Interest Rates as Drivers of Change

It looks increasingly likely that 2022 will go down in history as the year when the progressive era came to an end. We've seen peak Pride, peak save the planet, peak virus hysteria, peak trust in experts. From now on, all of this will be rolled back.

It also looks like 2022 was the year the bond bull market came to an end. Interest rates, which have fallen steadily since 1981 are once again headed upwards.

This is no coincidence. Rather, the two phenomena are closely related. Low interest rates are a sign of trust in the system. Low interest rates are also necessary in order to finance expert driven social experiments. Sustainable energy, lockdowns and global vaccination campaigns all required cheap credit.

Once trust in the system unravel, interest rates move up and expert driven projects become impossible to sustain. This exposes the impotence of experts which in turn leads to even higher interest rates.

Bond markets move in mega cycles that last for decades, and this new bear market is likely to be no different. Interest rates will continue to rise until a new system has been erected. The progressive era must be fully flushed out, and a new system must be embraced by a majority of people. Only then will interest rates once again go lower.

Cityscape

Economic Calculations in Times of War

It takes a lot of  money to wage a war, so much in fact that taxation alone is rarely enough to fund them. That's why almost all wars are financed through monetary inflation. Instead of taxing us directly, we're taxed by inflation. The purchasing power of our money is taken away through an expansion of the money supply. The extra money is used to finance the war at our expense.

Monetary inflation is especially effective when it's done as a sudden shift from sound money, because people don't immediately realize what's going on. This gives the state an advantage in that it can acquire resources at advantageous prices. It's only later that the population at large catches onto the scam. This causes a delay between the money printing and the price inflation caused by money printing.

World War I is an example of a war financed through inflation, where the states involved went from sound money to inflated money. The transition happened around 1913, but it wasn't before 1920 that we started to see run away price inflation, and hyperinflation hit Germany in 1923, almost a decade after the war started, and half a decade after the war had ended.

This meant that the warring states could make economic calculations based on pre-war prices throughout the war. No special attention needed to be given to the effect of monetary inflation because that effect only hit after the war was over. However, had price inflation already been a problem at the start of the war, economic planning would have been a lot harder.

Now that the world is once again at a war footing, we're already on inflation money, and price inflation is already a thing. This means that any further expansion of the money supply is likely to cause higher prices almost immediately. The resources required by the state in order to wage war will become very expensive. They may even become unavailable.

As it turns out, western states do not in fact possess the resources required to wage and win wars. The West is already low on ammunition, and the factories required to replace them aren't nearly as productive as they need to be. A lot of resources will be required to put this right. The West must build factories, man the factories with skilled labour, and feed the factories with raw materials. But none of this is available. This is because the real savings of the West are insufficient to wage a war.

Real saving are the things of value that back up the financial system. Factories are real savings. So are farms, mines, warehouses, ships and trucks. Money is merely a way to represent this. But this representation is only valid if the money is sound. If the money is inflated into existence, the added wealth is only apparent. Real savings don't change because someone prints a lot of new dollar bills.

It appears then that the western elite has made a blunder. They have assumed that inflated money can get them just as much resources as sound money would, and that they are in a position to wage and win wars everywhere due to their ability to print limitless money. But they have failed to incorporate real savings into their calculations, and this is only now starting to dawn on the people in charge of the war machinery.

Mark Esper with Jens Stoltenberg

By U.S. Secretary of Defense - 200212-D-AP390-6107, CC BY 2.0, Link

Noam Chomsky's Error

Noam Chomsky's gigantic error during the virus scare is a bit of a puzzle. How could a man who've spent a lifetime describing and identifying ways in which the elite manipulate us into fallacious thinking fall for the most blatant example of what he had been warning against? At the very moment Chomsky needed his clear thinking the most, he failed to apply it. Instead, he came out very much on the wrong side of history.

The key to this mystery can be found in studying his philosophy more carefully, because it reveals that he's a progressive. He believes in experts, and he believes that more government rather than less government is the solution to most problems in the world. Chomsky is a man of the progressive era, and his ideas are decidedly progressive in nature.

This means that Chomsky values expert opinion above liberty, and he values big government over individual liberty. Faced with experts that assured him that we were facing an existential threat, he promptly went along with their advice. Seeing himself as an expert in his own field, he gladly parroted advice from other experts. In the great council of experts that he imagined himself a part of, he came out in support of what other experts were talking about.

This is where another weakness in Chomsky's thinking became evident. The man holds in high regard the language of experts, and he's positively disdainful of people who don't use sophisticated language. He's also disdainful of anyone holding opinions about subjects that are outside their particular field of expertise. If you're no expert on what you're talking about, you should shut up and simply take orders.

The progressive idea is that experts should rule, and it follows from this that only people who are experts on topics under discussion can hold meaningful opinions. But this negates much of  Chomsky's own thinking which has to do with the way the elite manipulates us into erroneous thinking, because experts are themselves part of the elite.

The fact that Chomsky fails to see how his analysis negates the very premise of his progressive thinking should have been a red flag from the start. I was never very impressed by the man because of his lofty view of himself and his endless belief in experts and big government. However, it wasn't until Chomsky disgraced himself during the virus scare that I realized that all this aloofness and pandering to experts and government was in fact an error that goes contrary to his own analysis.

The only logical conclusion we can draw from Chomsky's societal observations is to embrace liberty. More experts and more government is not the way to go, and the virus scare will for ever remind us of this, because every expert and every government agency got the entire thing wrong every step of the way.

The Emperor's New Clothes

By Vilhelm Pedersen (1820 - 1859) - English Wikipedia (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/47/Emperor_Clothes_01.jpg ), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4038625

Desperate Weather Reporting

It's been raining hard in Portugal the last few days. That's how it always is this time of year, but the news channels are trying to make it into some kind of catastrophe. The local CNN franchise has had about equal reporting on the situation in the Middle East and the rain we've been having, as if the two are about equally Earth shattering.

Making this all the more pathetic, CNN sent reporters out into the streets to report on the weather. But there wasn't any flooding of note anywhere to be seen, so the camera man zoomed in on a puddle next to the reporter instead.

Greta Thunberg

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

Natural Cycles

The political elite likes to think of their subjects as robots. This is evident from how they structure society. Even long after the factory line was a common work destination for many of us, schools still operate according to this formula, bosses require our physical presence at the office, and we're only given a few days off at predetermined times of the year.

None of this is natural. Most of us are typically more inclined to focus on labour during fall and spring than we are during summer and winter. Deep down, we follow an agrarian cycle. Spring is for setting things up for summer. Fall is for getting in the harvest. Winter is for rest and indoor activities, and summer if for being out and about.

One thing I noticed about life in Norway when I lived there was the almost unbearable pain of having to force myself out into the cold and dark of winter in order to go to school and work. Staying chained to a desk during summer was equally painful.

When I ended up unemployed for about a year, all that anguish disappeared, and I just knew I had to find a way out of the system. That was around 2004. By 2011, I made my decision to end my professional career. By 2017, I was fully out of the system. Today, I thank my lucky star for having managed to get out of the system, and I'm determined to help my children achieve the same level of autonomy.

My wife is similarly determined to take control of her life, so it was no surprise to me that she kept our son home from school today. She didn't feel like sending him away in the rain. We're ignoring the system as much as we can. The experts can say what they please. We do things our way, and we're not alone. The progressive era has come to an end. People are tired of having to ask for permission.

Fireside education

By Transferred from en.wikibooks to Commons by Adrignola using CommonsHelper. Originally uploaded to en:Wikipedia in November 2006 (log) by Darentig (talk)., Public Domain, Link

Geopolitics is More Like Poker than Chess

Geopolitics is sometimes compared to Chess. However, this is not a good comparison because Chess involves only two players, everything is visible to both sides, and there's no bluffing. None of this is true for geopolitics.

To make a reasonable game comparison for geopolitics, we must find a game that involves a lot of unknowns, and an arbitrary number of players must be able to play the game. Poker comes to mind. But this too is lacking essential features of geopolitics. For one, the players are making themselves known before the game commences, and the type of cards that are used in the game are also known and understood. No new cards are invented along the way.

However, as a game comparison, I would still call it Poker. It's certainly a better comparison than Chess.

Mark Esper with Jens Stoltenberg

By U.S. Secretary of Defense - 200212-D-AP390-6107, CC BY 2.0, Link

A Possible Role for Egypt

With tensions running high over Gaza, things can easily run out of control. But there are ways out of the impasses. One being a scenario in which Egypt plays a key role.

What is often forgotten is that Hamas is a faction of the Muslim Brotherhood which held power in Egypt for a brief period during the Arab spring some ten years ago, so the current government of Egypt is no friend of Hamas. They too would like the organization wiped out.

But unlike Israel, which can be accused of ethnic cleansing, Egypt cannot be accused of such intent if it moves into Gaza, because Palestinians are fellow Muslims. Many of them came originally from Egypt.

Israel and Egypt are allies as far as Hamas is concerned, and a simple solution to the current situation would be for the two to agree on a new role for the Gaza strip. Israel may be willing to give political control over Gaza to Egypt in return for a guarantee that it will for ever remain a demilitarized zone.

With Egypt in control of Gaza, Hamas will be rounded up and neutralized. Egypt and Israel end up victorious over the terrorist organization, and peace is restored.

Liberty

Like Clockwork

The transition from summer to autumn in northern Portugal follows a remarkably predictable pattern. It's like a switch where the weather goes from sunny and dry to grey and rainy. The transition is usually from one day to another, as was the case this year, and it happens mid October, give or take a few days.

What follows is three months with a lot of rain. This is followed by a gradual decrease in rain until summer comes back in June.

There are of course variations and exceptions to this. Some five years ago, we saw the transition from summer to autumn happen on November 2. That was so late and unusual that it got a lot of attention from experts and laymen alike. Everybody could agree that this was strange.

This year, we had the summer weather end with a heat wave. That too is unusual. But the transition to autumn weather came right on time. It's almost as if the heat wave was thrown into our last summer days as a compensation for an otherwise cool summer.

Sun

By DracoLumina17 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

The 5th Empire - Choosing Sides

So, the attack into Israel wasn't some sort of military operation, as initially reported. It was a massacre perpetrated by the lowest low-life scum imaginable. From what we now know, it's easy to denounce Hamas for the terrorist organization that it is. To defend their actions in any way would betray moral deficiency. There simply isn't any way to describe the deliberate targeting of civilians as anything other than pure evil, especially when children and babies are among the victims. You can't say that such actions are somehow understandable in the light of decades of oppression. No matter how oppressed a person is, killing babies isn't a reasonable response.

However, there's mounting evidence that the Israeli state knew of the attack before it happened. It's also easy to see how the attack was convenient for a number of actors. It's no secret that Israeli military would like to see the Gaza settlement substantially reduced, and pushed farther away from the Israeli border. Many Israeli would like to see a pre-emptive strike against Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran. They would also like to see any supporters of their opponents silenced.

A number of strategic goals have already been achieved by Israel, and hard-line politicians are seeing mounting support both at home in Israel and abroad. Many are falling for the false alternative of having to choose to support either Hamas or Israel. But the truth is that we don't have to choose any of the two. We can choose to be on the side of the civilians who wish nothing more than to be left alone.

This is the beauty of the anarchist perspective. We see all state actors as evil, including wannabe state actors with their rebel flags and causes.

Explaining my position

Israel's 9/11 moment

Politicians and talking heads have been quick to call Hamas' latest attack on Israel a 9/11 moment. Implied in this is that Israel will be greatly transformed by the event. Liberties will be lost, wars will be fought, and the elite will grab even more power than they already have. There will also be all sorts of conspiracy theories. Is it really plausible that an attack of such a magnitude could go completely under the radar of the CIA and Mossad?

We'll be asked to choose sides, and the sides are pre-selected as Israel vs. Hamas. Never are we to suggest that there may be ordinary people on one side and a psychopathic elite on the other side. We are not to question the official narrative. However, I got a feeling that this trick, which has worked so well in the past, is no longer as effective as it used to be. It's just too obvious that the attack is of great benefit to all the worst people imaginable.

Mossad will get more funding. Israel's army can act with more force than has been tolerated in the past. War hawks in Israel and the US may finally have their war with Iran. The war in Ukraine can be quietly forgotten as our attention is drawn to a different hot spot.

The mask of the beast

Contagious Optimism

I've just read an article in ZeroHedge outlining the various draconian measures we can expect to see from the globalist elite as they push ahead with their great reset. The article contains eleven assumptions related to this presumed plan, all of them likely true in my view. However, what struck me as interesting wasn't the article itself, but the comments. While everybody agreed with the premises laid out in the article, hardly anyone agreed with the overall gloom and doom. Just about everyone was an optimist.

All sorts of things were pointed out. One being the way internet has worked to our advantage. The network effect has kicked in. Censorship backfired. Truth prevailed, and more and more people are waking up to the reality of it all: An unsavoury group of misfits is trying to install a dystopian world order with themselves as our rulers.

There's also a general agreement that 2022 was a turning point. That's when we had peak booster hysteria, peak Pride, peak global warming, peak anti-Russia, etcetera. The reset that the elite has spent decades working on is falling apart. But their reaction so far has been to double down in their efforts, which at this point will only fuel the current awakening.

Liberty