How Useful is Gold

Gold is useful or useless, depending on who you ask. Gold serves its purpose for coinage, store of value, portability, collectors, medicine, chemistry, electronics, and on the finger of every engaged or married couple around the globe as a symbol of the circle of life and forever love.

Gold used to be a universal yardstick of coinage value in market exchanges. Gold was helpful because it did not die on the way to the market, held its relative value in any amounts, did not tarnish, and it was the gold standard around the globe since 2500 B.C., relatively speaking.

Gold stopped being the universal yardstick behind the value of every currency after 1971, when the U.S. discontinued redeeming its paper currency with gold. That is when money became valued by government fiat (Latin for ‘let it be’).

Major trading nations had a fixed, official rate of exchange (1944-1971) tied to the U.S. dollar. Each dollar could be redeemed for gold at $35 per ounce. In 1971, the Nixon administration abandoned the gold standard and, since then, currencies have floated daily in value against each other, influenced by supply and demand, and by the monetary policies of various governments in their efforts to ‘manage’ their specific currencies. Some countries pegged (linked) their currencies to the value of the U.S. dollar or used the U.S. dollar.

Brics countries (Brazil, Russia, China, India, and South Africa) have agreed to trade in their own currencies and crypto currencies, via a payment called BRICS Pay.

There are countries that experience wild and rapid changes in the value of their currencies for various reasons, i.e., they cannot issue their own currencies, their economies are in turmoil, runaway inflation, deflation, defaults on loan agreements, huge balance of trade deficits, and bad economic policies that exacerbate the situation.

Gold reserves and a strong currency have always been stability goals. The value of gold has exploded to the highest level of $5,500 and recently to $4,600 per troy ounce (31.103 grams).

The spot price of gold represents the real-time market value for immediate delivery of 0.999+ pure gold. The global trading of exchanges COMEX in New York and the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) determine the price.

Price factors are supply and demand of gold, economic uncertainty, inflation rates, currency strength (especially the U.S. dollar), central bank policies, and geopolitical events such as wars.

Gold has always been a sign of wealth, a store of value, and a metal traded as gold bullion. According to Ed Conway, “Great Britain has no goldmining, no significant gold reserves, but is one of its biggest producers. That is because much of the world’s physical gold passes through London on its way somewhere else.”

How useful is gold in our modern society? Aside from store of value in the bank vaults of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, wedding bands, engagement rings with precious stones, and shiny jewelry, there are not many applications for gold.

One could say that we could live comfortably if there was no gold unearthed from mountains, a very toxic process with cyanide and mercury that hurts the environment, especially the rivers and soil.

A wedding ring required long ago one third or less of a ton of ore extracted from the earth in the traditional mining way, with a pickaxe. Experts say that today it takes 4-20 tons of rock blasted from a mountain to make one gold band.

After rocks are blasted from the side of a mountain in massive quantities, they are crushed and ground into a powder, then mixed with a cyanide solution which separates the gold from the rest of the dust. Do cyanide and mercury used in the process leech into the environment? Sometimes they do and low fines are levied.

John Maynard Keynes once called gold “a barbarous relic.”  Gold does play a small role in electronics and chemistry, about ten percent of demand.

There are so many other materials in the world besides gold, without which life would be much more difficult, but simpler as judged by minimalists, environmentalists, and conservationists - sand, salt, coal, iron, gas, fossil fuels, lithium, bauxite, and copper.

 

 

Colors and Poppies

When I was a child, my friends and I would walk away from our concrete block apartments to the nearby wheat fields guarded by two scary-looking men armed with axes. The desire to find and pick red poppies in bloom was stronger than any fear these men inspired. As little girls, we did not understand why it was necessary to guard a simple field of wheat with axes.

We eventually made the connection between the seeds of wheat and the ability to turn them into flour from which our mothers would bake bread. Because flour was in short supply and rationed, we had to line up daily to purchase ready-made bread before the communist-owned store ran out. 

Nobody in their right minds would have stolen wheat from the Communist Party that owned the field and all the means of production. They owned all the people too, including us. Our parents trained us all the time to keep our mouths shut and never say anything in public that we heard at home or else we would never see our parents again.

We reached the edge of the wheat field. The purplish-blue butterflies were out in force, flying by in their airy dance. We each caught one for a moment in our cupped palms, felt its velvety wings touching our skin, then released it giggling.

We were not too afraid of the guards with axes because we erroneously thought that they were there to protect us from harm.

We were happy and looking forward to finding the small patch of red poppies we spotted from our fifth-floor balcony the day before.

The intense poppy red was a sharp contrast to the colors that surrounded our lives. Color was often denied in our drab existence. Uniforms and regular street clothes came in basic groups such as brown, black, navy, grey, ink blue. White and ink blue shirts completed our uniform palette.

Beautiful flowers with stunning colors and shapes, often planted on small balconies in clay pots, was our way to escape the sad and grey world of the Bauhaus minimalist existence the Communist Party leaders forced us to survive in.

Grandma and mom’s siblings who lived in the country had a small patch by their homes in which they planted both vegetables and fragrant roses.

Occasionally we would find fabrics with a splash of red or pink and women bought yards to make dresses for little girls. The rest of us wore the basic and depressing colors of communist control – shades of grey, brown, black, and navy blue.

We walked joyfully that day, with a spring in our steps – Milica, Viorica, Dorina, and I. We reached the poppy patch, swimming through dense and tall blades of wheat, oblivious to the micro cuts we got from the plants hitting exposed skin.

As we started to pick a few poppies, the guards appeared out of nowhere, waving their axes and shouting for us to disappear before they hurt us for crushing the wheat.

I am not sure how much wheat we trampled; but we were running for our lives, so we thought, out of breath, and with tears streaming down our faces.

Clutching a few poppies to my chest, we ran in the direction of our apartments, crossing the railroad tracks separating the apartment buildings from the fields. I placed my poppies in a glass of water on the windowsill, a vibrant reminder of God’s beauty.

Our parents had no idea where we had been because we never told them. We were sure to be punished if we did. I never forgot the incident and never went back. My exploration streak would find plenty of wonders in my grandparents’ villages.

Years later I finally understood what the two men with axes were guarding. It was not the wheat harvest; it was the hidden poppies, the opium crop of those who had planted it.

The communist government ignored the illegal activities of its agents.

Control Grid and Nudge

What is control grid? Catherine Austin Fitts talked about the concept of control grid snapping into place quickly and becoming fast reality.

Control grid is “a process or infrastructure that allows digital technology to be used to assert phenomenal control and surveillance of people.” At the heart of this control grid is ‘programmable money.’

Programmable money is not exactly a currency but digital money that comes with a set of rules that can be enforced by banks. Bankers, who traditionally run monetary policy, could run fiscal policy as well via programmable money.

During Covid, if you left your house when told not to, if you tried to spend your money via digital currency, the banking system would invalidate its use because you left your house. The money becomes programmed with AI to enforce a certain set of rules that would go against your wishes.

Such programmable money allows bankers to control not only monetary policy, i.e. interest rates and the money stock, but also fiscal policy, currently performed by Congress and the President, who levy taxes, authorize spending, and allocate funds, by replacing Congress and the President with a set of rules for the digital money that is only controlled and enforceable by the banks.

A large infrastructure of surveillance is required to achieve control grid such as digital I.D., hardware locally and globally, i.e. cameras in neighborhoods that track cars coming and going in the 15-minute cities, cell towers everywhere, satellites to beam in Wi-Fi, tracking everyone everywhere, control weaponry and autonomous weaponry, and data centers to store all the information.

There are three elements to the control grid:

1.      Local hardware and infrastructure which includes the data centers (AI control centers that manage all data); the social credit system becomes most important to enforce rules and the data must be stored in data centers; examples include spatial control, movement control of people via kill switch in cars, money won’t work more than a mile from your home.

2.      Digital I.D.

3.      Programmable money.

Central banks are setting up the world so that they can control our finances in real time with the equivalent of a social credit system, Catherine Austin Fitts added.

Biometrics or facial recognition is part of the digital I.D. system and plays a key role in tracking our movements and facilitating surveillance.

People are promoting the use of cash instead of credit cards and trying to keep analog alive. However, if you go to a large store and purchase something with cash, even though your smart phone may be left in the car, as soon as you resume your use of the phone, ads will pop up, trying to sell you the very product you purchased with cash. How is that possible? Biometrics in the store have recognized your face.

Our local grocery store has cameras everywhere not just to prevent theft but to recognize who you are and how often you shop in their store and what products you purchase regularly.

Banks control how much of your own money you can withdraw as cash under the excuse that you might be the victim of fraud by a third party and they are trying to protect you. This is called ‘nudging.’

In the financial system, banks use ‘nudging’ under the guise of “subtle interventions to help consumers make better informed decisions about their money without restricting their freedom of choice.”

On the other hand, cybercrime is real. Banks and customers tend to lose a lot of money to cybercrime. But do we need banks to control our cash finances?

The reality is that ‘nudging’ is used in the banks’ interest, and it is restricting one’s freedom of choice when the ability to withdraw certain amounts of cash money is declined by banks.

The Federal Reserve, our central bank, has managed our monetary policy since 1913. Politicians determine fiscal policy. With programmable money, the bankers can assert control of fiscal policy, a form of financial coup d’etat. With the control grid enabled by programmable money, the legislators eventually become more or less ‘show and tell’ without any fiscal policy power. They just become figureheads.

If central banks are not on board with programmable money, those countries, like Iran and the Brics nations create great “leakages” in the model of the banking system’s programmable money with digital I.D. The only option to bring the ‘leakage’ countries into the fold of programmable money with digital I.D. is regime change.

 

 

 

 

North Bengal and Tea

North Bengal in India has many tea plantations. The workers are tribal laborers brought in by the British from Central India because they are considered "hardworking and obedient."

The tea harvest is difficult and backbreaking. The workers picking only the young, green leaves, must be really fast. They get paid 150 rupees a day for their work. That is the price of a cappuccino at the airport. If they are not fast enough, their pay is docked.

There is an empty space left at the bottom of the tea bush for an animal to seek shade and shelter in the sweltering heat. And sometimes female leopards with their cubs, asleep in that space, are startled from their slumber and attack the pickers. Mary Roach wrote in her book, Fuzz, that "Ninety percent of leopard attacks happen in North Bengal on tea estates."

Elephant herds, protected by the government can destroy entire fields of vegetation in less than a day and attack humans who cannot fight back. How could they? One of their gods, Ganesh, has the face of an elephant.

Humans are encouraged to fight back with noise makers and flares to scare the elephants away. Even if they tried to shoot the elephants, their skin is too thick for most conventional guns and their thick skin cannot be pierced. There are retaliatory killings of elephants, humans kill three to five elephants a year in such a manner.

The government uses elephants as soldiers and, when they retire them, they give them a pension, so to speak, and a place to live out the rest of their lives.

Elephant herds charge and trample people, their shanty homes, and their small crops of vegetation. Often an entire year's worth of work is gone and people cannot fight back.

It seems that India protects animals better than they do humans. For example, the government of Delhi announced in 2019 that it "planned to revamp the five sanctuaries it maintains for the city's free-ranging, traffic-snarling, sacred cows." Upon criticism that the government provided more for cows than for its citizens, the Minister of Animal Husbandry announced, "We are planning a unique coexistence programme where elderly will be allowed to stay with the cows."

If that is shocking, consider this, the Prime Minister, Narenda Modi, bestowed personhood status to the Ganges River. A river has human rights protection!

If you enjoy a cup of tea, remember the poor workers who have to fight to survive so much adversity, for so little pay.

Gold Shines

“Everything has its limit – iron ore cannot be educated into gold.” – Mark Twain

People have chased gold since they realized that keeping a barter economy was not always feasible because commodity money like grain rotted, salt scattered, and cows were tough to take to the market. So, they invented money: stone money (Yap Island), salt (China and Roman Empire), ivory (Fiji), elephant hair (Africa), tobacco (Solomon Islands), brick tea money (Siberia), East Indian Money Tree (Malay Peninsula), Copper money (Alaskan Indian), to name a few.

The history of precious metals shows that as early as 2500 B.C. gold, silver, and copper were used in Egypt and Asia Minor to pay for goods and services. The kingdom of Lydia was minting coins in 700 B.C. made of electrum, a pale-yellow alloy of gold and silver.

People minted coins. Silver and gold coins had high value, portability, and payments by tale were made, counting out the right amount rather than weighing it. Even though animals did not die on the way to market, and perishable commodities did not spoil, there was always the possibility of being robbed of commodity money and coins.

Ridges were added to coins made of precious metals because humans filed the edges of coins to get gold or silver dust which they then sold as bullion or bartered for goods.

The next step was storing wealth in gold and silver bars. Bars held value over time and were easier to store as wealth. Most nations store their gold bars with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. From this location, nations can request payments to other countries and the respective gold amounts are moved from the safe shelves of the payor to the shelves of the payee.

The one troy ounce ingot today sells for around $5,200, while the 3 kg bar sells for around $167,000. The price of gold has increased dramatically in the last ten years by 700 percent.

If a currency was not made of gold and silver, its value was measured in gold and silver. This gold standard held for a while. After 1971 the gold standard became outdated as countries no longer backed the value of their currency with gold. Inflation exploded as countries printed money without any backing of gold or backing by goods and services. Fiat currency was born. Our U.S. fiat currency, the “greenbacks,” date back to 1862.

According to reports by the World Gold Council, the top 10 countries with the most gold reserves as of January 2025 are: U.S. (8,133.5 tons), Germany (3,355.1 tons), Italy (2,451.8 tons), France (2,436 tons), Russia (2,299.9 tons), China (2,068.8 tons), Switzerland (1,040 tons), Japan (846 tons), India (760.4 tons), and Netherlands (612.5 tons). U.S. gold reserves are kept in Fort Knox, Kentucky, but nobody has seen them in decades.

John Maynard Keynes, the famous Keynesian economist, wrote that gold is a “barbarous relic.”  Used somewhat in electronics and chemistry, gold has major uses in jewelry and as a store of value in ingots and collectible coins.

According to Ed Conway, the typical gold wedding band requires the removal “between 4 and 20 tons of rock” from the top of a mountain while traditional mining methods required “0.3 tons of ore” to make a wedding band.

Conway wrote that, in a single day, three-story tall trucks remove rocks from the top of a mountain, or the hole dug up into a mountain, the weight of the Empire State Building. “For a standard gold bar (400 troy ounces) they would have to dig out about 5,000 tons of earth.” It is thus no surprise that whole mountains have been torn down to produce gold. Nobody knows the exact amount of pure gold ever extracted.

And how do they produce gold? The rocks blasted out of the mountain are ground into a fine powder which is then mixed with a cyanide solution to separate the gold, quite a toxic method for the earth, humans, and animals.

It is not surprising that humans have tried for ages to turn other metals into gold. Enter medieval alchemists, scientists, and charlatans, trying to find the “philosopher’s stone or the great elixir” that would change lead or other common metals into gold and silver. The most famous alchemist, Nicolas Flamel, a Frenchman, claimed in 1382 that he was able to change lead into silver and mercury into gold.

Even though Nicolas Flamel claimed that he had found the “philosopher stone and the great elixir,” there is no evidence that gold and silver could be transmuted from other metals unless particle accelerators and nuclear reactors were used.

Although unsuccessful, medieval alchemists promoted unknowingly the advancement of chemistry, optics, mathematics, and astronomy. History is full of gold stories which point to human ingenuity and greed.

The medieval ruler of Mali, Mansa Musa (1312-1337), lived in spectacular splendor and largesse thanks to the gold mined in massive quantities by slaves.

Archimedes found the solution to a gold problem when he was hired by Hiero, the king of Syracuse, to detect if his crown was pure gold or was adulterated with silver. Archimedes found the solution while sitting in his bath and ran into the street shouting the infamous “Eureka,” I found it (the solution).

Gold is denser than silver and displaces more water in a tub when a gold crown is submerged than a crown made of both gold and silver. Silver is lighter so less water is displaced when such a crown is submerged.

Very few treasures in Mexico, Peru, and Colombia survived the European melting pot of the Conquistadores who looted temples like the Temple of the Sun at Cuzco.

Pizzaro and his men captured Atahualpa, the emperor of the Incas. Atahualpa offered to fill his prison apartments with gold in exchange for his freedom. He filled one room with gold and two rooms with silver. He kept his word, but Pizzaro not so much. Gold Inca treasures were melted for coins.

In 1492 Christopher Columbus and his men found gold jewelry on Arawak chiefs in the West Indies and, in the next 40 years, the fiercest gold rush ensued and “the majority of the known gold-producing regions of the New World were theirs.”

“The natives of pre-Columbian America prized the gold for its beauty, presuming that the shiny yellow metal had a divine origin. In Mexico, the Aztecs called it the excrement of the gods, while the Incas of Peru thought it to be the sweat of the sun.” Gold was not valued as a major metal for currency. Because it did not corrode, it was used for fishing hooks and other tools, or it was just admired for its beauty in decorative arts. All the gold confiscated by the Spaniards enabled them to fund their fearsome armada.

Not long ago, grave-robbers in Panama sold ancient gold objects to dentists to be melted down for use in dental fillings.

Never forget, “all that glitter is not gold.”

NOTE: Medieval alchemists were somewhat proven correct that lead can be turned into gold, if the CERN Large Hadron Collider from Switzerland is used. During high energy particle collisions, the lead nuclei pass near each other at near-light speeds and generate intense electro-magnetic fields. These fields can trigger photons to knock out protons from the lead atoms, turning them into gold.

Gold has 79 protons while lead has 82.

During Run 2 (2015-2018) 86 billion gold nuclei were created this way, amounting to just 29 picograms, too little to make a gold coin, but it was gold. So, the medieval alchemists' idea of transmuting lead into gold was valid as long as a particle accelerator was used.

Fighting the Icecrete with Our Neighbor

Saturday we were going out to meet a friend for lunch. My husband backed the SUV out of the garage and, because the cleared path through the ice was narrow and crooked, he wound up in a huge bank of piled up ice which took his traction away from the wheels. The county had cleared one small and narrow path through the middle of the street for cars to drive through but piled the mountains of ice in the cul-de-sac.

Since he got stuck, hubby tried to get out the door to shovel. The mountain of ice was blocking the wheels and the doors on both sides; the doors would not open. Lucky for my athletic sixty-something hubby, he was able to crawl out through his window, went to the garage, picked up a shovel, and started shoveling the concrete-like ice. I called it icecrete.

Our neighbor’s son across the street saw him struggle and came with a shovel to help him dig out. He was neighborly and quite helpful. Eventually, after 45 minutes of shoveling hard ice, he brought a piece of wood which they were able to place under the front tires to create traction and hubby was able to drive the SUV off the ice bank. Needless to say, I could not come out the door on my side because it was also blocked by the mountain of icecrete.

Saying that we were momentarily unlucky, is an understatement. Fortunately, and graciously, our friend waited for us even though we were one hour late for our lunch date.

Getting old is a challenge for everyone, but my hubby was able to crawl out the window, not an easy feat for a man in his 60s.

Could he feel the pain next day? Of course, but he never complained once.

I Was a Resident Alien

In our county, the Census Bureau counted, the illegal population has grown by 40% in the last ten years. This figure does not count all other illegals dropped in our midst overnight by the Biden administration, all bussed or flown from the open southern border, aided by NGOs stationed in the Darien Gap between Colombia and Panama, NGOs financed by U.S. taxpayer dollars.

The arguments from the left about the illegals’ presence in this country is many-fold: we were all migrants/undocumented to this country at some point, we need open borders in order to facilitate the one world government, we need their labor, illegals need safety and a better economic life, and this land was stolen from them in the first place. Hollywood celebrities make sure they remind us of this misleading notion every chance they get together to award prizes to each other. Some own lavish mansions located on the actual 'stolen land' they mention.

A person I met from Central America talks about the abject fear that the illegal community lives under daily. One of her friends was picked up on his way to work and deported; now his family of four does not have enough support because the social security benefits are inadequate. Mom must work now to support her family. The father had been in this country for ten years. Why exactly could the father not obtain a work permit?

Three ladies she knew, traveling on the HOV on their way to work, were arrested and deported. She did not know why they were stopped, but they were all here illegally. None of them had work visas.

“Nonimmigrant visa holders are typically required to have a work permit (EAD) before being hired to work in the U.S. In most cases, obtaining a work permit will allow you to work for any employer. And you do not have to work in any specific trade or profession.” Work in the U.S. with a work permit (EAD) | USAGov

The problem with foreign nationals who are here is that many cross our border illegally, with help from paid coyotes, and settle in heavily ethnic areas where they intend to work off the books. They have no intention to learn English and assimilate, which would benefit and improve their lives here.

Even though Democrat politicians object to the use of the term ‘alien’ and prefer that illegal immigrants are called ‘undocumented’ or ‘non-citizens,’ the U.S. Immigration Court has reinstated the [prior] use of the word ‘alien’ for non-citizens, stating that the term is neither pejorative nor insulting.”

Illegals do pay sales taxes in the process of living here but they seldom pay Social Security taxes and income taxes; they send their earnings back to the countries that they came from to help their extended families. Illegal families here are usually on various welfare programs while the father works for untraceable cash.

The conservative part of America welcomes legal immigrants who are vetted for health issues, have no criminal records or gang-related history, are not illiterate in their own language, assimilate and contribute to our society, and support their families without burdening the welfare, educational, and medical systems in the U.S.

To the leftist argument that we need more illegals to increase our diversity – the answer is that we are diverse enough. We do not need dozens and dozens of foreign cultures within ethnic areas; we need a unified American culture with people who are able to speak English as well as their native tongues at home.

We should not have to translate government forms into so many languages. If you are unable or unwilling to learn English, then perhaps you should stay in your home country and help make it better. If you do not contribute in any way to the growth of our society, you should have stayed in your home countries and helped them grow.

Illegal children burden the school systems in many ways. They are not vaccinated which places local children in danger. They have been exposed to illnesses indigenous to the areas where they came from, while our children were not exposed to such. Illegal students are usually behind in their education and must be tutored to catch up and the school systems must hire special teachers for them.

The corrupt media never discusses the burden of illegals on American taxpayers. Illegals were told by Democrats that, if they come across the border, their needs will be met, and all they have to do is vote Democrat in America’s elections. Democrats do not care what they do to America because they want absolute government control.

Illegals are housed, fed, clothed, schooled, their utilities paid, their college tuition, phones, transportation paid, all while our veterans linger forgotten and homeless. Gang members, bussed in the country, are now murdering American citizens while America’s drug problem is exploding.

What foreign parents would allow their children to travel alone to the U.S. in hopes that, once inside the U.S., they will have a better life? Who will take care of them, where will they end up?

According to our government, during the Biden administration there were 300,000 foreign national children missing. When asked about their fate, President Trump is quoted as saying that they are probably slaves, sex slaves, or dead.

Illegal immigration is an invasion promoted by Presidents Biden and Obama, to fulfill a socialist agenda to destroy western society, belief in God, morality, the family, and to establish a one world government. It started with United Nation’s plan which demanded from its members that they allow mass migration from the third world to Europe and to other western societies.

Democrats and Republicans agree with this mass invasion, using illegals to keep themselves in power while ignoring the wishes of the American people.