Some thoughts

Yesterday The gold price reached an all-time high (Homer Simpson voice: "So far"). As the Royal Mint's latest bulletin  summarised:  Gold surged past $2,580 for the first time on Friday afternoon. In USD terms, gold is up 24% since the start of the year. You'd be forgiven for thinking that this means it's a bad time to be buying, however, there are a couple of exceptions that I'm going to explain in this post (all prices correct as of 14/09/24, but rounded up or down as appropriate). First of all, are you looking to invest or collect? I do a bit of both, (silver more for collecting) so I tend to buy what interests me and what I consider to be a good deal. There are two types of businesses I buy from, bullion dealers and collectible coin sellers. Of the former, I usually use Chards and Bullion by Post . The former is usually slightly cheaper, but they charge for postage and capsules, so I usually buy from them if getting multiple items. The latter gives free p

Via Instapundit, behold the poor sods; still traumatized by covid:  Meet the Americans STILL isolating 4 years into Covid pandemic... including NJ woman who's been in lockdown for 1,620 days While I do I feel a bit sorry for people (especially the elderly) who were terrified into thinking catching it was a death sentence, after 4 years they need to get over it. The people featured in the article definitely have other mental health issues, this line stood out:  Hill, who uses they/them pronouns' Yep, a well-adjusted individual here! It does seem that there are more and more people (and women in particular) who are too fragile to cope with everyday life. Social media has made people more willing to divulge personal issues that they would have kept to themselves in the past. I recently reconnected on FB with a woman I knew at school and she is constantly posting about her anxiety and other issues.  This post on Mental health and Leftism is also telling, and given women (esp. youn

Today was the last day of the summer holidays. The past few weeks have been busy preparing for results days, and then ensuring everything is ready for the start of the new school year.  I went to Brussels for the bank holiday weekend last week, primarily to visit Waterloo and its battlefield:   The Lion Mount and Panorama on the battlefield. The Hougoumont Farm Memorial at the farmhouse Napoleon's last headquarters And Wellington's HQ (now the museum) I also went to Liege for a day, while there I was wandering around a park on Sunday afternoon and came across a group of  ‘ puppy players ‘. It definitely, IMO, comes under the category of ‘do what you want in the privacy of your bedroom, but don’t frighten the horses.' Liege was pretty, with an impressive station, and a very old school aquarium. Finally, I went to  the Cantillion Brewery, Autoworld, And the Basilique Nationale du Sacré-Cœur. Overall a nice weekend away. 

  I'm not dead yet insists Biden as he's loaded onto cart of corpses - The Babylon Bee

If, as Voltaire once wrote, the Kingdom of Prussia was not a state with an army, but an army with a state, then modern Britain is surely not a state with a healthcare system, but a healthcare system with a state.   The NHS need not depend on immigration  - Sam Bidwell, The Critic 

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A long and depressing read on the effects of welfarism on women:  The march of Kamala’s brides . I like the term BOT- Bride of the State- to describe how women have replaced husbands with government programs: BOTS have demanded and received not only the female-targeted government grants, educational and jobs programmes, and social safety nets that benefited Julia and Linda and their singular progeny, but also a much broader set of social engineering measures that are fundamentally reshaping American mores. Since the Nineties, young American women have been positioned as the primary beneficiaries of neo-Victorian speech and conduct codes that have fundamentally transformed the behaviour of men and women everywhere from classrooms to workplaces to bars. However, this has a price (beyond the higher taxes) But have these efforts made BOTS happy? The answer, according to young women, is no. In fact, the demographic that has been the most highly socialised into core progressive values and wo

A good point is made here:  How Much Is Elon Musk Willing to Lose to Protect Free Speech?   'roughly speaking, 75 percent of Elon Musk’s wealth is tied to Tesla. And Tesla, of course, is an electric car company. 'According to Gallup, 71 percent of Republicans would not consider owning an electric vehicle. Eighty-three percent of Democrats would consider owning an electric vehicle. You don’t need to be a statistician to recognize which audience matters most to Tesla’s core business model.' This reminds me of the irony of Alyssa Milano saying she was going to sell her Tesla and by a VW, forgetting who started the latter. Hopefully, he'll make enough money from Starlink to counter the fall in Telsa sales.  UPDATED: a good summery of The British elites’ crazy rage against Elon Musk

An interesting article by Roger Kimball:  What the Right Gets Wrong About Art . Excerpt: ' it is no secret that much if not most art in recent decades has abandoned beauty, abandoned the ambition to please the viewer aesthetically. Instead, it seeks to shock, discommode, repulse, proselytize, or startle. Beauty is out of place in any art that systematically discounts the aesthetic.' and 'The trick, for viewers as well as artists, is not to lose sight of beauty but to concentrate primarily on something seemingly more pedestrian — the making of good works of art. The best guides to this task are to be found not in the work of this season’s art-world darlings but in the great models furnished by the past.' Worth reading and pondering