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Presented at the Capitalism and
Morality Symposium, Vancouver, B.C., July 2016
Contact@MercenaryGeologist.com
November 28, 2016
By Mickey Fulp
For as long as I can remember (and I have a very good memory), it started
with Santa Claus and it will never end until the day I die: Somehow someone
somewhere in some position of authority is telling me to believe in
this, that, or the other.
I hate the word �belief�. I cringe when someone says, �I believe�,
or �I�m a believer in��, or �It is my belief�.
Yada, yada, yada �blah, blah, blah.
My favorite American author, Mark Twain, hated the concept, too. He said:
�Faith is believin� what you know ain�t so.�
Personally, I refuse to use both the verb and the noun in their various
forms. They are never parts of my vocabulary.
To the faith and belief mongers I pose this question:
What in American culture demands that our parents, our teachers, and the
politicians who become our �leaders� constantly and continuously invent
mythical creatures and promulgate outright lies to us, those who they
obviously view as their serfs, subordinates, underlings, and minions?
At one time or another in our lives, the authority figures have tried to
make us believe in the following:
Santa Claus; the Easter Bunny; the Tooth Fairy; a monotheistic God; the
Russians are coming; we are winning the war that Obama is waging to make
peace; gold is going to $4000; and the Boogie-Man is going to get us if we
don�t get him first.
With that as introduction, I will now examine each blatant falsehood in
detail:
Belief #1:Yes Virginia, There is a Santa Claus.
My rebellion against belief (and authority) started at age six when I was
eavesdropping from the bedroom hallway into the living room. I overheard my
mother tell her friend about hiding the candy that the �Easter Bunny� had
brought for my brother and me.
I had already figured out that the �Tooth Fairy� who exchanged a tooth
under your pillow for a shiny Mercury dime was bogus. I didn�t tell my mom
because I wanted to get more silver dimes. Now I own about 20,000 of them (in
two bags of junk silver).
I didn�t really give a rat�s ass for a stuffed rabbit, bright yellow baby
chickens, hardboiled eggs colored with red dye #40, and those egg- and
bunny-shaped candies made out of bad chocolate.
But it got me thinking�If the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny were fakes
made up by my parents, then where did �Santa Claus� fit into this new world
of non-make-believe?
Now all of a sudden we were talking about real serious stuff:
For chris�-sakes, this was the jolly old St. Nick who zipped around the
world on Xmas Eve in an airborne sled with flying reindeer, climbed down our
six inch-wide chimney complete with gas flame and fake log, and ate the hot
cookies and cold milk my brother and I left out for him while we slept. That
good ol� bewhiskered fat guy delivered plastic pearl-handled cap guns, bows
with rubber tipped arrows, three-inch tall, green plastic Army men complete
with one shooting a big bazooka, and bright red shiny Schwinn bicycles.
Unholy moly! Was Santa Claus my parents, too? If I couldn�t believe in
Santa Claus anymore, then what was left to believe in? Was my bounty
of toys on Xmas mornings going to up and disappear?
Never one to beat around the bush, I asked directly and to my parents
credit, I was told directly: The Santa who rode a mile down Broadway in a red
fire engine at the annual Xmas parade was really just the big fat Buick
dealer who lived in a ritzy neighborhood on the other side of town.
My brother, five at the time, cried for an entire afternoon when I told
him the truth.
Belief #2:There is an Invisible Man Who Lives in the Sky.
The whole religious thing took a whole lot longer to ferret out.
I was quite the evangelical Southern Baptist Christian from age eight to
eleven. I even conned Jesus into forgiving me for being a hyperactive little
boy who got all A�s in school but bad marks for �does not work well with
others�; �does not like to follow directions�; �talks back to his teachers�;
does not respect authority; and/or �daydreams in class�.
Here�s how it worked:
I got forgiven for all these sins and shortcomings by getting myself
�saved� or �born again� or some such silly nonsense. It required getting my
head dunked underwater so then I could become a ritualistic cannibal and eat
some dry-as-a-bone, flat crackers washed down with Welch�s grape juice
(Baptists couldn�t drink wine; that was a really really bad sin), all blessed
by the local fire and brimstone preacher-man to become the flesh and blood of
Jesus Cristo.
But by age 12, when they tried to make me believe that Jonah got
swallowed up whole by a whale and then was puked up on a white sand beach
none the worse for wear, I thought: �That�s friggin� ridiculous. That�s just
another lie they expect me to buy.�
I didn�t dare say that out loud because the Sunday school teacher, some
old bitty named Mrs. Jones, would tell my mom I was going to burn in Hell and
that would for certain mean hell to pay with my mom. Of course, I would only
go to Hell after I was already dead.
Whatever.
So because of some funky dude named Jonah, a really big fish that was not
really a fish, and yet another teacher that I despised, I was soon shedding
my religion.
From that day on I considered it a monumental waste of valuable free time
to spend two hours of a precious two day break from school in this
nonsensical endeavor. Unfortunately the parental units didn�t quite see it
the same way and so I was forced to attend church. By age 16, my Sunday
mornings were spent nodding off with another hangover in the church balcony.
My only saving grace was the cute high school hotties who could barely sit on
the hems of their short short miniskirts; after all, it was 1969. Rest
assured, that helped ease the pain and boredom.
Now if you are one of the believers, I apologize. Please forgive my
sin for not buying in.
There are many Americans who believe their nightly prayers to
George Carlin�s �Invisible Man Who Lives in the Sky� will be answered. And
that�s perfectly fine with me.
But as a scientist, I cannot fathom blind faith and unquestioning belief
in anything that I cannot see, hear, taste, smell, or touch.
When it comes to religion, I say �each to his own�. Let�s all be content
to live and let live. With all due respect to Robert Ripley, Believe It
or Not!
Belief #3:The Russians are Coming.
Another big part of the misguided belief of my childhood in the
late �50s and �60s was �the Russians are coming.� American Cold War leaders
starting with Nixon, followed by McCarthy, and succeeded by Kennedy claimed
that the soulless, godless bastards from the unwashed East were infiltrating
our everyday lives with Soviet spies.
I was in kindergarten in 1958 as our families reacted with fear and
trepidation when two Sputniks satellites orbited over our heads in the Ozarks
of Missouri. Meanwhile, three of America�s first four attempts failed to
circle the globe.
Khrushchev compounded our worries when he infamously said to a group of
NATO ambassadors, �We will bury you.� He followed that up with an encore
performance at the United Nations in 1960, angrily banging his shoe on a desk
in protest of an anti-Soviet speech.
For sure that bald-headed old fart scared the be-jesus out of Middle
America. And President Kennedy certainly did not help matters when posted a
letter in Life magazine in 1961 promoting the building of bomb
shelters.
Subsequently, America�s irrational fear of the game of dominoes led to a
14-year quagmire in the jungles of Southeast Asia; it was to become the first
war the USA lost since 1812. Our military, elected, and appointed leaders
kept encouraging us to believe, �We are winning the War�. But Walter
Cronkite�s nightly news told otherwise; all we were doing was killing and
maiming local peasants and orphaning the children of those on the wrong side
of an unwinnable civil war.
That and shipping our boys back home with broken bodies, shell-shocked
souls, and/or drug-addled minds � plus 58,220 in body bags.
Belief #4:War is Peace.
One would think that our now lame duck, New-Age Left President would have
studied, understood, and learned from the mistakes of the past in the putrid
jungle and not continue to repeat them 40 years later in the hot stinking deserts
of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. One would think�
But like Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, Big Bush, Clinton, and Lil� Bush
before him, Barack Hussein Obama II kept the faith.
The faith, that is, in the economics of a military-industrial complex that
a life-long military man, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, warned us about in
1960.
So what has Obama done? He re-started two of America�s never-ending wars
in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Should we actually be surprised by that?
Barack Obama, the 44nd President of the United States, was in
Oslo, Norway on December 10, 2009 to accept the Nobel Peace Prize. In a
36-minute speech of classical 1984 Newspeak: The man said �war�
44 times; he said �peace� 32 times.
Channeling Orwell�s first slogan of the Party as displayed on the white
facade of the Ministry of Truth, Obama has asked us to believe: �WAR
IS PEACE�.
Belief #5:Gold is Going to $4000.
Thirty-seven years ago, in early September 1979, I bought my first gold.
The price had been going up steadily that year and hit an all-time high of
$330 an ounce. Nevertheless, I decided it was time to own some gold so after
a long day in the field, I stopped into a rock shop in Santa Fe, New Mexico
and bought eleven gold-quartz specimens for ten bucks apiece. It was quite a
good deal because the rocks were quite hot. No doubt they had been smuggled
out of the infamous 16:1 stope of the Sunnyside mine in a lunch pail and the
new owner (aka the fence) wanted to move them quickly.
Four months later, the price of gold spiked to $850 an ounce. For a very
brief period of time, the gold bugs ruled the financial world. Of course, the
price collapsed nearly as fast as it had risen. We all know any financial
market that goes exponential will soon be parabolic.
The gold market from late 1979 to early 1980 was a speculative bubble,
just like tulips and South Sea globalization.
However, the collapse of gold did nothing to curb the irrational
exuberance of the gold bugs. We were told to believe that gold was
going to $1000 an ounce soon. In December 1982, a popular newsletter
team predicted $4000 gold by 1985.
Imagine if you would have followed their advice 33 years ago when gold
traded at $445. These soothsayers advised putting up to 50% of your net
assets into gold bullion. You would have been better off opening a savings
account at the local hometown bank. Banks actually paid interest in those
days to the tune of 12 percent on a one-year CD. Now they charge you fees for
the privilege of keeping your devaluing fiat dollars on their electronic
books.
From its high of $850 in January 1980, gold took 27 years to get to back
to that price, 28 years to hit $1000, and 29 years to stick at four figures.
Gold touched $1900 an ounce in September 2011; by last December, it had lost
45% of that US$ price.
Remember that principle of parabolas?
Gold is not a long-term financial investment. It serves only as an
insurance policy, safe haven, and hedge against financial calamity. That
said, and like many in this room, I�ve continued to accumulate gold over the
years to maintain 10-20% of my net worth in physical bullion in my physical
possession.
That said, how can anyone believe the buggy-brained newsletter
writers� never-ending predictions that gold is going to $2000, or $4000 or
even $10,000 an ounce in the immediate future?
Have you ever considered that the yahoos promoting these ideas might be
�talking their own books�?
It�s kind of like that well-known pundit who first predicted an imminent
economic collapse in 1979 and parroted the same exact idea last decade, last
year, last month and � last week. Eh?
If gold does go to $5000 or $10,000, you better own guns, gas, and goods,
keep a bug-out bag by the door, and have a survival plan. Be careful what you
wish for.
Belief #6:Beware the Boogie-Man.
Our elected politicians and military leaders are determined to make the
minions believe in a Boogie-Man that we can despise, fear, and hate.
This phenomenon arguably started with the aforementioned Khrushchev who
was succeeded by the next man in line at the Kremlin. In the �60s and �70s,
we also had his Commie comrades Chairman Mao and Ho Chi Minh. By the
early�80s, the Ayatollah played the lead part.
When the evil red empire collapsed in 1991, our attention was turned to
the Middle East: Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden and his underlings in
al-Qaeda; then the Taliban. Now it�s a leaderless organization that our
military armed and our foreign policy created, called ISIS, or ISIL if you
are Secretary of State John Kerry, or Daesh if you are President Barack
Obama.
The fear mongers continue to weave fairy tales that give our warriors excuse
for waging a never-ending, �War on Terror� that allows an increasingly
socio-fascist government to gradually and covertly erode our
Constitutionally-guaranteed individual rights and freedoms under the guise of
�international and domestic security�.
Because of this irrational belief, we Americans are permanently
subjected to a terror alert of �orange�, whatever the hell that means.
Every time we try to board an airplane we must shed our shoes and walk in
bare or stocking feet on cold dirty floors, have our personal toiletries
intensely inspected, choose between having our bodies scanned by millimeter
wave machines or our privates groped, and buy $3 bottles of water from
airport vendors instead of bringing a container of tap water from home that
costs less than a penny.
Our lives are monitored by video cameras everywhere except inside the
privacy of our own homes; well, unless you fail to put a piece of electrical
(not duct) tape over your laptop camera or are dumb enough to hook up a smart
TV.
Our passports and driver�s licenses are embedded with microchips that
allow the government to track us wherever we go.
Hitler branded Jews; today, some people get their pets microchipped; how
long before the police state insists on embedding chips in our children, all
in the name of safety and security? NBC News is actually promoting chips in
children as quote, �inevitable, sooner or later� and says
military testing is ongoing.
An American patriot, Ed Snowden, blew the whistle on all this crapola
three years ago; the brave Mr. Snowden now lives in exile at the pleasure of
another oppressive dictator in an even more fascist regime.
Folks, face the facts: Believing the lies of Big Brother permits us
to be watched 24/7 � 32 years after the prescient Orwell predicted.
Concluding Remarks:
As an educated scientist, I am naturally skeptical. Present me with solid
and concrete evidence if you want an idea seriously considered.
Belief, faith, doctrine, dogma, creed, and conviction are anathema
to theory, hypothesis, evidence, fact, and proof.
All of us have been lied to since we were wee children: Cajoled, wheedled,
coerced, intimidated, threatened, and forced into believing for longer
than memory serves; in fact, from cradle to grave.
Nevertheless, it remains a matter of personal choice. I choose to be a
free-thinking individual, not easily conned, connived, or convinced. I�m from
Missouri and you have to show me.
I will never believe what they tell me to believe. I reject belief.
Belief is fallacy.
All this said, I remain a live and let live guy: Do not tread on me and
I will not tread on you.
In the name of science and reason: Amen.
Ciao for now,
Mickey Fulp
Mercenary Geologist
The Mercenary
Geologist Michael S. �Mickey� Fulp is a Certified Professional Geologist with a
B.Sc. Earth Sciences with honor from the University of Tulsa, and M.Sc.
Geology from the University of New Mexico. Mickey has 35 years experience as
an exploration geologist and analyst searching for economic deposits of base
and precious metals, industrial minerals, uranium, coal, oil and gas, and
water in North and South America, Europe, and Asia.
Mickey worked for junior explorers, major mining companies, private
companies, and investors as a consulting economic geologist for over 20
years, specializing in geological mapping, property evaluation, and business
development.In addition to Mickey�s professional credentials and experience,
he is high-altitude proficient, and is bilingual in English and Spanish. From
2003 to 2006, he made four outcrop ore discoveries in Peru, Nevada, Chile,
and British Columbia.
Mickey is well-known and highly respected throughout the mining and
exploration community due to his ongoing work as an analyst, writer, and
speaker.
Contact: Contact@MercenaryGeologist.com
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