66 Comments
May 8, 2022Liked by Joel Bowman

Last week's "longer than usual" essay was outstanding. Please, please don't dumb down.

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May 9, 2022Liked by Joel Bowman

Some can only hope this return to the 70"s will be accompanied by a return to decent rock music.

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Wouldn't that be refreshing! :)

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Prefer the sixties myself

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Superb writing !!! Thank you past elected leaders for dumbing down the majority of Americans.

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Joel, Your wry and incisive wit are always a welcome balm on the open wound of the common media banter. Thank you for taking the time to craft your thoughtful missives.

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"ineptocracy" absolutely beautiful and the diversity of comments below indicates that the war of all against anything/anyone continues unabated like a virus creeping into every cavity where a brain used to reside ..

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May 8, 2022·edited May 8, 2022

Absolutely loved last weeks essay and this one as well. Your essays make some otherwise complex and boring subjects endurable, and are alone worth the price of admission. Thank you so much!

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Keep writing the way you write, Joel. It is a pleasure to read your sesquipedalian essays.

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The 'next'American revolution has already begun. This one is very different folks because there are not just two sides. And, there won't be one winner and one loser. It'll be a long one, and may never have an official beginning and end, but when it eventually winds down and we are all out of food, gas , water and ammo, there will not be a United States of America, rather a whole bunch of independent territories, city-states, kingdoms and principalities.

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sounds like one of the many end of the world as we know it movies ...

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Love your wit. A little like me, you understand that the false debate between left and right distracts from the war between the top 10 and the bottom 90. The biggest danger that I see is that people don't know what to fear and hate on the one hand, and the core values of civilized people. The chronic absorption with memes could be moderated by a knowledge of history.

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Oy the insipid, snarky tawdry tone and clear “the red dooshbag elites are ok but the blue ones, they’re Jeffrey Epstein pals.” Nice deflection of what is in reality clearly comparable scumbaggery. My subscription just went the way of your credibility. Gone….

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May 8, 2022·edited May 8, 2022

Sorry when your joke tanks you don’t get to condescendingly blame the reader’s sense o humor (well in Twitter world you do ) who you know nothing about. Nice try though. This dude is a snarky, pale imitation of Bonner who was snarky himself but much funnier and less insipid and blatantly partisan. As you said, if they are both scumbags how does it serve comedy or credibility to spout old tired talking points supporting one and insulting the other and think it’s “humor” or satire. Flat is flat, dull is dull, contrived unfunny ain’t funny, unless you afford the “read between the lines” charity you did and I didn’t.

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It is all the cons have is to cry about Biden and inflation. Why didn't Trump take action instead of kicking the can down the road like the other presidents. It is musical chairs and Biden got caught standing when the music stopped. A shame he couldn't just hold rallies, sell hats and golf on the weekend.

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What sucks is Right Wing Fascism and their Sharia Laws.

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And now the Taliban controls the Supreme Court.

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When a Socialist loses the debate, they call the opponent Fascist

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deletedMay 8, 2022·edited May 8, 2022
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Hemingway didn’t ask for my credit card to subscribe. He was also thicker skinned than today’s bloggers for pay and their lemming fans. I come here for insightful stuff, not the same partisan poo humor I can get all day fir free.

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First part of market analysis is understanding who the customer is. Bonner earned one, Bowman lost one. Analyze that.

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But I bet you love the pot head weirdo, Musk.

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Of all the [false] dichotomies in American groupthink, most of which are carefully created and cultivated by designing men to mislead and misinform even the most well intentioned of honest Americans, I dismiss them as weapons of mass distraction. I think it's more on point to look at the battle between the 90% and the 10% (as you suggest) and figure out how to be on the side that's winning. I've been reading Bill's work religiously for 25 years or so, and I have two main objectives: How do I grow and preserve my wealth, while at the same time protecting my liberties against all those who would take them away from me (either by confrontation or by long slow encroachments). I can't be any good to anyone else if I don't have my own shit together. And second, I'm trying to figure out how many of my fellow Americans feel the same way I do? I just voted with my feet and relocated to a state that recognizes "Constitutional Carry" and part of the reason is to be ready if/when the nation breaks up and the states are left to do the best they can to carry on with law and order and polite society. If you read this far, I must apologize for the long run on paragraph. Thanks to Bill, Joel and Dan and the rest for your insightful, entertaining and thought-provoking work.

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Hillary beat Trump by 3 MILLION votes.

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Yeah but Trump won, that was soo funny

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you really think it makes a difference who wins lol

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deletedMay 8, 2022·edited May 8, 2022
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May 8, 2022·edited May 8, 2022

Hillary beat Trump by 3 million votes.

She should have started a ' Stop The Steal ' campaign.

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Now look at the destruction Trump did to this country.

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Gag.

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I'm beginning to think this "AFriend" clown is just on here to try and piss people off. He can't name one thing or way that Trump's presidency negatively impacted the quality of his life. Not one, yet he drops one ignorant comment after another. I'm beginning to really believe it's a form of mental illness. You can't educate someone that doesn't (or can't) really show up to class.

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I thoroughly enjoy your Sunday Sesh's, as well and Bill's daily missives. But in the interest of historical accuracy, I was a young USMC Lieutenant stations in Guantanamo Bay in the fall of 1972. The president (yes, Nixon) put the entire US military on DFECON One in the beginning of October, but no one told us in Gitmo why we were on high alert. Since the mission of the unit I was part of was to defend the naval base there in case of attack by Castro's forces, we immediately occupied our assigned defensive positions, ready to repel the Cuban Communist forces. After two days sitting, with loaded weapons, The finally told us the alert was not meant for us, but had been issued due to the Yom Kippur/October/Arab-Israeli, or whatever you want to call it, war. Bottom line was this happened in October of 1972. The OPEC oil embargo followed several months later in 1973, and by Fall of that year I was sitting in gas lines with my then pregnant wife! Ahh, the memories - Hope they don't come back!

Tim T.

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Bill, I think you guys do a standup, top-pocket job. Perhaps you should establish a Minister of Truth position at BPR to noodle out the squishy complaints from those misinformed naysayers who would cling to their pens and keyboards. I'm available for the job, whereupon I could claim international truth-telling status and attach myself to the governmental teat. Thoughts?

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For 50 years I've heard Nixon "slammed the exchange window shut". Prove me wrong, Joel, but wasn't the gold exchange window already shut for Americans? And I remember that foreign nations just wanted to trade their dollars for gold, and that was draining every last ounce of gold out of our coffers. So what choice did Nixon have, but to save our gold? If we were left without any gold where would we be then and now?

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OK, thanks. But I've always wondered what would have happened if Nixon let the nations with dollars exchange as much as they wanted. I'm sure some of your other subscribers have wondered, too. Nobody has addressed this particular point when criticizing Nixon on this.

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deletedMay 8, 2022·edited May 8, 2022
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Thank you for this important overview. I'm familiar with this tragic scenario because I was a Navy pilot (technically a Naval Aviator) from 1965 to 1975... I was there. Still, we would have exchanged most or all of our gold if Nixon hadn't prevented it. If so, what would Bretton Woods have become if the gold reserve in the US had been depleted?

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Joel, back to a fundamental question I've never seen answered. Nixon closed the (International) gold window because most other countries would have exchanged dollars for most or all of our gold if he hadn't prevented it. If so, what would Bretton Woods (the US dollar) have become if the gold reserve in the US had been depleted?

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