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

Waning Trust in Experts

A recent poll in Norway has revealed that 60% of Norwegians will take another dose of the vaccine if recommended to do so by health experts. While this number may seem high, it's in fact indicative of waning trust in the advice of experts, because a full 80% of Norwegians had at least one dose by the end of 2022.

This means that 20% of all Norwegians were unwilling or unable to take the vaccine when it was first rolled out, but a full 40% are by now unwilling to go with such advice. These 40% are not only twice as many as the 20% we had a year ago, but they are also more resolute. They are not merely unwilling or unable to heed advice, they are determined not to take advice.

This is a big shift in sentiment, and yet another sign that 2022 was the end of the progressive era that started in 1913, because the progressive era was founded on the idea that society should be ruled by experts.

The social contract

A Red Herring on my Facebook Wall

The way the tennis player, Novak Djokovic, stood up for bodily integrity during the virus scare has turned him into something of a legend. Very few can see or hear anything about him without thinking back to the days when he was locked out of tournaments for no other reason than that he refused to take part in the medical experiment involving a new and largely untested vaccine. In fact, very few can even watch a tennis match without giving at least some thought to the controversies that surrounded the man. Any mention of professional tennis invokes memories of the lockdowns, the vaccines, and the man who stood up against it all.

This makes Novak Djokovic a hero in the true sense of the word. The man stood up against tyranny when just about everyone had given in to pressure. He could have given in, and he could have faked compliance, but he did none of this. He stood up for the principle that we are the owners of our own bodies and no-one has the right to demand that we ingest or inject anything against our will.

Novak Djokovic is such a strong symbol for bodily integrity that the mere mention of him is a statement in itself. Tennis has likewise become a symbol due to the battle of wills that took place with this sport as the backdrop.

This has prompted me to post tennis related news on my Facebook wall. Tournaments riddled with bedridden sportsmen is one type of news that I share. Finals with Novak Djokovic as a contestant is another favourite of mine.

As it happened, the US open tournament this year was not only riddled with bedridden sportsmen, it ended with Novak Djokovic the big winner. Two years of systematic isolation of the man had not dented his great physical shape. While other players fell ill with chest pains and other ailments, Novak Djokovic sailed all the way to the top.

That resulted in me posting in short order three tennis related news-stories on my Facebook wall, all with minimal comments. The message required no help from my side, or so I thought until I got a grumpy comment on the story about Novak Djokovic's gold medal triumph.

"Just another ball hitter" the comment read.

This was either a deliberate attempt to derail my subversive messaging, or it was from someone genuinely clueless about the symbolic significance of Novak Djokovic's victory.

Not wanting others to think that I'm merely a tennis obsessed fan, I replied by laying out my true intention in sharing the news. I stated directly that I like Novak Djokovic mainly for his heroic stand against tyranny. The fact that he's a world class tennis player is of secondary importance.

I thought this would be the end of it, so I was surprised to find no less than three hastily put together replies to my explanation, one featuring an ugly picture of Novak Djokovic, the other two insinuating that the man is a crook and should not be viewed as a hero.

This revealed to me that the man's intention with his initial comment was to distract everyone from the true significance of Novak Djokovic victory. It was a red herring, intentionally put on my wall. This in turn made me angry, and I was tempted to reply with something equally provocative. But I thought better of it. Such a reply would only reflect badly on me, and it would further distract readers from my intended message. I had to come up with something more effective.

First of all, I had to fully take in the fact that I was dealing with a red herring. The purpose of the comments were to distract me and readers alike. From this it followed that I should simply double down on my message. I should make it crystal clear that Novak Djokovic is a hero no matter what else might be true about the man.

Secondly, I realized that I should simply acknowledge the tasteless way the commenter had portrayed the tennis player.

The short reply that I ended up with was that Novak Djokovic may have ugly facial features, and he may be a crook, but none of this diminishes the fact that he's the most highly profiled figure to come out in favour of liberty and bodily integrity in the midst of the virus scare and all the insanity that surrounded it.

My reply didn't just defend my original position, it pointed out the needlessly aggressive commenting by my Facebook friend. My reply elevated my original message. It also highlighted the sort of low level criticism that has been thrown at the man by simply referring to the comments made by my friend.

I had expected my Facebook friend to quietly ignore my final reply at this point, but he decided instead to apologize. It appears that he's not a mere internet troll to be ignored, and I put a like on his final comment, so we're still friends.

I must admit that I found the episode both uncomfortable and draining. But the way it panned out made it worth it. I now know that the way to defused a red herring is to double down on the message while holding a mirror up to the troll. If done in polite language and with no hint of anger, the troll is tamed. It may even apologize for its actions.

By Facebook, Inc. - http://en.facebookbrand.com, Public Domain, Link

Heeding the Winds of Change

I'm of the opinion that 2022 marked a turning point when it comes to people's perception of politicians and their myriad of experts. Up until mid 2022, people went along with expert pinion. But ever since then, experts have been increasingly viewed with suspicion. There's a growing awareness of a hidden agenda. The experts aren't there to tell us the truth. Rather, they're paid agents for an elite determined to control us.

This has resulted in calls for honest investigations and more openness. Politicians like Donald Trump have in turn caught onto this new trend. His rhetoric has changed from praising #science to questioning it. He has caught onto the new trend, and intends to ride it like a surfer rides a wave.

However, not everybody has caught onto the new trend, it seems. The governor of New Mexico has declared the 2nd amendment void for 30 days due to an increase in gun violence. But how exactly is she in a position to do so? Is she somehow elevated above the constitution of the United States?

I'm an anarchist, so I'm not saying that the constitution has any legitimate power, nor am I saying that politicians have any legitimate powers. The point isn't that the governor is acting as a tyrant, but rather that she's acting against the current trend. People want more openness and accountability, not less.

This makes the governor's actions interesting as a test case for the new trend. If she succeeds in acting out her tyrannical decree without much opposition, we may still have some time to go before we can say for sure that a new era has started. However, if this ends up as a political disaster for her, we have yet more support for our thesis.

Catching a big wave

By Bengt Nyman from Vaxholm, Sweden - IMG_8762, CC BY 2.0, Link

Megyn Kelly's Regrets

Megyn Kelly regrets having taken the vaccine, which means that she too has joined the great vaccine pivot. The trend that started in mid 2022 is accelerating.

Megyn Kelly used to be a staunch vaccine promoter, but this changed abruptly when she discovered that she's suffering from an auto-immune disease associated with the vaccine. She has now joined a growing chorus of people demanding to know the full story behind the vaccines.

The official narrative is being challenged. Experts are being viewed with suspicion. There's an increasing desire to think objectively about things rather than to trust blindly in the advice of authority figures.

What they will find if they dig all the way to the bottom of this, is that any institution shielded from litigation will attract individuals willing to exploit this legal loophole for profits. If these same individuals manage to make their services mandatory, there's no limit to how corrupt the institution will become.

If this becomes widely understood, vaccines will go the way of leeches. People will look back at the era of vaccines in much the same way we look back at 18th century obsession with leeches. Vaccine may still have their place, but they will no longer be universally recommended. They will be voluntary, and they will only be used in very specific cases.

Being an optimist by nature, I believe that this is where things are headed. The evil inherent in the current system, with its reliance on unaccountable experts and the use of coercion, has been exposed. We have entered a new era. We will know for sure that this is the case the day organizations like the WHO are dismantled, and institutions like mandatory vaccinations become outlawed.

Mask of the beast

Making a Stew

I'm a firm believer in the idea that nature is near perfect in the way it has arranged things. This includes the way we are put together as human beings. Our senses are perfectly in tune with what we need. Therefore, we don't have to consult experts in order to remedy our lifestyles. All we need in order to figure out what to eat and how to live is a capacity for introspection. We have to pay attention to what our bodies are telling us, and we have to respond proactively to its signals.

When it comes to foods, there are two things to pay attention to. It needs to taste good, and it must also feel good. Once we've eaten something, we shouldn't immediately feel like eating something else, nor should we feel heavy and bloated. Rather, there should be a pleasant calm emanating from our stomach, and this calm should last for several hours.

I first became aware of this in my thirties when I started noticing how a breakfast with bacon and eggs gave a more agreeable and long lasting sense of calm than cereals and milk. Proteins and fats felt better than cereals. But fibres are also important, so a perfect breakfast needs to have some fruit or cereals as well.

The typical hotel breakfast buffet is in other words a good example of a wholesome start to the day. If we stay away from the sweets, and pile up on the other things instead, we can go for hours with a pleasant calm.

This should come as no surprise to anyone, because our ancestors lived for millennia as hunter gatherers. Fruits, eggs, roots, vegetables, cereals, fish and meat were the foods that they ate. Our bodies are therefore tuned towards this kind of diet.

By this same logic, anything invented since the era of hunter gatherer society should be viewed with suspicion. Modern processed foods will not make us feel good. Even rice and white bread should be viewed with suspicion. They may taste good, but they're not all that satisfying. We're not made for diets loaded with this kind of foods.

To find out what kind of foods are likely to be the most healthy for us, we need only imagine the typical hunter gatherer camp site. Such sites would have a few fires that the campers would keep alive to avoid having to start new ones. There would be embers glowing, and food was prepared on top of this. The preferred way to prepare food would be at a low heat because that would require the least fuel.

Furthermore, the hunter gatherers would eat whatever they happened to have at hand. Having few containers to cook in, and not much heat, they would chop their ingredients into pieces and mix it all into a single container where everything would simmer for hours. In short, they would make a stew.

Stews must be among the oldest food types in existence, and by extension, they must also be among the healthiest things we can eat. This suspicion can be further supported by the fact that stews are tasty, and they give a long lasting sense of satisfaction.

Another positive aspect of stews is that they benefit from what's often thought of as inferior cuts of meat. A good stew often requires some bones, and the meat shouldn't be too lean. Fat and bones elevate the stew.

A good stew is typically made with a range of herbs and spices, all of which contain micro-nutrients that are absent from most processed foods. There's a whole range of minerals that our bodies require in tiny amounts, and these nutrients come mostly via herbs and spices.

The fact that a stew simmers for hours makes it perfect for softening vegetables that are too coarse for us to eat raw or lightly cooked. Kale and carrots do well in stews. All sorts of other ingredients do well too even if they are cooked into a mush. Such ingredients soak up flavours from the meat, and they infuse the meat with flavours.

The economic beauty of a stew is that it is not only cheap to make, it's also easy to make, and it's hard to get it completely wrong. All we need to do is to cut vegetables and meats into pieces, add salt, herbs and spices, and toss it in a pot with some cooking fat, then let it simmer for two hours or so, checking on it every now and again. Water, tomatoes or left over wine can be added for moisture if need be.

Sitting down to eat our creation, we can't help thinking of the things that went into the meal and how the various flavours mix. This makes the meal not only delicious, but also interesting. All sorts of questions arise: What other ingredient would have done well? Which herbs were most effective? What could have been improved?

With stews, as with most things in life, there's always room for improvements, and there's always something new to try.

Lunch with family

Feeling Trapped

My older brother in Norway is an extravagant version of myself. He too is someone who needs to feel free in order to prosper. He quit his job years before I did, and was in that way something of a trail blazer for myself. However, I went a few steps further than he did. Not only did I quit my job, I sold my house, divided my estate among my children, and left Norway for good.

I was feeling increasingly trapped by the system, and decided to get as far away from it as possible. My family found my sudden urge to get away odd, but it appears that the sense of unease that I felt back in 2016 is now starting to seep into a larger portion of the population. There's been something of an exodus out of Norway lately, and it doesn't appear to be confined only to the super-rich.

My cousin, who's wealthy but not exactly super-rich, has expressed an intention to sell all his shares in the family business. But that may not happen, because he has discovered to his dismay that the sale will trigger a 30% tax on whatever he can get for his shares.

Someone else in my family is also looking to get out of the company. I'm not sure who it may be, but the number of shares on offer indicate that it's someone from the younger generation.

I find all of this fascinating, so I called my brother to hear what he's making of it, and that's when he told me that he felt trapped.

People are discovering that there's no room for manoeuvring outside the path set up by the authorities. Any deviation from their vision of how people should live and invest is punished. There's a cage set up around us that we only discover once we try to do something contrary to their plan. The only option is to either stay within the confines of their plan, or get completely out of the system.

Once out of the system, we're not invited back in. I've discovered that I cannot any longer open a bank account or buy shares in Norway, and this problem extends to my eleven year old son. It appears that my plan to buy him a few shares in the family company has to be scrapped. We'll have to wait until he's eighteen so that he can set things up without having to mention his relationship to me.

However, there's no reason to feel sorry for either me or my brother. We're doing fine. He's enjoying a great deal of personal freedom, and so do I. Our everyday lives are spent in leisure. We both have enough gold to last us the rest of our lives. We're both free to do all the little things we like, and we're not confined by any boss. But we're not free to do much other than this.

With this in mind, my advice to my children in Norway will be to stay away from investments beyond a modest apartment and gold and silver coins. Now is not the time to be optimistic about the economy. It's a time to hunker down and do what my brother and I have done. If things deteriorate further, and there's a need to get out of Norway, my kids can sell their apartments and smuggle their coins out of the country. But I doubt that things will get that bad.

The most likely end station for this ongoing madness is a big parallel economy where things will be traded against gold and silver. My brother is in this respect perfectly positioned, as will my children be if they take my advice.

American Silver Eagle

Public Domain, Link

Note the Facts, Ignore the Analysis

It's starting to dawn on people that what poses as news these days is in reality propaganda, and this shift in perception is translating into a shift in how people read the news. As I pointed out back in May 2021, there's a way to read propaganda in which truth can be found.

The trick is to note the facts and connect the dots ourselves. The analysis and the conclusions drawn in the article is pure propaganda, and can be safely ignored. However, the actual facts cannot be completely hidden, and can often be found by simply looking for them in mainstream reporting.

Two recent examples of this illustrate my point.

1. The wine harvest in Portugal this year has been unusually good. This reveals the fact that the summer hasn't been as hot and dry as otherwise reported.
2. Tennis players are again dropping like flies during a US tournament. This is attributed to the virus, but most top notch players are fully vaccinated.

With more people now reading the news as the propaganda that it is, we no longer have to explain to people that the official narrative is crap. We can therefore use mainstream news when backing up our claims in the safe knowledge that few will take the journalist's analysis seriously. They will instead make a note of the facts and form their own conclusions as to what's going on.

Me in a fighting mood

Vaccine Hesitancy in Portugal

There's a saying in marketing that nothing destroys a brand name faster than an intense marketing campaign to sell a subpar product.

In the case of vaccines, the intense marketing campaign that we've witnessed over the last couple of years appears to have done exactly that.

There are fewer people lining up for their annual flu shot this year than in previous years. So few, in fact, that TV news here in Portugal saw it fit to make a story out of it. One expert after another was rolled out, all explaining how important it is to get the vaccine and the latest booster.

But this isn't going to install confidence in anybody, and mentioning the booster was most likely a mistake because few can any longer hear about it without feeling the cringe. Nor does the word vaccine have the same ring to it any longer. Decades of propaganda related to vaccines have been destroyed. The word vaccine is no longer associated with top notch heath care. Rather, it's increasingly viewed as quackery.

Making things all the more difficult for the vaccine pushers is that they cannot go out at this point and explain that there are different types of vaccines. They made a great effort to hide the fact that mRNA vaccines are experimental, and that it shouldn't be confused with traditional vaccines. Telling the truth now would only provoke more resentment.

Those who've seen or felt the bad effect of the experimental vaccine are now sceptical to all vaccines, and this will remain the case as long as the vaccine pushers don't own up to the fact that the mRNA vaccine was a disaster. But if they admit their mistake, they will be shunned, and it will still take years to regain the sort of trust in vaccines that people used to have.

So, it appears that the brand name "vaccine" has been permanently damaged.

Albert Bourla

By World Economic Forum - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vOjSYFsz4M, CC BY 3.0, Link

Parental Coaching

I'm a firm believer in the idea that there's a natural order to all things, and that the key to success is to live according to this order. I have also lived long enough to have noticed a change in the way I experience time, and that this has affected my thinking. I've gone from being an impatient doer to a patient planner. I've become distinctly strategic in my thinking.

This I believe to be the natural arch of our lives. We start out full of energy and lust for action, and we end up cautiously planning for the future. This is so universal that it is reflected in religion and in the structure of traditional society. The elders and heads of households are in charge of law and order. They are also the ones deciding on what the family or tribe as a whole should invest their resources into.

This arrangement is that of a medieval court, with the king and the queen in charge, and their princes and princesses acting out the advice handed down to them. In this, there is of course a great deal of liberty and autonomy given to the younger generation. However, when it comes to strategic positioning, they are as a rule best off following the advice of their parents.

Unfortunately, this natural order of things has been much corrupted over the last century. The progressive idea of our time has been to replace parental wisdom with expert advice, and a lot of people have taken the bate. Many have handed over control of their children to the state.

The result of this is that many miss out on the joys and rewards associated with parental coaching. The parents don't accumulate insights into how things work, because they have no intention on giving advice. The children don't listen to their parents because they have nothing valuable to say.

But not everybody has embraced the progressive idea. There are plenty of people still arranging their lives according to the traditional format, my wife and myself being two of them. We may have partially embraced the progressive idea in the past, but we have by now thoroughly rejected it. We are the heads of our household, and we see ourselves as our children's primary coaches.

This approach is panning out in an interesting and exciting way for my stepdaughter who my wife has given advice related to her education and career planning. My wife's daughter has studied to become an actress, and she has had some acting jobs in the years since her graduation. But the jobs are infrequent and unreliable, so my wife suggested that she take a course to become an interpreter so that she can follow two parallel career paths.

This turned out to be good advice. My stepdaughter had no trouble doing the occasional acting job while studying at the same time. Instead of going for a low paying job at the side, my stepdaughter acquired a valuable skill for which there is a lot of demand.

This type of coaching could only have come from someone who knows my stepdaughter well, because interpreter skills are not a given. An "expert" career adviser would most likely have suggested something different, like serving at tables.

It would also have been difficult to get this done if it wasn't for the relatively good economy of our household. If it wasn't for my wife's insights into the various talents of her daughter, and the relative strength of our combined finances, my stepdaughter wouldn't have done as well as she did. She might also have been too stressed and tired to get the acting job that she recently managed to find.

The relative safety and calm of our household has helped my stepdaughter get a part in a film project that holds some promise of success. The cast includes at least one famous name, so we're talking about a serious project, and my stepdaughter has been asked to set off several days for the job, so her part cannot be all that minor.

This might mean that my stepdaughter will soon make enough money to live on her own, and save some money for herself. That will in turn open up for more coaching. My wife and I will give advice on how to manage her savings, and what to look for in a flat. My stepdaughter can in this way focus her energy on her career in the safe knowledge that she's acting within the framework of a strategic plan.

Scouting for opportunities