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Posts Tagged → Ronald Reagan

May 6th, 2026

Lab grown vs Beautiful Naturals

Quite a debate has been raging for some years, decades really, about the impact of lab grown gems on the natural gem market. This debate is at peak right now, and appears to be headed in a surprising direction.

We are talking here primarily about colored gemstones, not diamonds. Lab grown diamonds for wearing as gems completely defeat the entire purpose of having a diamond in the first place. Gem-grade diamond grown by Mother Nature is quite rare, and therefore quite valuable. Lab grown diamonds are not rare, but are rather just cheap knock-offs of the real deal. What is the point of wearing a fake that looks just like the real? Are you trying to mislead people? That says a lot about you!

Forget those lab grown diamonds.

What started in the 1950s with junky, soft, easily identified, easily fractured high impact glass morphed into better quality lab-grown cubic zirconiums. Those “CZs” ruled the roost of cheap gem knock-offs for decades, both colored and clear, and were easily detectable by the eye and with simple two-prong “diamond testers” of many makes. Either a stone was diamond, or it wasn’t, and if it was not a diamond, it was most likely CZ.

The colored versions of CZ were almost ridiculous looking. They lacked the soft, deep, subtle nuance of the colored stones they were supposed to emulate, primarily red ruby and blue sapphire, and were often blindingly garish. Easy to spot these as fakes from a mile away, only the most unabashed or cheap wore them as deliberate gem representations.

Early attempts at lab growing blue sapphire corundum (and ruby, which is just the red version of corundum) gem-grade crystals bore rudimentary fruit, with clear growth rings that separated lab Frankenstein creations from Mother Nature’s real, beautiful, naturals. Same for lab emeralds, most of which still today have an unnatural nuclear-green Kryptonite color that is 99.999999% impossible to create naturally.

GIA really exploded in importance in this time period, because lots of decent lab-made fakes were being offered as natural colored stones, and GIA labs could analyze stones and certify them as natural, or not.

However, starting in the 1980s, the age of President Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” anti-Soviet space lasers and incredibly accurate laser sighting systems for terrestrial military tank cannons, and then for laser cameras on military satellites that can count the hairs on a fly’s ass from 100 miles up in space, etc, American and Russian laboratories began to grow various crystals from corundum and other chemical concoctions (like YAG) to suit the military’s optical needs, which also happened to result in true gem-quality product. Clear, clean, visually appealing, natural looking, hard.

In all of this re-purposing of mostly sapphire/ corundum and garnet crystals for high tech optical uses, a broader public niche slowly opened up: Gem-grade lab grown…gems. These lab-created crystals-cum-gems are mostly actual ruby and actual sapphire that look in all ways like something created over hundreds of millions of years in the Earth’s crust…. or, in the alternative, these gems are something else entirely, with non-garish, unnatural, but nonetheless truly beautiful gem properties, like the various colors of YAG.

Lab-grown Alexandrite is one of the cooler gems, because it occurs naturally (in extremely limited quantities, mainly in the Ural Mountains) and yet the lab creation looks exactly like the beautiful natural material. Making it in the lab is not that easy, so it is not ridiculously cheap.

Now, we are seeing people experiment with custom-grown lab crystals made to specific color (using various rare earth metals), refractive, and chatoyant characteristics, with hardnesses of 8-9 Mohs, which make them eminently wearable as personal gems. These purpose-crafted lab creations are not garish, but rather are beautiful gems to look at, and easy to appreciate. When encased in gold or platinum, they look every bit as beautiful as a genuine natural pigeon blood ruby or Ceylon cornflower sapphire, or more beautiful.

The advantages of these lab gems is that they cost far, far less than the naturals, and can be made to look as good as, or better, than the naturals. How is that for a ROI? Pretty damned good!

Why do humans wear gems and jewelry in the first place? First and foremost to make ourselves more attractive. Other reasons include showing off wealth, hoarding wealth, making wealth highly portable in times of war or dislocation. Royalty the world over wear crowns made of precious metals and absolutely loaded down with precious rare gems. These crowns are a form of banking, concentrating wealth – and thus power – in one very small place.

What the lab created colored gem stones have done is democratize beauty, making gems and personal beauty more affordable and thus more widely available. They have also grown appreciation for just how rare are the actual natural stones in those royal crowns and sceptres and sold by Harry Winston. By making beautiful gemstones both believable and also widely available, lab gems are here to stay. People can pick and choose personally tailored gems that work best for their own unique skin tones and eye colors.

And of course, there are already fakes of lab created gem stones, made of glass, so already the lab stones must have some greater value than just glass.

To put this crassly, everyone loves a beautiful natural, but boy, those lab enhanced “fakes” sure look good, don’t they? And the fact that they function just as well as the naturals, or even better, means they are here to stay.

If your emerald looks impossibly green, it is fake.

 

By Josh • Posted in Fruit of Contemplation • No Comment
March 20th, 2026

All hail John Fetterman and Chuck Norris

All hail US senator John Fetterman, and actor/ martial artist / patriot spokesman Chuck Norris, late of Planet Earth and now karate chopping endless pine boards in Heaven.

These two guys are (were) mavericks. Both started out as registered Democrats, and ended up as something else. More on this in a minute.

Nothing is more American than being an honest-to-goodness maverick; the one-off, independent spirit who charts his own path through tough times and obstacles. Maverick really is the heart and soul of American Yankee entrepreneurship, guys who think way outside the box. Whatever the box may be at that time in history.

Our own American Indians were impressively maverick, until they met the tough Scots-Irish frontiersmen, who largely founded the America we have known and loved lo, these past 250 years. They were even more maverick. The same Scots-Irish Over-Mountain Men who fought at Kings Mountain and won George Washington’s war of independence, and then got on their horses and rode back into rugged Kan-Tuck-Ee, and whose descendants then fought the British again at the bloodiest Battle of New Orleans in 1815, and whose descendants then became the iconic Rocky Mountains Mountain Men of the 1830s.

Mavericks, indeed. Generations of them. Generations of Us, the Americans, who are the mavericks of the world.

Chuck Norris said he left the Democrat Party because it had gone too far left, had become something unrecognizable, something not-American. Chuck Norris’ acting career was spent playing the same themes of American patriotism, the tough principled individual against mobs of loathesome no-goodnicks, the voice of the rational good guy against greedy bastards, and always, the maverick.

Lone Wolf McQuade, Delta Force, Texas Rangers, his TV shows were a consistently recognizable and reliably entertaining genre that summed up a great deal of American culture goodness, much as The Lone Ranger TV series had done for the previous generation.

Exit Chuck Norris stage right, and enter… stage left…?… a new maverick who almost died, who was only mostly dead, and who came back to the land of the living, and who yet still remains with us reborn, John Fetterman.

I well remember John Fetterman as the angry, defiant, politically anarchic state senator from western PA. That Cro Magnon beetle brow and large, sluggish frame made him easy to deride as a Frankenstein – like moron. But… Au contraire, mon ami!

Turned out, John Fetterman was one of the only people to graduate from Harvard University in recent decades who is not a moron. Fetterman says he is one of the only registered Democrats in his heavily Republican family, and for most of his career that showed. He was obviously trying to prove something to somebody with his ridiculous rhetoric and big doofus behavior as mayor of a East Succotash small town no one in that town had ever heard of, and then again in the Pennsylvania Senate chamber. With the satirical hoodie and no-no cargo shorts to boot. The guy was not a serious person, much less a serious representative of The People. He was all hat and no cattle.

And then, a couple years ago, the newly elected US Senator John Fetterman had a brain aneurysm, almost died, and suddenly returned to the US Senate as a maverick. This was bigger than any theater or movie; it was politically seismic, if also scientifically and cosmically weird.

Fetterman was not just dressed as a maverick, or doing boorish college student takeover-the-podium stuff, but also now thinking like a maverick. Communicating and acting outside the box he had been in, and had almost stayed in. Suddenly, the new John Fetterman was a calm voice of reason on thorny political issues. His staffers quit his office in droves, angry that the defiant far-left hysterics they had signed up for had grown up and put on a nice Oxford shirt under that hoodie.

For the past two years, post-aneurysm US Senator John Fetterman has been a calm voice of reason, not a politically partisan hack who just flows along with the partisan mob. He is a thinker, a divider of policies. I do not always agree with him, but enjoying more than finding some common ground with him, I really appreciate having a senator who carefully weighs stuff out before committing to a policy.

And the farther and harder crazy loon left his Democrat Party goes, the more John Fetterman stands like a rock of reason in a world where leftists have abandoned all reason.

Now, Fetterman is closing in on an upcoming primary race for the senate seat he occupies. This election is sure to bring out the angry far left Democrat voters who chased away Chuck Norris, Ronald Reagan, me, and a horde of other patriotic self-directed Americans from the “Party of Love.” US Senator John Fetterman surely must recognize that his maverick thinking, which bridges both political parties and unites most sane Americans, is a liability on the left, an admirable quality on the right, and puts him squarely in the middle.

One must wonder if US Senator John Fetterman (D-PA) is about to declare himself as an Independent, and thereby hold this Senate seat for the rest of his life, or at least until his next and probably fatal aneurysm. All will hail Caeser Fetterman, the newly hatched butterfly, the Master of the Political Realm for pretty much as long as he wants, if he declares himself an Independent.

Americans always like honest mavericks, and I think Fetterman is about to show us another bigger-than-life iconic example of the how and what of that.

By Josh • Posted in Government Of the People... • No Comment