When Idiots Take Over

I'm not a great fan of Ayn Rand. Her naïve belief in the heroic entrepreneur led to some pretty mediocre literature, void of the subtleties and nuances that characterizes real life. However, she was right about one thing. When things start to fall apart at the systemic level, idiots take over. This is well illustrated in Rand's novel, Atlas Shrugged, where at one point a competent train operator is asked to perform an impossible task. When he refuses to do what he's told to do, an incompetent and useless subordinate steps up to the challenge. He promises to do what the competent holds as impossible. He takes charge of the operations. He does what he's told to do, and the result is of course a complete disaster.

I was reminded of this the other day when I came across this article about the recent cold spell in Germany. Unsurprising to anyone, winters in Germany can get both cold and snowy, and this has a tendency to coincide with little to no wind. This is not a new insight. It has been known for millennia. However, the green lobby in Germany has nevertheless pushed through an agenda of renewable energy based on wind and solar power.

The only reason this winter hasn't been a disaster in Germany is the fact that a few competent individuals are still at large. They have ensured that there are enough coal-fired power stations in Germany to weather the coldest days of winter. The idiots are not yet in full control. But this may well change. If Ayn Rand is right in her assessment of the underlying mechanisms involved, there may soon be a purge against the last vestige of resistance. Coal and nuclear power will be closed down for good. Only imported electricity will then be available to Germans in coming winters. Electricity will be both expensive and unreliable, possible to the point of blackouts.

Further evidence of idiots rising to the top can be seen in other, less dramatic ways. My wife bought a new printer a few weeks ago. It's supposedly very smart, but it's been a headache from the start. It's by no means an improvement on the one we used to have, even though it's of the same brand.

My son got a Lego set for his birthday two months ago. It required us to download an app on a smart phone. Without it, we didn't even have instructions to assemble the thing. But the app was too big for his tablet. If it wasn't for the fact that my son was smart enough to look up instructions on YouTube, the thing would still be in its box. Lego used to be all about assembly of independent modules. No part was directly tied to any other part. But now, with idiots in charge, Lego requires us to have all sorts of accessories before we can play with their stuff. It's as if Lego has forgotten what it's all about.

On a more terrifying note, we can mention the Boeing Max debacle where common sense was pushed aside and silenced in favour of smart apps and the like. As we all know, it didn't end well. Here too, people were asked to do the impossible. The competent were pushed aside, and idiots rose to take control.

This is the basic mechanism of what we're seeing. But it's nothing new. All organizations have a tendency towards this kind of decay. It has always been like this. However, the scale of the current insanity seems to be greater than it used to be, and the reason for this may be found in the way the entire economy is currently manipulated by central banks.

Easy credit allows for bullshit jobs to persist for longer than they would otherwise exist. These bullshit jobs generate in turn all sorts of needless overhead for everyone else. Competent people resent this and leave. Easy credit also has the effect of detaching economic planning from the reality of real world constraints. It's possible to make a profit by being clever rather than competent. This too is something that competent people resent. But management loves it, so they promote the clever at the expense of the competent, and pretty soon we're in the situation we're currently in. Products and services deteriorate at an alarming pace, spurred on by a combination of political correct thinking and clever trickery. All enabled through easy credit.

Coal-fired power station

By Bodoklecksel - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

The Mask of the Beast - A True Story

I've spent quite some time on the subject of mask wearing, and how to protest it. I've suggested polite ways to protest, and more aggressive ways. But most importantly, I've recommended that everyone find a style that fits their particular situation and personality. Individual creativity has the benefit of surprise. Unexpected behaviour makes a far greater impression on people than the predictable.

I live in Portugal where people have a tendency to take it upon themselves to police their neighbours. There's a bit of shouting back and forth every now and again. It's the Mediterranean way. Furthermore, there's a lack of real policing when it comes to non-criminal behaviour. The police doesn't slam peaceful citizens with a fine out of the blue for violation of rules. That might happen in Spain, but it doesn't happen in Portugal. The enforcement of mask wearing rules is largely dependent on a combination of aggressive propaganda and hobby fascists.

While it's theoretically possible that the police fines a non-compliant citizen for not wearing a mask, the far more likely scenario is a random person shouting at us, usually from out of the window of a car. I've therefore decided to keep my mask tucked under my chin when out walking. If the police sees me, they might point a finger at me, and I'll comply. But they're highly unlikely to fine me. I don't really risk anything when protesting this way, which explains why this is fairly common. While some 5% of people refuse to wear their mask at all when outside, some 15% of people wear their mask under their chin like I do. However, I do it slightly different from others. My mask is inscribed with the number 666.

Here again, cultural and personal considerations come into effect, which means that others may want to do something different. The word SHEEP may be used instead of 666 for a similar and somewhat less aggressive effect in the Anglo-Saxon world. However, that wouldn't work very well in Portugal where verbal aggressiveness is more accepted.

The expected exchange between a non-compliant mask wearer and a hobby fascist here in Portugal is one in which the fascist stops his car and shouts at the non-compliant passer by. "Wear your mask!" The non-compliant replies "F*ck off!" And that's pretty much it. However, in the three cases where I've been shouted at in this way over the past four months, I've done something different and therefore unexpected. I've stopped dead in my tracks, turned slowly towards the fascist without saying a word, and slowly lifted my masks over my mouth and nose, revealing the number 666. Then, I've made the thumbs up sign.

The reaction has been the same every time. The baffled fascist has also made the thumbs up sign, which is funny because the number 666 is such a strong symbol of doom in the Catholic world that it's borderline taboo. Catholics have no lack of swear words. But they never mention the devil or any of his associated symbols. That would be beyond swearing. It would be to invite misery into their lives.

My mask doesn't fit into the general culture of the Portuguese. It's creepy in a cold and damp kind of way. It reeks of death and doom, and it completely baffles people to see it. Especially when it appears as a result of their own calling. There's all sorts of vaguely defined connections, none of them good. But I'm not swearing at them. I'm not calling them names. I'm simply following their instructions. And lo and behold, the symbol of Satan came forth. Yet they do the thumbs up in response to my thumbs up. Their bewilderment is written all over their faces.

My third and most successful stunt happened today. Not only did I get the thumbs up, I got to elevate the stunt to the next level. I was wearing a six-pence cap and sun glasses, so when I pulled up my mask in response to the fascist's demand, he had before him something not quite human. My entire face was nothing but a blank stare with the number 666 written across it. Clearly bewildered by the transformation, the man stared at his creation, and I used the opportunity to draw closer to him. He had after all called on my attention. That's something people normally do when looking for help, and I realized then that I could go further in my act.

The idea was to come all the way up to his window and say something like, "good morning, how may I help you?" But the man started babbling before I got to say anything. He asked for the direction to Porto. I said "it's there", with a finger pointing it out, and off he went at considerable speed. Much to my delight.

The mask of the beast

Bitcoin Going Up Will not Keep Gold and Silver Down

Bitcoin is making ever higher highs despite being as useless as ever. There's nothing Bitcoin can be used for outside of speculation. It cannot even compete with SWIFT for international transactions. The volatility is simply too great. Even a short term contract like a transaction involves significant currency risk when done in Bitcoin, and long term contracts are impossible. No-one knows what the price may be tomorrow, let alone a year from now.

None of this is true for gold and silver because gold and silver have physical properties that put them into the general hierarchy of things. There's a limit to how high or low the price of gold and silver can go relative to other commodities such as eggs and milk. Gold and silver cannot for this reason go to the moon. But they cannot go to zero either. This is not the case for Bitcoin which can have any price from zero to infinity, depending on the general mood of the speculators involved.

What is lost on the speculator during times of euphoria is the down side risk of speculative positions. Given the real world limitations on gold and silver, Bitcoin comes across as superior precisely because it is untethered by real world constraints. It's only when prices go down that speculators realize that an anchor in reality would be a good thing. But speculators are currently blind to the fact that Bitcoin can go to zero. They are flocking to it.

Spurred on by people like Musk, who would hate to see the price of silver take off in a big way, speculators go for Bitcoin rather than real world alternatives. Musk has even secured a big stake in Bitcoin for himself to illustrate that he's serious about his commitment. He's creating for his followers an illusion of solidity, ushering them into the unreal world of crypto, thereby avoiding a run on silver. Or so he thinks. But Musk is forgetting something important about money. Whenever someone buys something like Bitcoin, someone else is selling, and that someone else is unlikely to sit on cash for long before buying something else.

Cash circulates from one investment to another. It's never "put into" anything. Cash is always on the side-line, moving from one hand to another. What happens next in the alternative currency space is therefore wholly dependent on what Bitcoin sellers do with the cash received from people like Musk.

Many of those selling into the current speculative run on Bitcoin are sceptical to cash. They understand the inherent perils of fiat money systems. That's what attracted these people to Bitcoin in the first place. They wanted to escape central bank lunacy. With central bankers going full retard everywhere, they are not going to sit on their cash for long. Once they get their mansions and yachts, they will buy gold and silver.

Musk may have delayed the run on silver for now, but this is far from over. Rampant money printing by central bankers everywhere will send prices of all things higher. The liquidity is like a tsunami. It lifts all boats. Some are lifted before others, but every boat will eventually be pushed up. There's no way of avoiding this except through liquidity withdrawal from central banks. But it's too late for that now.

We're heading for widespread destruction of the monetary system. When that happens, speculative sentiments will flip from greed to fear. Bitcoin will go to zero together with Tesla shares and other speculative assets. Only that which is anchored in reality will be left standing. Everything else will be swept away by the tsunami.

Sovereign

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

The 5th Empire - Build Back Better

Things are rapidly deteriorating. All around us we see signs of madness and decay, and it's clear that no-one is coming to our rescue. We're left to sort things out ourselves.

Going forward, we're likely to see things deteriorate even further, to the point where things can get desperate. Those who aren't properly prepared by then are likely to suffer greatly. However, it's not immediately clear what constitutes proper preparedness, and without the correct view of this, we're likely to fail in our efforts to sail through the storm without too many losses. First step towards a better future is therefore to understand the problem at hand, which is the lack of community spirit in our everyday lives.

We are so focused on issues beyond our control that we've lost the notion of community, and in this lies great danger. Without community, we cannot trust anyone, we cannot reliably trade and we cannot reliably find employment. Everything becomes dependent on politicians and the elite, and they have little concern about individuals and communities, especially those remote from their lair. We must therefore build our own networks, and this must be done with community in mind.

The survivalist approach, with bunkers and arms is not going to work. Isolation is not the solution. Our current tribulations may well last for decades. The decay may not even be all that violent. Outside some big city hot spots, things are more likely to be marked by a slow and depressing decay than riots and violence. The way to survive such decay is through community rather than isolation.

What is required is not some grand break from the present system, but a refashioning of the way we do things. We need to focus on community rather than politics, and we need to do this through all channels. This is the non-binary approach. We neither cut our ties completely with the current system nor tie ourselves closely to it. We unwind our unhealthy relations in an orderly manner while building on what we see as benefiting our circle of friends, family and neighbours.

What makes this approach new and novel is our ability to communicate with individuals all over the world. This means that I don't have to be physically close to someone in order to benefit from their services. I have family all over the world. Many of whom I can help in some mutually benefiting way. Local lending rules makes it possible for me to access credit in ways that are impossible for family members in Norway. I can therefore help people in Norway get access to credit for the purchase of a house in exchange for security in gold coins that they have saved for this purpose. One of my children in Norway can hold this security until the loan is paid back.

All sorts of mutually benefiting exchanges are possible provided we stay on friendly terms. The same goes for local community, as outlined in my book. I make a point of being on friendly terms with all my neighbours. We buy stuff in local stores. We talk, and we gossip. This is how communities work. There's nothing radical in this. It's pleasant and informal, requiring no commitments from anyone.

Locally acquired art and furniture

Memory in Nature

Memory is fundamental to nature. Everything we see around us is an image of the past. Everything that happens in the present is the result of something that happened in the past. This is due to the limit that the speed of light puts on things. With the exception of quantum entanglement, there's no way to communicate information faster than the speed of light. The electric force, gravity and magnetism are all limited by this factor.

This means that Earth is not orbiting around the Sun where it is in the present, but where it was 8 minutes and 20 seconds ago. We also see the Sun where it was at that time so there's no discrepancy between what we see and what we calculate. There's no mismatch between optical observation and gravitational position. However, it's all in the past by 8 minutes and 20 seconds. In a very real sense, we can say that Earth orbits a memory of our Sun and not its present position.

Sun

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

A more direct type of memory is the energy states of electrons bouncing around the atomic nucleus. An exited electron is a memory of a past event, namely the impact of an energizing particle, such as a photon. The absorption of energy is a type of memory, and the release of energy in the form of light is equivalent to forgetting. Visible light is in other words produced by a process in which electrons first remember and then forget.

More permanent memories are often stored in structures. Everything organic contain records of past events. Tree rings are perfect examples of this. They can be used to reconstruct climate events many centuries back in time. Each tree ring corresponds to a year. They tell us how warm and humid it was at a given time in the place where the tree grew. Trace chemicals can also tell us about forest fires and volcanic eruptions. Everything organic is in this way a memory.

Tree rings

By Arpingstone - Own work, Public Domain, Link

On a more mysterious note, we have the strange ability of light to remember at what angle it entered a piece of glass. Contrary to popular belief, light does not diffract on entry into a prism. It refracts, but it doesn't split into multiple colours before on exit. This is such a mystery that many skip the issue all together when discussing physics. However, the issue can be resolved if we assume the existence of pilot waves. Such waves would be deformed on entry into a prism, functioning in this way as a memory of what happened. What happens at the exit can thus become a function of what happened on entry.

Diffraction

By D-Kuru - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0 at, Link

Equally mysterious, but ignored pretty much entirely by everyone is the fact that moving objects know that they are moving, and in which direction they are moving. We know this to be true because a moving object will change its energy in response to an impulse. A steel ball moving in a given direction will know that it must lose energy when hit against its direction of motion, while it must gain energy when hit along its direction of motion. However, a steel ball is in a state of rest when moving freely. It doesn't know anything about its motion. How then does it know why it must gain or lose energy? This too is a mystery, and this too can be explained in terms of pilot waves.

Newton's cradle

By DemonDeLuxe (Dominique Toussaint)

Image:Newtons cradle animation book.gif, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Memory is truly everywhere. Sometimes, it's easy to spot, like tree rings. Other times, it's a mystery. But for a work of physics to be complete, it must all be explained.

Numerals, Words and Bitcoin

I came across something odd yesterday while preparing to teach my son about Roman numerals. I wanted to add some peripheral info to the lesson to make it more interesting. One thing I wanted to mention was the convention of brackets used to denote big numbers. E.g. 5 = V, 5 thousand = (V) and 5 million = ((V)). My son will never be asked about this, but it's a cool bit of extra information that illustrates that the Romans were perfectly capable of expressing large numbers. But how about fractions? I wanted to add that too, so I went online to see what I could find, because I've never learned about this myself.

That's when I stumbled upon something unexpected. The Romans didn't express fractions in general terms. Such numbers were always linked to something in the real world, like money or angles. If a fraction wasn't used, it didn't exist. Their smaller denomination coins were divided into 12, so money could be expressed in fractions of 12, but not in fractions of 10. The idea of 1/10 had no meaning in the world of money. Similarly for angles. They were given names, like the right angle. They were fractions of a circle. Angles had to add up to 360 for a full circle. For smaller measures, they had arch minutes and seconds that had to add up to 60. To talk of one tenth of a degree would have been considered eccentric and nonsensical.

Our habit of talking of fractions as something detached from anything real has come about after the Romans, and it struck me that this coincides with our habit of using words with little to no descriptive meaning. For instance, the word neighbour used to literally mean person-who-lives-near. This type of direct link between abstractions and the real world is fading. There's something going on in the general psyche of society in which abstractions are taking on a life of their own. Things have meaning, even when detached from the physical world.

This split between the real world and our abstractions has recently accelerated further. Not only can abstractions exist in a vacuum void of any link to the real world. Abstractions can have value in and of themselves. A whole generation of people see nothing strange in paying hard earned money for Bitcoin. Many will gladly spend hours of labour to attain a fraction of a number. This fraction can never be held in our hand. It has no physical properties. It cannot be used to make anything. Yet it commands a price.

It remains to be seen if this latest development will be sustained into the future, but value has for now taken on its own life in the sphere of abstractions. It's also clear that this would have been seen as extremely strange by the Romans. The Romans would never have accepted the idea that Bitcoin has value. They would also have rejected the idea of unbacked paper money. At most, they would have accepted a credit note issued by a reputable citizen and backed by something physical. But even that would have traded below par with gold or silver.

What this suggests to me is that we're on a path away from reality, and if we use God as a synonym for nature, we can see where this might be headed. There's the story of Babel that tells us that artificial constructs of society-wide proportions have a tendency to fall apart, and I very much sense that this is what's going on right now. We are drifting away from reality. Like Icarus, we're flying too close to the sun. There will be a fall and a return to reality.

MDCXXX

By Fritzbruno - Own work, Public Domain, Link

Tactical Indicators

Pigs have gotten slaughtered in the silver market this week, but that doesn't mean that the greater battle has been lost. The pigs have merely played out their role as useful idiots so that bigger guns can enter the stage. With the landmines cleared out of the way, the generals can chose to leave the battle scene or go for another round of attack. It all depends on technical indicators that all seem to forebode another round of attacks fairly soon.

First, there is the issue of physical silver, which seems to be in short supply. Many dealers are out of stock, and what little silver there is trades at enormous premiums to spot. If this situation persists, we can assume the shortage to be real and not merely a function of the sudden surge of pigs willing to buy silver at almost any price.

Turning to Google trends, we see that the interest in silver has exploded 10 times since a week ago, making it for the first time ever more queried than Tesla, Bitcoin and gold. This indicates a substantial interest in silver. It's not just the pigs. Other people are interested in silver as well, which suggests to us that physical silver may remain hard to find for some time going forward.

Then there's the odd disconnect between future prices of silver, which are going down, and physical prices of silver, which remain high. This indicate a split between the official price of silver and its real price, reminiscent of Soviet practices where the official price of cabbages had little to no bearing on the real price of cabbages. If people start catching on to this meme, faith in the futures market may break down completely.

From a tactical viewpoint, another attack on silver seems likely due to the apparent weakness in the futures market and strength in the physical market. However, silver is not where I'm positioned, and I have no plans to enter this market at the moment. My strategy limits me to gold, real-estate and index funds. I'm not going to make a hasty decision just to get a piece of the action.

Strategies should not be altered in the heat of the moment but as a calculated deviation due to insights of substance. I may for instance choose to create my own index fund from individual shares rather than owning shares through a bank created index. I may also choose to own silver coins for practical purposes so that I can pay for goods and services in the parallel economy if society goes cashless. But none of this should impact my current position. My metal of choice is gold, not silver. However, gold and silver are related, so the current battle in silver is likely to spill over into gold. It's worth keeping an eye on the action, and make some tentative stipulations as to what we're likely to see going forward.

If physical silver remains hard to get, gold coins become the natural alternative, so we can keep an eye on gold vendors to see what they have in stock and what prices coins go for. I've been tracking a bank owned vendor here in Portugal, and I've noticed a sustained drop in available coins. This started about three years back, when the supply of gold wafers dried up together with one ounce coins. There's currently only gold sovereigns being traded, all at elevated prices, so it appears that the shortage in the silver market also exists in the gold market.

All of this will be interesting to follow. However, my strategy does not require me to do anything before the gold/Dow ratio falls below 5, so I'm not likely to have to do any trading anytime soon. There's at least a year or two left before we start approaching my target price.

American Silver Eagle

Public Domain, Link