217 - Trip to Belgium
A family trip to the Belgian coast, a fresh read of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Peter Duke’s Serenissima Directive, Kobo fixes with Grok and the latest on Bitcoin Silent Payments as well as the benefits of Breaking Pattern.
🇧🇪 🇪🇸 During last weekend V and I made a trip to Belgium to meet up with family and friends and to celebrate V's Mum's birthday. We had a great time, staying at the Belgian coast and meeting up with all the Belgian side of the family.
We rented a house in Nieuwpoort for the weekend. This gave us a base and everyone was able to join us there. In addition to all the family events we also got out and about to enjoy the Belgian coast and I got to enjoy some cycling along the canals. It is nice to have such great cycle paths and the countryside is completely flat.
We did also briefly pass through Antwerp on our way back. If you missed catching up this time, let's try for late August when we plan to be back again.
We are now back in Palma for a while, until our next trip. With all the travel this week I had lots of time for reading and I have a couple of gems for you below. Project focus remains on Bitcoin developments and evolution in addition to some Kobo insights. You will also have noticed that many things are becoming more difficult - this is the start of Lockdown 2.0 and it is happening on multiple fronts.
Book of the week
I have been continuing to read the books in the Chronicles of Narnia. You will recall that we have already reviewed The Magician's Nephew. I recommend that you go back and refresh your memory, especially Jason's interpretation and insights.
Despite being the first book to be published, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe follows on chronologically from The Magician's Nephew. It introduces readers to the magical world of Narnia through the adventures of four Pevensie siblings. I enjoyed it and, like the others in the series, there is plenty of significance beyond the superficial.
Click images above to see them full size
Plot Summary
During World War II, Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy Pevensie are evacuated from London to the countryside home of an elderly professor. While exploring, young Lucy discovers a wardrobe that serves as a portal to Narnia—a land trapped in eternal winter by the tyrannical White Witch.
The children learn of an ancient prophecy stating that when two Sons of Adam and two Daughters of Eve sit on the four thrones at Cair Paravel, the Witch's reign will end. The great lion Aslan—the true king of Narnia—returns to fulfill this prophecy, but Edmund's betrayal complicates matters. Aslan sacrifices himself to save Edmund's life, then miraculously resurrects, ultimately defeating the White Witch and restoring Narnia.
Roger Price
Click for plot summary and chapter by chapter notes
Long read of the week - Serenissima Directive
You will recall that I much respect and enjoy the work of Peter Duke. Recently he created a thought experiment called The Serenissima Directive. He used Twitter's Grok to imagine how a secret group with lots of money could take over the world. The result was a plan inspired by the true history of the old Venetian Republic, which was secretly run by a group of wealthy families who were invisible, hiding behind the officially elected government.
The Duke Report™️
Click for Peter's full explanation and summary explainer video
There are three main ways this control would happen:
- Hegelian dialectic: The group creates a problem, encourages opposition to it, and then offers a solution that was their plan all along. It's like a rigged casino where the house always wins.
- Disaster capitalism: They create or exploit big crises like pandemics or financial crashes to push through policies (like digital money or more surveillance) that people wouldn't accept in normal times.
- Mass schismogenesis: They stir up extreme conflict on different sides of issues, making people so tired and divided that they don't notice the real power structure. This is like forcing you to choose between two bad options, while the real puppeteers remain hidden.
Do click above for his full article and explainer. You can read the article and/or he has an AI-generated summary, podcast-style. You will learn a lot and see things much more clearly when you look around today.
More in this issue
- Photo memories - Nieuwpoort and Veurne last weekend
- Project Updates - Kobo, Silent Payments and outlook
- Plenty of useful links - don't say nobody told you!
- Closing out - Breaking Pattern - escape to the underworld
Nieuwpoort and Veurne last weekend
🛠️ Project Updates
I hit a snag with my Kobo this week. It's all sorted now and even much improved - you might want to try it too. Also there are significant developments around Silent Payments - you can likely appreciate why these will be increasingly important going forward. What are you doing?
Kobo problems and resolution
During the week I had some issues with my Kobo. You will recall that I abandoned Amazon and Kindle a long time ago. I have backups of all my Kindle books and the rest are in EPUB and PDF - I was able to make my own backup before Amazon disabled that capability.
One morning I picked up the Kobo and it said "Zero Books". Restarts failed to fix it so I turned to Grok (Twitter's AI that I can access from my old account that I no longer use except for this). I was AMAZED by the quality and depth of the answers.
Grok immediately diagnosed the problem and gave me steps to resolve it - simply deleting the .sqlite database and allowing it to re-build brought everything back in alphabetical order albeit with reading progress and covers missing.
From there we discussed options to prevent this in future. It recommended installing Kobo Utilities plugin in Calibre that automatically does backups and many more useful features. Also it suggested installing KOReader or Plato as better reading apps. I now have both of these and, indeed, you have tons more options to improve the reading experience.
Beyond that it prompted me to look into installing and using additional fonts like Atkinson Hyperlegible. These are indeed "life changing". Try it yourself.
Bottom line - I am fully back up and running and with much better reading experience. Covers are back, backups now happen automatically and I have excellent WIFI options for transfer to/from my Kobo. I am delighted.
Citadel Dispatch - Silent Payments
Craig Raw, creator of Sparrow Wallet joins Matt to discuss silent payments, a new bitcoin address system that eliminates address reuse, removes the gap limit, and aligns privacy with convenience. Craig walks us through the history of bitcoin address derivation from single key to Hierarchical Deterministic (HD) wallets to BIP 47, then explains how silent payments optimizes everything except scanning cost and how his new server implementation, Frigate, uses GPU acceleration to mitigate that. They discuss the path to adoption including hardware wallet support, public server infrastructure, BIP 353 human readable addresses and the overall vision of upgrading from HD wallets to Silent Payment (SP) wallets.
There are no coincidences
You know that I do not do or endorse crypto trading - that is basically gambling and exploiting the "greater fool". Notwithstanding that, you likely do want to do Dollar Cost Averaging (DCA) to obtain Bitcoin and Monero as alternative and censorship resistant money.
With more experience and market insight you may look to vary your purchases according to the market cycle and sentiment - making larger purchases when prices and sentiment are low (or oversold) and smaller purchase when they are high (or overbought).
With that in mind, you might well enjoy Jordan's latest musings. I often say that "there are no coincidences" - once you listen to this you will understand why. You will also see many things that you would not expect.
Roger Price
Click for summary and to listen to his full thesis and analysis
Remember: Iran is the new Covid. Lockdowns are being deployed globally while distracting you will all the lies, theatre and nonsense. Lockdown 2.0 comes in many forms: travel difficulty, fuel shortages and restrictions on what you can do online to name a few. It is past time to wake up and exit the matrix - use and help build alternative and parallel systems.
Principles of Economics - Lecture 6
This lecture marks a turning point in Saifedean's course, moving from foundational concepts (methodology, labor, property) into what he calls "the meat of the course": capital. He argues capital is systematically under-emphasized in mainstream economics because rigorous analysis of capital undermines many conventional economic teachings.
Roger Price
Click for summary, transcript and to listen to the full lecture
Understand that capital is not an exploitative privilege rather costly, continuous human effort requiring discipline, foresight and service to others. Misunderstanding this—treating capital as "manna from heaven"—explains 20th-century economic disasters and the poverty trap.
🔗 Links for your edification
The following are links from my Liferea RSS feeds - learn, enjoy and share.
Screw big tech!
It warms my heart to be able to share yet another update from someone who has discovered the joy of abandoning Big Tech. Foci has been on a journey now for over 6 months and he is making remarkable progress and having great fun.
It's so insidious
Peter has discovered how deeply the psychological manipulation techniques are embedded into the tools that Big Tech wants you to use. You might have imagined that Grammarly was clean and pure - nothing could be farther from the truth.
The Duke Report™️
Click for Peter's full explanation on what he found
Contrarian thinking
You will know by now that I encourage you to look at and consider contrarian thinking. Here is yet another example. It is easy to get caught up in the narrative that "AI will destroy everything" - you would do well to ponder on the alternative narrative. WDYT?
Pick your narrative
By now, most of us recognize that all media is a battle space in the information war. We see competing narratives and grab on to the one that feels like the truth. But in recent years, our media feeds have been flooded with narrative — so much so that it’s very hard to even know what’s real. Something has changed. Rather than fight for narrative control, all narratives have been weaponized. Narrative itself is a form of control.
Matt Smith Crisis Investing
Click for the full read - you can listen to him discuss it with Doug Casey here
The real trap is the certainty that comes with adopting a narrative. Resist the urge to fill the 'narrative void' with explanations and instead to simply observe actions and outcomes. The goal is not to find a perfect understanding, but to constantly notice when we've fallen into a narrative and to set it aside, trusting your own observations of cause and effect.
🤔 Closing Thoughts
This week Jason announced that he will Break Pattern and take a break from YouTube for a month or two. Breaking Pattern is good and I strongly recommend that you give it a go. In his case he will be focusing on Archaix Underground as he explains here. What are you doing?
Roger Price
Click for Jason's full walk-through of the platform
If you are not familiar with Breaking Pattern you should check out the following. Done by an independent creator, he took one of Jason's monologues and set it in the new style that you will see a lot these days. Well worth 12 minutes to educate yourself with practical knowledge that you can put to use today.
Click to watch - retrocausality could well be helpful; give it a go - you have nothing to lose
❤️ Enjoy this newsletter?
Forward to a friend and let them know where they can subscribe
No one can be told what The Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.
- Morpheus to Neo in The Matrix
Any questions or anything else? Feel free to comment below!
You can also email me at: LetterFrom@rogerprice.me
- The Architect
💡Enjoy the newsletters in your own language: Spanish, Dutch, French, Italian, German, Serbian, Croatian, Chinese Traditional & Simplified, Burmese, Irish (Gaelic), Russian and Thai