Please accept my apologies for having neglected the blog during a run of genuinely outstanding weather.
You can deduct a little from my pay. Oh, right, I receive no pay for this. I did, however, get the $90 Trump Medicare bonus deposited to my checking account earlier this week, as did my wife, so we’ll call it even.
Back to the glorious weather, this is the sort of sunny, dry stuff we usually get in September, but mostly were forced to do without this past month. I’d like to say I’ve been using the time in the sun to exercise my hobby cars and generally have fun. In truth, while I’ve done a little of that, I’ve also been washing, waxing and cleaning the interior of several other vehicles, along with mowing my grass and attending to life’s other details.
Regardless, I have been watching world events and am prompted to issue this latest News and Views installment.
NEWS: “Students” in France, now Belgium, and likely soon other European countries, have taken to the streets to stage the sort of violent, fiery protests CNN would call “mostly peaceful.”
VIEWS: I am reminded of my youth, when “students” rioted on U.S. college campuses, or “students” appeared daily outside the U. S. embassy in Tehran to provide background for television reports, then disbursed back to their mud huts. The latest “students” many of whom seem to be Middle Eastern (dare we say, Muslim?) imports based on attire and skin color, likely are not “students” in the traditional sense. Even if some of them are “students” they apparently skipped their classes on proper behavior in a civilized society.
NEWS: The Pirates organization and some fans have been celebrating finishing the 2026 season with a winning record, barely, of 82-80.
VIEWS: I would refer them to MLB’s ongoing postseason, where both Milwaukee and Tampa Bay have advanced to their respective league championship series, and Chicago and Cleveland play on to decide the final AL title series berth. Milwaukee, which won the most games in either league this season, is listed as the smallest market in the majors, at a touch under 1.7 million people. The Brewers had the 19th highest payroll, at about $143.5 million. Tampa Bay is the fifth smallest market at 2.4 million, had the 25th payroll at $98.3 million, yet won the most games in the American League. Cleveland ranks 19th in market size and dead last in payroll, yet remains alive in the postseason. The Pirates, with the fourth smallest market (2.4 million people) and the 23rd payroll ($107.6 million), are postseason spectators yet again. And, for those saying after the Pirates missed the postseason for the 11th consecutive year that turnarounds take time, consider the White Sox lost more than 100 games in each of the past three seasons, yet turned it around in 2026. The Pirates are running out of excuses.
NEWS: Judy Shelton has been hired as a counselor to U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
VIEWS: Perhaps you have been reading that our country has a massive debt problem, $40 trillion and counting, owing to a complete lack of fiscal discipline and deficit spending. You probably have not heard that speculation about one way to address our borrowing problems would be to put gold back into the dollar equation, something President Richard Nixon stopped in August 1971 when he ended dollar convertibility into gold. The U.S. is reported to be sitting on a stockpile of gold said to be 8,100 tons or so, mostly at Fort Knox. That is on the books at $42.22 an ounce. Gold trades late Friday morning, as I write this, at a spot price of $4,188.10 an ounce, about a thousand times above the price it is carried at on the country’s ledger. Shelton, a prominent economist who was considered for the Federal Reserve Chairman role that went to Kevin Warsh, is a so-called “gold bug”. In the past, she has called for the Treasury to sell gold-backed bonds, a backdoor method of instituting financial discipline and getting gold backing again for the dollar. Hmmmmm.
