All That Glitters Isn't a Conspiracy

Note: I wrote this one a few days ago.  Still don't know if it's worthy to post, but decided to do it anyway, just to post something.

Brains are incredible things, but you really have to be careful with them or they'll start playing tricks on you and make you see things that aren't real.  And so I'm bored and looking at Yahoo and see an article about how the government is sitting on $1 billion in gold coins because an idiot Republican thought he could get people to start using gold coins, so he mandated that the government make them; but people still didn't care.  So no one uses the coins and taxpayers are now stuck paying to store them in a warehouse..

Pretty straight forward story, right?  Not if you're an anti-government conspiracy monger.  To them, this is all about some secret plot to undermine gold and destroy our economy.  And I saw that on the most highly ranked comment on that story, which said:

The headline should read "Gold Colored Coins"

Now, I get his point.  His point is that these coins aren't actually made of gold, but of course, that's because they couldn't be.  After all, $1 of gold isn't really going to be big enough to make a coin out of.  But all the same, they look gold and coins have long been referred to as "gold coins" even if they're not actually made of gold.  Similarly, I can say I'm wearing an orange shirt without people thinking it's made of fruit.

And from that, we see comments like these:

You can't trust Yahoos' headlines anymore..

The Presidential Dollar coins do NOT contain any gold ... they have a golden color due to a special mix of alloys. Makes me wonder if this article is a propaganda article to spin the country's financial condition as being sounder than it is?

sounds like they are saying that gold itself is pretty worthless, and trying to call these coins gold? i agree fully with michael s

Eric, I want our currency made of real gold and silver so the fed can't just devalue them and steal my wealth.

Yahoo you suck!!! Big time!!!

This article is trying to convince me (emotionally) that these "gold-colored" coins (ergo gold coins) aren't worth considering because nobody wants em (bandwagon propaganda) BUT I'm not buying it. Gold and Silver Bullion is so much better than fake, digital, fiat, debt financed, federal reserve notes, and will be worth more when this country crashes and burns (by purposeful engineered design BTW)

And here's the thing: The word gold was NOT in the actual headline of the article.  It was the teaser headline on the Yahoo homepage that these people are referring to, while the actual headline was The $1 Billion That No One in the United States Wants.  In fact, the word "gold" was only used once in the article, and the point of the article wasn't about them being gold, but about them being metal and how people don't want metal dollars.

Yet, we're to imagine that Yahoo conspired to have someone write this story for the explicit purpose of devaluing gold by making people think it's worthless.  And naturally, Yahoo would have no purpose for doing this, were it not some plot from the government or some shadowy cabal.

But...if they were going to do such a thing, don't you think they'd do a better job of it?  I mean, you'd think between the combined resources of Yahoo, the government, and Obama's Kenyan-Chicago ties, we'd have a little better push on this than a minor story on a Yahoo blog.

For that matter, don't you think they'd have just written an article about how coins made of gold are useless because it's just a shiny rock with no intrinsic value beyond what we give to it?  That'd be a much better article for pushing that sort of agenda, and has the benefit of being true.  But no matter.  These people see a conspiracy and that's all that's important.

I've actually tried to explain that to people whenever they start talking about how paper dollars only have value that we give to it, as they somehow believe that gold has magical value that will always last.  But of course, value is all in the eyes of the person willing to pay for it, and if our country ever gets to the point that our money becomes worthless, we'll have a lot more problem on our hands than how many shiny rocks we have in our pockets.  If the shit goes down, bullets will most assuredly be worth more than gold.