Wielkie Biale Braterstwo w historii i kulturze narodu polskiego

"Apathy can be overcome by enthusiasm, and enthusiasm can be aroused
by two things: first, an idea which takes the imagination by storm; and second,
a definite, intelligible plan for carrying that idea into action."—Arnold Toynbee

"But the glory has been the glory of pasteboard, and the wealth
has been the wealth of tinsel."—Anthony Trollope

"The acronym 'FIAT' when used to describe our 'money'
is short for Financial Instrument Administering Theft."—The Mogombo Guru

"Money is the most marketable commodity."
—an insight of the economist Ludwig von Mises

"The legacy of nobility . . . is the great cause of all men who are friends
of liberty, of truth, of civilization."—Bonnie Prince Charlie

"It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong."—Voltaire

"God, guns and gold are the three core values to a real American."

"You've got to know when to hold 'em;
know when to fold 'em;
know when to walk away;
know when to run."
—famous lyric of the great country western song, 'The Gambler'

Origin of name: From the Anglo-Saxon word "gold" (the origin of the symbol Au is the Latin word "aurum" meaning "gold")

Gold was known and highly valued from earliest times. Egyption inscriptions dating back to 2600 B.C. describe gold and gold is mentioned several times in the Old Testament.

Gold is one of the elements which has an alchemical symbol, (alchemy is an ancient pursuit concerned with, for instance, the transformation of other metals into gold).

Gold is found as the free element in nature and associated with quartz, pyrite and other minerals. Two thirds of the world's supply comes from South Africa. Much of the USA production is from the states South Dakota and Nevada. Gold is found in sea water (about 5-6 g in a million tonnes of seawater), but no effective economic process has been designed (yet) to extract it from this source.

Gold has been the basis of many currencies over the centuries and so for economic reasons —among others—the possession of gold was or is restricted in some countries. Notably, private ownership of gold (apart from as jewellery and coins) was banned between 1933 and 1975.

Gold has been used for centuries for jewellery and decoration. In addition to the more familiar rings, brooches, necklaces and ear-rings, gold is used as gold leaf for decoration and protection, screen printing (directly on to bone china, earthenware, porcelain and glass surfaces or decals).

Gold is the key component of "liquid gold," preparations containing up to 12% gold ideal for decorative application using brushes and gold pastes used for screen printing.

Gold is also well known as a coinage metal (because of its scarcity, inertness, and decorative features) and is a standard for monetary systems in many countries. Apart from gold coins, gold ingots and gold bars; gold is available in many forms including pure gold and alloys as gold flakes, foil gauzes (meshes), grain, powders, sheet, sponges, tubes, wires and even single gold crystals.

Recently, gold catalysts as gold supported on carbon or metal oxides are becoming useful in the chemical industry. Many other gold compounds including neutral gold halides (AuBr3, etc.), aurates (K[AuBr4], etc.) gold cyanides, gold oxides, phosphine gold complexes, gold hydroxides and gold nitrates are available to industrial users. Chlorauric acid (HAuCl4) is used in photography for toning the silver image.

Gold is a really useful metal for electronics because of its inertness and its unique physical properties. Gold is used for electrical contacts, spring contacts, bonding wire, solder alloys, bumping wire, electroplating and sputtering targets. Gold is also a useful brazing material. Gold is used for coating space satellites, as it is a good IR reflector and is inert.

Since gold is inert and possesses useful properties when alloyed, gold is used extensively for dentistry in gold teeth, dental attachments, inserts, and solders. Similarly, gold is used increasingly for medical implants in eyes and ears, as well as many other medically useful wires, tubes, sheets, and foils. Disodium aurothiomalate is administered (intramuscular) as a treatment for arthritis. The gold isotope 198Au is used for treating cancer and other conditions.

Gold is used in nanotechnology applications as colloids, conjugates, nanoparticle inks, nanoparticle solutions and nanopowders.

Gold has been good to America. This ancient metal—the first used by man and still prized above all others—today plays a more vital role in the life and health of our nation than ever before.

Gold has become essential in today's high tech world. It ensures the proper functioning of the most sensitive electronic instruments. In national defense. In telecommunications. In advanced biomedical research. In many other ways that ensure our health and safety at home, at work, on the road and in the air.

The Pentagon specifies gold for critical instruments that may make the difference between life and death. Gold circuitry helped save the life of Air Force Captain Scott O'Grady when his plane was shot from the skies over Bosnia a few years ago. NASA specifies gold for sensitive spacecraft instruments to ensure the safety of astronauts. Air traffic controllers depend on gold for the flawless operation of radar equipment around the clock.

On America's roads, hundreds of lives are saved and thousands of serious injuries prevented each year by the gold circuits in electronic sensors that ensure airbags operate without fail.

Gold is used in all these technologies because of its unmatched reliability. It is not affected by extremes of heat, cold or damp. It does not rust, tarnish or corrode. It remains a superior conductor of electricity under all circumstances. It is amazingly flexible. And it is virtually indestructible.

Gold has been good to America in many other ways. The extraction of gold from otherwise barren rock formations has created tens of thousands of well-paid jobs, not only in the West but in 46 other states that make the modern equipment needed to find and extract gold more efficiently, more precisely, and with less disturbance to the natural environment. For every million dollars worth of gold produced, the local economy grows by nearly $2 million and household earnings increase over $500,000.

Gold has been especially good to our national economy. As recently as 1980, most of our gold had to be imported. Today, because of new technologies, we are able to produce domestically all the gold needed for defense, communications, aviation, medical research, computers, automobile afety and other important applications.

Gold also generates billions of dollars of income for other industries throughout the United States. Each year, gold production contributes hundreds of millions in state and local taxes to fund roads, schools, hospitals, universities and other facilities. It also provides over $500 million a year to the federal treasury. And it strengthens America's balance of trade by providing over $1.5 billion a year in exports.

The development of our modern, high-tech gold industry is an American success story. It has made our country stronger, more independent, more competitive in the global marketplace. And in many unseen ways, it has made life better, healthier and safer for millions of people here and throughout the world.

"Thou shalt not defraud thy neighbour, neither rob him: the wages of him
that is hired shall not abide with thee all night until the morning"—Leviticus 19:13

"You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer."—Winston Churchill

"The firm basis of government is justice, not pity."—Woodrow Wilson

"Take calculated risks. That is quite different from being rash."—Gen. George S. Patton

"It's the economy, stupid."—Bill Clinton

THE HEALING POWER OF GOLD

In medieval Europe, alchemists mixed powdered gold into drinks to "comfort sore limbs," one of the earliest references to arthritis.

Word of gold's power to relieve the pain of arthritis passed down through the centuries. Its mysterious efficacy has been confirmed by modern medical research. Today it is widely used, in combination with other compounds, in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis.

In ancient Rome, gold salves were used for the treatment of skin ulcers. Today, gold leaf plays an important role in the treatment of chronic ulcers.

As long as 4,500 years ago, the Egyptians used gold in dentistry. Remarkable examples of the artistry of these early orthodontists have been found, perfectly preserved, by archaeologists of our own time. Today, American dentists use some 13 tons of gold each year for crowns, bridges, inlays and dentures. The reason? Gold is non-toxic, it can be shaped easily, and it is tough—it never wears, corrodes or tarnishes.

The use of gold in modern medicine began around 1890, when the distinguished German bacteriologist Robert Koch discovered that compounds made with gold inhibited growth of the bacillus that caused tuberculosis. His work was honored with the Nobel Prize in Medicine.

Today, medical uses of gold have expanded greatly. It is used in surgery to patch damaged blood vessels, nerves, bones and membranes. And it is used in the treatment of several forms of cancer. Injection of microscopic gold pellets helps retard prostate cancer in men. Women with ovarian cancer are treated with colloidal gold. And gold vapor lasers help seek out and destroy cancerous cells without harming their healthy neighbors.

Gold has become an important biomedical tool for scientists studying why the body behaves as it does. By attaching a molecular marker to a microscopic piece of gold, scientists can follow its movement through the body. And because gold is readily visible under an electron microscope, scientists now, for the first time, can see whether and where a reaction takes place in an individual cell.

Some researchers are placing gold on DNA to study the hybrid genetic material in cells. Others are using it to determine how cells respond to toxins, heat and physical stress.

Because it is biologically benign, biochemists use gold to form compounds with proteins to create new lifesaving drugs. One experimental new gold compound blocks virus replication in infected cells. It is being tested for the treatment of AIDS.

Every day, surgeons use gold instruments to clear coronary arteries, and gold-coated lasers literally give new life to patients with once inoperable heart conditions and tumors.

Around the world, the unique qualities of gold are helping millions of people live longer, healthier and more productive lives. One day, it may save your life.

Gold is so rare, only 90,000 tons of it have been taken from the earth in recorded history.

Gold is so rare that the world pours more steel in an hour than it has poured gold since the beginning of time.

South Africa leads the world in gold production. Other countries leading world production are Russia, Canada, and the United States.

Gold is so heavy that one cubic foot of it weighs one half a ton.

A one ounce natural gold nugget is rarer than a 5 carat diamond.

Experts estimate that there are only 41,000 tons of gold left in the earth to mine.

Gold is so malleable and soft that one ounce can be stretched into a wire 50 miles long.

Gold is so malleable that one ounce can be hammered into a sheet so thin it would cover 100 square feet.

Gold has lustrous beauty, it’s easily workable, it is rare, and it is virtually indestructible - four characteristics that no other precious metal possess.

The jewelry industry uses about 1,000 tons of gold per year and dentistry uses 87 tons.

All the gold in the world could be compressed into an 18 yard cube.

Gold has been used by man for more than 66 centuries, In fact, the first nugget mined, now over 6,000 years old, probably exists in some form today because of its durability, considering the way gold is remelted and recast, that first nugget could be part of a ring, watch, or gold chain that you are wearing.

EARTHLING ECONOMICS
by Edmond J Bugos

Gold "gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or someplace. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head" - by a well known investor

Why humans would guard something that has no utility must have escaped notice there.

I'd like to know what kind of society the Martians in this allegory had.

I mean, under what system of social cooperation were they able to arrive at the far superior technology required to observe humans from way off in the distance? Do the individual members exchange ideas, or goods? If not, how were they able to economize on scarce resources in order to
produce their technology, or is there no such thing as scarcity in outer space? What motivates them to act? Are they centrally organized like a simple ant colony or collectively motivated like the coercive Borg in Star Trek, or is their division of labor organized by a complex but voluntary
system of the free exchange of property titles, which here on earth forms the basis of civilized societies?

If not, I wonder then why "anyone watching from Mars" would not also scratch their head about paying someone to guard this hoard, let alone of the concept of utility, especially to an "individual"? In fact, if such a system were so unfamiliar, what sense could a Martian make of any human action? Maybe the philosophy of exchange is not foreign to this observer.

If that were true, neither could a common medium be all that foreign. In fact, if our Martian observer knew anything of our history or of such a system of cooperation, the reasons for the puzzling activity would be no less clear to him than to any informed economist right here on earth. Corruption.

But let's fast-forward the economic mumbo jumbo and cut straight to the chase. Since we're in outer space already, amongst superior beings, we may be forgiven for our excursion into a little fantasy.

Imagine that we had the technological capability to travel through time, and you signed up for an expedition that would catapult you, say, 5,000 years into the future, what would you choose as money to bring with you . . . assuming that you were only allowed to choose one of the following prospects? Keep in mind that your decision could mean the difference between life and death!

1. Gold
2. Silver
3. Brazilian seashell necklaces
4. As much top grade Light Crude (Oil) as you can carry
5. Salt
6. Cigarettes
7. Dutch tulips
8. Cattle (or a lamb?)
9. A bottle of 5,012 year old scotch
10. Federal Reserve Note (US dollars)
11. Euros
12. Government bonds / bills d'etat
13. Chinese Remnibi
14. 1923 German Reichesmark
15. Microsoft or Apple shares, or other kind of claim on asset

I know your answer.

You already know what the Martians apparently don't. Aside from a few drunks and jailbirds debating the merits between the scotch and smokes, I'd bet that most 'humans' probably picked gold or silver.

The value of gold as the medium of exchange is a topic in itself but we don't have to go there today - we don't have to know why humans have preferred it to other goods to know that it has outlasted any of them. What other commodity, or currency, has survived as money for any similar length of time?

What has held its purchasing power better? Many of those above have been money at different times and different places, but scarcely any of them has been money as long as gold. Gold is one of the oldest, and it is still accepted where it isn't restricted by a state protected legal tender monopoly.

It was first coined at least 2500 years ago; it adorned Egyptian kings as far back as 4500 years ago; yet suddenly, in only the last three decades, it has apparently lost all of its utility, as if history vanished, and barbarism with it . . . as if empire and dominion, conquest and plunder, or any of those activities usually associated with the history of gold no longer exist. Indeed, for our Martian observer to be scratching his head over this implies that he must have only begun his observation in the last
thirty years, and is totally ignorant about the 4500 years of human history before 1975. I'd say that's out of line with most Alien accounts, especially since widespread sightings of UFO's date long before 1975.

Gold has a monetary value, which can only mean something that is attributed by a market.

The state can say something is money but the concept of value being attached to something implies the market has a say. Allow me to contend that what this Martian observer puzzles over as a waste of resources is not the "utility" of the metal, or the question of why we bother mining it. If he only started with this utility as a given, implied by the act of guarding it, and wrote it off to some human affinity or other, what would really puzzle him is the same thing that should puzzle you: that the state would go to so great an expense to withhold such a desired thing from freely circulating. Indeed, the costs do not end with the remuneration of the security guards at Fort Knox, or wherever. They only
start there.

Truth may not need the support of government, but fiat and fractional reserve bank notes do.

It takes additional resources to force individuals to accept something as money which isn't by choice; and if the integrity of this money is subject to the inflationary whims of a fractional reserve banking cartel, the costs can quickly pile up. Genuine savings are depleted, debased or frittered away . . . the control over the means of production compromised, inefficiencies burgeon, inhibiting progress and technological innovation, and instability reigns. Moreover, the policy undermines both the moral fabric of society and its adhesive force: the division of labor. Why would humans, as an observer who was not foreign to human history might astutely question, allow such self-defeating and costly institutions?

This, at least, is what puzzles me.

The answer is ignorance... induced by a misinformation campaign that is costly in itself.

The value of a sound money is that it prevents planners from redistributing the wealth and savings of the productive classes to the political classes in order to finance expensive unproductive agendas - or from depleting the savings of fixed income earners, or the wages of the poor . . . as Greenspan wrote many years before becoming a central banker: "In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation" (published by Ayn Rand in 1966).

Alas, the Martian observer can no longer be confused about either the utility of this metal or the reason that it is being guarded (rather than allowed to circulate). Its absence from circulation has been answered: it is part of a scheme to raid the savings of productive classes.

The utility of this metal should thus be clear: it restricts the coercive elements of society and protects savings; it is but an instrument of the sound money principle . . . and it is interchangeable with the idea of freedom.

There is no way to understand the utility of gold—or to make sense of the entire activity described in the quote—if one does not grasp history, or these ideas.

Comedian Jerry Seinfeld, who specializes in irony, perhaps reveals the fallacy best when lamenting that if Martians were watching (human) dog owners follow their pets around with a doggy bag, they'd probably think that the dogs were in charge. Just what you need . . . another head scratcher.