal) is in the coin. There is a big catalog of coins from around the world (the size of a very thick telephone book, and that’s just one century’s worth), generally called Krause after the publisher, and for coins with silver, gold, or other precious content they will give the weight of the coin in grams, then the purity as a decimal fraction, then “ASW” or “AGW” or “APW” for “actual silver weight”, etc. That last number is the actual content of precious metal. Collectors typically just follow that custom when labeling their foreign coins; coin shops will do so to entice people to buy the coin for the metal content if nothing else.

Anyhow the bullion coins, regardless of whether they are pure, will have some nice round number of either troy ounces (over here) or grams (over there in Europe/Asia) of precious metal in them. (Sometimes “over there” will do something in troy ounces, too.)