Author: Gary North

I devote an entire department to the fiat money Greenback lawyer Ellen Brown. She doesn’t understand economics. She also doesn’t understand historical documentation. I proved this in 2010. You can read the proof here. She still publishes articles on her website. Occasionally, they are picked up by Left-wing sites. The article I analyze here is an example. It was posted on Truthdig. Truthdig is a Leftist site. Incredibly, people who regard themselves as conservatives cite her as an authority. In the case of Max Kaiser, he actually brings her on his show. He has been doing this for a decade. GOVERNMENT-FUNDED HIGHER EDUCATION … Continue reading →

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William Lind is a specialist in 4th-generation warfare: non-state warfare. He is also an observer of culture. He has written an assessment of the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand on June 28, 1914. Within five weeks, this led to the outbreak of World War I on August 1. With the commemoration of Christ’s first Advent, the end of the calendar year and a widespread (and justified) sense that we are all walking on the edge of a precipice, an old question pops up again: when will the world end? Many seers, prophets, and charlatans have predicted a date when the world … Continue reading →

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Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize in economics. He is also the resident economist for The New York Times. In his latest article, he laments the power of Donald Trump and the Republican Party. He tries to offer eschatological hope. He assures his readers that there is hope politically because the Democrats may eventually come back into power. But this is only hope, he says. The United States of America is on the path to becoming a Third World tyranny. He actually believes this. I want to stress this fact: he is as sound a political analyst as he is a sound … Continue reading →

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The Wall Street Journal is trying to match The Washington Post for anti-Trump investigative journalism. Consider this article: President Trump Spent Nearly One-Third of First Year in Office at Trump-Owned Properties. It is a screed on Trump’s time spent vacationing. It has a subhead: “Unlike his predecessors, president traveled frequently to places he owns but where others pay to stay.” That is because his predecessors did not own several billion dollars’ worth of prime vacation real estate. Would you rather stay at a Motel 6 or Mir-a-Lago if someone else was picking up the tab? To ask the question is to answer it. I, … Continue reading →

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This was posted yesterday. From KurzweilAI: Demis Hassabis, the founder and CEO of DeepMind, announced at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference (NIPS 2017) last week that DeepMind’s new AlphaZero program achieved a superhuman level of play in chess within 24 hours.The program started from random play, given no domain knowledge except the game rules, according to an arXiv paper by DeepMind researchers published Dec. 5. “It doesn’t play like a human, and it doesn’t play like a program,” said Hassabis, an expert chess player himself. “It plays in a third, almost alien, way. It’s like chess from another dimension.” … Continue reading →

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“They also serve who only stand and pick.” — John Milton (almost) The Wrecking Crew changed popular music in the 1960’s. The only member who ever made it big as a solo performer was Glen Campbell. These musicians were the music behind the Beach Boys, including “Good Vibrations.” There is a great documentary on them on Netflix.  My review of the documentary is here. Time to buy old US gold coins In Muscle Shoals, Alabama, the Swampers did the same thing in the late 1960’s . . . and beyond. If they had not existed, Aretha Franklin would still not … Continue reading →

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The all-time record for the publication of peer-reviewed scholarly economics articles is held by the late Harry Johnson, who died in 1977. He published 526 articles, in addition to 41 books and pamphlets. He died at age 53. I doubt that this record will ever be broken by somebody age 53. My friend Walter Block, age 76, is fast approaching this record. He publishes something the range of 20 articles a year. Sometime in the next two years, he is likely to succeed Johnson as the all-time producer of peer-reviewed articles. You can read about him on Wikipedia. He now faces … Continue reading →

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I remember when I first saw Scrooge. In America, it was titled A Christmas Carol. It was 1951. We lived in Denver. I went to the theater by myself, as usual. The movie had just been released. It was what we call a sleeper. It was not narcolepsy-inducing. Quite the contrary. Rather, it took years for it to achieve classic status. It shared this attribute with It’s a Wonderful Life(1946) and A Christmas Story (1983). Sim’s performance was spectacular. At age nine, I recognized this. When an actor can impress a nine-year-old kid, he has found his perfect role. Sim never matched it, before or … Continue reading →

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Remnant Review My mother was born on December 15, 1917. She died just shy of 98 years old in 2015. These time-marking dates got me thinking about the world that she entered. Public health policies had overcome most pandemics by 1917. There was only one pandemic still ahead, the flu epidemic of 1918. That was the last one the West ever saw. While there have been tremendous developments in medicine since 1917, most notably penicillin and the development of sulfa drugs, the great breakthroughs in terms of increased life expectancy had been made by 1917 in the West. They were … Continue reading →

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Vinyl records are a niche market. There is a subculture of record collectors who love vinyl LPs. I have no particular commitment to vinyl records. I shall now state what I think should be obvious. If digital imagery had been invented in 1850, no one would have invented film. Similarly, if digital recordings had been available in 1880, Edison would not have invented the phonograph record. If the transistor had been available in 1900, nobody would have invented the vacuum tube. You may own some old albums that you bought in your youth. Or you may have inherited a collection … Continue reading →

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On December 13, 1917, Walter Boyd was charged with murder. He was in a jail near Caddo Lake in NW Louisiana. Possibly the night before — the records are silent — he had been involved in a shooting in a black tavern. These taverns were known as sukey joints. Authorities arrested him for having shot and killed a friend, Will Stafford. Boyd denied the charge, but he was convicted of murder. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison. Caddo Lake covers the Texas side of the border. Boyd was sent to prison in Texas, not Louisiana. This indicates that … Continue reading →

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The New York Times has published a screed with this title: The Internet Is Dying. Repealing Net Neutrality Hastens That Death. Let me remind you of the basic rule of titling breathless articles: begin with the phrase “the death of” or “the end of.” When you read such a phrase, you can be sure that whatever it is, it is not dying. Whatever it has been in the past, it is likely to be in the future. It is not facing the end. Here is the logic of the screed. The internet is dying.Sure, technically, the internet still works. Pull up Facebook … Continue reading →

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It happened on November 20, 2017. After 25 years, it was time to say goodbye to the Georgia Dome in Atlanta. It cost Georgia taxpayers $214 million to build, 1989-1992. In today’s dollars, that is $385 million. The new Mercedes-Benz Stadium is going to replace it, right next door. Total public funding: $600 million. Here today. Gone tomorrow. The first hour of the “Today Show” in Atlanta was pre-empted by the fireworks. There was a long delay. Advertisers were no doubt unhappy. Time to buy old US gold coins  Read the Whole Article

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Stan Freberg was a very funny man. I first wrote about him in 2003. He was part of the original Time for Beany, a local Los Angeles TV hand puppet show, which was immensely popular locally in 1949, and then went national from 1950 to 1955. Albert Einstein loved it. So did Groucho Marx. He did comedy skits on records, beginning with John and Marsha in 1951. He did some of the most clever TV ads for half a century. He ran his own ad agency, Freberg, Ltd. (But Not Very). The company’s motto was “Ars Gratia Pecuniae” (Latin for “art for money’s sake”). In … Continue reading →

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This caught my eye. The problem with “House of Cards” is it paints everyone in Washington with the same poison brush. I suspected it would bad for our brand from the start, but tuned in for the first season out of curiosity. I turned off the first episode after Frank Underwood killed a dog with his bare hands. After a year of persuading, friends talked me out of my boycott. I gritted my teeth through three more episodes, until Frank Underwood was in bed with a 20-something female reporter 30 years his junior, who was calling her dad to wish … Continue reading →

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