We know that Jason Hommel has...well...strident views on religion. We know that he sells silver at interestingly marked-up prices to his well trained band of sheep. We know that he has some sort of obsession with the birth certificate of President Obama. We know his predictions on the price of silver have been, are and will always be rather silly. Those that know their way round an Excel spreadsheet also know just how laughably bad his company analyses are, too.
But now we know that the guy is outright dangerous.
In an article that the nutbar published last week he included this pearl of whizzdumb:
"The only practical and relatively foolproof way to test for gold's purity is to cut into gold jewelry with a file, and test it with acid, because true gold will not corrode, or dissolve, with a certain strength of acid. The acids will bubble under the microscope if they encounter impurities such as copper in 22 karat gold. (Very strong acids, such as cyanide, will dissolve gold.)"
I don't know exactly how much you know about chemistry, kind and gentle reader, but if you took Hommel at his word, decided to do some playful stunts on a lump of gold with acid, then due to non-results decided to "beef the acid up a bit with some of that there cyanide", it would be the last thing you ever did (on this side of the Elysian Fields, anyhow). Or as one IKN reader who wrote in to Hommel pointed out to the dude:
…such as cyanide will dissolve gold”.
Wow… I’m absolutely speechless.
Jeez, dude you would be immediately dead if cyanide was put in an “acidic” environment, i.e., a ph <7.>
Gold only dissolves in one acid: Aqua regia, a mixture of concentrated nitric and hydrochloric acids.
I guarantee the author of that letter is somebody that really, but really knows what they're talking about, too. On the other hand, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Hommel has very little knowledge about his subject. He is a dangerous thing. DYODD.