I was looking at Ron Paul's book, "The Case for Gold", and all of a sudden I see a bombardment of one-star reviews. Maybe these were paid shills to undermine the man, because just a short while back this was a 4.5 star book:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Case-Gold-Ron-Paul/product-reviews/1469971801/ref=cm_cr_pr_hist_1?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&filterBy=addOneStar
Romney and the rest of the establishment do have a lot of money and are very scared of him, so I think you're probably right.
You can tell it was spammers because all of the reviews come from the same two days January 17 & 18. You can also tell that some have not read the book based on what they say in the reviews.
That is terrible, clearly the same person with multiple accounts or a possibility is that a specific group of people on a newsletter or at a book reading club. All read the book at exactly the same time and they all decided to make a review about it on the same day. Or its some sophisticated amazon review bot.
If you click on the account names of all the commenters and view their reviews, suspiciously they have negatively voted all of Ron Paul's books with 1 star and attacked them. They have also targetted Mark Levin. I would say it is one person with multiple accounts.
Aristophanes: You can also tell that some have not read the book based on what they say in the reviews.
Nor do they understand what the book is about, apparently, which is weird, because the title should sort of give it away.
They have also targetted Mark Levin.
That's weird. I would actually suspect Mark Levin of doing it. He hates Ron Paul.
I checked all the 1 star commenter's reviews and some of them had a 5 star review for Levin's book. Which I thought was a strange anomaly and came to the conclusion that it must be a fake review to make out as if it is a real reviewer, that is why some of them have reviews on random thigns like knives and toasters etc. Add on some extra reviews. The way they must do it after I was thinking about it, is have a seller account that they say they have the product for and then they just sell it to themselves and make reviews that way. I am not sure how they found a way around having to buy 100 ron paul books but if they did buy 5 ron paul books each then you would have thought by the first 1 star book they would have no interest in buying another four.
You don't have to buy things to post reviews.
And if Mark Levin has 5 star reviews from the same people trahing Ron Paul, then it is my opinion that the Mark Levin fans did to Ron Paul what Ron Paul fans did to Bill O'Rielly.
Aristophanes: They have also targetted Mark Levin. That's weird. I would actually suspect Mark Levin of doing it. He hates Ron Paul.
I used to listen to Levin every day, loved him years ago until I realized how big a federalist he was. He defends Lincoln til he's purple in the face, and frankly, Lincoln is indefensible.
I like Savage a lot better, but I only agree with about 70-80% of what he says. He's too much of a nationalist at times, very fickle, but that's what makes him entertaining and interesting.
There's really nothing inherently special about gold, when used as money. It's a commodity money, and it's among the most convenient commodity money's to use. Beyond that, it's still a commodity. You could base a currency on any commodity of just about any sort. The US at one point had wheat certificates you could redeem for wheat, as well as gold and silver certificates obviously.
If we look at bitcoin, it's really backed by nothing, no commodity at all; it's main utility is that it cannot be inflated (unless someone gains control of it via the 50% rule).
But we still consider that superior to a plain fiat money such as that created by most governments of the world, with zero limits on inflation and regulated by mere whim of rulers.
Now, the problem with gold is that people still won't carry gold around to complete transactions in the market-place. Inevitably, gold becomes gold-certificates, which again are just paper, are the certificates quickly become inflated in the same way that a bank issues more receipts for its cash reserves than it has on hand. You can end up with a run on the gold, which then brings down that currency.
Ideally, we'd want a currency backed by a commodity, such as gold or silver, etc., and then create one that natively supports electronic representations so that ordinary transactions could be completed. The ideal currency then would be a mixture of a commodity currency and the idea of Bitcoin. An e-currency with a commodity backing. That would be the ideal currency.
Where each unit of bitcoin would stand for a set amount of gold, and be redeemable for such, and then only value fluctuation you'd have then would be the exchange value of other currencies into bitcoin (bitcoin would tend to track the price of gold under this scheme, without discounting).
Not sure why I've never thought of that before, but damn that's brilliant. And it would be pretty easy to do. You have a cryptographic protection against arbitrary inflation, with each unit of value backed by a commodity.