Alchemy of the Modern Renaissance || Good Vibes Promotions

@ Huffington post

SALT LAKE CITY — Utah legislators want to see the dollar regain its former glory, back to the days when one could literally bank on it being “as good as gold.”

To make that point, they’ve turned it around, and made gold as good as cash. Utah became the first state in the country this month to legalize gold and silver coins as currency. The law also will exempt the sale of the coins from state capital gains taxes.

Craig Franco hopes to cash in on it with his Utah Gold and Silver Depository, and he thinks others will soon follow.

The idea is simple: Store your gold and silver coins in a vault, and Franco issues a debit-like card to make purchases backed by your holdings.

He plans to open for business June 1, likely the first of its kind in the country.

“Because we’re dealing with something so forward thinking, I expect a wait-and-see attitude,” Franco said. “Once the depository is executed and transactions can occur, then I think people will move into the marketplace.”

The idea was spawned by Republican state Rep. Brad Galvez, who sponsored the bill largely to serve as a protest against Federal Reserve monetary policy. Galvez says Americans are losing faith in the dollar. If you’re mad about government debt, ditch the cash. Spend your gold and silver, he says.

His idea isn’t to return to the gold standard, when the dollar was backed by gold instead of government goodwill. Instead, he just wanted to create options for consumers.

“We’re too far down the road to go back to the gold standard,” Galvez said. “This will move us toward an alternative currency.”

Earlier this month, Minnesota took a step closer to joining Utah in making gold and silver legal tender. A Republican lawmaker there introduced a bill that sets up a special committee to explore the option. North Carolina, Idaho and at least nine other states also have similar bills drafted.

At the moment, Franco’s idea would generally be the only practical use of the law in Utah, given the legislation doesn’t require merchants to accept the coins, either at face value – $50 for a 1-ounce gold coin – or market value, currently almost $1,500 per ounce. And no one expects people will be walking around town with pockets full of gold and silver.

Matt Zeman, market strategist for Kingsview Financial in Chicago, expects more people will start investing in gold as America’s growing debt and bankruptcies in other countries continue to decrease the value of government-backed money.

“You’ve seen gold replacing these currencies as safety instruments,” Zeman said. “If I don’t feel good about the dollar or other currencies, I’m putting my money in precious metals.”

Some supporters, including the law’s sponsor, seek to push Congress toward removing the tax burdens that discourage use of the coins, such as a federal capital gains tax.

“Making gold and silver coins legal tender sends a strong signal to Congress and the Federal Reserve that their monetary policy is failing,” said Ralph Danker, project director for economics at the Washington, D.C.-based American Principles in Action, which helped shape Utah’s law. “The dollar should be backed by gold and silver, so we have hard money.”

The U.S. and many other countries largely abandoned gold-backed money during World War I because they needed to print more cash to pay for the war. Later, during the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt took steps that essentially prohibited gold and silver as legal currency to prevent hoarding.

In 1971, President Nixon formally abandoned the gold standard.

Fifteen years later, the U.S. Mint began producing the gold and silver American Eagle coins, primarily aimed at investment portfolios and allowing people to trade them at market value but with capital gains taxes on profits.

Utah is now allowing the coins to be used as legal tender while levying no taxes.

Opponents of the law warn such a policy shift nationwide could increase the prospect of inflation and could destabilize international markets by removing the government’s flexibility to quickly adjust currency prices.

“We’d be going backward in financial development,” said Carlos Sanchez, director of Commodities Management for The CPM Group in New York. “What backs currency is confidence in a government’s ability to pay debt, its government system and its economy.”

Larry Hilton, a Utah attorney who helped draft the law, disagrees and says the gold standard would restore faith in American money at a time when spiraling debt is weakening confidence.

“We view this as a dollar-friendly measure,” Hilton said. “It will strengthen the dollar by refocusing policy matters in Washington on what led to the phrase, `the dollar is as good as gold.’”

@ Occupymonsanto

@ NORML

Commercially available baby soaps and other wash products that are commonly used with newborns may yield false positive results for THC in immunoassay drug screens, according to a just published study in the journal Clinical Biochemistry.

Investigators at the University of North Carolina, Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, assessed the impact of various baby wash products on drug-free urine samples after a number of false positive cannabinoid screening results were suspected at their hospital.

Researchers reported: “Mixtures of drug-free urine with various commercial products and materials that commonly contact newborns in our nursery were prepared and tested using the immunoassay screening methods in our laboratory. … Addition of Head-to-Toe Baby Wash to drug-free urine produced a dose dependent measureable response in the THC immunoassay. Addition of other commercially available baby soaps gave similar results, and subsequent testing identified specific chemical surfactants that reacted with the THC immunoassay.”

They concluded: “We have identified commonly used soap and wash products used for newborn and infant care as potential causes of false positive THC screening results. Such results in this population can lead to involvement by social services or false child abuse allegations. Given these consequences, it is important for laboratories and providers to be aware of this potential source for false positive screening results and to consider confirmation before initiating interventions.”

Read the abstract of the study, “Unexpected interference of baby wash products with a cannabinoid (THC) immunoassay,” here.

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. -Aristotle.

BY J.G Vibes

I’m sure I’m not the only one who has noticed that the freedom movement is quickly becoming just as polarized and divided as the mainstream political circles that are presented in the media.  While it is absolutely important that we stay true to our individual principles, that doesn’t mean that it is productive for us to immediately disregard anyone who doesn’t see the world exactly as we see it.  Likewise this especially does not give us the right to belittle or ridicule those who have different ideas than we do.

The truth is that we all have blind spots in our thinking, and we all have things to learn from other people.  It is possible to have a friendly conversation with someone who sees the world completely different from you, without sacrificing your beliefs and without expecting them to sacrifice theirs.  That’s not to say that there is no right or wrong answers, because in many cases there are things which can be verified and proven, but standing on opposing ends of an issue and shoving ideas down one another’s throats as fast as possible is how the republicrats communicate, it is not how we should be communicating in the freedom movement.

For those of us standing outside of the left/right political paradigm we can see the stagnation and inefficiency that is caused by this sort of divisive approach at communication and problem solving.  Debates in political circles are always centered more around scoring points and showing off, instead of being focused on actually solving the problems at hand, which is one of the many reasons why there are never any real “political” solutions to any of the world’s problems.

With that being said there is a growing number of people throughout the world who are really becoming disgusted with the violence and subjugation that has become common place in all of our societies.  These people all come from very different backgrounds, they have led different lives, had different experiences and each have taken in a wide variety of contrasting information about the world that we live in.  Due to that fact all of these people have entered the freedom movement, or the resistance, or the revolution or whatever you want to call it… all of these people have entered this movement with different preconceived notions about why we are in the mess we are in and how to get out.

This may seem like a dangerous and volatile situation because we are so used to seeing people who think differently tear each other apart, but in reality this is a beautiful gift that we should all embrace and attempt to learn from as much as we possibly can.  If we think of the global situation as a giant puzzle, we can describe all of these different people with different viewpoints as each being a unique piece in that puzzle that is essential for its completion.  Some of us may be voluntaryists or libertarians, some of us may be constitutionalists and Ron Paul supporters, some of us may be socialists or futurists, and we may all disagree on a whole lot of things, but the bottom line is that we all have a great deal to learn from one another and there is no way we are going to fight the mercantilist monster that stands before us if we don’t respect one another’s opinions and we refuse to entertain the possibility that someone with a different opinion has the potential to teach us something.

As free thinkers we should celebrate the moment that we learn new information, even if that information may cause us to change our minds and feel differently about certain things.  In fact, I would say that the ability to overcome one’s own ego and change their minds when presented with new information is one of the fundamental characteristics of a “free thinker”.  Now again I want to be clear that this doesn’t mean that you have to go around agreeing with what everyone says, or that you can’t be firm in your convictions, but it is just important to remember that we are in this fight to solve problems, and reduce the level of violence that we see around us, we are not here to score debate points and form cliques.

Today, almost every economy in the world is totally dictated by the ideas of two long-dead aristocrats. Karl Marx on one end representing communism and Adam Smith on the other end representing capitalism in the minds of most people. Our whole way of doing business on this planet has changed very little since the time that these two characters were alive, and that right there is the root of our problem. Imagine if a few people in every city across the world wrote their own economic manifestos and got together to respectfully discuss their ideas. We refuse to accept yesterday’s television shows, IPods and PlayStations, but without thinking we have accepted ways of living that are centuries old. It’s time for us to work together in creating strategies where everyone can meet their needs without violating the rights of others.

This article originally appeared at Alchemy of the Modern Renaissance

J.G. Vibes is an author, and artist — with an established record label. In addition to featuring a wide variety of activist information, his company Good Vibes Promotions hosts politically charged electronic dance music events. You can keep up with him and his new book Alchemy of the Modern Renaissance, at his website www.aotmr.com.

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