A New Beginning

Welcome to the reformatted and resurrected Daily Diatribe.

The idea for The Daily Diatribe was born around 2001 or 2002, when I had just begun my first stint as an Airline Pilot with Mesaba Airlines. Our union, The Airline Pilots Association or “ALPA” was engaged in a protracted labor dispute with airline management. I found myself writing posts on the ALPA online forum translating for my colleagues some of the misinformation the airline management was feeding us. For example, we were being told that the airline was losing money and had to be supported by our “parent” airline, Northwest, in order to survive.

Since we were busy flying mostly full airplanes and being paid less than Metro Transit bus drivers, it was clear there was something the company wasn’t telling us. It just didn’t make sense. I wrote an article for The Redliner, our local ALPA Magazine, explaining how it was possible to make one very productive company in a group appear to lose money through the bookkeeping magic of “income splitting.” Over time, I began to write regular articles commenting on different aspects of the negotiations and the actions taken by the airline management, and found myself with a small following of readers who started asking me, “When is the next ‘diatribe’ coming out?”

I don’t recall whether it was me or one of my colleagues who coined the term “Daily Diatribe” (and truthfully like on this web forum, it was more like the “Weekly Whine” or the “Monthly Monologue”) but the name stuck and soon they were serialized as “Daily Diatribe #12,” and so on.

About the same time, years of study on my part trying to understand the disparity between what I had been taught in school (i.e. what “everyone knows”) about our political, economic, and justice systems in the United States, and what I observed, came together and got me interested in (among other subjects) gold, silver, and other precious metals investing. I met a group of people on another online forum, and we began to learn from each other, mostly about the precarious position of the American and world economies (The current “global crisis” did not surprise anyone in this group), and investing in precious metals and mining stocks.

Many articles written by members of this group were published on a popular precious metals web site and we learned a lot from our discussions there about investment philosophy and mining stocks. It turned out the owners of the web site were (in our opinion) more interested in collecting fees for advertising than they were in an open exchange of ideas.

We began to find that a negative article or comment, no matter how accurate, about a mining company who was a site sponsor, could find a member summarily ejected from the forum. A positive post about a non-sponsor would have a similar effect. So, despite our having helped the owners of the site build their business by providing our articles as content, we found ourselves without an online home for the cyber conversations we’d come to enjoy so much.

So we pooled our money one day and GoldisMoney.info (GIM) was born, with a firm and steadfast resolution on the part of the founders that GIM would never be influenced by advertising revenues or other commercial pressures. Today it’s a very popular non-profit forum for gold, silver, precious metals, stock investment, survival preparation, religious discussion, banking, the Federal Reserve, politics, and other topics.

I reserved the domain dailydiatribe.net at that same time as we started GoldisMoney.info but got caught up in all the fun we were having growing GIM so The Daily Diatribe just sat there waiting for me get started.

Until now.

The format for The Daily Diatribe will be a weekly column, combined with an online discussion forum. We will discuss politics, economics, banking, even religion on occasion, along with my favorite topics of aviation and pilot careers. Participation in those other forums proved to be an enormous learning opportunity for me, a concept I hope to repeat with The Daily Diatribe.

The weekly column will be designed to encourage discussion and collegial debate on the subject presented. While I hope the weekly columns will stimulate some interesting discussion, we won’t limit the forum to the weekly topic. I look forward to an ongoing exchange of ideas on a variety of subjects. I sincerely hope that friends, new and old, will stop by to add remarks, discuss, and let me know when I’ve made a wrong turn, so we can all learn from the exercise.

Thanks for reading!

Carl Andersen

PS Before anyone asks, there’s no dispute or other problem driving me “from” GoldisMoney.info. Rather it’s my drive “to” have my own soap box, combined with some extra time to build it, that induced me to resurrect The Daily Diatribe right now.. I’ll still be posting on GIM.