As you can tell, I've been on a "money" theme this week, because believe it or not that's what the bulk of articles that people sent me were about. There is definitely "something in the aether" with this. It is, as they say, "trending." When I scheduled this week's blogs, however, due to one thing or another, I wasn't able to compose or schedule today's blog until Wednesday (Mar 6), but in a way, I'm glad I didn't, as Ms. C.M. spotted a story that once again goes directly to this week's "theme in the aether": gold, and counterfeiting. But first, there's another strange story that also emerged in the articles, and it concerns an alleged "deal" the USA made with ISIS, a kind of "we're making you an offer you can't refuse":

US Army Takes 50 Tons Of Gold From Syria In Alleged Deal With ISIS

The essence of the "deal" is just about as simple, and Mafia-like, as it gets:

As the remaining pockets of ISIS fighters faced imminent defeat in northeast Syria, the United States allegedly gave them an offer they couldn’t refuse: give us your massive caches of gold - or die. According to reports by Syrian state news agency SANA, U.S. forces struck a deal with ISIS whereby the terrorist group would give up 50 tons of gold across eastern Syria’s Deir el-Zour province in exchange for safe passage. The precious metal, worth about $2.13 billion, was plundered by the self-designated “caliphate” as its reign of terror spread across Syria and Iraq between 2015 and 2017.

The more things change... It's an old part of "the playbook": rather than staring down the muzzle of a Venetian bombard, ISIS was staring at fuel air bombs and helicopters; different technology, same playbook. It's called "the protection racket."

But needless to say, I have to wonder if that's the whole story, and herewith a bit of high octane speculation based on my speculation from Tuesday's blog earlier this week (Mining, Mergers, Monopoly, and "Perfecting the Capital" part two). Without reprising my whole high octane speculation from that day, I did hypothesize that eventually bullion might be implanted with a kind of "nano-tagget" much like explosives are, which would allow said bullion to be monitored and tracked from the point of origin (the mine) to the point of sale (the banks). What I did not mention was a rather obvious implication of that idea, namely, that if one were to do something like that, then one would have to gather up all the gold running loose out there in order to make such a step effective. In that respect, I do find it odd that in recent years we've seen a spate of countries buying up gold and attempting to repatriate any reserves held by foreign banks. I am not disputing the conventional reasons being advanced for this activity, but with the advances in technology, I have to wonder if something like my "nano-tagget" scenario might be in play in advance of some sort of "reset" scenario.

But then Ms. C.M. spotted this story, which made me sit up and think that maybe my wild idea was not so wild after all:

The Arms Race Between Gold Counterfeiters and Bullion Testers Is Heating Up

Now, the article makes clear what we all know from basic high school chemistry (or at least, what used to be basic high school chemistry before the Great Dumbing Down Era intervened to focus everyone on how they've been victimized): gold has unique signatures that cannot be "faked" and relatively simple tests will reveal it.

So where's the high octane speculation here? Well, join me as we walk right off the end of the twig on this one. Suppose for a moment, just suppose for the sake of argument, that alchemy was real, that there was some secret process of producing gold from "base metals". I would be, I aver, a closely held secret. Indeed, alchemical texts seem to allude not only to the reality of the idea, but also to guard that "secret" (if any) rather closely and carefully. Some of them allude to the production occurring in "putrefying dung", a strange reference that anyone familiar with alchemical texts will have encountered repeatedly. When I first did some years ago, the idea seemed laughable, and the whole thing was usually explained by scholars of such texts as being a sort of "code" for something else. There was, of course, little if any agreement on what that "something else" might be. Then a story appeared about a little bacterium that goes around eating things, and - well, there's no delicate way of putting this - pooping out gold. And not just any poop either, this is pure 24 karat poop. (See A bacteria that poops gold? Yep, that exists, and it’s in an art exhibit. (video))

It does not take much imagination to realize that someone, somewhere, will be thinking in terms of "economies of scale" and having gigantic farms of said bacterium gobbling up all sorts of toxic metals and golding out commercially useful quantities of poop... er... pooping out commercially useful quantities of gold. Someone will try to figure out some way to scale up the process. And most likely, if they are successful, they will try to keep the whole thing secret. And if one extends the speculation a bit, it's fairly easy to figure out the types of people that would do that: people with access to a lot of money, and able to conduct the research to do so: people at the pinnacle of deep states and covert infrastructures. And of course the catch with the little gold-pooper is that it is actually breaking down the gold in gold chloride, so the gold is there to begin with. But... with a little genetically engineered modification, who knows? Call it alchemico-genetic engineering.

And how would they introduce said gold into the "stream"? Well, one way might be by buying up lots of gold mines, and sneaking their own bacterio-alchemical product into the mix.

... yea, I know... It's a crazy idea...

See you on the flip side...