war Archives - Free-Man's Perspective

Bitcoin and the Power Grid

“Bitcoin is evil” articles exist in profusion, and these days I pretty much ignore them. But one of the recent types – raising awareness of Bitcoin’s environmental unsustainability – has engaged me. As it turns out, I have an unusual background to bring to this topic, and I think I should contribute.

So, here we go:

Another Apocalypse?

Let’s be honest and admit that most of the “environmental movement” sells fear of an apocalypse. And as we should all realize by now, humans have an innate weakness for fear.

More or less every apocalyptic environmental prediction has failed. (I’m talking about those that could actually be measured, obviously.) That won’t stop the fear-sellers of course, and now Bitcoin has come into their sights.

The fear is that because crypto mining uses so much power, it will bring down the grid or cause various environmental disasters. The advocates of this fear throw around scary sounding numbers (measured in terawatts) and assorted scientific terminology. (“They understand it and you don’t… don’t expose yourself to ridicule.”)

But it’s mostly just fear. Sure, proof-of-work sucks up power, but that’s nothing new. How much power do you suppose all those millions of air conditioners suck up every summer? I haven’t dug up the figures, but I’m ready to take bets that it’s several times more than crypto mining. Shall we now fear the air conditioner?

Further Factors

I worked for decades in the electrical industry, and so I’d like to give you some facts from that perspective:

Power use has been going up since the beginning. These days most houses get 200 amperes of electrical service. But there are still thousands of houses that are wired with only 60 amperes. That was plenty 60 years ago. New loads (devices using power) come along all the time. In just my time, we’ve added air conditioning, microwaves, and lots of computers.
Mining is a nice, steady load. The kind power companies thrive on. What makes their lives crazy are seasonal loads like air conditioning, which occur only a few months per year.
Power failures happen every year, especially in summer due to the aforementioned air conditioning load. It’s a good bet that several fear-sellers have press releases ready to go for this summer.
The utilities are making money on this. More power use means more income.
If people use too much power, the providers will raise their prices. Econ 101.

And the Big One

Cryptocurrencies don’t finance war.

The public hasn’t actually paid for a war since WW2. Since then the whole game’s been run on credit. (The same goes, more or less, for everything Big Guv does to save us poor, helpless sheep.)

With Bitcoin and all the cryptos that I know of, you can’t do such things. If you want to throw a war in a crypto-based economy, you’ll have to convince people to pay for it. Good luck.

* * * * *

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I just finished reading The Breaking Dawn and found it to be one of the most thought-provoking, amazing books I have ever read… It will be hard to read another book now that I’ve read this book… I want everyone to read it.
Such a tour de force, so many ideas. And I am amazed at the courage to write such a book, that challenges so many people’s conceptions.
There were so many points where it was hard to read, I was so choked up.
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Get it at Amazon ($18.95) or on Kindle: ($5.99)

* * * * *

Paul Rosenberg
www.freemansperspective.com

More Revolutionaries Are Coming

The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.
– Princess Leia, Star Wars

Assange, Ulbricht, Manning, Snowden… we’ve seen a slow stream of revolutionaries over the past decade or so, a few of whom became well-known. More will be coming.

The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.

– Princess Leia, Star Wars

Assange, Ulbricht, Manning, Snowden… we’ve seen a slow stream of revolutionaries over the past decade or so, a few of whom became well-known. More will be coming.

The reason I’m sure of this is that the two forces driving it are increasing:

On one hand, humanity is becoming better. You’ll never believe that if you watch “the news,” but out here in the real world humans are slowly improving. I’m tempted to say that I’d like the progress to be a bit more rapid, but the truth is that recent progress has sometimes been faster than I expected.
On the other hand, elite control, empowered by the internet’s parasitic “free stuff” model, has bypassed all known limits and is riding the numbness and compliance of the past few generations into new territory.

And so the best and brightest are increasingly caught between hammer and anvil. And when struck, they’re tending to see the entire system as retrograde and absurd. Which of course it is.

What happens when the young and healthy see themselves cast in the role of “the permanently abused,” then, is quite predictable, all the more so because they’re expected to thank their abusers: They rebel. As they should.

The Path Around Violence

You’ll notice that the four revolutionaries mentioned above have been fully non-violent. That of course is a very good thing and can be attributed to a mix of intelligence, information, and general goodness. What truly healthy person, after all, prefers violence as a tactic?

This, however, is bad news for elite power addicts. They need rebels to lash out violently. Their propaganda systems are designed to scare the rest of the sheep with images of violence and to use the whole drama to their advantage. That’s “their thing,” as John Lennon noted decades ago:

When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system’s game. The establishment will irritate you – pull your beard, flick your face – to make you fight. Because once they’ve got you violent, then they know how to handle you. The only thing they don’t know how to handle is non-violence and humor.

This is why, as you may also have noticed, all four of these revolutionaries have relied upon cryptography: because cryptography transcends violence.

You can bomb a car or a building, but you cannot bomb a math problem… and cryptogrphy is simply math.

The Crypto Platform

In the end, it is cryptographers who are preventing violent revolution, while the elites are provoking it.

And so, whether or not you think new tools like cryptocurrencies are flawed (and why would we expect perfection of anything?), it remains very much in your interest to support them in one way or another. We do not want violence, and the current system is pushing the young generation into it. Instead, we want abused young people to find peaceful, productive outlets, and crypto is pretty much it these days. (Though others would certainly be welcome.)

It really boils down to a type of equation:

Pressure A + Pressure B = Expulsion Energy C

Whatever values we plug in for these variables, we know that A and B are increasing. Humans really are improving and the elites have become degenerate control addicts; they can’t even see anything else.

Expulsion Energy C, therefore, will increase. We’ll be having more and more revolutionaries, whether or not they show up on authorized vid feeds.

It is very important that these young people find productive avenues. If they do, a benevolent future can form.

* * * * *

A book that generates comments like these, from actual readers, might be worth your time:

I just finished reading The Breaking Dawn and found it to be one of the most thought-provoking, amazing books I have ever read… It will be hard to read another book now that I’ve read this book… I want everyone to read it.
Such a tour de force, so many ideas. And I am amazed at the courage to write such a book, that challenges so many people’s conceptions.
There were so many points where it was hard to read, I was so choked up.
Holy moly! I was familiar with most of the themes presented in A Lodging of Wayfaring Men, but I am still trying to wrap my head around the concepts you presented at the end of this one.

Get it at Amazon ($18.95) or on Kindle: ($5.99)

* * * * *

Paul Rosenberg
www.freemansperspective.com

The Disgrace of War

Here’s a simple question. Give me the first answer that pops into your mind: What’s the purpose of the state?

Most people would probably answer, to keep us safe. I can argue that this isn’t the state’s true purpose (and I will, below), but it’s clearly its primary selling point.

And so, every war – and there are generally at least 20 of them under way at any point in time – is a screaming condemnation of the state. War is people dying; it is property being destroyed; it is market processes being torn apart. It’s the precise opposite of keeping people safe.

Yes, war is sold as “fighting bad guys elsewhere to keep us safe here,” but it’s boys and girls from here who must do the killing and dying… and there’s a whole lot of damage contained in just that.

Every war is a massive failure of the “keep people safe” system. For modern Americans, it means “your children will have their feet blown off” more than it does “your children will die,” but is that okay? Is that, somehow, “not a failure”?

A Small War Is Worth 30,000 Crimes

War is “unsafeness” on a huge, gigantic scale. Just a small war – perhaps like the invasion of Panama by the US in 1989 – is far worse than garden-variety crime. And Panama, we should note, is a very long way from an enemy of the US… and certainly no threat to Americans.

That little Panamanian war lasted only about a month, including the occupation, and resulted in “only” about a thousand deaths((Other figures run as high as 3,500 deaths. I’m not sure which are more accurate.)) and an unknown (but almost certainly much larger) number of wounded. And as you can see from the photo below, a large amount of property damage.

Since the argument goes that the state protects us from harm… and since harm includes crime… how many crimes was this war worth? The properly damage in the photo above has to be worth at least a dozen crimes, and that was just a single incident – there were hundreds of the type. So, perhaps we have a few thousand crimes worth of damage there.

And the deaths and injuries, how shall we count them? They are the equivalent of how many thousands of crimes?

Safe from What?

Still, this war was supposed to “keep us safe.” So, what did it keep us safe from? Reportedly, it protected US citizens and “combatted drug trafficking.” But since none of those citizens had been harmed, and since drug trafficking has continued unabated, I think we have to say that there was no safety gained from the exercise.

The real reason of course was to get rid of Noriega, the Panamanian boss who had worked closely with the CIA for years but was getting uppity. So, the US military “saved” the American people from someone who didn’t threaten them, but who rather irritated the US establishment.

So, we have a tremendous amount of damage, hundreds of thousands of Panamanians becoming much less safe, and Americans becoming no safer. (Indeed, the rest of the world has come to despise the US for such reasons.)

Even the “good war,” World War II, has a rather dubious standing as having kept us safe. Yes, it got rid of Hitler, and that was a very good thing. But at the same time, it protected, empowered, and glorified Stalin, who went on to kill far more people than Hitler ever did. So, how well did it really keep the world safe?

The Bottom Line…

The bottom line here is that nearly every war is a condemnation of the state. Pick a war, run the numbers, compare safety versus cost.

Still, people don’t want to do this. They want to believe that their state works righteousness. Part of this is simply that they don’t want to go through the effort of changing their mental furniture, but the bigger reason is that most people have made what I call “The Great Trade.” Here’s how I explained it in Production Versus Plunder:

[M]ost men and women feel conflicted, insecure and confused, and lack the time, skill or desire to fix the problem. So, they find ways to work around it, most notably to seek belonging in a group…

[And so,] the state and/or church present themselves to men as a superior entity… To be joined to them provides sanction from a higher source than that of their internal conflicts.

In our times we often hear this expressed as: People need to belong to something larger than themselves. They need to sublimate their confusion and conflicts into a higher entity.

So then, “keeping us safe” is not really the purpose of the state. The state, rather, is a psychological crutch that serves the purposes of its operators.

And the truth is that many of us have outgrown this crutch. It’s time to let it go. If we end up with a small increase in crime, would that really be worse than dozens of wars every year?

* * * * *

A book that generates comments like these, from actual readers, might be worth your time:

I just finished reading The Breaking Dawn and found it to be one of the most thought-provoking, amazing books I have ever read… It will be hard to read another book now that I’ve read this book… I want everyone to read it.
Such a tour de force, so many ideas. And I am amazed at the courage to write such a book, that challenges so many people’s conceptions.
There were so many points where it was hard to read, I was so choked up.
Holy moly! I was familiar with most of the themes presented in A Lodging of Wayfaring Men, but I am still trying to wrap my head around the concepts you presented at the end of this one.

Get it at Amazon ($18.95) or on Kindle: ($5.99)

* * * * *

Paul Rosenberg
www.freemansperspective.com