Roads Less Traveled

For many years now I feel like I’ve been the voice of a man “crying in the wilderness” by advising people to buy gold.  If you’d bought gold back when I wrote that article, you’d be up about 50% right now: not bad, but not great, either, considering you could have done slightly better in the stock market.  

Note: I first published this article two years ago. I am reposting today because my new novel, “Downsized” was recently rejected by a publishing company because of my politics, and specifically about one of my articles. I think this was the offending article. I’m republishing to stick a thumb in the eye of the publisher and to proclaim that free speech isn’t dead.

You’d think, walking around Stockholm (as I recently did), that Sweden’s national flag is rainbow gay.  After all, it’s more ubiquitous here right now than the Scandinavian nation’s own beautiful emblem (a bold yellow cross on a royal blue field).  Everywhere you look you see the queer colors: as a pennant on top of a hotel, a sign in front of a restaurant, and even flapping as ensigns from the ships in the harbor.  The waitresses are sporting the colors on their suspenders, and the waiters have rainbow ties.  Rainbow sunglasses, socks, and decals abound.  Why, you ask, is Stockholm afflicted with such a bad case of homophilia these days?

I was at a coin store the other day, and asked the proprietor about a nice proof condition Walking Liberty half dollar. He chatted with me a bit, and lamented the fact that numismatics was a dying hobby-that once today’s generation had passed, there would be no more coin collectors, save at the absurd .01% level-the kind of people who only want some coin that is absolutely unique merely to say they have it, rather than as a passion they have to finish a collection they began years ago and painstakingly accumulated over a lifetime.