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The new currency war

November 12, 2008 / Klint Finley

I originally wrote this in October 2007 and it was first published in OVO: Money. It has become increasingly relevant.

Since the colonial period, the United States has been fighting to control currency. In fact, this battle was part of the foundation of the country. Prior to 1764, colonists issued “Bills of Credit” to deal with a shortage of hard currency. Some were issued by “land banks” and backed by the value of land. Others were merely promises of credit. [1] In 1764 the British Parliment passed the Currency Act, which prohibited the use of these Bills of Credit. This caused significant economic hardship for the colonies, and helped set the stage for the Revolution. [2]

In an 1883 paper called “Ideas for a Science of Good Government,” Peter Cooper wrote (emphasis mine):

After Franklin had explained this [the use of paper money] to the British Government as the real cause of prosperity, they immediately passed laws, forbidding the payment of taxes in that money. This produced such great inconvenience and misery to the people, that it was the principal cause of the Revolution. A far greater reason for a general uprising, than the Tea and Stamp Act, was the taking away of the paper money. [3]

Although Cooper was in favor of government issued currency, he saw the British outlawing of the Bills of Credit as a problem. He opposed the use of these local currencies, but saw them arising out of a failure of the government: “Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, raised his voice against the curse of the local banks, which were allowed to come into being by the neglect of the Government in the performance of its duty.” [3]

Today, a host of independent currencies are available: from small and local to big and global, and they are all issued to solve perceived problems with government issued currency. But it appears that the government is none too pleased with this competition.

Indie currency

Activists on both the far left and far right of the political spectrum work to create government independent currency solutions, but it seems that the left tend to prefer local currencies. “Community currency is a tool that can help revitalize local economies by encouraging wealth to stay within a community rather than flowing out,” Susan Meeker-Lowry wrote for Z Magazine. “In many communities around the country people are taking control by creating their own currency. This is completely legal and, as organizers are finding, often very empowering.” [4]

The Local Exchange Trading System (LETS), developed in British Columbia in the 80s, is one widely used system. LETS does away with the need for a printed money, acting instead as an interest free credit system. Michael Linton, a computer programmer, created LETS to solve a simple problem: community members “had valuable skills they could offer each other yet had no money. He also saw the limitations of a one-on-one barter system. If a plumber wanted the services of an electrician, but the electrician didn’t need plumbing help, the transaction couldn’t take place.” [4]

LETS solves the problem by issuing credit within the system. In the above example, the plumber would owe a debt to the LETS system, and electrician would be issued credit from the system. The electrician would be able to redeem the credit from another LETS member who is either in debt or wanted credit, and the plumber would be required to make his services available to other LETS members. [4] Many variations of Linton’s original system have been created, and several “how to” kits and manuals are available for purchase, or to download for free from the Internet. [5]

Shifting the focus away from the US for a moment: during the Argentine financial crisis, the national currency of Argentina became practically worthless. [6] To help meet their needs and keep the economy working, many people turned to barter or to local currencies such as the “credito.” [7] The credito was based, amongst other things, on LETS materials translated into Spanish. Transactions were originally recorded in a notebook, as in LETS, but eventually paper certificates were needed. By 2000, circulation of this currency had reached the equivalent of about $5 million a year. [8]

Argentina illustrates the usefulness of independent currencies when central banks fail. Local currencies, which tend not to cross state lines, seem not to get much attention from the government. I don’t know of any cases of local currencies being shut down by the government.

Towards a more perfect capitalism

Right wing proponents of alternative currencies, however, tend to favor more global forms of exchange. Advocates of “free banking” propose the dissolution of central banks like the Federal Reserve in favor of private banks issuing competing currencies. [9]

The founder of the Internet payment solution PayPal, Peter Thiel, envisioned PayPal as a way to create a more free exchange of currency globally. Thiel hoped people in foreign countries with restrictive money export laws could use PayPal to hold their currency in dollars or other more stable foreign currencies, such as the US dollar [10]. But the proprietors of precious metal backed digital currencies like e-Gold and the Liberty Dollar are more even more ambitious.

Thinkers ranging from Ron Paul [11] to Alan Greenspan [12] advocate a return to the gold standard. But some entrepreneurs act directly by issuing digital currency backed by gold, silver, or other precious metals.

Dr. Douglas Jackson founded e-gold, the first Internet currency backed 100% by precious metals, in 1996. Jackson cites gold’s stability as a currency and the Internet’s natural openness as the reasons for creating an Internet based gold currency. He believes e-gold is currency perfected: stable and market driven. In an interview in Wired in 2002 he called e-gold “probably the greatest benefit to humanity that’s ever been thought of.” [13]

The Liberty Dollar, backed mostly by silver but by other precious metals, is sold by National Organization for the Repeal of the Federal Reserve Act and the Internal Revenue Code (NORFED). Founder, and former mint master of the Royal Hawaiian Mint Company, Bernard von NotHaus conceived of the currency to compete head-on with the Federal Reserve:

“For years America was saddled with a slow, poor postal service. Finally, Federal Express brought competition to this heavily subsidized government agency that no one though could change. And it responded and improved noticeably. NORFED emulates this model by bringing a superior product to America’s monetary system, its currency.” [14]

NORFED offers coins, certificates that look like something like dollar bills, and an Internet backed currency. Coins and certificates are available through “Regional Currency Offices,” and NORFED actively encourages Liberty Dollar enthusiasts to open their own RCOs and recruit others. [15]

Financial Jihad

Outside the western left/right political spectrum is the another global cultural force: Islam. While the founders of Pay Pal, e-gold, and NORFED believe themselves to be perfecting capitalism with their digital services, the Islamic founders of e-dinar, who formed a partnership with e-gold and at one point hosted 50% of e-gold’s reserve at their vaults in Dubai, believe they are destroying it. [13]

The founders of e-dinar are members of the Murabitun movement, a peculiur form of Sufism. Murabitun followers believe that paper money is haram, unlawful, according to Islamic faith. The founder of the Murabitun movement, Sheikh Abdalqadir, says: “A true study of the Qur’an and the Sunna shows us that capitalism will not be abolished on the battlefield but in the marketplace where it is practiced.” [13]

“Fatwa Concerning the Islamic Prohibition of Using Paper-Money as a Medium of Exchange,” a Murabitun text by Umar Vadillo, states: “After examining all the aspects of paper money, in the Light of the Qur’an and the Sunna, we declare that the use of paper money in any form of exchange is usury and therefore haram” because paper money (and, by extension, credit and debit cards) is “nothing but a pure symbol with no reality attached except the imposition of law.” [13]

Vidillo says: “You want to be radical? You don’t need to blow up the bank, just burn your bank account. For that you need an alternative. What is the alternative? E-dinar.” [13]

The current status of e-dinar is a bit mysterious. e-gold used be partners with e-dinar [[13], but according to e-dinar’s web site e-dinar officially split with e-gold in 2004 after being acquired by an unnamed “Large International Corporation” in 2003. [16]

The state responds

It would seem, though, that the larger reach of global alternatives lead to larger interventions by the government. Of all the major players in independent currency game, e-gold has probably had the worst legal trouble. “In December 2005, the Secret Service and FBI raided the company’s headquarters and seized roughly $800,000 in assets,” according to the Washington Post. [17] This lead e-gold to beef up their security measures, even creating new software designed to detect e-gold customers committing crimes. [18] The new security measures didn’t stop a federal indictment from being leveled against the company in April of 2007. The company was served with 4 indictments, including operating an illegal money transfer operation and money laundering. [17]

Then, on Wednesday May 9th, 2007 the United States government seized the holdings of 58 e-gold accounts, forcing 48 bars of gold to be redeemed for approximately $77 million dollars. As of this writing, all the funds are still in in the US government’s control pending the outcome of lawsuit filed against e-gold’s parent company. [19] However, e-gold and its subsidiary Omnipay maintain business as of this writing.

In 2006 The United States Mint issued a press release stating that circulating Liberty Dollars is a federal crime. The press release implies that Liberty Dollars are deceptively similar to US currency, and that NORFED intends them to be used as legal tender. [20] As of this writing, I am unaware of any case against any persons in the United States for using the Liberty Dollar.

NORFED responded with a civil lawsuit. On March 20, 2007 von NotHaus filed against the US Mint, asking “the court to declare that the use of the Liberty Dollar is not a ‘federal crime,’ as claimed by the U.S. Mint. And the organization further asked the court to enter a permanent injunction against the U.S. Mint requiring it to remove any reference that the use of Liberty Dollars is a federal crime from its website.” [21 As of this writing, the case remains unsettled. But on November 14th, 2007 the situation took another turn: the FBI raided Liberty Dollar on charges of circulating illegal currency, mail fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering. The affidavit also described Liberty Dollar as a “multi-level marketing scheme.” [22]

Von NotHaus has described the raid as “a direct assault against the US Constitution and your right to own and use gold and silver in any way you chose” and dismissed the mail fraud, wire fraud and money laundering charges as fantasy. [23]

Pay Pal, eventually burdened with legal problems, banned the use of PayPal for gambling, pornography, and several other uses in 2004. [24]

Conclusion

It is important to note that e-gold and NORFED may well be guilty of the crimes it has been charged with, it remains to be seen how they will come out in court. NORFED and e-gold have many competitors, so the international, gold back Internet currency business continues. However, the struggles of these companies, and the fact that they are being held liable for what their customers use their services for, is illustrative of the control the US government exerts over currency. If the Federal Reserve were held accountable every time legal tender were used in criminal transactions, surely the Fed would have been shut down by now. Why are companies like e-gold held to a different standard? Why are they asked to act as de facto law enforcement?

And all of this raises the question: why is there such a demand for alternative currencies? Shouldn’t the state be spending its time trying to correct the problems the Fed (or shutting it down), instead of trying to shut down those who are trying to solve problems the government is not?

References:

1. ushistory.org “Currency Act,” http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/related/currencyact.htm Retrieved 10/30/07.

2. u-s-history.com “Currency Act,” http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h1212.html Retrieved 10/30/07.

3. Cooper, Peter. “Ideas for a Science of Good Government,” http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h1212.html Retrieved 10/30/07.

4. Meeker-Lowry, Susan. “The Potential of Local Currency,” Z Magazine, July 1995. http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/articles/july95lowry.htm Retrieved 10/30/07.

5. Wikipedia. “Local Exchange Trading System,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Exchange_Trading_System Retrieved 10/30/07.

6. Ballvé, Marcello. “Silent Revolution,” Orion Magazine, July 2006. http://thetake.org/media/The%20Silent%20Revolution.pdf Retrieved 10/30/07.

7. Katel, Peter. “Argentina: the Post Money Economy,” Time, February 2002. http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,199474,00.html Retrieved 10/30/07.

8. DeMeulenaere, Stephen. “Reinventing the Market: Alternative Currencies and Community Development in Argentina,” International Journal of Community Currency Research, 2000. http://www.uea.ac.uk/env/ijccr/pdfs/IJCCR%20Vol%204%20(2000)%203%20DeMeulenaere.pdf Retrieved 10/30/07.

9. Greaves, Bettina Bien. “Market Money and Free Banking,” The Freeman, October 1999. http://www.fee.org/publications/the-freeman/article.asp?aid=4946 Retrieved 10/30/07.

10. Bodow, Steve. “The Money Shot,” Wired, September 2001. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.09/paypal_pr.html Retrieved 10/30/07.

11. Ludwig von Mises Institute. “The Case for Gold.” http://www.mises.org/store/Case-for-Gold-The-P386C0.aspx?AFID=1 Retrieved 10/30/07.

12. Greenspan, Alan. “Gold and Economic Freedom.” The Objectivist, 1966. http://www.321gold.com/fed/greenspan/1966.html Retrieved 10/30/07.

13. Dibbell, Julien. Wired, January 2002. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.01/egold.html Retrieved 10/30/07.

14. Orzano, Michele. Coin World Magazine, October 1998. http://www.libertydollar.org/news-stories/pdfs/1164902714.pdf Retrieved 10/30/07.

15. Liberty Dollar web site. “Regional Currency Office.” http://www.libertydollar.org/ld/rco/index.htm Retrieved 10/30/07.

16. e-dinar web site. “History.” http://www.e-dinar.com/html/3_4.html Retrieved 10/30/07.

17. Krebs, Brian. washingtonpost.com, “U.S.: Online Payment Network Abetted Fraud, Child Pornography,” May 2007. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/01/AR2007050101291.html Retrieved 10/30/07.

18. Zetter, Kim. Wired News, “E-Gold Gets Tough on Crime,” December 2006. http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/12/72278 Retrieved 10/30/07.

19. “US Government Forces E-gold Redemptions – Seizes Gold,” Money Net News, May 2007. http://www.moneynetnews.com/articles/54/1/US-Government-Forces-E-gold-Redemp Retrieved 10/30/07.

20.US Mint web site. “Liberty Dollars Not Legal Tender, United States Mint Warns Consumers.” http://www.usmint.gov/pressroom/index.cfm?flash=yes&action=press_release&id=710 Retrieved 10/30/07.

21. Liberty Dollar web site. “Legal Updates.” http://www.libertydollar.org/ld/legal/updates.htm Retrieved 10/30/07.

22. Taylor, Jeff. Reason Magazine web site,”Your Liberty Dollar Raid Update.” November 2007. http://www.reason.com/blog/show/123553.html Retrieved 7/24/07.

23. Liberty Dollar web site. “FBI Raid on the Liberty Dollar.” November 2007. http://www.libertydollar.org/ld/legal/raid.htm Retrieved 7/24/07.

24.Balko, Radley. Reason Magazine,”Who Killed Pay Pal?” August 2005. http://www.reason.com/news/show/33114.html Retrieved 10/30/07.

C[r]ash Flow (Or What Went Wrong in October in Book Publishing)

November 9, 2008 / TiamatsVision

“It’s the only thing I’m thinking about recently, so I’m going to go ahead and kill the elephant. Let’s talk a little bit about what happened in October.

You’ve heard about the massive layoffs at Doubleday; you’ve heard about Harper’s terrible state of profit, BNN’s worst quarter and projected year ever, and the closing of Impetus, an indie press (which, as I’ll explain below, I don’t think was Impetus’s fault even vaguely). Yes, there’s a crisis. However. Anyone who wants to talk about “the death of publishing” can leave the room. I’m at the beginning of my career and I plan on being an editor for a long time; a lot of you are yet-to-be-published authors and I’m sure you’re equally intent on not seeing book publishing fold (not that it’s going to; that’s ridiculous). So instead I want to talk about what’s actually causing the problem–it might help us come up with solutions for protecting what’s important to us.”

(via Editorial Ass. Thanks SP!)

Documentary- “Off The Grid: Life On The Mesa”

October 26, 2008 / TiamatsVision

The image

The current economic crisis has some people showing an an interest in survivalism, frugal lifestyles, etc. This fascinating documentary focuses on one particular group of people who live according to their own rules.

“Twenty-Five miles from town, a million miles from mainstream society, a loose-knit community of eco-pioneers, teenage runaways, war veterans and drop-outs, live on the fringe and off the grid, struggling to survive with little food, less water and no electricity, as they cling to their unique vision of the American dream…”

(“Off The Grid: Life On The Mesa” via Snag Films)

Hard Times Have Some Flirting with Survivalism

October 22, 2008 / TiamatsVision

“Atash Hagmahani is not waiting for the stock market to recover. The former high-tech professional turned urban survivalist has already moved his money into safer investments: Rice and beans, for starters. “I hoard food,” says Hagmahani, 44, estimating that he has enough to last his family a year or two. “I’m not ashamed to admit it.” “People keep asking when this (economic crisis) is going to clear up,” says Hagmahani, who agreed to be interviewed on the condition that he be identified only by this pseudonym, which he uses for his survivalist blog, or by his first name, Rob.

The answer, he predicts, is that the country is entering what he calls a “Greater Depression.” “Maybe they jolly well better get used to the change in lifestyle.” Hagmahani is not alone in concluding that desperate times call for serious preparations. With foreclosure rates running rampant, financial institutions teetering and falling, prices for many goods and services climbing, and jobs being slashed, many Americans are making preparations for worse times ahead. For some, that means cutting spending and saving more. For others, it means taking a step into survivalism, once regarded solely as the province of religious End-of-Timers, sci-fi fans and extremists. That often manifests itself as a desire to secure basic emergency resources “‘ what survival guru Jim Wesley Rawles describes as “beans, bullets and Band-Aids.”

(via MSNBC. h/t: LOLFed)

Jeff Vail: The Timing of the Financial Crisis & Peak Oil

October 16, 2008 / Klint Finley

You can buy a house with a frozen credit market–you just have to save up the cash purchase price first. Novel approach, I realize, but there you have it. Believe it or not, people used to do this fairly frequently.

You can still manufacture complex products. But, rather than getting a loan to buy the capital equipement, materials, and pay the labor, then give it to the customer, get them to pay you, and repay the loan, now you need to 1) get the customer to pay you, or 2) maintain enough cash reserves to carry this cost until payment. This means that either the customer or the producer needs to save up the money for the end product first, rather than pay later. This also has a dramatic impact on business models–the ‘get big first, then figure out how to profit’ model advanced by Amazon.com and others simply doesn’t work. All these changes really shake up the rate of throughput while System B reverts back to System A. […]

The next two or three years of focus, budget, and effort fixing the financial crisis are two or three years where we aren’t using oru rapidly dwindling supply of high net-energy surplus oil and gas to invest in a renewble energy infrastructure or to restructure our economy away from the demand for continual growth. In fact, the short-term drop (or at least fear thereof) in commodity consumption is likely to depress prices enough that there’s no financial incentive to even invest in keeping production steady.

We’re setting ourselves up for the perfect storm. Resurgent global demand for energy will hit just about the time that our energy supplies (especially our net energy supplies) begin to rapidly decline. As I’ve said in jest many times on this blog, the Mayan prophecies about 2012 may not be that far off the mark–at least as far as timing is concerned.

Full Story: Jeff Vail

Patrick M. Byrne: “Deep Capture” the Movie

October 16, 2008 / TiamatsVision

“Hey Friends.Two years ago I began a campaign to expose a massive circle of corruption on Wall Street involving something called ‘naked short selling.’ The financial press, which had previously been quite generous towards me, immediately began devoting a tremendous amount of energy to misrepresenting, dismissing, and downplaying my allegations. It began to seem as though they were taking part in a cover-up, especially given that I simultaneously became persona non gratis on Wall Street, so that the entire discourse about whether or not I was right went forward with precisely one person precluded from taking part: me. The lengths to which this cover-up was prosecuted astonished even me: for example, last year a large conference (‘Value Investors’ Congress’) invited me to speak, but some powerful hedge funds threatened to boycott if I were allowed to tell me side of the story, and the invitation was rescinded.Times are changing, however, and a few weeks ago I was invited to speak to an even bigger conference of hedge funds. I did so, and was finally able to connect the dots for the public.”

(“Deep Capture” the Movie. “Deep Capture”, The (very long) Story)

The Giant Pool of Money

October 5, 2008 / TiamatsVision

An old radio show from May that gives a good explanation on the sub-prime mortgage crisis.

“A special program about the housing crisis produced in a special collaboration with NPR News. We explain it all to you. What does the housing crisis have to do with the turmoil on Wall Street? Why did banks make half-million dollar loans to people without jobs or income? And why is everyone talking so much about the 1930s? It all comes back to the Giant Pool of Money.”

(via NPR. Thanks Stewart!)

Emails Show Journalist Rigged Wikipedia’s Naked Shorts

October 3, 2008 / TiamatsVision

“Two and a half years ago, Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne penned an editorial for The Wall Street Journal, warning that widespread stock manipulation schemes – including abusive naked short selling – were threatening the health of America’s financial markets. But it wasn’t published. “An editor at The Journal asked me to write it, and I told him he wouldn’t be allowed to publish it,” Byrne says. “He insisted that only he controlled what was printed on the editorial page, so I wrote it. Then, after a few days, he got back to me and said ‘It appears I can’t run this or anything else you write.'”

The Journal never changed its stance. But last week, the editorial finally saw the light of day at Forbes – after Byrne added a few paragraphs explaining that naked shorting had hastened what could turn out to be the biggest financial crisis since The Great Depression. “With a traditional short sale, traders borrow shares and sell them in the hope that prices will drop. A naked short works much the same way – except the shares aren’t actually borrowed. They’re sold but not delivered. By the middle of the summer, these unresolved “stock IOUs” – as Byrne calls them – were pilling up in four Wall Street giants already struggling to stay afloat: investment banks Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch and mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. On July 12, the Securities and Exchange Commission issued an emergency order banning naked shorts in a host of major stocks, and all four of those names were on the list.

The order expired in mid-August, and in the weeks since, Lehman Brothers has filed for bankruptcy, Merrill Lynch has swallowed into Bank of America, and Fannie and Freddie were seized by the US government. Then, on September 17, the SEC issued a new order meant to curb naked shorting of all stocks. “These several actions today make it crystal clear that the SEC has zero tolerance for abusive naked short selling,” read a statement from SEC chairman Christopher Cox. “The Enforcement Division, the Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations, and the Division of Trading and Markets will now have these weapons in their arsenal in their continuing battle to stop unlawful manipulation.”

In the wake of the SEC’s crackdown, the mainstream financial press has acknowledged that widespread and deliberate naked shorting can artificially deflate stock prices, flooding the market with what amounts to counterfeit shares. But for years, The Journal and so many other news outlets ignored Byrne’s warnings, with some journalists – most notably a Forbes.com columnist and former BusinessWeek reporter named Gary Weiss painting the Overstock CEO as a raving madman. Byrne has long argued that the press dismissed his views at least in part because Weiss – hiding behind various anonymous accounts – spent years controlling the relevant articles on Wikipedia, the “free online encyclopedia anyone can edit.” “At some level, you can control the public discourse from Wikipedia,” Byrne says. “No matter what journalists say about the reliability of Wikipedia, they still use it as a resource. I have no doubt that journalists who I discussed [naked shorting] with decided not to do stories after reading Wikipedia – whose treatment [of naked short selling] was completely divorced from reality.”

(via Investigate The SEC)

(Many people believe that the current financial crisis is mainly due to the domino effect of the sub-prime mortgage collapse. This is just a part of the equation. The illegal practice of naked short selling has been going on for years under the radar of the SEC. It’s a complicated practice to explain, let alone uncover. This is why the SEC has a temporary ban on ALL short selling (some financial experts disagree with this). “Naked short selling” and “short selling” are two different things. For good definitions on short selling and naked short selling read the excellent articles provided by Investopedia.com.)

No Money Down: Rushkoff on the rigged credit system

October 1, 2008 / Klint Finley

It all started to make sense to me when I attended Learning Annex’s Wealth Expo earlier this year-a seminar where teachers of The Secret, the hosts of Flip This House, George Foreman, Tony Robbins and former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan [pictured above in banner from Learning Annex website] purportedly taught the thousands in attendance how to take advantage of the current foreclosure boom.

Using language borrowed from today’s more money-centric New Age spiritualists, as well as the get-rich-quick books of the early 1900s ‘New Thought Movement’ on which these pyramid schemes are based (such as Elizabeth Towne’s The Science of Getting Rich or Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich), they encouraged their mostly black audience to get on the ladder to success by purchasing educational DVDs and wealth-building ‘systems.’

These courses all promised to teach the properly motivated American how to find homeowners down on their luck and approaching foreclosure, as well as how to buy those homes from under them and resell them at a great profit. What made the spectacle doubly outrageous were not the dancing girls or indoor fireworks; it was the fact that most of the participants were themselves desperate former homeowners, whose illnesses, divorces, fires, and floods had put them in to foreclosure, too. Get it? They were paying to learn how to feed on people just like themselves. […]

Participation in business or, in most of our cases, land or home ownership, means helping put those wheels of the credit industry in motion. And the more we push, the more momentum they gain, and the more influence they have over an increasingly large portion of our experience. Reality becomes defined by credit sectors, and our time is consumed more each day with wondering how we’re going to pay back what we’ve borrowed.

Every once in a while, though, we break the rules and get to see the possibility for another kind of economy. Whether it’s an alternative currency, an open source software solution, or the simple good faith gifts we make to one another for creating value in each other’s lives.

Full Story: Arthur Magazine

September 29, 2008: A Weird Kinda Day.

September 29, 2008 / Justin Boland

First of all, there’s the nearly unbelievable story of the Denver Police Union’s commemorative T-Shirts from the 2008 Democratic National Convention.? There’s a caricature cop with a club, and the caption “WE GET UP EARLY, to BEAT the crowds” — seriously.? Here’s the story courtesy of Denver’s ABC affiliate station…and it had to be Channel 7, right?? It’s been that kind of day:

Like the Universe had to rub it in? The lead quote everywhere is from Barney Frank…he’s got a different context in mind but it’s remarkably appropriate: “One of the Truly Great Coincidences in the History of Numerology” The law of averages recieved a further blow when the markets released their closing statistics: “Dow plunges over 7%, S&P over 8%, Nasdaq over 9%” — but before jumping to occult conclusions, let me recommend two great reads from back when Rigorous Intuition was really dropping gems: The Banality of the Weird and most of all, The Higher Coincidence.

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