Tit for Tat Strategy Confirmed

So, it appears that Russia has in fact chosen a tit for tat strategy against Ukraine this year, as I predicted back in May. Russia has achieved its military goals and is therefore in no rush to continue expanding westwards. However, any aggression from the Ukrainian side has been met with immediate and swift responses that add up to more harm than whatever Ukrainian forces manage to inflict on the Russians.

We have seen this pan out several times this summer. Whenever there's a strike inside Russia, there's retaliation in the form of heavy bombardments. This, it appears, has also extended into territories gained by the Ukrainians during their summer offensive. Whenever Ukraine has managed to eek out some territorial gain along the front line, the Russians have responded by grabbing a little more from the Ukrainian side. The Ukrainian summer offensive has in this way ended up with a small net loss of territory.

Vladimir Putin

By Kremlin.ru, CC BY 4.0, Link

Reactionary Dreams

There is this notion among many liberty minded people that life was better in the past. This is often expressed through romantic notions of simplicity, self sufficiency and community. However, if anyone were to try living like the post card notion of the past, they would quickly find that it doesn't work.

This is not to say that things aren't in fact deteriorating. Many were better off a generation or two ago. But the reason for our decline in life quality isn't because of new technology.

The problem we're facing is that the benefits of new technology have been offset by a corresponding burden put upon us by the current system. For every advancement, we're hit by a corresponding burden that diverts resources away from us and into the hands of a small group of well connected people.

This small group of individuals would like nothing more than to see liberty minded people turn off their internet and move into cottages in the country. It would signal defeat on our side, and it would allow these people to continue their pilfering.

On the other hand, the elite would hate to see an honest investigation into what's happening. They don't want us to stop and think for ourselves. Above all, they would hate to see people come up with solutions to their continuous pilfering of everything that makes life good and meaningful.

What we need is not some reactionary withdrawal from society, but a proactive move in which we safeguard what we value. Our first action should therefore be to come up with an honest vision of how we would like to live.

I live in Porto, and I like it a lot. I value the cafés. I love going for walks around town. I enjoy reading things on the internet. I've learned a lot thanks to this. I've written a little thesis on physics, and I've come to understand politics and economy a lot better. I'd hate to see the internet gone.

I like to sit down for meals with my family, and I love my balcony with flowers and the compost bin that produces earth from kitchen refuse. It would be nice to have a cottage of my own out in the country, but we can't afford it at the moment, and I don't have the energy for it either. The balcony is the cheap and reliable alternative.

An honest vision is not merely a dream. It's a realistic and attainable goal, and in my case, I'm pretty much living it. There are very few things I would like to see different, so I've managed to go from wishing to live like I do today, to actually living it. My vision from the past is my current reality.

It should be noted that my goal was realized by cutting down on needless consumption, and by a systematic effort to avoid taxation. Selling my house in Norway was a painful but necessary part of this. Focusing on making my wife's modest apartment in Porto as comfortable as possible was another important step. Avoiding banks by getting out of debt and into gold rather than cash savings was a good move too.

Modest living frees up time for things I value highly by reducing the need to spend time earning money. Modest living reduces fixed costs, it reduces taxation, and it reduces the need for bank loans. Taken together, there're a lot of savings just there. Additionally, I moved from high cost Norway to low cost Portugal. Not only do we have a better climate here in Porto, but it's a lot cheaper as well.

The key to good living isn't some unworkable move back in time but the realization that what's valuable is rarely very expensive, and that no-one can be happy and relaxed living financially on the edge. We have to live well within our means, and we need to avoid external meddling in our finances by the state and its associated banks. Finding ways to avoid taxation, inflation and debt is key, because those are the ways the elite use to pilfer us into poverty.

Café de Flore

People - By Arnaud 25 - Own work, Public Domain, Link

A Cool Summer in Porto

This summer has been the coolest I've experienced in the 17 years I've lived in Porto. Temperatures have rarely strayed from around 24 C, and we haven't had a single period of more than three days with temperatures above 30 C. We've also had more cloudy and rainy weather than usual.

Two years ago, I made a similar observation, and I predicted that this weather pattern was going to remain with us for years to come. So far, I've been correct in this. However, I was criticised by local friends for saying that this weather pattern was something new. What has been unusual is the sweltering warm summers I experienced during my first ten years in Porto. Last year was neither cold nor cool. It was in their opinion a normal summer. But I'm sure my friends will agree that this summer was no warmer than the last two summers we've experienced, and that's an interesting point in itself because Porto is located on Iberia, a place foreign news outlets have pointed to as nearly boiling.

If there has been unusually warm summer days in Iberia, they have been poorly reported on here in Porto, and they cannot have been in this part of the peninsula. In fact, Portugal as a whole has had a remarkably good year for wine growers, so the sweltering hot and dry weather must have been confined to Spain.

Greta Thunberg

Eco-anxiety - By Anders Hellberg - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

Gold and the Japanese Saver

Keynesian economic theory makes the claim that savers are a burden on society because their money isn't participating in the economy. It's just sitting in bank accounts, doing nothing. The solution to this, according to the same theory, is to make sure the money loses purchasing power over time.

In reality, however, the money of savers doesn't sit dormant in bank accounts. The money is lent out to entrepreneurs who invest in the future. Savers are not a burden on anybody. They're an essential part of a healthy economy, making sure that investments are made for future productivity.

But this logic, however irrefutable, hasn't deterred modern economists from going after savers. Case in point being the Bank of Japan's decade long quest for price inflation. They've been creating mountains of currency, and they've kept interest rates at zero. Yet, Japanese savers have absorbed it all, and there's been virtually no price inflation. Newly created currency has always found its way into various bank accounts. But that has suddenly changed.

The Bank of Japan has finally managed to create price inflation. The Japanese Yen is going down, and it's going down fast. So, savers should by now be rushing out to buy stuff. But that's not happening. At least not in the way intended.

All that's been achieved is a growing unease among Japanese savers. They are as determined as ever to save for the future, so they don't want to spend their money on consumption. Instead, they look around for Yen alternatives, and they find this in gold which has gone up a whopping 20% relative to the Yen so far this year.

When we combine this with the fact that decades of monetary inflation by the bank of Japan has created some hundred billion dollars in bank deposits and many hundred billion dollars more in various cash alternatives, we see that there's the potential for a flood of Japanese currency coming after gold. If Japanese savers all get the idea that they should have at least some physical gold hidden away in a drawer somewhere, the demand might overwhelm the bullion banks, with a price reset as its consequence.

Sovereign

By Heritage Auctions for image, Mary Gillick for coin - Newman Numismatic Portal, Public Domain, Link

Fear and Confusion

One of the positive things that came out of the virus scare was that the mechanisms of evil have been laid bare. Everyone, including relatively young children, have now seen with their own eyes how evil operates. All that's required for them to see it clearly is for us to point it out.

This, I believe, is the right way forward in our battle for liberty.

Whenever someone expresses fear or confusion related to some woke topic, we can remind them of some previous fad that has by now been thoroughly debunked by the person in question.

I have, for instance, an eleven year old boy attending dance school. The woke mob has somehow caught onto this and is now busy trying to convince him that he's gender fluid or something like that. My boy is inundated with pride related stuff on social media.

This has made my son excessively preoccupied with pride values, and also worried that someone will force him into some nasty transition program. The pride agenda is full of down right scary stuff, so I understand my son's concern. But I've calmed his nerves by telling him that we never had him injected with the vaccine, and we're for sure not going to let any creepy pride guy get his way with him. 

I've pointed out that pride is a fad on decline. It will soon disappear. But, should someone at the dance school for some reason insist on some embarrassing gay stuff, we will simply pull him out of it. He can rest assured that his parents will have nothing of it.

A friend of mine has a similar problem with his eleven year old boy. The kid is convinced that we're in some sort of climate emergency. He's also convince that his father knows less about these things than his teacher, so he refuses to listen to his father.

My guess is that my friend was a little too quick to dismiss his son's concern. But it's never too late to adopt a better strategy, so I've suggested he try the same overall strategy as I've used with my son. Start by toning the scaremongering down a notch by saying that the problem is exaggerated. Nothing dramatic is going to happen to our planet over the next few decades. We got plenty of time to adapt if there really is a problem with our climate.

Other things he can do is to point to the ocean in front of his house and the mountains in front of his cabin. Let the boy take in the immensity of it all. Clearly, we're too small to change any of this dramatically in the space of a few years. Even decades or centuries are short timespans relative to the billions of years our planet has existed.

As for the boy's trust in his teacher's insights, my friend can point out that the teacher also thought that masks were a good idea. My friend can do this because his son was initially conned into believing this to be true, only to realize later that his father was right to dismiss the pseudo science. It was my friend who had things right, not his son's teacher.

As parents, it's our duty to protect our children from hysteria and confusion, and we do this by remaining calm and clear. This may not work well right off the bat, but the longer we persist, the more credibility and respect we get.

My friend and I remained calm and clear throughout the virus scare, so we have one big victory we can point back to. With the woke agenda unravelling before us, we'll soon have many more victories to lean back on, and our standing in the eyes of our children will only grow.

Taking in the view

The Power of Optimism

At the height of the vaccine mania that swept the world a year ago, my ten year old son was asked by a class mate if he was vaccinated. When my son replied that he wasn't, and that he had no intention to ever take the vaccine, his friend replied that mandatory vaccination was inevitable, so there was no point in trying to avoid it.

Half a year later, my son told a friend that we had bought a new car. When his friend learned that this car had a conventional petrol engine, he told my son that we should have chosen an electric one because petrol engines will be illegal in a few years from now.

My son reacted to both events with amazement. Why did these people automatically assume that something will happen just because someone says so?

Now, a year later, we know that the experimental vaccines will never be mandated, and we also know that the average electric car has a lifespan of about seven years. Both the vaccine and the purchase of an electric care are decisions many already regret, or something they will soon regret. If they did any of this merely because they thought it inevitable, the regret will become all the stronger.

The lesson here is that we should never do anything just because someone says so. Giving up a fight even before the battle has been pitched is a road to ruin and regret. It's also disgraceful. Norse mythology has it as the greatest of all sins, and a sure ticket to hell.

This doesn't mean that we should eagerly engage in battle. On the contrary, battles should be avoided. But when there is a battle waged against us, our moral duty is to hang in there as long as possible. Giving up is not an option, even against overwhelming force and certain defeat.

This is the moral essence of Ragnarok, the final battle where even the gods are defeated, with many of them killed: It doesn't matter if the outcome is certain, the battle has to be fought to the end. It is our actions during battle that defines the future, and to simply fold and give up is therefore not an option.

This insight dovetails well with a central Christian insight, namely the importance of faith, love and hope, because those are the three factors that combine into what we call optimism, and optimism is the opposite of defeatism. When evil forces are turned against us, we can remain optimistic as long as we have faith in God, aka nature. Additionally, love for our family, friends and possessions will give us strength to fight, and hope for a better future fill give us endurance.

This is not merely some religious rambling, it has been proven to work. Optimists will on average last eight times longer in a struggle than the average defeatist. This has been demonstrated in laboratory tests of various kinds, but simply looking around for examples in the real world will confirm the thesis. The optimists who refused to fold under pressure outlasted the defeatists by months, and even the authorities had to give up in face of our resistance.

A similar study that ties into this has shown that if an optimist wins a battle, the relative number of defeatists in his group will drastically decline. This can easily be verified by noting the sudden disappearance of people talking about the new normal and how our lives must inevitably be changed in order to accommodate for this.

These findings are in turn reasons for optimism. When optimism won against defeatism back in 2022, a new trend was set. Instead of fighting an uphill battle against tyranny, we now have momentum on our side. All we need to do in order to keep this going is to stay strong in our optimism.

If we persist in making optimistic observations, we'll win more battles which will in turn result in more optimism. Key to this is to look for optimistic angles to everything. E. g. when a friend of mine told me that 60% of Norwegians remain fully prepared to take another vaccine shot if told to do so by experts, I pointed out that this means that 40% aren't prepared to do so. That's up from 20% just a year ago.

It's also important to remember that trends take time to pan out. This year is likely to go down in history as the first year of a new era. We have another hundred years to go before this trend comes to its end, and it's silly to think that this trend will be without battles on the way. However, optimism is here to stay, and the more we show our optimism the more likely we are to make a real impact on where things go from here on out.

Odin and Fenris

By Emil Doepler - Doepler, Emil. ca. 1905. Walhall, die Götterwelt der Germanen. Martin Oldenbourg, Berlin. Page 55. Photographed and cropped by User:Haukurth., Public Domain, Link

When time comes for Ragnarok, the great battle between giants and gods, Loki and his children join the battle at the side of the giants.

Cantillon's Effect on Display in Stores

The price of olive oil has gone up a lot lately. That's a big deal in Portugal because olive oil is the primary cooking fat in Portuguese cuisine. When the price of olive oil goes up, everyone is affected.

On the other hand, the price of wine is going down. There are discounts to be had, especially on the finer wines. However, this isn't of much help to most people. Wine is a luxury also in Portugal. That's especially true for those who find it hard to make ends meet. Olive oil, on the other hand, is an essential ingredient that cannot easily be replaced.

Today, when I was in the local super market, the shelves reserved for the most affordable olive oils were bare. Only the more expensive kinds were still available. This might be a one off occurrence. But it might also be a sign of the times, because this is the sort of things that happen when markets get distorted by a credit bubble.

Monetary inflation progresses through the economy like a wave. The typical pattern is that it first affects financial assets, then luxury items, and finally essential goods. This is because the rich and well connected are typically the first to receive the newly printed money. They invest in financial assets. They buy luxury goods. It's only later that ordinary people get hold of the new money, and that's when more mundane things go up in price.

This was first described by Richard Cantillon some 300 years ago, and this pattern is therefore named after him.

Ludwig von Mises further elaborated on this a hundred years ago by pointing out that a credit bubble can only have two outcomes. It either results in a crash in the prices of everything, or it results in the destruction of the currency itself. If we have a crash of prices, this too will affect some things before other things. It will typically pop the early bubbles before the later ones.

This is probably what we're seeing in the super markets. Essential goods are going up at the same time that luxury goods are going down. The disappearance of reasonable priced olive oil is a result of panic buying in the expectation that prices will continue up.

A few months from now, we might see a glut and price collapse in olive oil. That would be the popping of the olive oil bubble. But we may also see central bankers panic in the face of massive losses in financial markets. If they turn the money printing back on, prices of everything will once again go up. Stuck in the middle of this is the average guy, hit by huge fluctuations in prices that he's ill equipped to handle.

Olive oil

By Poyraz 72 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link