Kort tråd om USAID-skandalen og hvorfor den er relevant for Norge

Trump og Musk ruller nå opp en skandale som handler om USAID, en del av den amerikanske regjeringen.

Det er panikk blant de som har nytt godt av pengene som USAID har slushet rundt med, og ansatte i organisasjonen har til og med fysisk prøvd å forhindre etterforskningen.

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x.com/AutismCapital/… USAID har kanalisert penger til media og frivillige organisasjoner som ledd i omfattende politisk påvirkningsarbeid, både i USA og ellers i verden.

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https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1887164770811355449?t=3N59xar72V8sM-qVkQ_czA&s=19

Chronic distrust as public capital

(A thread)

Trust vs naivety

Scandinavia and in particular Norway is known as having a people that place a lot of trust in each other.

Many have argued that this is a valuable social capital.

Today I call it a liability.

The reason is that our trust has been exploited and that we were too naive to see it.

Few ask where the trust comes from and to whom trust has been awarded.

Trust doesn’t appear by itself and it’s not something you are entitled to.

On the contrary, trust is something you have to earn and which you are bound to lose if you do the wrong thing.

It has been suggested that our harsh Nordic climate forced us to trust each other as this was necessary in order to make us cooperate closely so that we could survive.

This is in my opinion a crude and unsatisfactory explanation.

We know for sure that our tradition of having a high degree of trust in each other predates the formation of the state.

And when we study history we see that the people, for good reason, had a fundamental distrust in individuals with power.

I’ve many times written about my ancestors in Trøndelag, the middle part of Norway, who had a legal obligation to kill any king who placed himself above the law.
It was general conscription, in service of the people, against the state.

This is the perfect example of distrusting the politicians as a matter of principle.

The Trønders probably knew that they would lose their freedom if they gave an ambitious king as much as an inch.

Instead these «resistance provisions,» as they were called, meant that the people built trust in each other, because those who abstained from hunting down the tyrant king would lose their friends and with that their security too.

“Join the fight against the state and we trust you. Be a free rider and we distrust you and despise you.”

This seems to me to be a better explanation of how trust became such an important part of our social fabric.

I don’t know who came up with the moronic idea that we ought to trust institutions such as the state or individuals such as politicians.

Those who succeeded with sowing the seeds of this way of thinking in my culture must have had a hell of a marketing budget.

But the reality seems to be that someone where able to pull off this incredible feat – to make people start distrusting each other and instead worshiping the state. A Jens worth listening to

One of the most prominent authors we’ve had in Norway, Jens Bjørnebo (1920 -1976), once said in a TV interview that:

“Power should be accompanied by chronic distrust.”

Bjørneboe was a brave and vocal critic of the Norwegian state’s accumulation of and use of power.

He was also deeply cherished by the people, especially for his fight for freedom of speech.

This included the gay community, of which Jens himself was part of.

So far no Norwegian author has been able to rise to the throne that he sat on when he was the uncontested Norwegian champion of anarchism.

We are, however, still a few remnants who are vocal about the ideas of individual liberty.

And there are signs that give us reason to cling on to our optimism.

30 silver coins for Judas

In this thread I'll try to give you some perspectives on the political context of Judas' betrayal of Jesus.

1/13 We must start with Tyre, which is an ancient city in today's Lebanon.

The city had a mint that produced coins, called "the shekel of Tyre."

The shekels were 14 grams of 94% silver, which was a higher degree of purity than the Roman silver coins.

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The flawed narrative of Yuval Harari, Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum

Before Christmas, Tucker Carlson and Dan Bongino discussed why Professor Yuval Harari and the World Economic Forum (WEF) pose a threat to our lives.

Klaus Schwab, who is the founder of WEF, relies heavily on Harari’s teaching when he formulates his policy recommendations to leaders around the world.

Harari knows a lot of historical facts, is good at storytelling and masters the art of rhetoric.

Commentators and academics therefore find it difficult to show exactly where Harari goes wrong in his analysis.

What I want to bring to everyone’s’ attention, is that Harari and Schwab base their policy recommendation on a narrative about the history of our civilization that simply isn’t correct.

It’s probably the repetition of this narrative that makes Schwab’s communication so effective when he talks to intellectuals, policymakers, journalists and leaders of giant corporations who firmly believe in “leadership” and the idea of technocratic global governance.

However, when we point out the flaws in Harari’s analysis of humankind and our history, it becomes a lot easier to shoot down his and Schwab’s ideas.

Therefore, I hope you will join me in this thread, as it in about ten minutes enables you to understand where Harari went so terribly wrong.

1/ Harari’s background and some of his ideas

Wikipedia gives us the following introduction to him:
«Yuval Noah Harari (Hebrew: יובל נח הררי [juˈval ˈnoaχ haˈʁaʁi]; born 1976) is an Israeli author, public intellectual, historian and professor in the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of the popular science bestsellers Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2014), Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016), and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018). His writings examine free will, consciousness, intelligence, happiness, and suffering. »

Harari, who also describes himself as an atheist and a vegan, promotes such ideas as:

- people don’t have free will, and human rights are a fiction,

- we are witnessing a natural development of a technocratic two-tier society where a «useless class» of consumers is guided or ruled by an elite class of «human gods. »

In short, Harari suggests that what we use to refer to as the foundation of liberal society is pure imagination, while the development of an apartheid-like dystopia is completely natural.

2/

Graph reveals political scandal in Norway

My friend Gregard Mikkelborg produces some amazing graphs. He sent me this one yesterday.

Take a close look at it and read my comments below if you want to understand its significance.

The short version of my comment is the following:

***
The Norwegian pension fund squanders its capital and indirectly drives up price inflation in Norway. This is the opposite of what the politicians and economists told us that they wanted to achieve by establishing the fund. We were most likely gaslighted.

***

For thousands of years, rulers used to save in gold

The reason was that gold is hard to dig out of the ground, so its inflation rate is low, less than 2% on average per year.

This means that gold has stored value better than any other assets over time.

When society’s productivity goes up, for instance due to population growth and innovation, this in fact causes gold to increase in value as time goes by.

Furthermore, gold doesn’t go bankrupt.

Companies, on the other hand, rarely persist very long, so investing in stocks always involves a great deal of risk.

Lending out savings to companies at an interest, or giving companies access to savings as equity, must result in a profit that compensates for the risk.

This is very hard to achieve in a competitive market, and it’s a whole lot of trust involved in this game.

For this reason, when kings and emperors invested instead of saving in gold, they preferred investing in companies that they at the same time gave a protected status, typically with exclusive rights to trade with the colonies.

The East Indian Company is a good example of this.

1/X
Jackpot!

In the 1960s huge oil and gas reserves were discovered on the Norwegian continental shelf.

When these enormously valuable resources much later started to pay off, Norwegian politicians didn't at all like the idea of saving in gold.

They wanted to take risk instead.

They wanted to turn a profit.

You see, our politicians despised gold.

That’s probably why they in 2004 let Norges Bank, which is our central bank, sell all of Norway's gold reserves.

Turning Norway into a gargantuan hedge fund
Our politicians decided to establish an investment fund owned by the state.

The fund is named “The Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global.”

Its official objective is to ensure:

"responsible and long-term management of revenue from Norway’s oil and gas resources, so that this wealth benefits both current and future generations."

When oil and gas companies pay tax to the Norwegian state, the revenue is slushed into the fund.

Today it has almost USD 1.5 T of investment capital at its disposal.

This makes it the largest Sovereign Wealth Fund in the world.

2/

Today I will explain one of the most powerful graphs you will ever see in your whole life.

But before we look at the graph, I can mention that about 60% of Americans invest in stocks and about 50% of Norwegians invest in securities funds.

Few know that the value of their… https://t.co/afTuCuGePntwitter.com/i/web/status/1…
Thanks a bunch to @gullerpenger for the graph!

1991
A story about two doctrines, the US neocon hegemony and the Norwegian battery, and a tough personal awakening.

🧵 1/5

32 long years
Today, on Monday 24 July 2023, 32 years after the Soviet Union broke up, the whole thing about what has happened on the geopolitical scene… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 2/5

The Americans’ dilemma in 1991
Sometime in the late 1980s/early 1990s, it likely dawned upon the US government and its major constituents that the real question was:

“How can we assure that we get the financial benefits of printing of US dollars in a rapidly changing… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

🧵
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Central Banks Are Transforming Your Money Into A Shitcoin
This easy-to-read article on inflation and monetary policy spread rapidly after I posted it in Norwegian on Friday. Powell, Lagarde, Wolden Bache and the other heads of central bank debase their currencies in… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 2/4

The rapid decline in value means that money has very low quality. This makes us lose confidence in money. We lose trust in them, because they can't store value is for us, such as the value of our labor.

In the modern society, therefore, we get rid of the money as quickly as… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Ida Wolden Bache gjør krona til en shitcoin
I stedet for å vente på at avisene vurderer om de skal trykke kronikkene mine fortsetter jeg å publisere her på Twitter. Mediene er portvoktere, men jeg skriver ikke for dem. Jeg skriver for folket. Hvis du liker kronikken min er det… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… For de som vil se på de mest sentrale kildene legger jeg ved noen linker her:
Kritikken fra Andreas Steno Larsen
dn.no/makrookonomi/k…

4 November 2008. I warned them in my op-ed.
Two days later Finansavisen covered it bravely. Norges Bank responded cowardly, as expected. Later it all fell apart. And here we are!

(Sorry to my English-speaking followers, this text is in Norwegian only).

1/ 2/

Kronikk: Taperne i lønnskampen
🧵
Jeg legger ut kronikken her i stedet for å sende den til avisene og vente på svar fra dem.

I år handler lønnskampen nesten bare om inflasjon. Det forstår de færreste arbeidstakerne fint lite av, så vil du hjelpe dem, så er det fint om du deler. I forbindelse med innspilling av en podkast i England i forrige uke fikk jeg spørsmål om hvorfor jeg skrev bok om inflasjon. Jeg svarte: «Fordi det er det viktigste temaet av alle».

My first book was about quick clay. The mechanism that causes landslides in almost flat areas is called "liquefaction". It has parallels with the transition from high inflation to hyperinflation, which happens when trust in money suddenly disappears.
1/ The problem is that the appointed experts, who are engineers, not geologist, don't understand the mechanism. Therefore, 2-3 serious quick clay landslided occur each year in Norway.
2/

It's simple math. Govt's tend to debase their currencies by increasing the money supply by 7+% per year on average. This cuts the value of your money in half in 10 years, and 1/3 in 16 years. But your stock investment has to triple in 16 years just to maintain its real value.
1/ The problem is, if your stock portfolio keeps pace with the money printing press, you still have to pay capital gain tax. The effective tax rate on gains on shares and dividends is 37.84% in Norway.

Do you like your odds?

2/

The MSM amplifies the lies that central bank governors serve the people about where the inflation comes from. VG, Norway's biggest newspaper still hasn"t responded to the op-ed that I sent them. So here is the English version, with links to sources. Feel free to share it: Inflation is a Policy

Central bank governors are not honest when it comes to explaining the cause of inflation.

Kronikk om inflasjonspolitikken
(Op-ed, I'll post the English version later)

De store norske avisene har sluttet å svare meg når jeg sender inn kronikker til dem. Derfor legger jeg ut denne kronikken her på Twitter i stedet. Det er fint om dere hjelper meg med å spre den.
👇 Inflasjon er politikk

Penger er det vi kaller et "universelt betalingsmiddel". Samfunnet blir ikke rikere av at det blir mer penger. Kommer det mer penger i samfunnet går bare prisene opp.

Imagine you are a young American, and the year is 1890. Prices have been steadily declining for decades, due to productivity gains.

You know this also has to do with the gold standard, which secures that there is almost no increase in the money supply. Same amount of money. More goods and services. Then prices must go down.

Easy.

Your brain tells you that it's necessary that the general price level falls. It accepts it as a law of nature, on par with gravity.

Why isn't this bombshell of an article trending? Pullitzer prize winner Seymour Hersh claims that USA and Norway took out Nord Stream.

https://twitter.com/Antiwarcom/status/1623333246145822720

I posted it on Facebook, not one like after one hour. Looks like Facebooks algoritms are suppressing it.

The pill and I – a personal story

Have you seen ‘The Matrix’? The main character is Thomas Anderson / Neo, played by Keanu Reeves. He meets Morpheus, played by Laurence Fishburn.

(thread) Morpheus offers Neo a choice between two pills: red to reveal the truth about the system they live in, which he calls ‘The Matrix’, and blue to forget everything and return to his former life.

Søndagsanalysen.

I 1900 var staten/off. sektor ubetydelig. Den brukte 6% av BNP. Det å ha innflytelse/kontroll over staten var imidlertid svært profitabelt. Alle ville ha gratis fordeler. Norge var ekstremt rikt på ressurser, og med en så liten stat var potensialet stort.
1/n De rikeste har størst mulighet til å utnytte staten. De vil påvirke staten slik at de får næringsprivilegier, for å få det vi kaller monopolprofitt. Hvis de kommer i posisjon til å få kontroll over staten, vil de investere mer og mer i den.
2/n

1/17. The Norwegian real estate market will crash, and the reasons are: 2. The money supply has increased steadily since 1971. It more or less tripled the last 15 years. It increased by 12% in 2020 and 10% in 2021, when the government locked down society.