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Category: Money

Posts about being frugal, getting out of debt, staying out of debt, spending practically and splurging joyfully. This category may also contain posts about hard money and what the government is doing to all that “soft money” it creates.

A great big mea culpa to (almost) all conspiracy theorists everywhere

Older readers may remember the Illuminatus! trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. First published in 1975, but clearly a product of the wild 1960s, it’s a mad, non-linear romp through political conspiracy theories, drugs, sex, and pretty much anything else you want to read into it. It begins with the assumption that every single conspiracy theory about the assassination of President Kennedy is absolutely true, then goes on to encompass the birth of the Illuminati in 1776, ancient Egyptians, John Dillinger, the American Medical Association, and the thoughts of a squirrel in New York City. Among other weirdness.…

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Friday Freedom Question: The truckers

We haven’t done a Friday Freedom Question in a while, and this one’s definitely due. It’s a two-parter. What will happen TO the truckers and what will happen AFTER the truckers? Oh, and if you haven’t donated yet … please do. Even if you can give only a few bux, you can leave an encouraging comment for these freedom fighters. An Ontario court is trying to shut down the new GiveSendGo fundraising campaign, but it looks as if they’re not going to have as easy a time as the Ottawa cops had inspiring and colluding with GoFraudMe’s* attempt to steal…

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Please help Mike Hendrix of Cold Fury

Mike Hendrix, proprietor of the Cold Fury blog, is in dire straits in an ICU and losing limbs as we speak. He could yet lose his life. He is a great guy who runs a great blog. His physical condition is dire, and by the time all this is done, so will his medical bills be. Please help him if you can. The GoFundMe is here. The tragic, and ongoing, story can be found in several places including the GoFundMe page, but I got it from Bayou Renaissance Man. Good luck, Mike (my fellow Ravenclaw). Live long and prosper. UPDATE:…

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We’re all Cockapoos now; so what do we do in these “economic end times”?

It’s spring. The weather warms. The blossoms bloom. And a cloud of doom lowers over our heads. You feel it. I feel it. Random strangers on the street feel it. Commentators (those who haven’t drunk gallons of the Kool-Aid) feel it. Redditors buying GameStop and Dogecoin feel it. Heaven knows, anyone who’s studied Austrian economics must feel it (and while that’s only a few people in THE world, it’s a lot of people in our freedomista world, and some of the smartest). It’s there, looming over us like a green or orange sky blotched with mammatus clouds (and if you’ve…

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Down Memory Lane
And a new liberty store at the end of it

101 Things — grubby, but free! Last month a curious member of the Living Freedom Forums discovered a copy of my old 101 Things to do ‘Til the Revolution hiding at Archive.org. Not a pretty copy, mind you. It’s a scan of a physical book that (so someone told me) even has coffee stains scanned in. But there it is. I’m not thrilled when anybody pirates my work. I’m especially un-thrilled when a rich outfit like Archive.org scans an entire book without even trying to get permission of the writer who conceived and gave painful birth to it. But that’s…

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Freedom is dying. Be of good cheer.

We’ve been watching freedom be throttled, stomped, and shoved off a cliff for most of our lifetimes. I hardly need mention that the downward plunge has accelerated in the last year and especially the last few weeks. The murder of freedom has been a boon for oligarchs, plutocrats, useful idiots, fans of Marx and Gramsci, co-opters of the name of Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus, and thousands of pathetic over-schooled conformist nobodies in online mobs who could never gain so much power over others through brains or hard work (who are currently enjoying their brief ascendency, not realizing the Jacobins will…

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This time, it might really be different

A remarkable series of events culminated in at least one major Wall Street hedge fund on the verge of insolvency and widespread anxiety and even panic from the titans of the financial system.
— Glenn Greenwald

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Silver here. Claire asked me to comment on the GameStop short squeeze debacle.

It’s early, what’s happening is complex, and there are multiple players and multiple levels. These are my first impressions, but the rebellion of small investors against hedge fund billionaires could be a milestone in the rebirth of freedom.

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Fear and loathing in the hinterlands

I’m sorry for going so long without posting. I didn’t intend to, but for weeks every time I’ve thought of blogging, I’ve been overwhelmed with disgust. If my disgust were only about politics and the current woeful state of the world, I’d blog my way through that. That’s mere business as usual. Politics and its attendant idiocies, however, are only a minor component of the bile that rises in my soul. The much larger component of my disgust continues to be triggered by the depleted and degraded state of freedom in the minds of so many who ought to be…

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Indulgences on the road to Armageddon

This afternoon I poured myself a glass of a lovely white wine. Then I just sat. First I sat in the newly finished screen porch contemplating the bank of ferns behind Mo Saoirse Hermitage. When it got too chilly I came inside and slipped into a big bentwood rocker that has a view out the south windows. A few stalks of Crocosmia Lucifer were beginning to open their exotic flame-red blooms. Beyond them lies my 1/4-acre park-to-be, which is about halfway done and is now pastoral and pleasant after seven years of fitful labors. I so seldom do this, just…

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Friday links

Okay, after months of madness and rants, time for some (mostly) upbeat news. So here we have positive political developments, scathingly rational commentary, and even a couple of charming monkeywrenches. Enjoy. “The Rebellion of America’s New Underclass” by Joel Kotkin. Sooooo very typically politically sneaky and snaky, if true: Money donated to Black Lives Matter, specifically earmarked to defund police, is going straight to the Joe Biden campaign. (I haven’t verified this.) Glenn Greenwald (who, along with Matt Taibbi is one of the few rational, liberty-respecting voices remaining on the left) excoriates the politicians and so-called medical experts who performed…

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