As is common in our societies, New Year brings with it the idea of “New Year Resolutions”. A time to make change, a time to make decisions, a time to look forward to a better life.
In the global scheme of things, in a world wracked with social, economic and political pain, there is obviously a need for a much more encompassing form of New Year Resolution – something like what Stefan Molyneux has put together in his video which expresses hope for a more peaceful future:
The WikiLeaks disclosures reveal something very disturbing – that while the state grants itself the right to know everything about us, we are not supposed to know anything it is up to – even though we pay for it.
This obvious turn-about in the way things are supposed to work – that state employees’ actions should be out in the open, while ordinary citizens are entitled to privacy – is the subject of an interesting post by Glenn Greenwald: The Government’s One-Way Mirror
WikiLeaks is doing something extraordinary – quite apart from disclosing the secrets of governments. They are providing us with a ready-made way of knowing who our “friends” are – whether they are really pro-freedom, or pro-authoritarian.
Ask anyone for their thoughts on gold and you’ll get a wide variety of opinions – from the standard “but you can’t eat it can you?” to “what happens if the government confiscates it?” to to possibility that gold could form the basis of a new monetary system and end up being priced in the thousands of dollars per ounce.
So who better to ask for an opinion on gold and precious metal stocks than John Hathaway – manager of the $1.4 billion Tocqueville Gold Fund – as Jeff Clark does in this interview.
The eurozone is coming apart at the seams – and faced with either a debt union or the break-up of the eurozone itself, its leaders are like possums frozen in a car’s headlights.
The way Julian Assange has been arrested, and denied bail, for some petty issue regarding two Swedish women who obviously sought sex with him is an outright disgrace, and exposes our much-vaunted Western freedoms (the one’s the terrorists are supposed to hate) as being nothing more than bloated hypocrisy.
This Charlie Rose interview – featuring John Hathaway of Tocqueville Asset Management, Peter Munk founder and chairman of Barrick Gold, and James Grant of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer - is definitely worth watching.
