Gold does not come from the earth. This is the first thing they teach you wrong, and they teach it wrong on purpose, the way you tell a child the light in the wall is just electricity so the child will stop asking what electricity is. Gold comes from the deaths of stars — this much even the textbooks admit now, neutron stars colliding somewhere in the dark, forging the heavy elements in a single annihilating second and scattering them across the void. Every atom of gold on ea

Picture medicine in the year 1790. If you fell ill, a doctor came and made it worse. They opened your veins and bled you, sometimes by the pint, until you fainted, believing the illness would drain out with the blood. They dosed you with mercury until your teeth loosened and your gums bled, and called the poisoning a cure. They blistered your skin on purpose. They purged you until you were hollow. George Washington, the most powerful man in America, died in 1799 partly becaus