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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;V. Kurt Bellman, post: 2485619, member: 71723&quot;]Both Mr. Christian and NorthKorea are correct. (Wow, I never imagined I&#039;d ever type that!)</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>a) You are correct. I don&#039;t personally know either gentleman, only their writings and/or testimony.</p><p><br /></p><p>b) I don&#039;t doubt that they may have served the hobby admirably. Many people have. Some have awards from national numismatic associations honoring them for such contributions. I happen to be one of them. So what?</p><p><br /></p><p>c) Blindly accepting the veracity of what anyone says simply because of past service to the hobby is idol worship, not scholarship. I have often openly to their faces challenged published authors for fallacies in their work. I started doing it as a 20-year-old undergrad at Franklin &amp; Marshall in 1975. The author was economically justifying slavery. My old professor who&#039;s still around still talks about that occasion. (He thinks I was right. I successfully revealed the flaw in the author&#039;s reasoning.) I&#039;m now 61, and time has NOT mellowed my tendency to &quot;speak truth to power&quot;. I am on a first name basis with the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania. I&#039;m Kurt, and he&#039;s Your Honor, and always will be. That&#039;s not because of him, although I do like him even as just Tom, but the office he holds commands deep respect.</p><p><br /></p><p>d) My personality type has admirers and detractors, and plenty of each. I frankly don&#039;t care.&nbsp; I seek truth, and defer to no man in my search of it.</p><p><br /></p><p>e) I have a very low opinion of &quot;numismatic expertise&quot;. I truly believe only less than 10 living people on the planet truly have it. Clearly Bowers is one. Kagin is another. Most of the rest are very narrow specialists. The VAST majority of people who claim to have it are charlatans. I for certain have started too late to ever hope to have it. That doesn&#039;t make the journey any less worth doing.</p><p><br /></p><p>f) [Mods, looking for a little latitude here.] I have come to believe that the coin hobby is infected with a pernicious widespread belief in some pretty severe &quot;far outside of the mainstream&#039; political beliefs. No, of course not all, but far too many. It is characterized by a certain hostiity to government generally. I find it corrosive, unattractive and harmful, not to leave out hateful. It warps their thinking, frankly, and I wish I could excise (or exorcise?) it from our hobby, really I do. But I can&#039;t.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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