Posted on 01/28/2012 7:54:33 AM PST by oblomov
The machine guns roared, pouring tens of thousands of bullets into the night's blackness. Suddenly: Ka-WHOOOMP! WAAHHHMP! WHA-OOOOMP!! Enormous fireballs flashed into yellow-white existence, mutating into billows of orange flame 100 feet high. The pulse of shock and heat hit my skin. As the explosions faded, the night air was lit by an endless fusillade of red and green tracer rounds, the incandescent muzzle blast of automatic weapons, and flames from burning vehicles…
Just a typical evening in the green autumn hills of north-central Kentucky.
Typical twice a year, I should say. Every April and October, the Knob Creek Gun Range, fittingly located in Bullitt County, Kentucky, hosts "The World's Largest Machine Gun Shoot and Military Gun Show." Knob Creek Range lies just a few miles north of Fort Knox, home to the United States Bullion Depository and the 147 million ounces of gold in its vaults. As the names suggest, the range is only a short hop from the distillery where Knob Creek Whiskey is made (more about that superb nine-year-old bourbon later).
I had been hearing about this machine gun shoot for a while. According to the Knob Creek website, the shoot consists of "firing at a wide variety of used appliances, abandoned vehicles, pyramids of tires, and barrels of fuel with pyrotechnic charges attached.…The charges are set off by the impact of the bullets, creating fiery mushroom clouds and fireballs from hell!…The objective is to destroy everything down range." That sounded like something I needed to investigate personally.
After a 10-hour drive from Northern Virginia, I finally got off the interstates near Louisville, and headed south down Dixie Highway past Fort Knox. Checking in at the Gold Vault Inn, a modest but pleasant establishment, I spotted a stack of official-looking notices at the front desk.
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
You gonna be able to have somebody like Archimedes with you on every shopping trip on the day after TSHTF??
Do they have howitzer competitions?
Actually, with the price of hay now. The theft of
bailed hay and the big rolls is up.
I personally own a relatively modest bit of physical gold and other PMs, most of it purchased in the 90s and early 2000s. I purchased it as an investment, since I believed at the time that gold and other commodities were undervalued.
I couldn’t imagine paying $1700/oz+ for anything but a short-term trade.
History indicates that gold would be a poor SHTF hedge. The best, and perhaps only, example is the price of gold relative to other commodities during the slow dissolution of the Roman Empire.
If we consider short-term economic shocks and not true SHTF scenarios, the evidence does not favor gold. In Russia during the 90s, some ordinary citizens became oligarchs by trading forex (shorting ruble against the Deutschmark, Yen, or US Dollar), but they did this through a bank, and utilized enormous leverage which the bank happily provided. So profiting from the anarchy required a bank situated where there was political and economic stability.
Post-Katrina New Orleans was an example of civilization breakdown, at least for a few weeks. Ammo, water, and food were valuable, but gold was nearly worthless to those who were stuck there.
Untraceable when stolen,, kinda like the part of savings purchasing power that vanishes every year? And its a heck of a lot easier to -find- a hay bale, than something the size of a silver dollar. Properly concealed,, theft is a minor problem. And ask anyone who has had a bank account drained exactly how “traceable” the stolen money was.
Now it’s size reveals another fun advantage. A person walking along carrying apparent pocket change, and wearing some jewelry, can actually be carrying a small fortune that doesn’t get reported to the Feds.
And I laugh when i hear people sternly warn us how the government might confiscate it like in the 30’s. As the Allman bros sang,, “that was then, this is now”.
People are mobile like never before. For Tennessee Jed to dispose of Gold internationally in the 1930s was nearly impossible. Today it’s easy. The Mob smuggles out SUVs, the mexicans and chinese smuggle groups of humans and bales of hay known as pot. Yet supposedly, i can’t move a handfull of one ounce gold coins?
But heres the best part,,, i don’t even HAVE to get them across the border. I just have to drive across town to the local Chinese or Indian restaurant owners place. They’ll buy all you have,, and will send it back to the old country.
Yes,, owning some gold makes a lot of sense. It is only a bad idea if you trust the government enough not to own a gun either.
PS,,immediately after the Roosevelt gold call in, the US govt nearly doubled the price at the window-or devalued the dollar by almost half, as you prefer.
Owning gold makes no sense because it is easy to steal, yet, owning firearms makes sense because they are not easy to steal?
So, exactly what do you expect to hold wealth when the dollar collapses? Hay?
People all over the world for the last 5000 years have managed to find away around your “problems” with gold....
Ask the people who went through hyperinflation in Argentina or the Wiemer Republic on what History indicates about owning gold.
In Argentina, it would have been better to have some rural land (the cities were dangerous) and a leveraged long US dollar position in a US bank.
In Weimar Germany, stocks in blue-chip German companies performed as well as gold as a store of wealth. Income-producing farmland performed even better.
Agreed. People in Argentina immediately after the collapse were reportedly better off with cheap junk jewelry with a little gold content than purer gold. Gold would get them severely cheated. Those who want gold to continue having some value during hard times should help to vote their own ruling, socialist-conglomerate class out of every level of government, business and academia in exchange for politicians like Newt (spoke for return to hard money). ;-)
Diamonds are more compact than gold.
In Communist China, land was stolen, AND landowners were executed.
In Communist China, land was stolen, AND landowners were executed.
In communist Russia, land was stolen, AND landowners were executed.
Isn't communism grand?
5.56mm
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