Metcalfe's Law

Metcalfe's Law states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of its user base. The more users that adopt a network, the more valuable it becomes.

Since crypto-currencies are token based payment systems on the internet, it follows that their value will increase exponential with their increased use.

This in turn has been used to defend the current price of Bitcoin. However, there is one thing about crypto that this particular defenders of Bitcoin's astronomic rise in price has left out.

Crypto tokens represent both ownership of the network and the use there of. A Bitcoin account does not represent a user, but a potential user. Opening a Bitcoin account does not in itself represent usage, nor does the purchase of Bitcoins represent usage. It represents ownership.

It is only when crypto is used to perform transactions between external accounts, or in trade for something other than crypto that we can say that we are dealing with usage.

By all accounts, the vast majority of crypto holders are owners with no intention to use the crypto for anything but speculation. The user base is extremely small.

Furthermore, it is well known that Bitcoin cannot ever function as a convenient currency. As a technology, it has already become obsolete. The use of Bitcoin in commerce is therefore destined to go to zero in the not too distant future.

It follows from this, using Metcalfe's Law, that Bitcoin will go to zero. The large number of nodes in the Bitcoin network has nothing to do with adaption of Bitcoin as a currency. It is all speculation.

Metcalfe network

By Woody993 at English Wikipedia - Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons., CC0, Link

Climate Related Deaths in England

Old, sick and frail people are more likely to die during winter than during summer. This is no secret, of course. It has always been this way, and this is the way things are even today, despite modern houses and heating.

Modernity has brought relief, but it has not managed to balance things out completely. Winter is still the season when people are most likely to die.

The average cold weather death toll for England is 25000 people. Better heating and better houses could no doubt reduce this number by quite a lot. But it will never be zero. Winter will always be the harshest of the seasons.

The trend in cold weather deaths was until recently downwards. However, that appears to have changed. 34000 excess deaths were recorded last winter, and 40000 excess deaths are expected this winter.

Something dramatic appears to have happened. Fewer people are able to keep sufficiently warm through the winter.

Since houses are unlikely to have changed much in quality over such a short time span, and winters are no colder than usual, we can only conclude that energy prices must have gone up or people in England have become poorer.

Quite possibly, there's a mix of both higher heating costs and lower incomes. Whatever it is, one thing is certain, the increase in climate related deaths in England is not due to global warming.

Paying the Electricity Bill

It is a built in feature of crypto-currencies that it gets more and more difficult to calculate new tokens. While the first ones are relatively easy to calculate, the last ones are extremely difficult and time demanding to find. As the number of registered tokens increases, it takes an increasing amount of computer power to find new ones.

A consequence of this is that more and more electricity is consumed in order to calculate new tokens. Since the calculations are a race among "miners" in which the fastest has the most chance to find the most tokens, the computers used are of the fastest possible kind. As such, they are veracious power consumers.

At this point, with Bitcoin fetching almost 9000 dollar per coin, the profitability of mining, and the need to be fast, has pushed up power consumption for mining Bitcoin to the equivalent of Irland's total demand. That's about 1.5 billion dollar per year. This electricity bill has to be paid, and it is the people "mining" for Bitcoin that have to pay these bills. With huge bills to pay, they have to sell some of their tokens to finance their operation.

The result of this is that the supply of Bitcoin will go up. Keeping in mind that value is a function of perceived utility and scarcity only, we see that the increase in cost of "mining" crypto does nothing to increase the value of such tokens. All that the increased cost does as far as the crypto tokens are concerned is that it pushes up supply. The increasing supply of crypto from "miners" will put downward pressure on these currencies.

Also, having invested in hardware dedicated to find crypto tokens, the "miners" will create new variations on crypto tokens so that they can continue their profitable business. The supply of crypto will increase dramatically until prices for crypto meet the production cost. As long as production cost is lower than the market price, new tokens will be generated.

Each crypto-currency may be limited in number. However, there is no limit to the number of currencies that can be created. There used to be only one crypto-currency, namely Bitcoin. Today, there are more than 1000 different ones. That's inflation at at a truly staggering scale, and it's only going to get worse. By the time supply finally meets demand, there may be many thousand crypto currencies, and their price will reflect the price of production, not of Bitcoin, but of the cheapest one available.

Value is after all utility and scarcity. With nothing much separating crypto-currencies as far as utility is concerned, they must be viewed as a whole. It is not the price of mining the final Bitcoin that will limit the supply, but the price of mining the first few tokens of a future crypto. That price is way less than a dollar per unit.

Cryptocurrency mining farm

By Marco Krohn - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

The Announcement Before the Collapse

Bitcoin will never function as a convenient currency. It is slow and expensive to use, and will for that reason be replaced by something faster, cheaper and better.

That means that Bitcoin will have no utility at all in a not too distant future. Since value requires both scarcity AND utility, its value will be null, and its price will quickly go to zero.

This has been known since Bitcoin traded at 3 dollars a coin. Bitcoin's technical drawbacks as a currency has never been a big secret. Yet, here we are a few years later, and Bitcoin is trading at 8000.

The reason for Bitcoin's success, despite its known technical weaknesses, must be attributed to a rather naive belief that software upgrades and technological advances would fix the problems.

Those speaking against Bitcoin, warning about its limited utility, have been viewed at cranky skeptics, reactionaries and anti-technology. Bitcoin buyers have ignored the skeptics in favor of the rosy picture painted by enthusiasts.

However, the technical problems with Bitcoin are now so obvious that even the proponents have to admit that the skeptics were right. Prominent Bitcoin promoters have stated in plain English that Bitcoin will never function as originally intended.

There has been an announcement, so to speak. Everybody now knows that Bitcoin will not be a widely used currency.

Yet, apart from a flash crash a week and a half ago, nothing has happened.

The reason for this is that there is always a short period of calm after an announcement. Apart from a few that immediately get the message and leave (the flash crash), everybody are looking around to reassess their position. Did they really hear what they heard? How many got the message? What does this mean?

People are grasping with the significance of the announcement. Many are clueless about what Bitcoin actually is. They are invested in it to get a part of the action, but have little insight into what they have bought. Others are better informed. None of them are completely sure how to interpret the message.

Some left immediately after the announcement. But were these well informed or badly informed? There's confusion and an eerie calm.

The calm can last for weeks. However, once the announcement has been made, it will inevitably lead to a collapse. This is how bubbles burst. Someone that the manics believe and trust makes a statement that is so glaringly obvious that even the most enthusiastic must admit it to be so.

It remains to be seen if the announcement from a week and a half ago was clear and concise enough to lead to a collapse. Those still invested in Bitcoin are clearly hoping and believing that it will have no future impact. However, sentiments appear to have changed. There is much less enthusiasm. The mania may already be over. If so, there will be no stopping the collapse when it arrives.

Big Volume Days

Big price moves are usually accompanied with big volume. With the price changing rapidly, a large number of potential trades are turned into real transactions.

What should be noted in this respect is the relative size of the volume between up days and down days. Up days with higher volume than down days indicate strength and confidence. Down days with higher volume than up days indicate weakness and concern.

As of late, Bitcoin has had more volume on down days than up days.

Diminishing Volume

When a price is considered right, there is a lot of bid and ask, and volume is high. There is plenty of trading activity.

However, if either the sellers or the buyers find the price wrong, there will be little bid or ask. As a consequence, the volume goes down. The price needs to be readjusted in order to find a new equilibrium.

This is why speculators pay attention to volume. A diminishing volume indicate that a big move is about to occur.

This is of particular interest when there has been a flash crash, with prices restored to its former level. If volume remains healthy, things may remain stable. However, if there is diminishing volume, a real crash is increasingly likely to follow.

Furthermore, if prices change on diminishing volume, chances are that the price move is in the wrong direction. The correction will be in the opposite direction. If prices change on increasing volume, the change is in the right direction, and is likely to continue.

Unfortunately for Bitcoin holders, the recent all time high reached after the flash crash from a week ago has been on diminishing volume. A dramatic price drop in the near future appears increasingly likely.

A piece of brass pretending to be a store of value

By Steve Jurvetson - https://secure.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/8410385932/in/photostream/, CC BY 2.0, Link

The Great Stilling

Global winds have reduced in strength since the 1960s, and nobody knows why.

Earth is slowing down in its rotation, and nobody can figure this one out either.

However, the mystery of the above is relatively easy to explain, so it's not like there's no available theory to explain it.

Gerald Pollack suggested several years ago that our planet's rotation is most likely sustained by radiation from our sun. A sustained decrease in solar activity should then mean a slowing down of both wind speeds and rotation.

As it happens, our sun is gradually decreasing its activity, and this has been going on for a long time. We are approaching a solar minimum. A slowing down of Earth's winds and rotation is exactly what we should expect.

Current prediction for Sunspot Cycle 24

By David Hathaway, NASA, Marshall Space Flight Center – http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/predict.shtml, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28557779

Climate Change?

Weather patterns are stochastic by nature, so we should be careful, and not read too much into an unusual bout of bad or fine weather. A lot of unusual weather is in fact the norm. It is to be expected.

However, when large weather patterns change significantly over time, there are good reasons to take note and consider one's options.

We know from history that significant changes have happened over relatively short time spans in the past. There's no reason to believe that such changes will not happen again.

Catastrophic changes in weather patterns are rare and far between. But when they happen, a lot of damage is made, and those caught unprepared suffer the consequences.

Growing up in Norway, I remember learning about the Scandinavian ice sheet. With its origin in Jostedal, it spread out to cover most of northern Europe. At its biggest, Norway was covered by 2000 meters of ice. Scandinavia was completely covered, as was much of England and Ireland.

The picture painted by schoolbooks on the subject is that of a creeping glacier, growing for thousand of years to reach its maximum extent. However, that isn't how it grew. It came from above and covered Scandinavia in the space of a few decades.

Norway is a coastal country, situated at the Atlantic. There is plenty of precipitation. It is also a mountainous country. On average, the country is about 1000 meter high. Summers are short and winters are long.

Norwegian highlands are barely free of snow before a new bout of snow descends on them.

If average temperatures were to drop by a centigrade or so, or the amount of snow fall was to increase by a few percent, snow in the highlands would not melt away in time for winter. It would remain through the summer.

If this were to happen, the highlands of Norway would be covered in permanent snow and ice within a decade. If this weather pattern were to persist for longer than a decade, the ice sheet would start to push into valleys and low lands. A permanent cold gust from the highlands would accelerate this process. Within the next decade, all of Norway would be covered in ice.

The Scottish highlands would see a similar development. Ice would cover Scotland long before the Scandinavian ice sheet would arrive from Norway.

A disturbing aspect of this is that we have of late seen a change in the jet stream. It's weakening and it's making bigger dips into continental areas. What used to be a stable, fairly straight moving wind, propelling weather systems from west to east is now making deep dips into continental North America and Eurasia.

The new weather pattern looks a lot like the pattern that existed during the last great ice age.

Relatively warm and dry air is being sucked up towards the North Pole at the west of the northern continents while cold and wet air is being pushed down south over their central and eastern parts.

Coastal California and Iberia are experiencing drought. A little farther inland, there is cold and rain and snow.

When I visited my cabin up in the Norwegian highlands in August 2016, we had snow. This year, Norwegians are complaining that they never had any real summer days. Temperatures in the lowlands stayed below 20 C, and there was a lot of rain.

In America, we see record cold and snowfall. Greenland's ice sheet is expanding.

We're balancing on a razor thin edge between little ice cover and enormous ice cover. An ice age is only a tiny drop in temperatures away, and we may have crossed the line. If the weather we have had the last two years continues, there will be more ice. If temperatures drop a tiny bit more, accompanied by a tiny bit more precipitation, we might see an alarmingly quick return to glaciation of the northern hemisphere.

Hardangervidda: Barely ice free in the middle of summer

By Smtunli, Svein-Magne Tunli - http://www.tunliweb.no/SM/English/sm_eng.htm - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Financial Suppression

One of the reasons house prices have gone as high as they have in Norway is the suppression of gold as a form of saving.

While completely legal to hold, and freely available as a commodity, gold ownership is rare. The reason for this is a 25% sales tax on gold bullion. Only coins can be owned without having to pay a heavy tax.

This means that it is prohibitively cumbersome to convert a large asset like a house into gold.

The result of this is that people do not pay much attention to the gold-house price ratio. Few people realize that prices are in bubble territory, and the bubble becomes larger than it otherwise would have.

Additionally, a policy of financial repression, in which real interest rates are kept below zero, makes for a financially stressed population. Everybody knows that cash is only for losers. It has to be invested in something. But the one thing that would calm people's nerves is kept out of their way.

Without gold as a viable alternative to cash, there is only real estate and shares to choose from. Both are in bubble territory.

Then there is crypto, a self regulating currency that has not yet become suppressed. It can be bought and sold freely without the 25% tax.

Norwegians are rushing to buy this as an alternative to gold. They call it digital gold. They claim that it is the new gold. It is better than gold. But the only thing good about crypto is the fact that it is free of government suppression. Apart from that, it is a terrible alternative to gold.

The success of crypto is entirely due to the suppression of gold. Without this suppression, no one would want to own it. People would go for a gold backed alternative, such as Goldmoney.

By Phee - Pixabay, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

The Great Scandinavian Housing Bubble

House prices in Scandinavia have gone up more or less continuously since the early 1990s.

Last time house prices crashed in Norway was in 1986. Back then, the price of an average house fell by 50% before finally reaching the bottom, and it was not before 1996 that house prices reached the same nominal price as at the top some ten years earlier.

Adjusted for inflation, house prices in 1996 were still substantially lower than in 1986.

Today, we are witnessing a similar crash to the one we saw in 1986. How far the house prices will fall in nominal terms remains to be seen. However, a fall of at least 50% relative to gold is almost certain. The house bubble today is larger than the one in 1986. The fall, relative to sound money, is therefore very likely to be bigger.

The culprit behind the inflated house prices is of course the central banks in Scandinavia.

Faced with an appreciating currency, relative to the Euro, Scandinavian central bankers decided to lower interest rates. This is a move believed to have the effect of lowering the value of a currency. However, much to the central bankers' surprise, lowering the interest rate did not weaken their currencies.

The Scandinavian currencies remained strong throughout the period in which their central bankers kept lowering the interest rate, and the reason for this is quite obvious in retrospect.

The low interest rates made it increasingly lucrative to buy real estate. House prices started to rise. Foreign investors took note of this. Wanting to get into the action, they moved their cash from under-performing countries to the much better performing Scandinavian countries.

To do this, the foreign investors had to buy local Scandinavian currency.

Rather than deterring foreigners from buying Scandinavian currency, the low interest rates encouraged foreigners to do so. The lower the interest rate, the more investors piled up on real estate.

The result of this has been a real estate bubble far larger than any one ever recorded in Scandinavian history. In Sweden, the inflation adjusted peak of the current bubble was more than twice as high as previous peaks.

Now that the peak is in and house prices are falling, Scandinavian currencies are rapidly falling too.

Foreigners are selling real estate. The money that they obtain is sold for other currencies.

The central bankers are now in a predicament. Having encouraged people to take on debt, household debt is at an all time high. If interest rates are moved up, a lot of people will get in trouble. However, if interest rates are kept low, foreigners will keep on selling their currency. Import prices will go up, and everybody will be poorer.

Having failed to make the Scandinavians any better off during the boom, the central bankers are now in a situation where they will either make everybody worse off by keeping interest rates low, or make every house owner a lot worse off by rising interest rates.

Reflection in a soap bubble

By Brocken Inaglory. The image was edited by user:Alvesgaspar - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

My House in Norway

So it looks like I sold my house in Norway only weeks before the Scandinavian housing bubble popped.

House prices in Norway have gone down about 10% since I sold. Adding to this that the Norwegian Krone is down about 10% relative to the Euro, the fall has been a brutal 20%.

What's interesting to note from my own experience was the fact that the bid disappeared completely for a short while, just when I tried to sell the house. There was a flash-crash-like absence of bid. Then there was a return of buyers, followed by the real crash that started several weeks after I sold my house.

The experience was spooky and nerve wrecking. I knew I was dealing with a bubble, and I knew I could not ride it out. I was pressured by the taxman to sell. There was a lot of money at stake.

Luckily for me, I was ahead of the herd by a few weeks.

Back in 2004 when I bought my house, there was a similar absence of bid, and I took the opportunity to get my house on the cheap. However, that quiet period did not precede a crash. The house prices continued up.

It appears that I lucked out in both 2004 and 2017.

It is also clear that a sudden disappearance of bid is no guarantee for a subsequent crash.

By Raysonho @ Open Grid Scheduler / Grid Engine - Own work, CC0, Link

The Flash Crash

A flash crash is a sudden price drop followed by a quick reversal. This often precedes a real crash some time later, usually within a few weeks.

The flash crash is caused by a lack of bid in the order stack. The price is supported by a narrow band of small orders. Once these orders have been satisfied, there are no more orders of any significant size, and the price plunges.

One or more large orders placed in such an environment will cause a collapse in the price, and we have the initial flash.

Since the crash is caused by a small number of sellers, they realize the damage they have just done to the price, and they remove their orders so as not to cause more damage.

The large sellers are gone, and the buyers return, sometimes helped by one or more large participant intent on repairing the damage.

What follows is a period of uneasy calm. Everyone knows that the bid is thin and brittle. However, there is a conspiracy of silence. As long as everyone treads lightly, the hope is that things will return to normal.

This is the period when optimists continue buying while the realists carefully unwind their long positions. There is a quiet panic among the ones who knows the significance of the flash crash.

As the awareness of the true state of the market spreads, the number of people who want to exit their long positions increase, and a real and sustained crash ensues.

Reflection in a soap bubble

By Brocken Inaglory. The image was edited by user:Alvesgaspar - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Relative Size of Things

Here's a great little "game" that my 5 year old boy found on the net:

https://www.silvergames.com/en/the-scale-of-the-universe-2

It lets the user zoom in and out to discover the relative size of objects, and it is a lot of fun.

Zooming out, we see the relative size of buildings, countries, planets, stars, galaxies, etc. all the way out to the entire visible universe.

Zooming in we go from insects to bacteria, viruses, molecules, atoms, and so forth, all the way down to the Plank constant.

Keeping in mind my own view on things while playing around with the "game", I found it interesting to note that the neutrino was included in both its energetic form and its neutral state. The energetic one was much bigger than the neutral one.

However, the photon and the electron were not included. Instead, there were wavelengths of various types of light. The inclusion of wavelengths seems strangely misplaced in what is otherwise a display of things, and I could not help thinking how wrong the wavelength idea is. Energy is always a matter of size. The neutrino is displayed correctly. The photons are still displayed in the old and incorrect way.

As for the very large structures, they too should be viewed with some skepticism. Their sizes are based on conventional ideas related to red-shift. They are highly red-shifted objects, so they are assumed to be extremely distant. Should it turn out that they are much closer than assumed, they would be correspondingly smaller in size.

Scarcity, Utility and Price

For something to command a price it must be seen to have utility, and it must be scarce.

Air is of great importance to us all, yet it commands no price. There is no scarcity of air.

Fresh water on the other hand does command a price. Fresh water does not come for free. There is an infrastructure associated with it which does not build itself. Only those willing to pay for the infrastructure get fresh water delivered to them.

However, water is very cheap relative to other less important things. An ounce of water cost next to nothing. An ounce of gold costs a small fortune.

The reason for the higher price for gold is not that it is more useful than water, but because it is more scarce. Scarcity drives up the price of gold.

But scarcity does not in itself command a price. There has to be perceived utility too. If gold had no utility, it would not command a price. It is the combination of utility as jewelry together with scarcity that people value in gold. This combination gives gold its "intrinsic value".

There are plenty of scarce things that do not command a price. Shares in bankrupt companies are worthless. Nobody is willing to buy such shares. The fact that the number of shares in a bankrupt company will never increase, does not help. Nor does the fact that such shares come with a complete network for trade. Bankrupt shares can be bought and sold on exchanges. There is nothing stopping people from trading in bankrupt shares. Yet they command no price.

The reason for this is that bankrupt company shares have no "intrinsic value". They can be traded. But that's all. There is no utility to bankrupt company shares outside of their ability to be bought and sold. There is no need to own shares in bankrupt companies. There is no benefit to it either.

The "intrinsic value" of central bank issued fiat currency is the fact that it keeps people out of jail.

Every year, a lot of people are obliged to hand in a certain amount of currency to tax collectors who will send these people to jail if they resist. These people are therefore in real need of fiat. Without fiat currency, they loose their freedom. Freedom has utility. People value it, and are therefore willing to work hard in order to preserve what little freedom they have.

The fact that a lot of people do not pay taxes does nothing to lower the value of fiat. Everybody knows that the taxman will send certain people to jail if they don't pay. This gives us confidence in the currency regardless of whether we are directly threatened or not.

The "intrinsic value" of gold, on the other hand is derived entirely from a desire to own it. No taxman is required to give gold its value. The price for gold is ultimately set at the jeweler by people buying a gold ring for marriage or something to impress the wife or girlfriend.

The perceived value of something can of course be completely wrong relative to what it's truly worth. However, prices do average out over time to reflect utility and scarcity.

Tulip bulbs were for a short while in Holland perceived to be immensely valuable, but the mania quickly corrected itself once people realized that a tulip is not an industry, nor a fantastic store of value, but merely a flower.

In this perspective, the current price of crypto currencies must be regarded as a mania, soon to crash like the tulip mania in Holland. The reason for this is that crypto tokens have no more "intrinsic value" than shares in a bankrupt company.

Just like shares in bankrupt companies, crypto come in limited numbers, and they can be traded on exchanges. However, the number of different bankrupt companies are not limited. Nor is the number of possible crypto currencies.

There is in fact no real difference between shares in bankrupt companies and crypto currencies. The only difference is the perception that people have about crypto. People perceive crypto to be something more than what it truly is.

People in Holland perceived tulip bulbs to be industry. This misconception lead to the famous tulip mania of the 17th century.

People of today perceive crypto to be investment vehicles, far superior to company stocks. The fact that crypto tokens do not in fact have any more utility than shares in bankrupt companies has not yet widely understood.

However, the lack of "intrinsic value" in crypto is slowly starting to dawn on people. Last weekend saw some wild price action in the crypto sphere. The limited utility and complete lack of "intrinsic value" of Bitcoin sent it down by more than 20 percent. The competing Bitcoin Cash, perceived as having more utility, went up by 400 percent.

It appears that my prediction is coming true that there will be price chaos in crypto before the final crash. When something with no "intrinsic value" commands a price, the price can be anything. There is no limit to the size of the price swings. Total price chaos is the only possible outcome.

Wedding and Engagement Rings

By Photo by Derek Ramsey (Ram-Man) - Self-photographed, CC BY-SA 2.5, Link

Peter Woodhead's Hollow Earth

When I was first made aware of the expanding Earth hypothesis some seven years ago, I was fascinated by the overwhelming evidence in its favor. However, I could not imagine any mechanism to explain it.

I looked around, finding nothing but exotic and strange explanations. All of it hypothetical and none of it proven in any way.

Then I came across Peter Woodhead's very simple theory. Earth was expanding due to internal pressures. No mass was being added. It was all good old steam power.

I was immediately convinced that he was on to something. His explanation required no magic of any kind.

However, there was one troubling detail. His explanation for the increase in surface gravity did not fit the accepted model of gravity.

I contacted him about this, hoping that he could explain his position in more detail. What followed were a series of e-mail exchanges in which it became clear that his theory lacked a good explanation for surface gravity.

No less enthusiastic about Peter Woodhead's theory after our exchange of e-mails, I decided to look into possible solutions to the surface gravity problem. What followed was a series of proposals culminating in my essay called The Gravity Mystery in which I reached the conclusion that capacitance must be playing an important part in gravity.

Shortly after this, I published A Capacitor Model of Gravity in which I sketched out a general outline of what a proper theory of gravity would have to look like.

With this model in mind, I continued looking for clues as to the true nature of gravity. I found Morton Spears' capacitor theory, including his model of the atom. Then I found Halton Arp's lecture on intrinsic red-shift.

Morton Spears' model of the atom and Halton Arp's red-shift hypothesis fit together perfectly. Atomic nuclei were getting bigger over time due to gamma-ray radiation. Also, the increased charge locked in the crust of our expanding planet was contributing to gravity.

Growing atomic nuclei are not only making Earth more massive, it is making everything more massive. The dinosaurs lived in an environment of less gravity and less inertia. This explaines the strange size and shape of dinosaurs. As outlined in my blog post on the Quetzalcoatlus, the dinosaurs were not only way bigger than what would be possible today, their overall shape was wrong too.

Adding the fact that an expanding planet accumulates charge, we end up with a total of three factors that have changed over time. Gravity and inertia have increased, and charge has increased. Taken together, we have an explanation that supports Peter Woodhead's theory.

Peter Woodhead was right about Earth being hollow. His explanation for the increase in surface gravity was in my opinion incorrect, but he set me thinking, and he has been of great help for me in my search for a proper theory of physics to support the observed facts. Without his initial hunch about how things must hang together I'm not sure I would ever have arrived at the Velcro universe, which would have been a shame, considering how satisfying it has been to develop my very own theory of physics.

Cross section of a hollow planet

David LaPoint's Primer Fields

David LaPoint made a series of three videos on his theory of physics, which he put out on YouTube for everyone to watch.

The videos are well worth watching. They are fine examples of systematic thinking related to electromagnetism and optics.

However, there is an inconsistency in David LaPoint's thinking related to the photon.

To explain the double slit experiment without the use of an aether, David LaPoint makes the red photon bigger than the blue photon. In this way, the wide interference pattern observed for red light can be explained as a function of photon size. The larger the photon, the wider the pattern.

Setup for double slit experiment

The problem with this is that it does not account for the fact that particles larger than photons make increasingly tight patters as they get larger. Electrons make tighter patterns than photons, atoms make tighter patterns than electrons, and molecules make tighter patterns still. Why then expect big photons to make wider patterns than small ones?

Furthermore, the decision to make the red photon larger than the blue one, makes it impossible to explain why blue light refracts more than red light through a prism. David LaPoint makes no explanation for the difference in refraction in his video. He makes an animation and presents it as truth. That's all he does, and also the only thing that he can do, because there is no sensible way to explain the difference in refraction with his big red photon and small blue photon.

Big photons take more time than small photons to pass through the refraction region between air and glass. It must therefore be the big photons that refract the most.

Blue photons refracts more than red photons

In his effort to bypass the aether as part of his explanation, David LaPoint ends up in an impossible situation where his photons can either explain the double slit experiment, or explain the prism, but not both.

Models that include an aether and have red photons smaller than blue photons avoid this problem. Refraction through a prism becomes a logical consequence of relative size between photons, and refraction through the double slit becomes an equally logical consequence of particle size relative to the aether.

The Tired Light Hypothesis

The tired light hypothesis was proposed as an alternative to the expanding universe hypothesis.

The idea was that light would loose energy over time. Distant things would then appear redder than closer things because of the energy loss.

However, in the absence of an ether, energy loss would mostly be due to dust and similarly large particles. This would produce much more scatter than we observe. Distant things should appear fuzzy and unfocused. That's not the case.

But if there is an ether, then energy loss might very well happen without any scatter. Physic theories that invoke the existence of the ether are in other words indirectly supporting the tired light hypothesis. It does not necessarily follow that the tired light hypothesis must be right if there is an ether, but it would add a great deal of weight in its favor.

The Double Slit Experiment Proves the Ether

The double slit experiment has of late produced overwhelming evidence for the existence of an ether, yet no scientist appears willing to admit this fact. Instead, scientists are doubling down on their insistence that all particles display wave-like behavior.

When molecules consisting of as many as 114 atoms were used in a recently performed double slit experiment, the only explanation presented for the detected self interference pattern was that the molecules had in fact passed through both slits. This is after all what classic quantum mechanics tells us.

But is it really credible that a molecule consisting of so many atoms can pass through two slits at once? Wouldn't that cut the molecule in two? Or are we to believe that regular physics has to be abandoned for all things not directly observed?

Why not use the much more plausible explanation that the molecules did not travel alone through space, but rather through a medium, and that it was this medium that passed through both slits. The medium interfered with itself. It produced a standing wave pattern that guided the individual molecules to the detector at the far wall.

Using this explanation, each molecule arrives at the detector as a particle, producing a single imprint. When many enough molecules are used, a pattern arises that is directly proportional to the size of the particles. Large particles produce tight patterns. Small particles produce wide patterns.

Interference pattern

The pattern is due to the wavelength of the ether, itself most likely made up of a mix of neutrinos and zero-energy photons. The two particles making up the ether interfere with each other to produce the standing wave, which in turn interfere with larger particles in the manner observed in the double slit experiment.

Particles themselves do not have wavelength. They have size. What the double slit experiment shows us is the size of particles relative to the ether. It is thus a way to measure the relative size of particles.

Electromagnetic Propulsion

In the chapter on radio transmission, I pointed out that radio transmitters polarize zero-point photons, and give these photons a boost of energy. From this, it follows that if the polarized photons were to be focused in one direction, they would produce thrust. Energy ejected in one direction must after all produce a reaction in the opposite direction.

The thrust would be modest. However, it would also be extremely efficient. No propellant would be needed. The zero-point photons are after all a part of the ether. The antenna is merely boosting the energy of the photons as they fly past it.

One possible design for such an electromagnetic propulsion device would be to place a parabolic disk around a radio antenna. Another possible design would be an electromagnet with plenty of copper windings.

This latter design is well known to produce thrust as demonstrated in this video, pointed out to me by my Facebook friend, Freddie Thornton.

Interpreting this video in light of the Velcro model, zero-point photons are concentrated into a high flux beam that in turn induces electric ionization of the atmosphere, visible as a blue spark.

The question that arises from this is then whether or not the same setup will produce thrust in a vacuum. If it does, we will know for sure that the proposed interpretation holds. If not, something else must be going on. Something requiring an atmosphere to function.

According to Rudy Maldonado, another Facebook friend of mine, there have been several successful demonstrations of electromagnetic thrust in a vacuum. This short paper narrates one such experiment.

No blue light was observed, yet there was thrust, exactly as we would expect in light of the Velcro model.

This is of course very encouraging as far as the Velcro model is concerned. However, I would like to see more papers demonstrating the effect, as I do not fully trust the paper claiming to have verified the effect in a vacuum.

Radio Waves vs. Radiation

The one thing that magnetic connection, radio waves, and radiation have in common is the photon.

This makes it sometimes difficult to distinguish between the three fenomena. Other times it is easy to forget that they are in fact related.

The reason for this is that the photon has two independent properties that can appear individually or in combination.

1. Magnetic connection is entirely dependent on the spin of the photon
2. Radio waves depend on spin and energy
3. Radiation is entirely dependent on energy.

Radio waves have something in common with both magnetic connection and radiation.

As pure radiation, radio wave photons have too little energy to be useful. They need to be polarized in order to be easily detectable.

Antennas designed to detect radio waves reveal the magnetic nature of such photons. Radio wave antennas are sticks of metal that can pick up minuscule magnetic signals.

Radiation such as gamma-rays are detected in a completely different manner. The energy of such photons are detected through direct impact. No magnetic detection is required.

Visible light is detected in the same manner.

It is only when photons have very little energy that they need to be polarized in order to be detected. Such photons are what we call radio waves.

Polarized photons used in radio transmission

The Coming Revolution

The current mania in Bitcoin is a harbinger of things to come. It signifies a shift in sentiment, driven largely by exasperation with the current state of affairs.

If we could fully trust the currencies issued by central banks, there would be no place for Bitcoin. Commerce would simply take place with the currency currently in circulation.

However, people are waking up to the fact that central bank issued currencies are in fact fraudulent, benefiting a very small group of people at the expense of everybody else. In an effort to get away from this tyranny, people have turned to crypto as a viable alternative.

But, as many will soon find out, crypto is both slow and expensive to circulate. It takes a lot of energy to clear a crypto transaction. Also, there is no limit to how many crypto currencies can be created. There will be inflation in crypto, and their price will crash.

When the crash comes, the exasperation with the system that caused the bubble to grow as large as it has will be channeled towards demand for reform. There will be increased pressure to return to sound money. There will be calls to abandon central banking.

In short, there will be a general drive to reverse the damages caused by the progressive era, which started with central banking at the start of the 20th century.

If successful, the revolution will herald in a new era, similar to 19th century England, but technologically more advanced. While the 20th century will go down in history as similar to 18th century France, the 21st century will hopefully be an era of sound money, growth, and prosperity for all.

Sound money

Public Domain, Link

Radio Waves vs. Magnetic Connection

Radio waves are magnetic, and not really waves at all, but polarized photons with a tiny bit of energy, sufficient to affect a receiver.

Radio transmission

Waving a magnet about close to a radio receiver produces static interference. This is one way of demonstrating that radio transmission is in fact a magnetic phenomenon.

Electric generators and motors are also magnetic. However, they work on a different principle. The photons communicating the magnetic force between the rotor of a generator and the electrons in the copper wire do not need to carry any energy. All they need to communicate is force.

Generator and motor

The magnet in the generator lock onto the electrons in the wire through mutual attraction. The gap between electrons and the magnet is depleted of zero-point photons. The effect is that of a low pressure area in the ether, and very similar to standard fluid dynamics.

In this way, we can liken the setup of an electric generator and a motor with that of a hydraulic pump and motor. The copper wire between the electric generator and motor act very much like the hose connecting the hydraulic pump to its motor.

The gap between the magnet and the copper wire is in effect sealed by the low pressure area in the ether.

This is in contrast to radio transmitters that act more like open hoses, spraying energetic photons about in all directions.

There is no magnetic connection between a radio transmitter and a receiver. When a receiver is turned on, there is no reaction to this at the transmitting end.

An electric motor on the other hand is magnetically connected to the grid. When a motor is turned on, there is a reaction at the generating end. The generator and motor are connected in a way similar to an hydraulic pump and motor.

A rule of thumb that applies to this is that if there is a gap between the generating unit and the receiving unit, magnetic connection is involved if significant power is transferred. If it is known that the receiver is communicating back its drain to the transmitter, we know for sure that we are dealing with a magnetic connection.

On the other hand, if the receiver does not communicate back its drain to the generator, we know for sure that the process involves radio waves only. In such cases, the energy drained by the receiver should be minuscule.

Significant power transfer through radio transmission is never done in engineering. However, in nature, gamma-ray bursts are example of large scale radio transmitted energy.

Bubbles and Revolutions

An interesting thing to note about financial bubbles is that they often precede revolutionary changes in society.

The tulip mania that gripped people in Holland in the 17th century preceded the Dutch domination of the flower market. Dutch flowers, and tulips in particular, are sold in flower shops all over Europe. It is a big industry.

The South Sea bubble of the 18th century preceded the rapid expansion in world trade.

The .com bubble of the 1990s preceded the rapid adaption of the internet as a universal communication and information platform, and the Bitcoin bubble of today is no doubt heralding a revolution in banking and transactions.

There is in other words a general sense of revolution that fuel these bubbles. People are excited about something new. They can sense that something monumental is about to happen, and they want to get in on the action.

However, the revolution is only beginning, and few people are able to fully comprehend what is going on. There is a lot of room for wild speculations and little in the way of sober reflection. Things get blown out of proportion.

Tulips are flowers. The South Sea Company was a shipping company. Internet is a communication platform, and crypto-currencies are alternatives to the SWIFT system for international transactions.

All of this is pretty mundane stuff, yet people were for a while prepared to pay huge premiums for a piece of the action.

The fact that Isaac Newton, the worlds smartest man, managed to loose a fortune on the South Sea bubble illustrates that it was not just idiots that lost their sense of proportion. A lot of very smart people were gripped by the mania.

In retrospect, it's easy to chuckle at the insanity of it all. Why should the average guy in the street be invested in tulips, international trade, internet, or inter-banking transactions?

Sure, at sane prices, all of the above industries may be excellent investment objects. But at the peak of each of these bubbles, there was no rational way to explain the price.

I have heard relatively smart people argue that Bitcoin could go to a billion dollars a piece. Scarcity will drive up the price, they say. But "Toys R Us" shares are also limited in number. That doesn't make them valuable. Scarcity has no value in itself. Things have to be both scarce and useful to be valuable. But Bitcoin is not very useful, and will for technical reasons never become very useful either.

What eventually pops a bubble is reality. Once people understand more fully what the big deal is all about, there is a return to sanity, and the inflated prices quickly collapse.

Once people understood that tulips are in fact nothing more than flowers, despite their wonderful qualities, prices went down. Once people realized that the South Sea Company was but a single one of a multitude of shipping companies, the South Sea bubble collapsed.

The .com bubble burst for the same reason, and once people realize that Bitcoin is but one of many possible alternatives to SWIFT, the current market cap of more than 120 billion dollars is sure to come down.

Most likely, Bitcoin will go the same way as the South Sea Company. The South Sea Company never had more than a few ships sailing. Bitcoin is hardly used in any cross border transactions.

What we are likely to see in the near future is a revolution in banking and money technology. However, just like the South Sea Company never became a part of the revolution in world trade, Bitcoin will not be a part of the coming revolution in banking.

What is coming will be quite different, and in the end, quite mundane. Everyone will shake their heads and wonder why people all over the world suddenly wanted to be part owner of an international transaction system that had quite obvious flaws in its implementation.

Tulip

By Bernd Haynold - Own work, CC BY 2.5, Link

Electric Generators and Motors

One of the great benefits of electricity is that it gives us a convenient way to distribute kinetic energy from one location to another.

A waterfall in a remote location can thus be used to power an electric train in some other remote location. All that is required is a generator at the waterfall and an electric motor in the train, connected to each other by a copper wire suspended above the railway.

Once the connection is made from the generator to the train's motor, kinetic energy from the waterfall is transported to the motor in the train.

Generator and Motor

To understand how this works, consider the above illustration.

The brown line represents Earth, and the two circles with magnets inside of them represent the generator and the motor respectively. The live wire is pink, and there is a switch to connect and disconnect the motor.

To make a good generator, copper wire is wound carefully around the generator, but for simplicity, we omit this aspect from our illustration.

The magnet in the generator is spinning. One moment the north pole is inducing current. The other moment, the south pole is inducing current. When the north pole whizzes past the copper wire, electrons are pushed one way. When the south pole whizzes past the copper wire, electrons are pushed the other way. This is explained in the chapters on Ampere's right hand grip rule and induction of current in wires.

The result of a magnet whizzing past a wire in this fashion is an alternating current. However, as long as the switch leading down to the motor is in the off position, no net current is produced. All that is happening is that the capacitance of the live wire is filled and drained with electrons taken from and given back to Earth. There is an alternating electric potential, but no drain.

To keep this state, very little energy is required. There is the friction in the generator, and there is a little bit of loss to the environment from the live wire in the form of low frequency radio waves.

The electrons moving back and forth between capacitance and Earth, produce radio waves in the manner described in the chapter on radio transmission. This is energy lost to the environment. It is an undesired side-effect of AC power distribution, and the reason why people don't like to live close to power lines. The idea of constant radiation from power lines is not a very appealing one.

However, this is beside the point. What we want to understand is how the kinetic energy gets from the waterfall and into the copper wire. Electrons have inertia. Energy is therefore required to set them moving. But the copper wire is separated from the spinning magnet by a small air gap. How does the kinetic energy make the jump from the spinning magnet and into the wire?

The answer to this is of course magnetism.

Inside the copper wire, there are electrons moving about, each with their associated magnetic field.

As we know from playing with stick magnets, magnets line up in an attracting manner when free to move.

The magnetic fields of the magnets will therefore align in an attracting manner relative to the rotating magnet of the generator. An attracting field develops between the magnet and the electrons. The rotating magnet gets in this way a grip on the electrons inside the copper wire.

Since all the electrons in the copper wire are separated from each other by a mutually repelling electric field, moving the electrons in the copper wire at one point, causes all the electrons in the copper wire to move.

The generator has in other words a grip an all the electrons in the copper wire, which it sends one way as the north pole sweeps by the wire and another way as the south pole sweeps by.

Once the electrons are in motion and oscillating between Earth and the capacitance of the wire, no more energy is required before the motor is engaged. We have electric potential, but no drain.

Once we close the switch, and engage the electric motor, current is suddenly free to flow from the overhead live wire to Earth. The initial drain is enormous as there is virtually no resistance. However, as soon as the motor starts rotating, a resistance builds up.

To avoid a complete melt down of the motor and associated circuit, it is important that the motor is spinning. This is why large electric motors are phased in slowly. It is also the reason why electric motors can catch fire and melt if the rotating magnet is stopped.

To understand why this is the case, all we have to note is the similarity in design of a generator and an electric motor. In principle, they are identical.

This means that the magnet in an electric motor, once it starts spinning, connects up to the electrons of the copper wire in the same way as the generator. There is magnetic attraction between the moving electrons and the magnet.

This attraction is at its strongest when the magnet in the motor rotates in perfect harmony with the oscillating electrons in the wire. This happens when there is no load on the motor.

Note that it is in this idle state that the motor produces the biggest resistance in the copper wire. The rotating magnet of the motor is in other words producing resistance in the wire. When the motor is spinning freely in the idle position, very little current is drawn.

To understand how this can be the case, we have to keep in mind what happens if there is a change to the current flowing.

If more current was to flow, a stronger magnetic field would develop, slowing the current down. If less current was to flow, the magnetic field would lessen, weakening the connection to the magnet. The effect of this would be a freer electric flow.

Scaled correctly relative to the inherent resistance in the copper wire, it is possible to make a motor that produces near perfect resistance in the system when rotating in the idle position.

Once we understand that the motor produces resistance in the copper wire, it is also clear why an increased load on the motor will result in an increased load on the generator.

A motor that experiences an increased load slows down. As a consequence, the resistance in the copper wire is reduced. With less resistance in the wire, the generator speeds up. More energy is moved from the waterfall and into the wire. This energy is in turn transferred to the motor.

The whole system balances perfectly, and is in fact self regulating. An electric motor with no load, spins at its maximum, yielding maximum resistance to the circuit. With an increased load, there is less resistance, and the generator speeds up, pumping more kinetic energy from the waterfall into the circuit.

This self regulating effect of magnets and electric currents countering each other is sometimes illustrated by dropping a magnet down a metal pipe. Any metal will do to illustrate this point. As long as the pipe is an electric conductor the effect can be clearly seen. The magnet dropped into the metal pipe slows down significantly.

As the magnet falls, current is induced into the walls of the metal pipe. The current spins around the pipe, so there is no net electric current noticeable anywhere. However, the spinning current produces a magnetic field that pulls on the magnet, and this causes the magnet to slow down.

As a final aside, it is interesting to note that the fact that generators and motors are virtually identical can be used to generate electricity from railroad transportation.

To slow down an electric train, the electric motor can be turned into a generator. The kinetic energy of the train can thus be turned into electric energy.

In this way, trains bringing iron ore down from Sweden to the Norwegian port of Narvik are net generators of electricity. The trains, fully loaded with iron ore, coming down from Sweden, function as generators as they constantly have to break their speed. The empty trains going back to Sweden use this electricity for their power, and the surplus is fed into the grid. The Sweden-Narvik train line is in this way a generator of electricity for the local grid.

Comparing Bitcoin to SWIFT

While Bitcoin is a slow and inefficient way to make ordinary everyday transactions, it is a relatively quick and efficient way to make international money transfers. For this reason, I compared Bitcoin to SWIFT in an earlier post.

However, I did not explain my comparison between the two in any detail. I simply noted that a market cap of 120 billion dollars seems excessive for a system that is only one of several alternatives to SWIFT.

What follows is the reasoning behind the comparison:

SWIFT is currently the dominant system for money transfers between bank accounts located in different countries, and is therefore one of many current systems that Bitcoin can bypass.

Bitcoin can also be used for other purposes. It can be used to pay for goods and services from local vendors, if the vendors choose to accept it. However, Bitcoin is slow and inefficient. It takes a lot of time and energy to clear transactions, and will therefore never be the preferred currency for such transactions.

Furthermore, Bitcoin is slow and inefficient by design. The blockchain requires a lot of processing in order to make absolutely sure that transactions are valid. This feature cannot be omitted.

From this, it follows that Bitcoin will never be used in ordinary everyday commerce unless there is a real crisis in the local currency so that there is no choice but to use it. Under normal circumstances, Bitcoin will only be used as an alternative to SWIFT and similar international payment systems.

This means that Bitcoins are tokens used for book keeping during international transfers.

A typical transaction will go as follows:

1. Person in country A buys Bitcoin on an exchange
2. Person in country A transfers Bitcoin to person in country B
3. Person in country B sells received Bitcoin on an exchange

Bitcoin isn't used before nor after the transfer. Instead, it's handed over to investors who sit on it until they choose to sell it again.

The value in this is only the transfer itself. What makes Bitcoin valuable is access to the network on which it resides which only Bitcoin owners can use.

This makes Bitcoin simultaneously a payment token AND a share in the network.

Since the tokens on their own are mere numbers, the only true value of a Bitcoin is the share of the network that it represents.

A Bitcoin is therefore very much the same as a share in SWIFT.

The total market cap of Bitcoin can be directly compared to the total market cap of SWIFT. Add in the uncertainty associated with Bitcoin's future dominance over alternative solutions, and we have a reasonable estimate of Bitcoin's true worth.

Cryptocurrency mining farm

By Marco Krohn - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

Darwin vs. Newton

My wife and I took our 5 year old son to the botanical garden a few months back. It's a great place with plenty to see. In addition to the gardens, there is an old mansion where they host exhibitions, and this summer, the theme of their exhibition was Darwin and his discoveries.

One of the "laws of nature" that was highlighted was the fact that animals of completely different species will develop virtually identical shapes and sizes given similar environments. To illustrate, they used the Armadillo, the Coypu and one more animal that I can't remember the name of.

In all three cases, they had examples of animals that were almost identical in shape and size, but from completely different places and of a completely different genetic origin.

The environment had put evolutionary pressure on these animals to develop similar shapes and sizes in order to survive. The result of this is that these animals look almost identical despite their genetic differences.

What's particularly interesting about this is of course that this rule must also apply over time. Going back in time, we should see animals with similar size and shapes as we see today. However, that is not what we see.

What we find is that there are certain shapes that have completely disappeared, and where shapes are similar, the animals are vastly larger than the same shaped animals of today.

The long necked dinosaurs like the Brontosaurus, were extremely successful in their time. The large muscular tail and the long swan like neck were clearly ideal for their environment. Yet nothing like this exists today.

The Triceratops on the other hand, looks suspiciously like the Rhinoceros, but was way bigger.

Using Darwin's principle of shapes and sizes, we can only conclude that something must have been very different in the environment. Otherwise, we would have seen these very successful shapes and sizes in animals of today.

The only logical conclusion from the viewpoint of Darwin is that gravity (and inertia) must have been less back in the days of the dinosaurs.

However, this would violate a "law of nature" postulated by Newton back in the 17th century. According to Newton, gravity and inertia are constants throughout space and time.

Newton's postulate is in other words in direct conflict with Darwin's principle of shapes and sizes.

We cannot have both, and since Newton's postulate has never been proven to be right, while Darwin's principle has a long list of confirmations, we must conclude that on this particular issue Darwin is right and Newton is wrong.

Gravity (and inertia) vary through time and space. Furthermore, all evidence points towards an increase in both gravity and inertia over time.

  

Meganeura, lifesize model

(from Land of the dead blog)

The Future Potential for Bitcoin

Bitcoin is a slow and expensive medium of exchange. Transactions require much time and energy to clear. It will therefore never become a convenient way to pay for everyday purchases.

The only type of transaction where Bitcoin comes out better than current systems is in international trade. It is cheaper end faster than SWIFT.

This means that Bitcoin is a possible replacement for SWIFT. However, any other blockchain based token system will do just as well, and there are currently tens if not hundreds of alternatives.

In light of this, the current market cap of Bitcoin appears stretched. I have no idea what SWIFT may be worth, but I assume that it isn't much more than the 120 billion dollars that Bitcoin is currently trading at.

At current prices, Bitcoin appears to have fully priced in that it will be the preferred alternative to SWIFT in the future. However, this is far from certain.

With little upside potential, and a lot of downside risk, Bitcoin is not a good investment at current prices.

The Layered Approach to Power

I'm still amazed at the level of detail that internet censorship has come to. It had never occurred to me that individual blog posts would be suppressed within a blog that is already suppressed. However, that's quite clearly the current state of affairs. Certain ideas are more heavily suppressed than other ideas.

This shouldn't have surprised me, though. After all, the suppression is easy to put in place. All that's required is a list of keywords and a general ranking of blogs. Anyone with some basic programming skills can put together the algorithm. With most large internet corporations openly stating that they will combat fake news, it's not even a secret that censorship is being put into place at every level. It's just not talked about much, and posts that do are of course suppressed. Such posts do not disappear. They are just a little harder to find and often mixed up with flat earth conspiracies and other nonsense, just to make it extra difficult to figure out if it is true or not.

Every other aspect of our lives are similarly regulated in layers, so why not the internet too. It makes perfect sense.

Taxes, for instance, are not collected as a single charge, but in multiple stages. There is income tax and sales tax. The two are both a drain on people's finances, but because they are split, the total tax burden is not immediately apparent.

In some countries, like Norway, the total tax burden for an average citizen is a massive 70% when all taxes and fees are summed together. This is not a secret. The information is freely available on the web. In the case of Norway, the information was even available at the tax collectors' own web pages for a while before they took it down. Now, everyone will have to do the calculation themselves.

Everyone can sit down and add up the fees and taxes paid from the moment money leaves the hands of an employer, until it reaches the end point where a good or service is purchased by the employee.

Very few people in the west will find their tax burden lower than 50%. Government agents are in other words in control of people's finances. The average person is left with the smaller share of their earnings.

Had all these taxes and fees been paid as a single lump sum at a specific date every year, everyone would be up in arms. However, under the current layered approach no one seems to care. Those who protest are quickly silenced by someone pointing out how little they are paying in income tax relative to all the services they get. The fact that the income tax is but one slice of the total tax burden is of course bypassed in silence. The information is freely available but suppressed. Most people have no idea that they are taxed as heavily as they are.

The beauty of this system is that it is often defended by its victims. People who point to income tax as if it was the only tax in existence are not in most cases the politicians, but victims of high taxes themselves. People who defend minimum wages are completely unaware that it is nothing but a law preventing the low skilled from getting a job.

Some people are so misinformed that they are willing to die in order to defend their current level of enslavement. They join the army. They go abroad killing people who stand in the way of their ruling masters. It's beyond stupid. Yet this mentality is the norm. Most people believe that they are free even as they stand in line for government handouts.

As Adolf Hitler once said: "What good fortune for governments that the people do not think."

No Charge vs. Neutral Charge

My Facebook friend Freddie Thornton made an interesting comment about charge the other day. He noted that there is a big difference between no charge and neutral charge. Yet most literature on the subject regard the two as the same.

I would take that statement one step further and say that charge is everywhere, so there is no such thing as no charge. In the Velcro universe everything is made up of charged particles. The photon has a positive and a negative orb, the atom consists of electrons and protons, and the neutrino is rarely completely neutral.

Massive bodies are full of charge, even if they are electrically neutral. Every atom carries charge.

Between massive bodies, there are neutrinos carrying both positive and negative charge. These neutrinos have imprints of the atoms that they have bounced off of, and they communicate these imprints with each other. The net effect is electric neutrality.

However, due to a small imperfection in how neutrinos communicate repulsion between electrons, there is slightly less repulsion then attraction between massive bodies. This results in the tiny net attraction that we call gravity.

Gravity is a consequence of charge being everywhere, and slightly less repelling than attracting for neutral bodies.

Modern Day Censorship

What surprised me about the suppression of my two blog posts on Newton and NASA, regarding the hollow Earth hypothesis, was not so much the suppression itself, but the level at which it occurred. While I had quite expected my blog to become virtually impossible to find on the web, I had not expected Blogger itself to rank my blog posts according to its own standards.

I have had no illusion about this blog ever becoming widely available through Google searches. The purpose of my blog is after all to highlight odd little facts that do not fit the mainstream narrative. My blog is in other words a "fake news" site, and everybody knows that Google aims to suppress such channels in favor of channels that support the Status Quo. My blog is in other words going to be permanently suppressed by Google.

What came as a surprise is that the mechanisms used to suppress blogs like my own are also used to suppress individual blog posts. Blogger appears to weigh blog posts against their particular standards in much the same way Google weighs entire blogs.

This should not have surprised me, though.

Google owns Blogger. Google can easily lend Blogger a hand in doing a ranking, and the way it works is almost certainly as follows:

Having already been labelled a "fake news" site by Google, Blogger runs a list of keywords against every blog post I publish. If any of these keywords are found in a blog post, it is given a penalty of a certain percentage.

In the case of my blog posts on Newton and NASA, the keywords that kicked in were "Newton" and "NASA". These are two important authorities. Any mention of them in a "fake news" site should therefore be heavily penalized.

This will have the effect of making the said blog posts harder to find. They do not disappear. They are not censored in the old fashioned way. They are merely suppressed.

The beauty of this in the eye of the censors is that it is a relentless mechanism that will sway public opinion over time, and it can be presented as a real service and benefit to the public in general. Most people prefer the general accepted narrative. Some can even get very angry at being presented with alternatives. For these people, the suppression mechanism is seen as a great service.

Authors of blog posts on the other hand discover to their bemusement that some popular blog posts do not appear in their top ten statistics, and just like me, they start asking questions.

Cielo Estrera, a Facebook friend of mine, pointed me to a FAQ page for Blogger designed to handle this precise question. The answers were quite telling. While Google admitted that some posts would at times be ranked lower than expected, the reasons for this were too complex to explain. All sorts of excuses were presented. None of them very convincing.

The only way blog posts can be suppressed as much as 50% relative to view counts is through direct interference. When Blogger generates statistics for presentation purposes, they pull out the view counts AND the suppression metrics. The sum of the two determines the ranking.

What we have is a system of layered suppression put in place by the establishment. Everything is ranked and weighted according to a metric designed to support the Status Quo.

This happens at all levels, and not only in the realm of information. It happens in financial markets and in politics too. Everything is ranked and weighed.

Nothing is banned outright. Everything is available for the one who looks. It's just made as difficult as possible to find the alternative views. Modern day censorship is presented to the public as a service, and is largely accepted as such by the average person.