23A052 My Friend Glenn by Jim Davies, 12/26/2023

For several years Glenn Winstead and I emailed each other almost daily, since we shared interests both in a free society and how to get one, and in the Forex market where anyone can trade on-line in the relative prices of about 30 of the fiat currencies of worldwide governments. After about 2014 though, Glenn and I lost touch.

So although my friend died last February, I heard no news of it until late November; and it came from Missoula, MT. For a couple of years he had been suffering from diabetes and it gradually wore him down.

Glenn was a courageous and principled man. He qualified as a physician in the 1960s and joined the US Army, rising swiftly to the rank of Captain. He worked as a surgeon, trying to repair the appalling damage done to an endless stream of young men who had been flown back injured from Vietnam. Seeing the carnage, he became disgusted with the government for prolonging that War, and the break point came in his VA hospital in Texas when LBJ and his retinue took over its top floor for a PR visit while patients were stacked up in the corridors on gurneys. Glenn resigned his commission, hoping to help shorten the conflict by removing one of the resources the FedGov relied upon to prevent the war becoming more unpopular than it already was.

He then worked as a physician in Missoula for a quarter century and prospered, and during the 1990s Glenn found a way to prevent the IRS grabbing such a large chunk of what he was earning and putting it to malevolent government use; he assigned it to an offshore trust so that no income tax would be due. It appeared legal, but the IRS disagreed. The case went to a government court staffed by a government judge, a government prosecutor and a defense counsel licensed by government, so the outcome was a year in prison. The AMA then pulled his permit to practice medicine, because it evidently thought that resistance to evil is incompatible with promoting health. Glenn was out of work, and in some way he and I encountered each other on the Net; in about 2008. We had a lot in common, and took coffee together once in a Boston Starbucks.

We shared an interest in the Forex market, in which it's theoretically possible to build a large fortune by predicting correctly whether the exchange rates of foreign currencies will rise or fall. We emailed each other frequently to say what seemed to work and what didn't. He was better at it than me and made use of software that would automatically analyse price movements during millseconds rather than in minutes or hours (which I preferred so as to keep hands-on control) but neither of us made the anticipated wealth. Even so, it was a great way to stretch the brain.

One of his other interests was dogs, and in 2010 he sent me this fine portrait of his good friend Sophie. Another was in fractals; he was fascinated by the endless variety of patterns they produce.

Only too often today, "men" emerge from school and college who are little more than wimps, multicolored and indoctrinated into submission to Authority, morally spineless. For every Edward Snowden who blew the whistle when the NSA so blatantly spies upon us all, there are 100 equally brilliant computer geeks in its employ who do not; and for every Glenn Winstead who quit the Army rather than help government continue its war, a thousand other surgeons did not. He was a man with a backbone; gentle, amiable, intellectually curious, but with a moral compass intact, a man of steel.

Albeit mostly at a distance, it was a privilege to know Glenn. He was one of a kind, and the freedom movement has lost a warrior.