Bryan avenged, sort of, not really.
The Populists of the 1890s were good diagnosers but terrible prescribers. They analyzed the problems of financialism and globalism beautifully, but their proposed solution was always a weakening of the gold standard. Exactly backwards. What happened when Nixon finally killed the gold standard? Final victory for the bankers and globalists.

For some reason the usual Populist Pill was Bimetallism, which mixed 15 parts silver and 1 part gold into a magic token that would destroy all bankers.



Now bimetallism has returned in an equally useless way. In Max Keiser's latest episode he discusses a metal-mix ETF, which supposedly has some properties of a currency. When you buy a unit of this thing, you're supposedly claiming title to a mix of metals stored in bullion warehouses somewhere. The mix is 93.75% silver, 3% gold, and the rest platinum and palladium.

93% sounds familiar. 15 to 1 is 93.33% silver, 6.66% gold.

= = = = =

Is that why they chose 15? Were they consciously beasting gold? I doubt it. 666 wasn't a big deal in 1890. Only a few scholars and offbeat snake-handling churches focused on Revelation themes. Public attention began with TV evangelists in the 70s.



Oddly, Google's Ngram thingamajig doesn't show the pattern. I can't think of a way to distinguish the religious context from incidental occurrences of 666 in technical publications. 666 volts, 666 hours of part-time work, etc. I'd expect the incidental references to be fairly constant over the years; the Ngram is fairly constant, which tells me that the printed publications of evangelists never made it into libraries. There is a mild correlation between the peak frequencies and preparing for war. 1811, 1844, 1917, 1939, 1989. When we are riling ourselves up to attack some foreigners, we talk about the Beast.

Labels: Asked and sort of answered, skill-estate

  ¶ 4:58 PM