Oprah Invites Hundreds Of Lucky Fans To Be Buried With Her In Massive Tomb

Gold ETFs

I meant to mention this after my post the other day about GLD and SLV in my IRA. For the record, I don't recommend buying paper silver or gold with investment money. You're better off investing in mining companies or even a mining company fund (GDX, for instance), or buying physical gold and silver from your local precious metals dealer. However, in an IRA or 401(k), where your money is essentially being held hostage in exchange for some dubious tax benefits, holding precious metals ETFs can be a method of inflation-proofing and diversifying your portfolio.

So, two questions arise: which precious metals and which funds?

Freedom isn't free (and it isn't for the morally degenerate)

John Philpot Curran (although frequently misattributed to Thomas Jefferson):

The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt.

Edmund Burke:

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

and:

All who have ever written on government are unanimous, that among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn:

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.

First IRA swap

The gold/silver ratio dropped below 50 today. It dipped down this far a few weeks ago, but only momentarily, and I missed the opportunity to trade below 50. This time, it looks like it might actually hang out down there. I traded a quarter of my SLV for GLD. I considered IAU instead, since Soros went that route and their expense ratio is lower, but ended up just sticking with GLD. Maybe when and if the ratio breaks through the next resistance (~45), I'll move a chunk of SLV into IAU.

This is an interesting experiment: to see if a sterile, inflation-proof investment can actually produce a return through arbitrage. Next trade will be either a third of my SLV to GLD if the ratio goes under 45, or a quarter of my GLD to SLV if it goes over 60.

Is that better?

There, I cleaned up the template. Hopefully it's more readable now.

And for good measure:

Uh oh.

Looks like I have a second follower, and a priest, no less. Guess I have to clean up my act. Thanks, Father, for the advice. I'll try to clean up the blog that I have no intention of using.

Gotta get this offa my chest...

...and since I've got exactly ONE follower, it won't much matter what I say here, will it? Here goes...

WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?!!!

I mean, I get it that Joe Miller wasn't a strong candidate. He was of a lower caliber than Sarah Palin, I think, and I don't care much for her. But you ditched him in favor of Teh Crown Princess Lisa MooCOWski?!!! You had to write her name in to do it too! And I've analyzed the votes. It wasn't Democraps that put her over the top. Take my district, for example:

Registered voters: 2021
Cards cast: 965
As an aside to the 55% of you who didn't bother to show up: why bother registering to vote, when you're too damned lazy to actually exercise that right? Seriously, why? Does it make you feel better to have a voter registration card in your wallet?