Looking forward to reading the book! It’s perhaps fitting that gold looks to have finally broken out of its range on the week that you released it! Let’s hope it holds.
Niall Ferguson argued in his history of debt and money, The Cash Nexus. Gold’s future, he said, is ‘mainly as jewellery’ or ‘in parts of the world with primitive or unstable monetary and financial systems’.
Hoist by his own petard! We live in unstable monetary and financial systems.
Mike Green (gives a fig … & is denser than gold on the subject of “passive”) by way of Rudy Havenstein (who is a fresh wholesome fruit purveyor, too), both on substack, talks metals & metallic bits between the the back teeth in many mouths that are going to get rode hard, put up wet, & sent to the dog food & glue factories - again - is worth the time:
“Known in the numismatic world as a "Moby Dick Coin", the Ecuadorian 8 Escudos doubloon, minted in Quito, Ecuador, between 1838 and 1843, is the one ounce of gold "sixteen dollar piece" Captain Ahab nails to the mast of the Pequod, promising it to the first man who "raises" Moby-Dick.”
~~~ In that great SNL skit Bruce Dickison’s got a fever for more-more-more cowbell. ~~~
These Ahab/itual offenders all have hard-ons for the biggest hard-on of all & the permanent refractory period only ol’ Moby can provide ….. (This Pequotidian place is batshit crazy, insane, always has been & will be.)
Ahab’s bitten off leg has an ivory prosthesis strapped to the stump. The Jhole Ahabs (in Wyoming, just lately) wheedle-whittle wooden nickels from the tragic commons & with those “pay” the tragi-comic commoners to work their legs, clear up past their asses, off.
And, “isn’t it ironic?”, Melville had to hang it up. Couldn’t pay the bills with his writing. Later, after he’d been dead awhile, carpetbaggers turned his work into gold … until from that same ilk gold was turned into paper scrip & digital bits, until gold went down with the ship Moby sank … down down down into the octopus’s yellow submarine garden at the bottom of the Holy central bank sea … See? And Paul got a Sir. And whatever permissions the Crown of the anti-virtues ~ hubris ~ hands out to the welfare queens that accept that “title.” (Walter Raleigh was such a sir, too, until the sire/n call of the shiny objects had his head severed from his neck. See Raleigh’s poem, The Lie. Straighten from a liar’s mouth, it is.)
Adnan Khashoggi had this Pequod built for $100 million in ’80.
Khash sold it in ’88 to the Sultan of Brunei “who in turn” sold it to Orange Julius (would be Caesar) for $29 million.
“After a refit, Trump renamed it Trump Princess.[3] To dock Trump Princess at the Atlantic City harbor, Trump obtained special dredging permits which instead of taking three years were accomplished in only a couple of months with support from Roger Stone and the lobbying firm Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly."
Trump sold it in ’91 for $20 million to some other Barbary-Arab pirate.
Down, down, down is what prices do in the in-theory-only healthy economy - because/as “the money” becomes more valuable the “purchasing power” increases - none of us have ever known.
But that’s not the dynamic among these “art of the deal” bankrupters who plank-walk most of the planet’s population.
DH Lawrence:
“So ends one of the strangest & most wonderful books in the world, closing up its mystery & its tortured symbolism. It is an epic of the sea such as no man has equalled; & it is a book of esoteric symbolism of profound significance, & of considerable tiresomeness.
But it is a great book, a very great book, the greatest book of the sea ever written. It moves awe in the soul.
The terrible fatality.
Fatality.
Doom.
Doom! Doom! Doom! Something seems to whisper it in the very dark trees of America. Doom!
Doom of what?
Doom of our white day. We are doomed, doomed. And the doom is in America. The doom of our white day.
Ah, well, if my day is doomed, & I am doomed with my day, it is something greater than I which dooms me, so I accept my doom as a sign of the greatness which is more than I am.
Melville knew. He knew his race was doomed. His white soul doomed. His great white epoch, doomed. Himself, doomed. The idealist, doomed. The spirit, doomed.
The reversion. ‘Not so much bound to any haven ahead, as rushing from all havens astern.’
That great horror of ours! It is our civilization rushing from all havens astern.
The last ghastly hunt. The White Whale.
What then is Moby Dick? He is the deepest blood-being of the white race; he is our deepest blood-nature.
And he is hunted, hunted, hunted by the maniacal fanaticism of our white mental consciousness. We want to hunt him down. To subject him to our will. And in this maniacal conscious hunt of ourselves we get dark races & pale to help us, red, yellow, & black, east & west, Quaker & fire-worshipper, we get them all to help us in this ghastly maniacal hunt which is our doom & our suicide.
The last phallic being of the white man. Hunted into the death of the upper consciousness & the ideal will. Our blood-self subjected to our will. Our blood-consciousness sapped by a parasitical or ideal consciousness.
Hot blooded sea-born Moby Dick. Hunted by monomaniacs of the idea.
Oh God, oh God, what next, when the Pequod has sunk?
She sank in the war, & we are all flotsam.
Now what next?
Who knows? Quien sabe? Quien sabe, senor?
Neither Spanish nor Saxon America has any answer.
The Pequod went down & the Pequod was the ship of the white American soul. She sank, taking with her negro & Indian & Polynesian, Asiatic & Quaker & good, business-like Yankees & Ishmael: she sank all the lot of them.
Boom! As Vachel Lindsay would say.
To use the words of Jesus, IT IS FINISHED.
Consummatum est!
But Moby Dick was first published in 1851. If the Great White Whale sank the ship of the Great White Soul in 1851, what’s been happening ever since?
Post-mortem effects, presumably.
Because, in the first centuries, Jesus was Cetus, the Whale. And the Christians were the little fishes. Jesus, the Redeemer, was Cetus, Leviathan. And all the Christians all his little fishes.”
And:
“The great difference between the extreme Russians & the extreme Americans lies in the fact that the Russians are explicit & hate eloquence & symbols, seeing in these only subterfuge, whereas the Americans refuse everything explicit & always put up a sort of double meaning. They revel in subterfuge. They prefer their truth safely swaddled in an ark of bulrushes, & deposited among the reeds until some friendly Egyptian princess comes to rescue the babe.
Well, it’s high time now that someone came to lift out the swaddled infant of truth that America spawned some time back. The child must be getting pretty thin from neglect.”
Loaded with memorable, quotable lines, this one, in the chapter on Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking novels, led me to the book:
“The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, & a killer. It has never yet melted.”
Pithy.
But unlike another Brit who royal we’d that exploration would not cease & when the end of all that exploration came full circle round to the start that place would finally be recognized for the first time … DHL found it easier to recognize in America what he couldn’t recognize in Britain, or all the other places people congregate.
The human condition is the territory. These divide/conquer distinctions (including all the generational “turnings” gizmos) are just maps drawn by smoke-blowing cosmographers for smoke-inhaling wannabe cosmographers.
(Too many) People (children) want to shove a lollipop-bit/coin in a unicorn’s mouth & then ride it over a rainbow.
Because that’s where the leprechaun’s gold pot is.
And because with our magic horsey tech we can Pol Pot his ass, easy, & take that gold.
Plus we have magic historians who can fix up the story, & turn us all into important actors, like Cypher told Agent Smith he wanted to be, post betrayal/murder.
AA, artificial adulthood, domesstication, begets all this stuff - including AI.
More manual prestidigitation, less digital prestidigitation, but still just the zeroes & ones castes, preceded, on the same “sophistication” arc … that the ones are building arks & bunkers for pairs of ones just like them & no zeroes need apply.
The hunt goes on♾️ for perpetual motion, cold fusion, Tesla free energy … to power fusion/data centers & the most magical Peter Panopticon ever.
What was that, Twilight Zone? Outer Limits? Billy Mumy?
Profligacy is not “power.” It’s a Billy Mumy child, engaged in that same ol’ mummified kid stuff.
And Keynes was a barbarous, appetite-disordered, homosexual, who provided useful fig leaves, “intellectual cover” - yeah, that little head down below - to other Priapuses & satyrs.
For erections lasting more than centuries, see a doctor, which is another centuries-old erection … & was that when Mary Shelley wrote it out in 1818.
In a few years, these trying times will be the good old days when you could buy gold at less than USD$3400 per ounce.
Great first chapter, Dominic. You have me hooked. 👍
Thank you!
So I looked at the old uk gold mines and quickly discovered that it is illegal to pan for gold in these areas.
Well well well … somebody is protecting their assets
Looking forward to reading the book! It’s perhaps fitting that gold looks to have finally broken out of its range on the week that you released it! Let’s hope it holds.
Indeed. There’s a nice symmetry to it
Niall Ferguson argued in his history of debt and money, The Cash Nexus. Gold’s future, he said, is ‘mainly as jewellery’ or ‘in parts of the world with primitive or unstable monetary and financial systems’.
Hoist by his own petard! We live in unstable monetary and financial systems.
Haha I think he might’ve since changed his view
Mike Green (gives a fig … & is denser than gold on the subject of “passive”) by way of Rudy Havenstein (who is a fresh wholesome fruit purveyor, too), both on substack, talks metals & metallic bits between the the back teeth in many mouths that are going to get rode hard, put up wet, & sent to the dog food & glue factories - again - is worth the time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3iqbB6URHA
Read, then watched. Good job, Dom.
***
You may drive out nature with a pitchfork, yet she'll be constantly running back.
- Horace
And so, per your headline, The Useless Mentality That Rules The World.
Red in tooth & claw. Juggling jugulars. Use it up. Grasp-grab after those shiny objects youse not so bright burners, youse.
Coen Bros:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQL--Ayw9Jw
Bill Withers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuYDKzky4z0&list=RDNuYDKzky4z0&start_radio=1
“Known in the numismatic world as a "Moby Dick Coin", the Ecuadorian 8 Escudos doubloon, minted in Quito, Ecuador, between 1838 and 1843, is the one ounce of gold "sixteen dollar piece" Captain Ahab nails to the mast of the Pequod, promising it to the first man who "raises" Moby-Dick.”
~~~ In that great SNL skit Bruce Dickison’s got a fever for more-more-more cowbell. ~~~
These Ahab/itual offenders all have hard-ons for the biggest hard-on of all & the permanent refractory period only ol’ Moby can provide ….. (This Pequotidian place is batshit crazy, insane, always has been & will be.)
https://www.litcharts.com/lit/moby-dick/chapter-99-the-doubloon
Ahab’s bitten off leg has an ivory prosthesis strapped to the stump. The Jhole Ahabs (in Wyoming, just lately) wheedle-whittle wooden nickels from the tragic commons & with those “pay” the tragi-comic commoners to work their legs, clear up past their asses, off.
And, “isn’t it ironic?”, Melville had to hang it up. Couldn’t pay the bills with his writing. Later, after he’d been dead awhile, carpetbaggers turned his work into gold … until from that same ilk gold was turned into paper scrip & digital bits, until gold went down with the ship Moby sank … down down down into the octopus’s yellow submarine garden at the bottom of the Holy central bank sea … See? And Paul got a Sir. And whatever permissions the Crown of the anti-virtues ~ hubris ~ hands out to the welfare queens that accept that “title.” (Walter Raleigh was such a sir, too, until the sire/n call of the shiny objects had his head severed from his neck. See Raleigh’s poem, The Lie. Straighten from a liar’s mouth, it is.)
Adnan Khashoggi had this Pequod built for $100 million in ’80.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_5KR#/media/File:Kingdom_5KR.jpg
Khash sold it in ’88 to the Sultan of Brunei “who in turn” sold it to Orange Julius (would be Caesar) for $29 million.
“After a refit, Trump renamed it Trump Princess.[3] To dock Trump Princess at the Atlantic City harbor, Trump obtained special dredging permits which instead of taking three years were accomplished in only a couple of months with support from Roger Stone and the lobbying firm Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly."
Trump sold it in ’91 for $20 million to some other Barbary-Arab pirate.
Down, down, down is what prices do in the in-theory-only healthy economy - because/as “the money” becomes more valuable the “purchasing power” increases - none of us have ever known.
But that’s not the dynamic among these “art of the deal” bankrupters who plank-walk most of the planet’s population.
DH Lawrence:
“So ends one of the strangest & most wonderful books in the world, closing up its mystery & its tortured symbolism. It is an epic of the sea such as no man has equalled; & it is a book of esoteric symbolism of profound significance, & of considerable tiresomeness.
But it is a great book, a very great book, the greatest book of the sea ever written. It moves awe in the soul.
The terrible fatality.
Fatality.
Doom.
Doom! Doom! Doom! Something seems to whisper it in the very dark trees of America. Doom!
Doom of what?
Doom of our white day. We are doomed, doomed. And the doom is in America. The doom of our white day.
Ah, well, if my day is doomed, & I am doomed with my day, it is something greater than I which dooms me, so I accept my doom as a sign of the greatness which is more than I am.
Melville knew. He knew his race was doomed. His white soul doomed. His great white epoch, doomed. Himself, doomed. The idealist, doomed. The spirit, doomed.
The reversion. ‘Not so much bound to any haven ahead, as rushing from all havens astern.’
That great horror of ours! It is our civilization rushing from all havens astern.
The last ghastly hunt. The White Whale.
What then is Moby Dick? He is the deepest blood-being of the white race; he is our deepest blood-nature.
And he is hunted, hunted, hunted by the maniacal fanaticism of our white mental consciousness. We want to hunt him down. To subject him to our will. And in this maniacal conscious hunt of ourselves we get dark races & pale to help us, red, yellow, & black, east & west, Quaker & fire-worshipper, we get them all to help us in this ghastly maniacal hunt which is our doom & our suicide.
The last phallic being of the white man. Hunted into the death of the upper consciousness & the ideal will. Our blood-self subjected to our will. Our blood-consciousness sapped by a parasitical or ideal consciousness.
Hot blooded sea-born Moby Dick. Hunted by monomaniacs of the idea.
Oh God, oh God, what next, when the Pequod has sunk?
She sank in the war, & we are all flotsam.
Now what next?
Who knows? Quien sabe? Quien sabe, senor?
Neither Spanish nor Saxon America has any answer.
The Pequod went down & the Pequod was the ship of the white American soul. She sank, taking with her negro & Indian & Polynesian, Asiatic & Quaker & good, business-like Yankees & Ishmael: she sank all the lot of them.
Boom! As Vachel Lindsay would say.
To use the words of Jesus, IT IS FINISHED.
Consummatum est!
But Moby Dick was first published in 1851. If the Great White Whale sank the ship of the Great White Soul in 1851, what’s been happening ever since?
Post-mortem effects, presumably.
Because, in the first centuries, Jesus was Cetus, the Whale. And the Christians were the little fishes. Jesus, the Redeemer, was Cetus, Leviathan. And all the Christians all his little fishes.”
And:
“The great difference between the extreme Russians & the extreme Americans lies in the fact that the Russians are explicit & hate eloquence & symbols, seeing in these only subterfuge, whereas the Americans refuse everything explicit & always put up a sort of double meaning. They revel in subterfuge. They prefer their truth safely swaddled in an ark of bulrushes, & deposited among the reeds until some friendly Egyptian princess comes to rescue the babe.
Well, it’s high time now that someone came to lift out the swaddled infant of truth that America spawned some time back. The child must be getting pretty thin from neglect.”
Loaded with memorable, quotable lines, this one, in the chapter on Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking novels, led me to the book:
“The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, & a killer. It has never yet melted.”
Pithy.
But unlike another Brit who royal we’d that exploration would not cease & when the end of all that exploration came full circle round to the start that place would finally be recognized for the first time … DHL found it easier to recognize in America what he couldn’t recognize in Britain, or all the other places people congregate.
The human condition is the territory. These divide/conquer distinctions (including all the generational “turnings” gizmos) are just maps drawn by smoke-blowing cosmographers for smoke-inhaling wannabe cosmographers.
(Too many) People (children) want to shove a lollipop-bit/coin in a unicorn’s mouth & then ride it over a rainbow.
Because that’s where the leprechaun’s gold pot is.
And because with our magic horsey tech we can Pol Pot his ass, easy, & take that gold.
Plus we have magic historians who can fix up the story, & turn us all into important actors, like Cypher told Agent Smith he wanted to be, post betrayal/murder.
AA, artificial adulthood, domesstication, begets all this stuff - including AI.
More manual prestidigitation, less digital prestidigitation, but still just the zeroes & ones castes, preceded, on the same “sophistication” arc … that the ones are building arks & bunkers for pairs of ones just like them & no zeroes need apply.
The hunt goes on♾️ for perpetual motion, cold fusion, Tesla free energy … to power fusion/data centers & the most magical Peter Panopticon ever.
What was that, Twilight Zone? Outer Limits? Billy Mumy?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxTMbIxEj-E
Profligacy is not “power.” It’s a Billy Mumy child, engaged in that same ol’ mummified kid stuff.
And Keynes was a barbarous, appetite-disordered, homosexual, who provided useful fig leaves, “intellectual cover” - yeah, that little head down below - to other Priapuses & satyrs.
For erections lasting more than centuries, see a doctor, which is another centuries-old erection … & was that when Mary Shelley wrote it out in 1818.
thanks!
You are a very talented man. I liked your reading of the first chapter enough to order the book.
thanks
I've already pre ordered it. Looking forward to reading it while playing with my sovereigns!😍
That’s the way to do it :)
Funny:) Lots of room for jokes in there.
🤣
So informative Dominic, Audio Book downloaded!
thanks