I have noticed that some people I respect have jumped on the bandwagon of calling Bitcoin a cult. I will agree with the word cult even know it is ment to be pejorative, giving the movement a religion like meaning. Is is a cult in the sense that it is a movement based on philosophical believes. Underlining the complete philosophy is not my intention neither my place. Bitcoin is a cult in the sense that it is a movement of people who are sick of currency manipulation, and war for dominance.

Before I get to the conversation; I find it necessary to note that I have been listening to Peter Schiff’s podcast on and off, and find his inside to be agreeable most of the time. He knows his stuff, and is explaining it very well. Me Why invest in Gold rather then diamonds? What makes gold a better money then diamonds? Peter Schiff Diamonds are not fungible! Diamonds can now be created by industry, rather then mining.

There is an interesting article about The Summit for Democracy titled Biden Invites Taiwan to Democracy Summit Alongside 110 Countries. I want to add a short but important observation. As mentioned in the article Hungary and Turkey have not been invited to the Summit. But contrary to the article, I believe that the reason has nothing to do with the leaders of these countries. More authoritarian leaders then Viktor Orban and Erdoğan have been invited after all.

Once upon a time China was a flourishing country. Trade was booming. Europe was buying and China was producing. Hence the silk road from way back in time. China was selling and was selling for silver. All the world’s silver was flowing to China in exchange for goods. However Europe, all the individual countries in Europe were trading in Gold. Money in China was silver, money in Europe was gold.

Peter buys a house for $100. 10time passes and Peter sells his home for $200. 2time later he decides he wants to buy the same house back but now the house costs $210. However Peter has only $160 after paying $40 capital gain taxes. He lost $50 buying power, and therefore is poorer. Peter was hedging inflation with real estate.

Hey you thinker, here are some thoughts for you to ponder. STOP trying! We are preprogrammed not to trust anything that doesn’t look, feel, or smell like us. The more someone looks like us, and talks like us, the more trustworthy they appear to us. The second we meet someone we judge them. We judge them based on their posture, dress, hair, smile, you name it. We will have an idea about that person’s character in less then a second.

Not only do we know that Democracy as we know it doesn’t work, in 1787 the man who gave us democracy here in the USA told us that it would not work, hence the second amendment. They said this is the best we have deal with it. Don’t let it get too big! What did we do? We didn’t only let the government get too big. We even exported our broken democratic system all over the world without the second amendment, without the failsafe fuse.

Once you develop confidence in your own ability, you’ll be able to make a real contribution to creating a better world. Self-confidence is very important. Not in the sense of blind pride, but as a realistic awareness of what you can do. As human beings we can transform ourselves by our good qualities and reducing our faults. Our intelligence enables us to judge what is good from what is harmful.

There was a time way back when I just plain didn’t know. Then as I found out one by one. At first I was justifying then who knows at which point it turned in to rationalizing. My awareness started with atrocities we inflicted on to each other; like the African American slavery but by the time I learned about slavery it was all over. Same goes for American Indians, Stalin and the Holodomor, Church and the inquisitions (It is estimated that The Black Death alone killed over a 100 million people in 4 years).

The Google Earth .DEB still depends on ia32-libs, but ia32-libs has been removed as part of the transition to multiarch, so it won’t install. Steps Download the 64-bit google earth .deb file from http://www.google.com/earth mkdir earth dpkg-deb -R google-earth*.deb earth edit the file earth/DEBIAN/control and replace the Depends line as shown below dpkg-deb -b earth earth.deb dpkg -i earth.deb apt-get install -f Replace Depends: lsb-core (>= 3.2), ia32-libs with