My social media feed right now:
Facebook: 90% bluepilling, 10% WTF-is-going-on-in-the-world?-pilling
Twitter: 30% orangepilling, 60% blackpilling, 5% easy-entertainment-pilling, 5% join-our-new-cryptoscam-pilling.
Nostr: 100% orangepilled-a-long-time-ago
LinkedIn: 100% extend-and-pretend-don't-complain-pilling
I learned some interesting details about the Vikings and modern time speculators while reading Fraudcoin by nostr:npub1sv4zk080fvt4f3982u5kffzdkex3nm0kylky29um2xws5h4wsxvswtsrw4
🤝
Today's national currencies represent a gargantous energy-consuming machine.
Bitcoin fixes this.
How?
A national currency, such as for instance the US dollar, inflates with on average 7% (new dollars that debase the value of all of the dollars that are already in existence). This effectively cuts the value of each unit of the currency in half in 10 years.
Prices and wages don't increase nearly as much. This means that a company or a person who wants to maintain an after-tax currency reserve of equal value has to produce or work more and more over time.
This extra work requires use of enormous amounts of energy. Everything in the production line that requires energy, such as workers and machines, will have to consume much more of it.
The inflation rate of bitcoin (new bitcoin in addition to existing bitcoin) is in comparison only 1.8%. In May 2024 it falls to 1.1% and later it falls over time until it reaches 0% in 2140.
Partly because of this quality the value of bitcoin outperforms all other assets, including stocks, real estate and gold. Because the value goes up, people who save in bitcoin can work less. This means that they can consume less energy.
The amount of electrical power used to secure the Bitcoin network grows slower than the overall growth in production of electrical power.
As a result Bitcoin's share of the consumption falls over time. In 2021 researchers at the University of Cambridge estimated at 0.5%.
@LynAldenContact is considered as one of the leading macro and bitcoin market analysts. In her report "Bitcoin’s Energy Usage Isn’t a Problem. Here’s Why"
udated in January 2023, she wrote that:
"Since the world uses over 176,000 TWh of energy per year, that means that the entire Bitcoin network, at its peak consumption level, uses less than 0.1% of the world’s energy consumption."
As time goes by and bitcoin gradually replaces national currencies, our monetary system's drag on the world's energy reserves falls dramatically.
It's also every reason to believe that energy wasted on gaslighting people about Bitcoin's energy consumption will go down noticeable over the next few months.
lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/
This was a good analysis of the European economy with a focus on energy, deindustralization in Germany, the Europeans' relationship with the US and why the euro might be hurt by European leaders' stance on the war in Ukraine.
When the strawman betrays you
This note dives into some of the criticism of Seymour Hersh after he published his article «How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline» on 8 February this year. I do it to honor his life-long work as an investigative journalist, as I think his article was treated unfairly by many journalists, reporters and commentators.
My objective as a writer is to seek and speak the truth. I mainly write about monetary policy. It has an important geopolitical context, which now and then makes me look at other political subjects that are closely related to monetary policy.
One of these subjects is the co-operation between the governments of Norway and USA. The former adapts its monetary policy to the latter’s manipulation of the world’s global reserve currency, and for a long time it has been pretty much the same with the rest of the world. The result is a globally coordinated monetary policy that has implications for the two other major policy areas: Security and energy.
Norway is a major oil producing country. It’s also a founding member of NATO. This makes Norway special, and understanding the interplay between Norway and the US government provides valuable information about America and the so-called “Rule-based order”. This is the system of international organizations, rules, and norms. Representatives of the US government increasingly refer to the “Rule-based order” these days, as the geopolitical situation changes from a state of American hegemony to a more multipolar world.
In my job as a writer I focus on presenting the key facts and avoid speculating on people’s motives. If the facts are presented clearly and orderly, people can easily analyze them and form conclusions on their own.
In my world conspiracy theories are an energy drain and a distraction that I shun. I think the same of most rhetoric. And I have nothing but contempt for people who try to obstruct public discourse by introducing strawmen and attacking them with a smirk on their face.
Grammarly(.)com defines a strawman argument as following:
«[T]he logical fallacy of distorting an opposing position into an extreme version of itself and then arguing against that extreme version.»
This kind of trick is what was used by journalists, reporters and commentators in the mainstream and social media after Seymour Hersh published his article. He wrote about how the US blew up the pipe with the help of the Norwegian military. Hersh quoted his source, a person who said he had been part of the team that was planning the sabotage, and who said that the Norwegians «hated the Russians».
Hersh also wrote that Secretary General of NATO and former Prime Minister of Norway, Jens Stoltenberg
«was a hardliner on all things Putin and Russia who had cooperated with the American intelligence community since the Vietnam War. He has been trusted completely since.»
Furthermore, Hersh’ source said about Stoltenberg that:
“He is the glove that fits the American hand.”
Hersh drew a lot of flak from journalists, reporters and commentators in the mainstream and social media. Some of the most profound criticism was put forward in an article written by independent analyst Oliver Alexander, who wrote:
“I doubt Jens Stoltenberg was a US intelligence asset in his early teens.”
Alexander’s article was widely referenced by newspapers, including here in Norway.
Commentators used the fact that Jens Stoltenberg only was a teenager during the Vietnam war as if it was some sort of a trump card that proved that everything in Hersh’ article was wrong. Jens was 16 when the war ended 30 April 1975. This supposedly proved that he couldn’t have cooperated with the intelligence community back then. People made the reference to Jens Stoltenberg as a strawman that they attacked with fervor.
When reading these comments, I got a bad taste in my mouth and thought the behavior was suspicious.
Everybody who knows something about the American intelligence service understands that it indeed would have been possible that the CIA had an asset who was a 16-year-old aspiring politician. The fact that he was born into one of the elite families of the Norwegian Labor parties actually meant that he could be an asset of immense value to the Americans.
In the following I will present a timeline with facts without discussing or analyzing the information. It will enable you to make up your own mind about Alexander’s and the other commentator’s attacks on Seymour Hersh.
1931: Torvald Stoltenberg, Jens’ father, is born.
1950: Torvald enrolls as a student at the University of Oslo where he takes the equivalent of a Master of Law degree in 1957. As part of his studies, he goes to the US to study international relations.
1958: Torvald gets his first job as a secretary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Later his career will include being a diplomat stationed in San Fransisco, Secretary of State in three ministries, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Minister of Defense.
1959: Jens Stoltenberg is born.
1965: Ola Teigen is elected president of the Norwegian Workers’ Youth League (WYL), the Norwegian Labor Party’s youth organization. WYL supports NATO membership.
1968: Someone steals a letter from Teigen’s desk. The letter includes information about large payments from the CIA (via another organization) to the International Union of Socialist Youth, where the WYL is a member. The newspaper Dagbladet writes about it a few days later and the scandal is a fact.
1969: Teigen resigns. The WYL’s investigative commission finalizes a report about the case. The report is marked “Strictly confidential”, and I don’t have any information about its content. WYL changes its stance on NATO and wants Norway to leave the organization.
1970: Teigen is found dead in Trondheim. It’s being reported as a suicide.
1973: Jens (14) enlists in the Labor Party and establishes a local department of the Workers’ Youth League.
1975: The Vietnam war ends. Jens is 16.
1983: Jens is elected vice president of the Workers’ Youth League.
1985: Jens is elected president of WYL. Prior to the election he supports the WYL’s fight for ending Norway’s membership in NATO. A journalist in the newspaper Aftenposten interviews him about this in the run-up to the election. Shortly after he is elected, Jens turns 180 degrees, and starts fighting for making WYL support NATO membership.
1987: Jens succeeds in convincing WYL about his stance on NATO. In his biography he says: “"I didn't lie to the journalist from Aftenposten, but I still couldn't look him straight in the eye."
1992: Trond Giske, who later became a high-ranking member of the Labor Party, but who is currently shoved out in the cold by the party’s leadership, finds a report at his desk on his first day as leader of the WYL.
1996: Anniken Huitfeldt, the current Minister of Foreign Affairs, also finds the report at her desk on her first day as leader of the WYL.
2004: The book “Politisk overvåking av studenter på 1950-tallet” (Political surveillance of students in the 1950s), written by lawyer Asbjørn Fossen, is published. Fossen tells the story about how a group of students at the university, including Thorvald Stoltenberg, started a witch hunt against leftist students and reported about their activities to the American embassy. An official commission that was set up to investigate the Norwegian intelligence community’s surveillance of citizens, The Lund Commission, has later confirmed that the surveillance negatively affected Fossen’s and several others’ careers.
2016: An article in Dagbladet says that the aim of putting the report on the WYL’s new leaders’ desk was “to remind new leaders of history, so it would not repeat itself.” The newspaper interviews Huitfeldt, who explains that “I had been preoccupied with the CIA scandal for a long time. It went so far that a friend told me that "you need to relax, the same bad things won’t happen to you””.
2014: Jens is appointed Secretary-General of NATO.
2022: Jens is appointed leader of Norges Bank, the Norwegian Central Bank. When the Ukraine War breaks out, he instead extends his stay at NATO.
Jens Stoltenberg has had a significant influence on Norwegian politics. He has been leader of the Labor Party, and held numerous high-ranking positions in the government, including Prime Minister in 2000-2001 and 2005-2013.
Summary and conclusion
If you familiarize yourself with CIA methods and read the timeline above, I will consider it rather unwise if you dismiss Seymour Hersh’s article on the basis that it says that American intelligence community trusted Jens Stoltenberg “completely since the Vietnam war” and that Jens only was 16 years at that time.
Considering that Jens evidently had political ambitions already as a 14-year old kid, and that his father Torvald seems to have started his cooperation with representatives of the intelligence service at the American embassy already while he was a young student it seems quite plausible that Hersh’ source was speaking the truth.
Having learned these facts, you should also view the rest of the arguments put forward by Alexander and the other critics of Hersh’ article with a great deal of skepticism.
They haven’t done their due diligence, and now it’s them that we cannot trust.
In this note I have shown how Jens Stoltenberg THE STRAWMAN has betrayed the critics of Seymour Hersh. I suggest that they go out, do their civic duty as writers and try to investigate if Jens Stoltenberg THE POLITICIAN has betrayed his fellow countrymen. If they care about their reputation that would be the only honorable thing to do.
***
Afterword:
In cases of tyranny, corruption and incompetence within government, no other group in society is more valuable than investigative writers. I salute people like Seymour Hersh, @schellenberger, @mtaibbi and our own @BjornJahr for playing a major role in seeking and speaking truth in a time when media constantly fails to do its duty. I hope they inspire young writers who are sick and tired of wandering through this fog of lies, the smearing and the bundle of cowardly tricks that meet us every time we open a newsletter or read comments on social media.
The Norwegian journalist and author Bjørn Wormdal has written several books on the cooperation between Norwegian and American intelligence organizations. When Dagbladet interviewed him about his recent book “The Spy War – the secret spying co-operation between Norway and the US” he explained that representatives of the Norwegian intelligence authorities threatened him and tried to steer the content of the book. I haven’t read the book but would be interested to hear what those who have say about it.
Lastly – we should keep in mind that people like Hersh and Wormdal must fight a significant challenge which best can be described as an asymmetry of information. Their investigations are of such a nature that they often run into things that governments want to keep secret, not necessarily due to our safety, but also because revealing information sometimes will be harmful to politicians’ and others’ careers. At the same time, as we have seen with the Twitter files scandal, they work actively to limit the writers’ freedom. While doing this they have all sorts of tools that can be used to surveille and cause problems for the writers.
This asymmetry represents a major challenge for our democracy. If you understand and honor this fact, you also understand that you should be careful with how you go about when you comment on those who dedicate themselves to investigating the people who are supposed to represent us. Principle No. 1 is to check facts thoroughly and present them in a clear and understandable manner.
If you found this note interesting, the algorithms and I would appreciate it if you click like and follow me.
***
I have included some of the sources to this note below, including the article by Hersh, and Alexander’s comment. The sources are in English and Norwegian.
https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream
https://oalexanderdk.substack.com/p/blowing-holes-in-seymour-hershs-pipe
https://www.dagsavisen.no/kultur/2014/09/03/der-internasjonale-nettverk-skapes/
https://www.universitas.no/heksejakt-pa-studentersamfundet/238381
He must have been a wise man
Everything scales in layers. This includes civilization. The foundation for every civilization is the people's belief system. This is the first layer. Money and the monetary syatem is the next layer - I call it civilizations' cornerstone. If you fuck up these two basic layers you fuck up every layer that has been built on top of them.
Taxes are theft?
Many Bitcoin meatheads use this talking point, without thinking further.
In my humble opinion, some sort of wealth distribution is necessary in order to try approach an equal starting point for every child.
How does wealth distribution happen without taxes ?
I’ll Tag you here Rune. Perhaps you feel like giving your 2 sats on this. nostr:npub1sv4zk080fvt4f3982u5kffzdkex3nm0kylky29um2xws5h4wsxvswtsrw4
I'm against taxation on principal grounds and I'm not going to get into a discussion about this now.
I think an internal implosion is more likely this time
Interesting perspective. I think it will be almost impossible with the euro countries, and they would start to feel threatened if it happened in the Nordic countries. So although it's a possibility I don't see it as very likely. The dominant strategy for some countries will be to loot real economic wealth here and there and to prepare for a more decentralized and multipolar world. At the same time, some regions within nation states in the west will embrace bitcoin, and the same with more and more countries in the global south. They will probably do it step by step and without as much noise as in El Salvador.
To sum up - I believe the monetary policy has been stretched too far as an instrument that can do the heavy lifting. Rulers in the US camp will steal more real economic goods wherever they can, and think that they can trade them for bitcoin in the. Rulers other places will gradually embrace bitcoin. The effect will be that it becomes more and more difficult to use monetary policy as an extraction device.
Who's pockets should the next war be paid from?
A long time ago wars were financed by the ruling class. Conscription was rare, as the wars were mainly fought by professional armies.
Their capacity for waging war would be limited by investors' willingness to let the kings and emperors borrow money. Looting the enemy was posted as collateral. In this way the war could partly be financed by the people living in the country that lost.
This system could made it profitable for the super wealthy to profit from financing both sides of a war. The downside was that it caused a high frequency of conflicts. The upside was that the impact on the rulers' subjects were relatively limited.
This gameplay changed significantly when Sweden established the world's first central bank in 1668. As I show in the #Fraudcoinbook, central banking and governments' deficit spending made it possible for the kings and emperors to force their costs upon their own people by inflating the country's currency. This sparked a wave of bloody and seemingly endless wars.
The combination of central bank-coordinated lending to the governments and use of paper money meant that the rulers could use inflation to direct the general public's production capacity towards the waging of war. The money-printing became a super-efficient wealth and extraction device, that turned the citizens into batteries that made the kings' war machines run non-stop for years and years.
The nation states' ability to wage war would in practice only be limited by the rate of the depreciation of the warring countries' currencies. If the country borrowed to heavily with the support of a central bank monetizing the debt, the currency would plummet, with runaway domestic price inflation and a swift breakdown of the country's economy. And that would soon force a state into making peace with its enemies.
A period of almost 150 years of inflation-fuelled wars culminated with Napoleon's fall in 1813. The following 101 years would be a time of relative peace, when governments temporarily allowed themselves to be restrained by a hard currency regime such as the gold standard.
This period of low monetary inflation and a significant economic prosperity came to an end in 1914. When World War I broke out the governments denied people their right to redeem gold for paper bills. Five years of the bloodiest inflation-financed war that had ever been faught until then followed. Soon after the same thing happened in the second world war.
It's no coincidence that the US were on the winning side of WW I and II. The rising economic power managed to finance its participation in these wars with limited borrowing and without crushing its dollar.
After WWII the dollar's reserve currency status helped the superpower to fight a seemingly endless number of wars using inflation of its money supply as means of finance. Having the ability to export its inflation instead of causing domestic prices to run amok was an asset of immense value for its growing military-industrial complex. This made it possible to shift at least some of the economic burden of money-printing from its countrymen and over to people in other countries.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the US made a deal with China: Accept our dollars as payment for goods that you produce, buy our treasuries (US public debt) and let's shove Russia out in the cold. China happily obliged, and this love affair continued up until the COVID-19 pandemic years of 2020-2022.
However, this period of romance between east and west has now effectively ended. Today US neocons refer to China as its enemy number one, and the conflict about Taiwan has been identified as a potential cathalyst for a new large war.
In parallell the neocons who are most influential in the Biden administration also dream about overthrowing Putin and installing a puppet leader in Russia. The war in Ukraine can potentially function as a springboard for a war between Russia and a US-led NATO and EU alliance.
The obstacle to the neocons' dreams of big wars is partly financial. Runaway federal deficits, a record-high public debt and decreasing opportunities to export newly printed dollars imply that an attempt to finance war with inflation can crash the USD, potentially triggering hyperinflation for the American people and a destruction of the US economy.
Limited financial capacity from a domestic perspective doesn't seem to put any breaks on the neocons' ambitions. They probably hope to dip their hands into other countries' pockets. However, the number of friends of the American empire is dwindling fast, forcing them to talking their old and new allies in Europe to chip in.
The EU is no obvious candidate. Large public deficits, economic stagnation for 15 years and a Germany which finds itself in an economic depression, cannot fight from a position of strength. The UK is in no better condition. High and lasting price inflation all over Europe doesn't improve the situation.
Rampant deindustrialization of the West combined with the fact that the NATO countries have admitted that they were running out of conventional ammunition and had to send clusterbombs instead to Ukraine make the dreaming of new wars look downright silly.
In this age of hubris I only find it natural if the plate-licking aggressors in Washington have set their eyes on the Norwegian people's saving account. The oilproducing country has been a US vasall state since WWII and its government has amassed a 1.4 trillion USD sovereign wealth fund. The fund is supposed to cover the states' future pension obligations.
In the current political climate it can instead become a liability. If the US wants to wage wars in the near future, I believe the superpower will pull every string necessary to make the Norwegian government pay "its fair share". Either the neocons will force it to empty its pockets, or to make Norwegian politicians to wring more kroner out of the taxpayers' pockets.
The neocons will probably turn a blind eye to the fact that Norwegian households have more debt than they have in any others countries, and that raising taxes will trigger a wave of defaults.
Summary and conclusion:
The neocons in Washington want to use wars to continue the US hegemony. They cannot finance these wars with inflation, and has a limited number of rich "friends".
The Americans might be tempted to loot the Norwegian pension fund. The only problem is that more money helps very little when you have deindustrialized your country by turning it into an exporter of money.
The US is in no position to wage large wars. It cannot finance them and it doesn't have the production capacity to turn money-printing or loot into guns and ammunitions.
But the neocons will try, that's for sure. Because it's the only game they know.
Are you also constantly seeking out podcast episodes that have something valuable that you can learn from?
This episode with nostr:npub15dqlghlewk84wz3pkqqvzl2w2w36f97g89ljds8x6c094nlu02vqjllm5m on The RO Show blew my mind. I learned a ton about Bitcoin and I think it can be a perfect combined introduction and deepdive for most people.
Enjoy, and tell me what you think afterwards.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/0XugcOeu3dWQnogxcDPKE2?si=cZxkigsYQo6U8qAqhOYVRg
Do harm to do good is a deeply flawed concept
That is due to a mix of intellectual property law, taxes and inflation (none of it being a result of free market, instead it's a result of politics) not because of innovation.
Thx for input. Scamming with silver and goldcoins isn't very widespread. Checking value of various types of coins is relatively easy. Finding the exact value might not be important in small scale transactions in the secondary market of various consumer goods.
Do you know why #Bitcoin saves much more energy compared to the energy which has to be spent on securing its network?
There are many reasons, but first of all because it removes a lot of the friction that we get when we have a society which is built upon inflation as a policy.
The effect inflation has on the rural areas, and how to counter it.
The inflation economy is based on debt growth. The geographic areas with the highest debt growth also get the highest price growth, in terms of wages and house prices. This attracts people and capital from the rural areas.
The result is depopulation of the rural areas and uncontrolled growth of the cities.
In Asia, for example, the United Nations estimates that the urban population will increase by almost two billion by 2050. It goes hand in hand with the exponential global debt growth, which was 70% in just two years during the Covid-19 pandemic.
It's as if the debt-based system plugs millions of cannulas scattered across the countryside, bleeding the rural districts slowly to death via a tightly knit web of plastic tubes.
Over time this creates major problems for your country, for instance with regards to the cost and quality of food production.
It also creates huge challenges with maintenance of critical infrastructure, both in the cities and out in the districts.
The inflation policy is almost like a cancer for your country, and the effect it has on where people live is one of the most visible symptoms.
If you read governmental white papers etc. on demographics and district politics you probably won't find anything about inflation. Instead they are filled with all kinds of proposals on how one can stimulate growth with for instance subsidies and tax exemptions. I have done that job and haven't found anything on inflation in such papers here in Norway.
What few seem to understand is that the political measures that the experts and politicians propose aren't nearly powerful enough to counter the instant bleeding of the countryside caused by the inflation policy.
The question is what you can do about this.
We have two effective tools that we can use. And these tools have a stronger network effect than anything else.
They are:
- information
- money
The first and most important thing to do is to share this information.
You won't find it other places. The schools don't teach it, and the MSM don't mention it.
Even economists who understand inflation rarely say anything about the effect inflation has on demographics. I have read, discussed and written a lot about inflation and I rarely see this aspect of it being mentioned. So, sharing this information is very important.
The second thing is to start using silver and gold coins and bitcoin as gifts to your friends and family. Tell them that you give them something that stores value better than your national currency, which typically lose half of its value in about 10 years, due to the policy of increasing the supply of more money into society. And tell them that by doing this you support a healthier development in your country, because the national currency sucks the lifeblood out of the rural areas while it makes the cities grow in an uncontrolled manner. When they ask how, you have the answers above.
Information and money are also important in the way they connect people who don't know each other.
Combining these two resources can be very effective.
You can try to tell people that they are free to pay for goods and services you sell, for instance when you sell used sports equipment, in silver coins gold coins or bitcoin. And if it's you who's buying for instance a used bike, you can give the seller the same alternatives. Tell them why you prefer to do it like this and they will learn something from you.
In this way you give people valuable information and forms of money that counter the destructive policy of inflation at the same time.
The network effect of sharing of information and using sound money as gifts and payments is extremely powerful.
Please don't hesitate to share your thoughts in the comments below.
Thx, yes i agree 💯. Let me also add that Bitcoiners is a very diverse crowd, and if Bitcoin becomes religion for some people that's ok with me. However, my concern is that people don't see that your belief system is base layer No. 1. And if you adopt Bitcoin as your religion, and something happens that destroys Bitcoin or what it seeks to solve, then they might feel that all is lost. Therefore I try to show people that monetary freedom is THE core principle, and that Bitcoin is an enabler. If we understand this, we will always fight for monetary freedom regardless of what happens to Bitcoin.