Geir Vikan

When something is free, you are the Product.

When the First World War began, British soldiers went into the trenches wearing nothing more protective than a cloth cap. Shrapnel from artillery, not bullets, caused the overwhelming majority of battlefield head wounds, and the old soft caps offered zero protection. As artillery barrages intensified, the British Army rushed to adopt the new Brodie steel helmet, a simple bowl‑shaped design meant to shield soldiers from the rain of metal fragments constantly falling from above. Once the helmet was issued, medical officers suddenly recorded a massive spike in head injuries. To the generals reading the reports, it looked like the new equipment was somehow *causing* harm. They assumed the design was flawed, that the steel rim was redirecting blasts, or that the shape was concentrating force in the wrong places. The numbers were so shocking, thousands of percent higher, that the Army treated it as a potential engineering disaster. But the explanation was brutally simple: the helmet wasn’t creating more injuries, it was preventing deaths. Before the Brodie, most soldiers struck in the head by shrapnel never made it to a medical station at all, they were counted as fatalities. The new helmet didn’t eliminate wounds, but it turned what would have been instant kills into survivable injuries. The “increase” in head wounds was actually the first statistical proof that the helmet was doing exactly what it was designed to do: keeping men alive. Picture is for demonstration purpose only.

Before heading the Manhattan Project, J. Robert Oppenheimer was a brilliant theoretical physicist. In 1939, he and his student George Volkoff calculated what happens when a massive star runs out of fuel. They proved that gravity would overcome atomic forces, compressing the star’s core past the point of no return. When Oppenheimer published his calculations showing that a star could collapse into an infinitely dense point, what we now call a black hole, the physics community, including Albert Einstein, flatly rejected it. Einstein even published a paper that same year arguing that matter could never be packed tightly enough to form a “Schwarzschild singularity.” Oppenheimer, known for getting easily discouraged when his ideas faced heavy resistance, completely abandoned the topic. He never wrote another paper on stellar collapse, and the study of these objects stalled for decades because the world’s top minds assumed they were just mathematical ghosts. Oppenheimer’s math was completely flawless. In the 1960s, astronomers began detecting pulsars and intense X-ray sources from deep space. Physicists like John Wheeler and Roger Penrose dusted off Oppenheimer’s 1939 equations, proving that black holes were not just real, but a common feature of our universe.

The Economist on the U.S. economy’s consistent growth outperformance relative to other advanced countries: “America’s outperformance began decades ago, but in the 2020s it has become vast. And it is likely to last. The latest IMF forecasts show American growth besting the rest all the way to 2030 and beyond…. Many of America’s advantages are hard to emulate. The country’s continental scale, single language, natural-resource wealth and the fiscal space that comes from issuing the world’s safe asset give it a unique economic advantage over Europe… But America also shows just how much other rich countries are failing to live up to their economic potential.” #economy @EconUS @TheEconomist

Skrevet 1939!

HV. Overalt, alltid.

This two year old boy from Sweden, Lucas Toader was missing for over 14 hours before a member of the Swedish Home Guard found him in the woods. It was the biggest news in Sweden for the last 24 hours and the search for him was huge. Drones, helicopters, dogs, volunteers, conscripts and members of the home guard partook in the search effort. I'd like to point out that even with all that modern and expensive technology (and I agree they are helpful!) it was a person who found him, a member of the home guard with training and experience in this kind of undertaking.

Ære være dei som iblant tek saka/saga i eigne hender.

- Vi gir bare leserne det leserne vil ha! Har slått meg til ro med at jeg ikke tilhører målgruppen og at verden har beveget seg i en underlig retning.

⚡️Turkey is what monetary credibility death looks like before the state itself collapses. The country still functions. People still go to work. Banks still open. Markets still trade. The government still rules. But the currency has been spiritually broken. The lira still works as a payment rail, but it no longer works as a trusted vessel for stored time. That is the real fracture. Once citizens stop believing the unit of account, everything becomes defensive. Households flee into dollars, gold, real estate, crypto, inventory, foreign assets, anything that might hold value better than the domestic paper. Businesses price with devaluation in mind. Workers demand wage adjustments before prices move again. Foreign investors demand absurd yields to hold local debt. The central bank has to fight not just inflation, but memory. Memory is the killer. People remember being diluted. They remember being lied to. They remember watching savings die. Once that memory embeds, policy credibility becomes brutally expensive to restore. A 30%+ yield is not “opportunity.” It is the bond market saying trust has to be rented at emergency prices. Turkey’s story is not just bad monetary policy. It is political control overriding monetary discipline until the currency became the shock absorber for the regime. That is the lesson. When leadership treats the currency as a tool of political convenience, eventually the population treats the currency as something to escape. That is when the loop becomes self-feeding. Weak lira raises import costs. Import costs raise inflation. Inflation weakens trust. Weak trust drives dollarization. Dollarization weakens the lira further. Higher rates slow the bleeding but also punish the real economy. Political stress rises. The government intervenes again. The market trusts even less. That is credibility hell. The lira has experienced a generational collapse in purchasing-power trust. The exact percentage matters less than the behavioral shift: citizens no longer treat the currency as a safe claim on the future. For Bitcoin, this is the cleanest philosophical advertisement. People in reserve-currency countries treat hard-money arguments as ideology. People in weak-currency countries understand them as self-defense. Turkey is why the “what is money?” question is not academic. Bad money steals the future quietly, then suddenly. For the U.S., the lesson is not “America becomes Turkey.” The U.S. has the reserve currency, deeper capital markets, military power, energy, tech dominance, and global collateral demand. Totally different structure. The warning is colder: credibility is the ultimate reserve. The dollar can absorb far more abuse than the lira because the U.S. system has empire-scale privilege. But even empire money is still belief-backed. Deficits, inflation, political pressure on the Fed, fiscal dominance, and financial repression all matter because they chip away at the invisible trust layer. Turkey shows the end-state of that process in a weaker system.

🇷🇴 Bucharest’s new park will be named Donald J. Trump after a popular vote. Over 116,000 people voted. Trump won.

I have long said we should emulate some of our European NATO allies and make water bombing an RCAF mission. This would count towards NATO spending, take a financial burden off the Provinces, and provide the new Calgary DHC-515 production line with a major order.

Ja, her skal alle kluter settes inn.

Eit profilbilde kan'kje vara evig, veit du, kan aldri vara evig.

Endelig kom beklagelsen vi har ventet på til Kong Sverre; godt jobba pave Leo.

I always thought that sonobuoys were just "simple" metal cylinders packed with microphones and a radio, that were dropped by ASW aircraft to find submarines by their sound. While the idea is generally correct, these sonobuoys are anything but "simple" metal cylinders. Watch this video of how sonobuoys deploy underwater - this blew me away when I first saw it. The RAF and RoNAF blanket-bombed the Atlantic with such sonobuoys last month to drive off a trio of snooping Russian subs (see my previous tweet).

Israel has decided on a massive escalation in Lebanon. This is partially a reaction to all the IDF soldiers lost there. But also an attempt to derail the Iran deal: 1) Until now strikes stayed in south Lebanon and the Bekaa. Chief of Staff Zamir told the cabinet they need to hit buildings in Beirut and Tyre to restore deterrence on drones. According to Ynet, a senior Israeli official tonight: "decided to act on a broader scale in Lebanon." 2) The new doctrine is disproportionate retaliation — every Hezbollah drone answered with strikes on Dahiya (Hezbollah's Beirut stronghold) or the Bekaa. Their logic is deterrence, not revenge: make every drone cost more than it's worth. 3) Plans on the table to hit Hezbollah's drone array and senior figures sheltering in Beirut who've been untouchable under the current rules. 4) The operation has already started. Israel already struck Hezbollah targets in the Bekaa and other areas, Beirut not yet, but it's the next rung. 5) The northern Command deepening control through observation and fire across south Lebanon, clearing surface and underground infrastructure. Expect massive bombings of Beirut soon and targeted assassinations of Hezbollah leaders. The direction is a renewed invasions northward that will destabilize the Iran deal.

Erik Solheim har skiftet syn på innvandring etter å ha stått i bresjen for masseinnvandring til Norge. Da er det nok fint å reise til Kina som har blant verdens strengeste innvandringspolitikk.

👀

Plenty Unlimited raised $940 million from Jeff Bezos, SoftBank, and Eric Schmidt. They were going to feed the world with vertical farms. Lettuce grown indoors, under LEDs, using 90% less water and no pesticides. The pitch was beautiful. The decks were elegant. The press releases were full of words like "revolution" and "future." They filed for Chapter 11 in March 2025. The valuation had collapsed by 99% from its $1.9 billion peak. Bowery Farming raised $700 million at a $2.3 billion peak valuation. Backed by Fidelity, Google Ventures, Justin Timberlake. Shut down in November 2024. Fourteen indoor farming companies filed for bankruptcy in 2025. Combined funding burned: $1.37 billion. Of capital. Vaporised. The reason every single one of them failed is the same reason a farmer in Herefordshire with 180 cattle, no LEDs, no robotics, and no Series C, is still in business in 2026. Grass is free. Rain is free. Sunlight is free. The cow does not require a $200 million data centre to function. She is the data centre. She runs on weather, processes cellulose, outputs protein, and her firmware has been stable for ten thousand years. The pitch decks promised to reinvent agriculture. Agriculture was already invented. It was just in a field, looking the other way.

Look at this 😂 The 'activists' from the Gaza flotilla ⛵️ that the IDF stopped are chilling and having a full-on party on Israeli naval vessels... peacefully sailing toward Israel like it's a luxury cruise.