@DB: "... It simply needs to be allowed to breathe. The native genius of the Russian peoples waits to be freed once more. The Russian culture is beautiful, agragrian and vibrant. It is not necessarily thuggish. It does not demand a thug for a leader."

Well said. Thanks.

@mava

I am not a theologian. I believe that theology has served to lead the Church away from the Truth. I am a disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ who is the Truth and I seek to know Him as fully as I am known by Him.

The serpent was introduced into the Garden by God to tempt the man and the woman He had created in order to prove their obedience to His will. His will is the only true Way to Life since He is the Creator of all things and has designed them to be perfect and to work perfectly together. He gave the man the command that he could eat of every tree in the Garden except the one in the middle called the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The Tree of Life was also in the middle of the Garden so the choice the man had was between Life and Death. In other words he was completely free in all things except in this one thing. This one thing was the will of God. The man Adam was given the freedom to choose whether to obey God in this one thing and therefore to learn the Way or to go his own way according to the desires of his own heart. God warned him that if he chose to go his own way he would surely die.

God then separated spirit from soul. This is symbolised by the taking of the woman out of the man. This separation of his powers weakened the man since the woman was acting to a certain degree independently of him although he had instructed her that they could not eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The serpent then tempted the woman since she was more susceptible to being deceived having received the command from the man rather than from God directly. He told her that if she ate of the fruit of the Tree of which they had been commanded not to eat then she would become as a god knowing good and evil. Here is the actual portion of scripture describing this event:

3:1 Now the serpent was more shrewd than any of the wild animals that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, 'Is it really true that God said, 'You must not eat from any tree of the Garden'?' 3:2 The woman said to the serpent, 'We may eat of the fruit from the trees of the Garden; 3:3 but concerning the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the Garden God said, 'You must not eat from it, and you must not touch it, or else you will die.' 3:4 The serpent said to the woman, 'Surely you will not die, 3:5 for God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will open and you will be like divine beings who know good and evil.'

3:6 When the woman saw that the tree produced fruit that was good for food, was attractive to the eye, and was desirable for making one wise, she took some of its fruit and ate it. She also gave some of it to her husband who was with her, and he ate it. 3:7 Then the eyes of both of them opened, and they knew they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves."

The serpent represents the lower or bestial nature that speaks to the soul or mind of man and presents him with temptations addressed to the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life. These are the temptations that the first parents of mankind fell into. They chose the will of the carnal Self over the will of God and so they died and they passed this death onto all of their progeny which we are. In another scripture we are told that the sting of Death is Sin. Sin is lawlessness or missing the mark i.e. radical imperfection according to the Way or the Law of God. Therefore because we are mortal we are inevitably sinners, we cannot be otherwise.

The plan of God has been to return mankind into relationship with Himself and to reunite us with Himself. In order to do this He has Himself entered into His Creation as a man, Jesus of Nazareth, and has lived out His life according to the Way, the Law of God in order to qualify for Life. He then had to die in order to fully identify with mortal man and then He rose from the dead having conquered Death the root of Sin on behalf of all mankind. He then ascended into the highest dimension of Spirit where He assumed the position of authority over all the Heavens and Earth. The Father then sent the Spirit of the Son to anoint those who had believed into Him and they went out to preach this Good News of the Kingdom of God to all the Creation. This was the beginning of the Christian Church.

The Lord Jesus Christ is the Last Adam of the Old Creation and the Second Adam of the New Creation. Therefore in order for us to become partakers in the New Creation we must be united with the Second Adam initially in His Spirit then as we walk in Him according to the Way, He brings Resurrection Life to our soul, i.e. our mind, will, emotions and desires, in order to align them all with His will. The final step is to bring Resurrection Life to the body and it is this step that is to be the next revelation of God to humanity.

We are a corporate spiritual being although each of us has a unique personality. This corporate spiritual being is called in scripture the Bride of Christ or the Body of Christ, or the Church. In connection with the Second Adam we are symbolically the Second Eve. The name Eve means Life or Living so we as the Body of Christ are the Mother of the Living as prophesied by the name given to the first woman. I believe that Death is transmitted through the line of Adam while life is transmitted through the seed of the woman. Jesus was born of woman, the "seed of the woman" mentioned in Genesis 3:15, but He was Fathered by God. In other words He was born as an immortal as was the First Adam. He then passed the test that the First Adam failed when He met with the devil in the wilderness and refused the three temptations that the first man and woman had fallen prey to.

There were other questions you had and some of them may be answered if you read the comment I made on the DB article entitled "Directed History: Lunacy or Truth" you can read how God led me into an initial understanding of the Truth which He is. Here is the link:

Click to view link

Yes. Interesting. You write as a theologian. But, I think I understand the point you were making.

Question is, what is it that the serpent had done? Is the god as represented in the bible truly supreme? Are there force above him, that can put the end to him? And how do we know that whoever it is that speaks to us is actually god, and not simply a seprent that took the place of god?

But the wording with regards to "eating dust", is really interesting.

I am not sure what your deal with church is, but here is mine: I want all of the apocrypha to be open to everyone, just the same as I want ALL the evidence of 9-11 to be available to anyone.

I am pretty certain that whenever there is even a single secret that is kept from me, then whoever is keeping it is clearly working against my interest. You can see how this obviously leads me to mistrust of the church, as well as to desire fore more inquiry with regards to the "serpent". If your reference concerns the serpent teaching Adam and Eve how to procreate, then I can not see why they should not have full knowledge with regards to everything pertaining to their property - their bodies and souls.

So, while the picture presented by the church, clearly suggest unknown to us relationship between objects mentioned in the way of food chain, energy, and Matrix, this might be a purposefully inverted picture. Is there a way to know one way or another?

@mava

"As to the world in the largest sense, withing a concept of our life, I tend to believe that yes, it is a virtual reality too. In the sense that we do live for real, but that the purpose of our existence is much, much more pragmatically planned than we could tolerate to imagine. It is about something that we produce when we are alive, may-be even as a by-product. It could be something as simple as bacteria, and something as unknown as brain waves that is being utilized beyond the bound of the abstraction of the Matrix."

The answer to this riddle is one of the insights provided by the Christian faith that is rarely spoken about because the Church at large has lost much of the spiritual meaning of the scriptures due to an emphasis in the interpretation principle (known in theology as the hermeneutic) that has been adopted over the past one hundred and fifty years, to the best of my knowledge. This emphasis insists that the scriptures should be interpreted literally unless otherwise indicated. That is at least my best understanding of it and in practice it has had an influence on the minds of most Christians I know who are limping along in their spiritual life barely able to walk. I know this because I left the institutional Church in a period between 1998 and 2004. I had been a member for twenty one years of a Pentecostal church and had come to the conclusion that we were being "warehoused" and kept as "babes in Christ" in order to be "fleeced" by the leadership. I am sure that the leaders themselves were unaware of their role since they themselves had for the most part been raised in the Church and had learned the ropes within the institution. I do not by this pass any judgement on the people. Each of us is answerable to our own Master. God Himself has visited blindness in part upon His people for His good purposes.

Anyone who observes the natural world becomes aware that the mineral world is the food of the plant world. The plant world is the food of the animal world to which we belong and we in turn eat the animals that have been created and ordained for that purpose since the Mabbul... the Deluge. Therefore the question naturally arises as to whether we are food for the spiritual realm since that is the next dimension in the hierarchy of existence. At this point however the process appears to reverse since when Jesus comes He tells us that we must eat Him. (This is the symbolic meaning of the sacrament of communion or the Eucharist.} He also tells us that the words He is speaking are Spirit and Life. In other words He is saying to us that just as we feed on our physical environment in the Earth dimension and receive life support from this environment so we must feed on our spiritual environment in the Heaven dimension which dimension He is and He is now our sustenance, source of Life and the foundation of our growth in Him. As He said "Apart from Me you can do nothing".

Nevertheless there is one last piece of the puzzle I would like to share with you. There is indeed a parasitical spiritual entity that feeds upon our energy in the same way that we feed upon the animals and plants that we eat to absorb and use energy from them in this matter/energy matrix in which we physically live. This spiritual entity is known as that great serpent satan, the devil. Setting aside all the fantastic tales that are told about this spiritual entity the truth is that it does exist and was created by God through His Word, the Lord Jesus Christ, for the purpose of training His sons. It also has other functions and one of them is to feed off the energy released by the human race especially when they die. It is known as the lord of Death.

This entity is also the great deceiver and works through men using deception to build a kingdom in the material realm known as the Kingdom of the World, the world system, a counterfeit kingdom to rival the Kingdom of God that has been in preparation from the beginning of time. The meaning and purpose of our lives is contained in the scriptures and summed up in the life, death, resurrection and ascension of the Lord Jesus Christ who is known as the firstborn from the dead, the firstborn of the New Creation and the firstborn of many brethren. He is the Pattern Son who now fills the universe and in Him we receive Life that is immortal and come into union with the Father through the Son. At the present time mankind is going through the early stages of formation into the Kingdom of God and for the past two thousand years there have been individual human beings who have been chosen to enter into the Kingdom and form the Body of Christ. Jesus of Nazareth is the Head of this Body and when He appears it will be in His Body the corporate revelation or unveiling of the Son in the sons of God. It is these sons who will administer the Kingdom and restore the Creation bringing it into union with the Father in the Son. Eventually everyone who has ever lived will be resurrected and judged according to their deeds and their faith. The judgements will be given and everyone will enter into some degree of correction and purification until they too are conformed into the image of God. This plan was revealed to us in the very first book of the Bible as being the purpose of God. The Bible then tells how the plan has been unfolding since then and what we must do to be involved in it.

Returning to the evil entity known as satan or the adversary, it is being used in this process of developing the Kingdom of God and its actions are experienced on Earth in very specific ways that are identified once again in the revelations in the scriptures. Amongst these actions it foments wars through its servants since these provide unusual release of life energy which is its food. This is revealed in the book of Genesis when God issued the judgements on the serpent, on Adam and on Eve after the man and woman had eaten the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil when Eve was deceived by the serpent. Here is the curse on the serpent:

Genesis 3:14 "The Lord God said to the serpent, 'Because you have done this, cursed are you above all the wild beasts and all the living creatures of the field! On your belly you will crawl and dust you will eat all the days of your life. 3:15 And I will put hostility 40 between you and the woman and between your offspring and her offspring; 41
her offspring will attack your head, and you will attack her offspring's heel.'

Here is the judgement on the man:

3:17 But to Adam he said, 'Because you obeyed your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you,
'You must not eat from it,' cursed is the ground thanks to you; in painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. 3:18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you, but you will eat the grain of the field. 3:19 By the sweat of your brow you will eat food until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you will return.'

The food of the serpent is dust and man is dust. Therefore the food of the serpent is man. The curse on the man also reveals to us the origin of Money. But that is a story for another day.

Now that you read that, two concepts must begin bridging for you, the Gold and the War (not Oil). Question then is, how does 9-11 fits into this? I think, that without 9-11 the War would be impossible to obtain, while the Gold had already been spent.

As for the question on why Putin buys Gold? Regardless of the character of Putin himself, this question still stands. I beleive the following excerpt may help you to understand why:

Quoted (shamelessly copied and pasted from FOFOA Click to view link
(try to read without revolting, because, eventually, the truth can set you free):


At the highest level of wealth, I think the giants that understand gold have a lot less than 50% of their wealth in gold at today's price. At a Freegold price it may be closer to 50%, but I doubt they would book their gold at Freegold prices now, or even at the much higher off-market price they paid.

At that level, gold is merely insurance of sorts, even if they understand Freegold, and especially if they understand Freegold. The reason it is transacted at a higher-than-market price is so that the seller of the gold gets the future Freegold windfall now at the time of the sale, and the buyer simply preserves his current purchasing power through the transition. I'm only speaking very roughly, of course, since the higher prices mentioned by Another were not the full revaluation figure, but some number in between. So essentially the "Freegold windfall profit" is being split between the buyer and seller at the highest levels.

If you have, say, $20B that you want to put into gold, you can only do so in paper unallocated through the BBs. When the revaluation happens, as Another said, you will get your $20B in real gold at the new Freegold price. In other words, you buy $20B in unallocated paper gold today and then after Freegold you will have about 11 tonnes of real physical. Alternatively, if you want to take possession of your physical now, or have it allocated now, you are taken into a private room and given a very private education on the realities and constraints of today's gold market.

Here's my guess. Perhaps you are given two choices. $20B in paper gold as above and you suffer the same fate as everyone else in paper gold but you're at least guaranteed that physical at the revaluation price (11t), or you can take 22t now for your $20B. Let's see, that 22t option would be at a present price of $28K per ounce. So you're still likely to double your wealth if you take the latter deal and believe the story. But there's no way you are going to get the 370 tonnes that today's price says you should be able to buy.

But more likely than that is they simply say, look, you can't get more than 5 tonnes if you want physical. If you want paper gold, we'll take your $20B and give you the paper gold credits, but you can't have it allocated because there's simply not enough physical to go around. So let's say this guy gives them his $20B and also gets the 5t allocated. Come Freegold his paper gold will bring him 9.9t plus he'll have his 5t allocated for a total of 14.9 tonnes. See how that outcome is right in between the two choices above? And the best part is that this way they didn't have to explain Freegold to him, they simply had to explain the realities and constraints of today's gold market.

So now let's look at this guy's net worth. Let's say in Freegold his gold is roughly half of his net worth. 14.9 tonnes in Freegold would be about $26B, so let's say this guy is worth around $50B in Freegold. Maybe he's worth $40B today (pre-Freegold) because he's going to make a little bit of a gain (~25% gain overall) through the transition because of his choice to go after some physical gold. Today he only has 5 tonnes in actual physical, but in reality he has the equivalent of 14.9t because he put half of his net worth into a combination of paper and physical gold.

So, at $1,680, 14.9 tonnes is $805M, which represents only 2% of his current net worth. This is what I mean by insurance. The really big money cannot go deep enough into physical to get a windfall anywhere near what we shrimps can. It can only use gold as insurance to preserve what it already has, and with a little foresight, make a relatively modest gain.

Now, if we apply this across the board to those elites with $35T in net worth, 2% in real physical would be $700B or about 13,000 tonnes of physical, which sounds reasonable. But perhaps some of them have much more, like, for example, the Saudis. They could easily have 6,000+ tonnes alone (according to Another's figures), but even that is small potatoes compared to what they could have bought at market prices over the years.

Here is what the USG worried about back in 1973. It's from Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969-1976, V. XXXVI, The Energy Crisis, 1969-1974:

Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, and Kuwait, limited by small populations, inadequate numbers of technically capable people and a dearth of non-oil resources, will not be able to increase spending on imports as fast as oil revenues mount. Nor could their gifts to other Middle Eastern nations even on a generous scale, greatly reduce this surplus of receipts over current expenditures.

Thus the foreign assets of the Middle East countries could amount to between $50-$80 billion by 1980 in constant 1973 dollars. At the upper limit these assets would be equal to about 60% of the world's gold and foreign exchange reserves in 1972. The trends already in motion, if continued through 1985, would result in the Middle East oil producing states accumulating foreign assets that would be truly astronomical. Their assets would range from a low of $100 billion to as much as $180 billion by 1985, comparable to total gross U.S. foreign assets and to more than double net U.S. foreign assets.

Foreign assets of such enormous magnitude would inevitably be held in relatively liquid forms, such as securities and short-term instruments. The Middle East countries lack the industries and managers to make direct investments abroad on a really massive scale. Moreover, their buying up existing foreign companies would cause strong policy reactions.

In any case the Middle East oil producers would have unprecedented financial power. Discretionary use of such vast assets obviously has enormous potential for disruption of financial markets. Attempts to neutralize these assets through capital controls in producing countries might induce the producers to curtail output.

Footnote:
In an April 17 briefing memorandum, Saunders and Quandt reminded Kissinger of Yamani's proposal for a special relationship with the United States (see Document 140), the 'real purpose' of which was to develop closer strategic ties by binding the United States to Saudi oil, offsetting a short-term U.S. balance-of-payments problem by investing in the United States, and thus guaranteeing that the Saudis would not cut off the flow of oil.


The point here is that they knew, even back in 1973, that the Saudis essentially had gold cornered. The Saudis could, theoretically, have had 60% of the world's gold by the early 80s and probably all of it by the late 80s (and it's a good thing for them that didn't happen). But instead, someone worked out a deal and, by 1999, let's say the Saudis had 6,000 tonnes of physical amounting to maybe 4% or 5% of the world's gold at that time, rather than all of it or even 60% of it.

You see, the Saudi's windfall came in the 1940s when they woke up and found themselves sitting on top of the world's richest resource. Freegold will not be their windfall, they already got that long ago. Freegold will simply preserve it for them long into the future, perhaps even well past the end of fossil fuels. And that's kind of the way it is for any Giant at that level. If you're worth $40B today, you already got your "windfall" and Freegold is simply a way to lock it in and preserve it far into the future, it is not a way to multiply it many times over. The realities and constraints of today's gold market make that impossible.

Quoting from David_Robertson:

"Television is particularly potent in this regard since it is an extension of our cerebral cortex and requires that we provide a high degree of subjective interpretation to the messages being sent. This ensures that our conclusions are perceived as being independently arrived at and are therefore difficult to dislodge. "

Very true, I think you're very much correct on this. I hadn't came across an explanation like yours, however, I have always felt exactly this effect from watching television. A feeling of a foreign idea being implanted. For me personally, the television thus creates some sort of sense of discomfort, as if I am being programmed.

No, I don't hear any voices in my head, lol, but I understand why a reader may think so while reading this, - it's just the words I use to describe the feeling from watching the television. So, I had resolved this, ah.. something like 6-7 (?) years ago, by quitting watching the television cold turkey. I feel significantly better now. Not that I felt bad as in sick before, but it is just that now I don't have to constantly witness my consciousness trying to decipher the television and resulting in a sense of Matrix or a Plato's cave for me.

I highly recommend this to anyone, - it brings a very real sense of piece of mind (unless, of course, you were never bothered by the television).

Another interesting quote about television is this one "They don't call it 'programming' for nothing... ".

As for a feeling or sensing the Matrix in general, not related to the television, I can say that just like it can be felt with TV, it can be felt about the world in general. To me, it feels as if last 120 years (slightly more than 100 years as was suggested by Abu Aardvark) is an added layer of Matrix within the Matrix.

As to the world in the largest sense, withing a concept of our life, I tend to believe that yes, it is a virtual reality too. In the sense that we do live for real, but that the purpose of our existence is much, much more pragmatically planned than we could tolerate to imagine. It is about something that we produce when we are alive, may-be even as a by-product. It could be something as simple as bacteria, and something as unknown as brain waves that is being utilized beyond the bound of the abstraction of the Matrix.

Speaking of the brain waves or yet unquantified substance of "intelligence", it is curious to observe that as the total number of human beings on the planet increases, the average intelligence is decreasing, which implies that there is either a sum total or an absolute limit. If that makes any sense, then it isn't too hard to suggest that in order to raise the average intelligence (assuming it matters to something or someone above the Matrix), one would need to artificially reduce the population.

Just some thoughts here.

@ Abu Aardvark

Thanks for the discussion. It has been both informative and stimulating. The link you provided on planned obsolescence was very much on point and something I had not previously read although I was familiar with the concept.

The Plato's Cave link was interesting to me especially since the idea of types and shadows is very much a Christian concept also with the physical universe being in its entirety a type and shadow of the spiritual reality. Once more coincidentally before I had read your comment I had perceived a parallel between the original video and certain spiritual verities. I have actually written them down in a short article called As In The Days Of Noah.

@ David_Robertson

When I was writing that 'no one is forcing you to buy this car or go to that restaurant (yet)', I was thinking of 'force' in it's very physical meaning - badges, guns and all. Other than that, I entirely share your perception.

In fact, I subscribe to the DB's notion that the world as we know it, at least for the last 100 years, constitutes a kind of Dreamtime, the Matrix, or Plato's Cave, if you will ...

"In Plato's fictional dialogue, Socrates begins by describing a scenario in which what people take to be real would in fact be an illusion. He asks Glaucon to imagine a cave inhabited by prisoners who have been chained and held immobile since childhood: not only are their legs (but not arms) held in place, but their necks are also fixed, so they are compelled to gaze at a wall in front of them. Behind the prisoners is an enormous fire, and between the fire and the prisoners is a raised walkway, along which people walk carrying things on their heads "including figures of men and animals made of wood, stone and other materials". The prisoners cannot see the raised walkway or the people walking, but they watch the shadows cast by the men, not knowing they are shadows. There are also echoes off the wall from the noise produced from the walkway.

Socrates suggests the prisoners would take the shadows to be real things and the echoes to be real sounds created by the shadows, not just reflections of reality, since they are all they had ever seen or heard. They would praise as clever, whoever could best guess which shadow would come next, as someone who understood the nature of the world, and the whole of their society would depend on the shadows on the wall."

Click to view link


And since you addressed it specifically, see also:

"Planned obsolescence (... ) Origins of planned obsolescence go back at least as far as 1932 with Bernard London's pamphlet Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence. The essence of London's plan would have the government impose a legal obsolescence on consumer articles in order to stimulate and perpetuate consumption."

Click to view link


Now, if it wasn't for the apparent desire of a small group of insane people to control all of humankind, none of this would exist, imho. Of course, one cannot know what the world would look like (once more?) without their chokehold, but we may speculate ... and spread the word, for that matter.

I hope we live to see it ...

Reply from The Daily Bell

Very good!

The Bank of International Settlements (BIS) is an institution that was established by [a href =""http://www. profitconfidential. com/central-bank/"]central banks[/a] around the world. The BIS essentially is a bank for all of the world's central banks, the aim of which is to foster financial and monetary stability globally.

Because of this role, the BIS creates many reports to monitor the conditions of countries and banks around the world.

Recently, the BIS reported on the state of foreign reserves held by central banks around the world. Foreign reserves are simply the assets-currencies, bonds-held by central banks. For instance, if the People's Bank of China buys European bonds to help Europe, then China's central bank now holds European bonds as part of its assets or foreign reserves.

@Abu Aardvark

"And while no one is forcing you to buy this car or go to that restaurant (yet),"

Interestingly after this discussion I did think about this very question. The conclusion I came to was that the nature of the "forcing" or "compulsion" was rather more subtle than simply issuing edicts.

Ever since Edward Bernays invented PR in the Great War working for the Wilson Administration we have been subjected to increasing measures of mental and emotional conditioning, especially through the electronic media. I would recommend reading "Understanding Media - The Extensions of Man" by Marshall McLuhan on this topic. Television is particularly potent in this regard since it is an extension of our cerebral cortex and requires that we provide a high degree of subjective interpretation to the messages being sent. This ensures that our conclusions are perceived as being independently arrived at and are therefore difficult to dislodge.

In the 1950s a conscious decision was made by the ruling elites, based upon Keynesian theory, to stimulate consumer demand on the one hand and to degrade the quality of consumer goods on the other. The result was the kind of throwaway consumer society we have today fuelled by endless credit issued by the central banking system. Most people would regard this information as the ravings of a lunatic but it has been documented and was included in the series entitled The Century of Self, a documentary aired by the BBC Channel 4 in 2002:

Click to view link

Given the existence of this deliberate policy, that must surely be replicated in other aspects of our society, I believe we may actually assert that our lives are very much controlled by those in power even to the extent of ordering personal decisions to an extent unprecedented in human history.

Reply from The Daily Bell

This is excellent, thanks.

@Abu Aardvark

Somehow, I don't get the humor. You must be kidding, I still think, by posting that link of a proof that gold is not money.

If you are kidding, then never mind.

If you are seriously trying to imply that because the people no longer know about gold, then gold is no longer money, then I have this for you: Just because 99.9% of Americans questioned don't think Liechtenstein is a place doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Same goes to the answers of many children to some basic math questions, - the math still stands, unshaken by "reality" of thought.

IN FACT, SHOULD READ:

@ David_Robertson

Point taken. Thanks for the incisive reply. In fact, I tend to agree with almost everything you wrote. And while no one is forcing you to buy this car or go to that restaurant (yet), there can be no such thing as a free market in a fiat-money monopoly environment, imho.

Having said that, their limitations notwithstanding, I hold dear the feats of men like Gary North or Ron Paul, for that matter, although I'm thoroughly marinated in Hoppean Elvish Hot Anarchism (HEHA) myself.

John 9:25. There's no going back.

I cannot rule out *anything* when it comes to control, deceit, and the REAL extent thereof, however.

Not any more ...

Should read:

@ David_Robertson

Point taken. Thanks for the incisive reply. In fact, I tend to agree with almost everything you wrote. And while no one is forcing you to buy this car or go to that restaurant (yet), there can be no such thing as a free market in a fiat-money monopoly environment, imho.

Having said that, their limitations notwithstanding, I hold dear the feats of men like Gary North or Ron Paul, for that matter, although I'm marinated in Hoppean Elvish Anarchism (HEA) myself. John 9:25. There's no going back.

I cannot rule out *anything* when it comes to control, deceit, and the REAL extent thereof, however.

Not any more ...

@ David_Robertson

Point taken. Thanks for the incisive reply. In fact, I tend to agree with almost everything you wrote. And while no one is forcing you to buy this car or go to that restaurant (yet), there can be no such thing as a free market in a fiat-money monopoly environment, imho.

Having said that, I hold dear the feats of men like Gary North or Ron Paul for that matter, although I'm marinated in Hoppean/Elvish Anarchism (HEA) myself. John 9:25. There's no going back.

I cannot rule out *anything* when it comes to control, deceit, and the REAL extent thereof, however.

Not any more ...

DB,

I've thought for some time that the elite have drained about as much as they can from the American slaves, and so must set up the next host nation to bleed. They have done considerable damage in the past to both Russia and China. But, by allowing them to "recover" and rise, the BRICs can be used once the elite abandon America. Revolve, recycle, and reuse.

@ Abu Aardvark

The point I was making was that Gary North was using the video to illustrate that gold is not "money" since it is not accepted by the people as "money". This statement would be true in a free market. Therefore he was saying that we are operating in a free market which we are not. That was, as I say, the material point and it was not made clear in either the video or the commentary which, since Gary North is a well known Austrian economist, is surprising. (I use the term economist in its broadest sense.)

I did mention that Mark Dice was the person giving away the gold Maple Leafs but in using the preposition "in" in connection with Gary North and the word video I did appear to suggest that it was actually Gary North in the video. That was not my intention as can be readily understood in the context of the entire comment and the video itself.

Actually I thought the distinction I made was quite important and I would not have discovered it had it not been for the video and the commentary. It is not something that has crossed my mind before. We are inundated so much with propaganda that we are living in a "free market" economy it has affected my own thinking at least to the extent that I have until now given some credence to it, believing that free market principles still operate in the present economy. I see now that I have been wrong.

This has been my thinking even although I know that the economy is largely controlled through government regulatory actions at the behest of the corporate and banking cartels. I can now see clearly that there is no free market whatsoever and in fact there cannot be one until we have sound money which as we know is gold and silver.

It was in seeing this that I was surprised that Gary North did not mention it given his understanding of markets and the gold standard. I even suggested he may have done it deliberately as an education tool in order to give credit to his expertise. Who knows, perhaps I have stumbled onto something that has been missed by even the great minds of our time.

BTW I do know who Gary North is since I followed Ron Paul's nomination campaign closely both in 2011/12 and in 2007/08. I even started reading his work on Biblical Economics. Now that we have had this exchange I shall make a point of looking into it again.

David_Robertson on 02/12/13 10:16 AM wrote: "To pretend that free market rules operate in a government controlled economy as does Gary North in this video appears to betray a misunderstanding of our present economy."

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Gary North does no such thing, since he doesn't appear in the video. Her merely wrote ABOUT it. In fact, Gary North writes about the "government controlled economy", gold, free markets, Austrian Economics, etc. for decades - 9 articles a day, dozens of books, etc.

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In 1976 North was Ron Pauls speechwriter and economic analyst, by the way ...

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@Abu Aardvark

"Gold Is Not Money. This Video Shows Why." by Gary North

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We are living in a world in which "money" is whatever the government says it is. The fiat dollar is used because for over forty years the government has said that is the only money that can be used in the USA. Even going back further to 1935 there has been no gold backing for the dollar, just Federal debt.

In these circumstances is it surprising that the general public knows nothing about the historic role of gold as money? If tomorrow the government of the USA decided that they would make gold the money of the country then I wager that within a very short period of time if Mark Dice played the same game with the people he would give away every single gold coin.

In other words we do not live in a free market economy, we live in a government controlled economy that operates under different rules than the free market. To pretend that free market rules operate in a government controlled economy as does Gary North in this video appears to betray a misunderstanding of our present economy.

Nevertheless he does make a good point that makes us think and for that he is to be thanked. Given his understanding of the gold standard it may well be he intended this video as an educational tool. Suffice to say that I believe the gold standard can only operate properly in a free market. The two are inseparable. If we meddle with one we lose the other. This has also happened frequently in the past. It is very probable that the ideal has never been attained.

The Bank of International Settlements (BIS) is an institution that was established by central banks around the world. The BIS essentially is a bank for all of the world's central banks, the aim of which is to foster financial and monetary stability globally.