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For this edition of The Room, I'm going to try to tell a story, but using snippets from other sources with, perhaps, a side comment thrown in now and again.

I am taking this approach because, frankly, since hopping on the plane to Las Vegas last week, the sheer volume of proposed new regulations, legislation, and plain idiocy have outstripped my processing abilities. It seems that every hour or two over the past week, there has been a breaking story that has me saying out loud, 'What, are you kidding?' Or, 'Wow... we're really in trouble now!'

It came to me as I started writing to you this morning, that these many stories – rather than just random spatters of inanity – together form a distinct pattern. And the pattern seems to point to a new paradigm now materializing here in the U.S. and, by extension, the world.

As I think the following stories demonstrate, the new paradigm is not one any thinking person will embrace....

Of late, it seems as though I have gotten sideways with the technology deities. First, as reported recently, was my accidental deletion of an hour-and-a-half recorded interview with trading gurus Dave Hightower and Terry Roggensack. Then, yesterday, while waiting to put in a phone appearance on the U.S. Global Funds Webinar that many of you sat in on, I carefully put my speaker phone on mute (you can tell it's on because the button lights up) and set about trying to wolf down a chicken salad sandwich before it became my turn to talk. This led to being reminded of several of life's little lessons. Including....

Summer weather, at least that of the preferable sort, has finally returned to the corner of the globe where your correspondent sits listening, too loudly, to Michael Franti's Yell Fire!. For those of you unfamiliar with Franti and his band Spearhead, his genre is what might be termed "Revolution Rock"... as in taking it to "the man." While I don't agree with many of his lyrics, which skew far left, I do like the music and his thematic focus on peace and, paradoxically, burning things down. Regrettably, in his view the rebuilding would be of a socialist paradise. It is, of course, deeply ingrained in human nature to want everything wrapped up in a nice utopian package. Problems arise, however, because one person's idea of utopia is another's idea of hell. And, inevitably, even utopia's champions awaken one morning in full agreement that their vision was hell... just ask Robespierre or Trotsky. In the end, no one gets their utopia because the entire notion is merely a dangerous fiction that, in the attempt, leads only to the disenfranchisement of one group or groups in favor of another. And, in time, of everyone....