His Holiness Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia has given a sermon that reduced numerous officially unofficial mouthpieces of the Global American Empire’s officially unofficial state religion to incoherent rage.
The war in the Ukraine is a holy war – not because Putin is holy, but because the unofficially official state religion that seeks to rule the world is unholy.
The proximate cause of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was that Nato was persistently pushing to expand to Russia’s borders.
This expansion was pushed by making – not exactly war, but not peace – on Donbas, a not-peace that killed many thousands of people in Donbas, and was continuing to kill people, a pressure that while short of outright war, still killed people, and continued to kill people. It was not exactly war, but was clearly not peace. Which is what happens to your country if you fail to hold a gay parade.
A pressure that just went on, and on, and on, for eight years now and is not going to stop until major armed force stops it.
The Cathedral wants to make Donbas to hold gay parades too, as a step towards making Russia hold gay parades.
It is not NATO that they want to expand, it is our officially unofficial state religion.
This sermon calls the war for what it is: An armed defense against a hostile power seeking to expand its unchristian faith by force. Putin invaded Ukraine to defend his power in Russia – but his power in Russia is threatened because he would not hold a gay parade. In this sense he invaded Ukraine in defense of Christianity.
hat tip encelad
Patriarchal Sermon at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior by his Holiness Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia
For eight years there have been attempts to destroy what exists in the Donbass. And in the Donbass there is rejection, a fundamental rejection of the so-called values that are offered today by those who claim world power. Today there is such a test for the loyalty of this government, a kind of pass to that “happy†world, the world of excess consumption, the world of visible “freedomâ€. Do you know what this test is? The test is very simple and at the same time terrible – this is a gay parade. The demands on many to hold a gay parade are a test of loyalty to that very powerful world; and we know that if people or countries reject these demands, then they do not enter into that world, they become strangers to it.
But we know what this sin is, which is promoted through the so-called marches of dignity. This is a sin that is condemned by the Word of God – both the Old and the New Testament. Moreover, the Lord, condemning sin, does not condemn the sinner. He only calls him to repentance, but not to ensure that through a sinful person and his behavior, sin becomes a life standard, a variation of human behavior – respected and acceptable.
If humanity recognizes that sin is not a violation of God’s law, if humanity agrees that sin is one of the options for human behavior, then human civilization will end there. And gay parades are designed to demonstrate that sin is one of the variations of human behavior. That is why in order to enter the club of those countries, it is necessary to hold a gay pride parade. Not to make a political statement “we are with youâ€, not to sign any agreements, but to hold a gay parade. And we know how people resist these demands and how this resistance is suppressed by force. This means that we are talking about imposing by force a sin condemned by God’s law, and therefore, by force to impose on people the denial of God and His truth.
Therefore, what is happening today in the sphere of international relations has not only political significance. We are talking about something different and much more important than politics. We are talking about human salvation, about where humanity will end up, on which side of God the Savior, who comes into the world as the Judge and Creator, on the right or on the left. Today, out of weakness, stupidity, ignorance, and most often out of unwillingness to resist, many go there, to the left side. And all that is connected with the justification of sin, condemned by the Bible, is today a test for our faithfulness to the Lord, for our ability to confess faith in our Savior.
Because the Cathedral is primarily driven by holiness competition, it is incapable of acting rationally. This is in some ways a strength. The way to win at chicken is to first drink a bottle of vodka, then at the last moment rip out the steering wheel and throw it out the window.
But it is also a weakness. The likely result is, sooner or later, to blunder into war, state to state, state level civil war, nonstate war, and likely all of the above.
And now, in 2022, blundering into state to state war.
Offtopic regarding personal economics, since today there was a meagre rate hike from the Fed of 25 bps, it has got me thinking of where I should store my money now in hope of not being too damaged in the coming depression/stagflation.
The Fed has telegraphed they will be raising rates 6 more times in 2022, which I am sure most commenters here will see as far too little even given official inflation levels, let alone the unofficial runaway inflation.
So my question is then: what should I do? I have a small amount of savings in the bank, which will be dwindling in real terms by the day, so I must do something and do it soon. I could invest in real estate, either real or an index, either in the West or abroad. I have seen from Jim that his properties rents are going up, so maybe buying now and renting out is a good idea before even more inflation hits. I could invest in Western or non-Western stocks, or I could get and personally hold real commodities like metals. And of course I could get some cryptocurrency. Or I could do some combination of these, perhaps avoiding the Western markets as much as possible. On the other hand though, a basket of Weimar stocks vastly outcompeted Weimar inflation, to the tune of 100 fold if I remember correctly, meaning perhaps the S&P is not so bad.
I honestly have no idea whether collapsing supply lines and stagnation will outcompete inflation/hyperinflation, meaning, I am not sure if now is the time to invest or I can wait for the depression to be in full swing in a year or two and buy things on the cheap.
Assuming I already have a little bit of cryptocurrency, and do not want to bet the house on cryptocurrency since I need some financial stability to start a family.
Does anyone have any insights to help me?
Second, minor question, is this a depression, or is that normalcy bias, and this is instead the shattering of all global and domestic Western supply chains and production, that will likely not recover in our lifetimes unless a Caesar emerges? Feels like it could be the latter for me.
They won’t raise rates 6 times, i highly doubt they’ll do it more than once more. The debt must be monetized.
If they raise rates 6 times, it’s because they’re intentionally trying to create a collapse of the middle class while Sleepy Joe is in office and they know they can make the most of it. Given the history of the Fed rate increases, I am not convinced this would be an abnormal play.
The problem with raising interest rates is its going to impact the priesthoods money and Shaniquas money…
They don’t care what it will do to the middle class which they hate but they do care about that.
I’m in exactly the same boat you are Cat in terms of trying to figure out what to do. Although you have hope of having a family so congratulations for that.
The short answer is ‘it depends on how bad you think things will get’. If genocide, go crypto (so you can keep the money while you flee). If military coup, go stocks/gold or other things that can hold value (since things will eventually become normal). If dark age… buy whatever cannot be produced in the future that will be in high demand. Its really hard to predict, made worse by the fact alot of stuff right now is already garbage that doesn’t last long.
As for the minor question… no, that is an accurate accessment. Trade requires trust. Leftism devours trust. If leftism isn’t stopped by the execution of leftists it will continue to devour until there is nothing left. The real question is how much of the world follows us into the abyss.
Diversify what savings you have and spread it across several different sorts of investments that do well during high inflation. The currency is going to be destroyed, and the straightforward thing to do when that happens is to own real things, not paper promises of things. Governments get very confiscatory when they get desperate.
Buying your own modest home is a good idea but rental real estate may not be a good investment – governments tend to put rent controls in place during high inflation and the owners get screwed while tenants live basically rent-free in their properties.
If you want to put some money in crypto, fine, but do not make the mistake of ignoring gold. Put at least 10% of your savings in physical gold coins that you keep in your possession, not in a safe deposit box – those are frequently frozen and searched by governments too, when they get to the phase of confiscating foreign currencies and precious metals with the excuse of a national emergency.
Buy commodities. Commodities are real things and have real value. Early on you are probably safe in buying a commodity ETF like DBC. Later on, even those will probably be frozen/confiscated by the government, so consider buying actual physical commodities like copper or other useful industrial metals.
Stockpile a year’s worth of food. Animal protein and fat is very valuable during high inflation. If your trade uses raw materials or tools, consider buying more or extras of those so you can continue making money.
You can put some money into value stocks but early in high inflationary periods stocks do not do well. The 1970s in the USA for example was a stagnant stock market at the same time prices were rising strongly. Only very late in high inflationary periods do stocks begin to rise strongly, as people suspect the inflation is ending and that stocks may be a bargain.
Buy a stockpile of the clothing, shoes, household items, car repair items, and so on that you will need. They will become very expensive or be unavailable as the public in general begin hoarding and stockpiling. The earlier you get to it, the better.
Obviously, avoid bonds, savings accounts, CDs, or any other debt instrument denominated in dollars. In general, any money left in bank accounts is liable to be frozen when bank holidays are declared during periods of panicky high inflation. Keep a number of thousands of dollars in paper money stored away on hand as well. It will lose value but there are times during high inflation when businesses will not accept credit cards or checks, or will give more in return for cash. When monetary velocity is high as during high inflation, people don’t want to wait for checks to clear, and credit card companies can’t afford to extend credit for 30 days. Then cash is king and it pays to have some on hand.
Thanks for this excellent post, which draws on the important fact that many times we can use the tool of observation to see what actually happens. Many of us are thinking through the same issues and I have a few points to add.
Several lessons from the recent past here in Canada are in order.
One of the major banks here in Canada has a slogan that runs, “You’re richer than you think.” This slogan is of course intended to lure victims into the treadmill of debt-spending-and-slavery, but my point with it is, that I would turn it on its head, and advise anyone that in fact, one should probably live life assuming that one is poorer than one thinks, and take it for granted that any given asset class is subject to evaporation in any given year or decade. This is probably normal life for most people in most times.
In other words, diversification is a founding principle. There’s no one asset class that will conjure you magically to safety on the other side of this.
Let’s talk about the freezing of bank accounts which took place last month. This sends a chill down my spine even as I type, but the reality is, we need to talk about it, because they did it. And in a manner of speaking, through ineptitude, they delivered a tremendous lesson at what was really a fairly low cost, which is, that going forward, the government can and will do this again. So if one plans to continue holding dissident-tier opinions, one is advised to figure out how to get one’s money out of the bank and how to live without a bank, if necessary.
(Crucially, I think, what I’ve seen is that at present governments are not totally unrestrained; some legacy institutions of checks-and-balances still function, so that although our government may like to assume dictator-calibre powers, in fact they can’t, yet, but one needs to be mindful of what they may want and try to do, and perhaps succeed at doing.)
Let’s talk about crypto. I know very little about it, but I now know this: crypto wallets and exchanges were frozen, so you may be able to get money in now, but not get it out later, meaning that, as someone said above, crypto in a hardware wallet may be useful primarily in case you need to flee the country and get the money back out in your new country.
I would like to comment on precious metals like gold and silver. I have been trying to learn from all angles, and I’m aware of some quite bright commenters who don’t “believe in” gold and silver, don’t think it’s worthwhile or has any useful place. I have been trying hard to understand what their argument is, and the best I can come up with is that it’s another form of the ol’ normalcy bias, meaning, people who think gold and silver are a waste of time are people who don’t REALLY believe hyperinflation could occur, economies could literally crumble, and so forth. If anyone understand the argument any better, please fill me in.
Second thing about gold and silver is this: traceability.
Let’s take a step back here, and talk about guns. (I do not want to talk about guns, right here, but this is appropriate.) Most people may not be aware that here in Canada there is a looming gun ban with a deadline of next month. Most of the guns that are on the ban list are “non-registered”, ostensibly not on a formal list, and yet it has been normal practice for gun shops to maintain their own internal list of which guns were sold to whom, so that, if the government got interested enough, they could theoretically summon all those gun shops records and try to track down these guns.
My point here is not to talk about guns, but to say, I spoke this week to my gold-and-silver dealer, who informed me straight up-and-down that when I purchase from them, they do NOT record my name or what I purchased from them, in any manner traceable by the government. Even if I pay with a bank draft, instead of cash, the government could theoretically see that I bought… something… but doesn’t know what it was. Coulda been jewelry. So, if you are going to buy gold and silver, please confirm with your dealer beforehand about the best ways to ensure untraceability. As others mentioned, don’t let normalcy bias hit your ass when this thing blows; governments throughout history can and have gone all-out to confiscate gold.
On that note, although cash (until they ban it) is obviously the most anonymous medium, be mindful not to fall afoul of your country’s money laundering laws.
The banking system has really fallen apart in the last decade or two, hasn’t it, at least for savers. Why bail them out next time? Replacement urgently needed.
Any crypto wallet that can be frozen is not a crypto wallet, but a scam.
As long as you have internet, you can do crypto transactions.
And the time fast approaches when you can buy stuff with crypto currency, but not with government money.
A major driving force in the adoption of crypto currency is that international transactions have become steadily more dangerous and difficult. They have rather suddenly become a great deal more dangerous and difficult. The time fast approaches when using the government money in your wallet to buy stuff at the store will become a problem.
Okay, as I said, I obviously know next to nothing about it. But all I’m saying is, they certainly tried to freeze the ability to use crypto. How successful they were (or could be), I invite others to comment upon.
Thinking about it again, it seems to me that what they tried to do was not “freeze wallets”, which as you say is not a thing, but rather, to tell institutions under their control (crypto exchanges, e.g.) to stop interacting with Wallet XYZ. Whether there is a way around this tactic, idk, you tell me. I’m just saying, if your level of knowledge approximates mine, then bee careful.
Back to gold for a sec, again in the interest of arming people with as much knowledge as possible, be aware that gold and silver are “property” under the law, not currency, meaning if you sell them you are supposed to declare capital gains or losses.
I asked my gold guy if anyone ever does this in practice. He laughed and said, “Yeah, people are supposed to avoid jaywalking too.”
The point being though, just be cognizant of the hypothetical where the government knows you have (or had) gold, you say to them, “Nah bruh, I sold it”, and they say, “O rly, where’s your capital gains declaration then?”
This is how smart folks need to be.
Personally, I’ve had a bad luck run of unfortunate boating accidents where large portions of interesting material were lost forever to the depths…….
Immortal words from Moldbug on holding Bitcoin:
“(In your own private wallet, of course—not on some fool’s server.)”
What is the likelihood of prepper level preparations being needed? Getting into a situation below the Weimar Germany tier, basically. What would concretely be needed to descend elow that level?
It might be instructive to read Peter Grant’s experiences during Katrina if you think we are approaching that level.
https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2008/08/lessons-learned-from-hurricanes-katrina.html
We are in for stagflation until something changes which means commodities for the time being. Look at ticker symbol GSG,
I found the graph in this article helpful:
https://www.schroders.com/en/us/insights/equities/how-does-stagflation-impact-investment-returns/
No doubt about the inflation part, but stagnation is difficult. Massive reduction is more likely
I help my fiance’s mother out at her store once in a while. “No deliveries for the next three weeks”, I heard today. And in fact I would be surprised if a truck showed up three weeks from now. I have the feeling that the supply chain is about to crash real hard. Well, if you are poor like I am, take comfort in the fact that when things go to shit, the security services are going to stop caring, and you can just take things from other people. Or, if you are not so heartless, private security is going to be in great demand, and they are going to pay their guards in things they want and need.
Interesting data point here:
https://twitter.com/RWApodcast/status/1504215640021819403
Basically, the Source is saying that the vast majority of RF casualties are being generated by artillery. He states that there are almost no casualties from gunfights/gunfire. He also intimates that the logistics management is an issue, with managers using inappropriate tactics from the Syrian War (long, dense convoys; in desert situations, you want to keep everyone together and keep SecFor mobile to respond and interdict, like North Atlantic convoys during the War of Progressive Aggression).
Jim has asserted that logistics and supply should not be done by the military, but should rather be provided by companies/contractors. I always had an issue with this, because it is hard for me to envision having to rely on businessmen to keep my men fed and armed. But, I now see that if logistics and supply are up to merchants, they are going to very quickly identify bad practices that cause them loss, and rapidly change techniques. When L&S is up to a fellow general officer, getting him to change things will have to go through useless red tape, dick measuring, and turf wars.
Jim doesn’t even want logistical contractors. Merchants show up with military goods and the officers buy them for their men.
I’ve done studied quite a lot of WW2 logistics and my conclusion from it was that central planning is fucking retarded and doesn’t work. When Jim talked about free market logistics, it make a whole heck of a lot more sense than the insanity that went on in WW2.
I’m not convinced of the idea of some amazon employee on the frontlines.
Same with everything being handled by them at all times that isn’t combat.
I agree that central planning is inefficient, and that having non-soldier work done by soldiers in name only has long-term negative externalities with the army becoming a bunch of non-soldiers, who are conceited as they think of themselves as soldiers.
However I feel like this is just the cost of and the issue with a modern technologically advanced military.
If you are maintaining and repairing equipment while fighting for example, that’s not something an ordinary civilian can do, or would want to do, since there is a substantial risk involved, not most of the time, but sometimes.
We consider army medics to be part of the army, and I think it would be unreasonable to separate them completely, and have a regular doctor there to help the wounded.
There’s also potential issues with having random low level civilians directly involved in military operations because they’d know too much. Background checks for every low level worker is a lot to ask, with soldiers you know they will be doing the same job for years because they have do, there isn’t as much turnover.
You used to have merchants following armies and providing them with goods. But when that was true, things were much simpler, armies were more of a single group of people, moving more slowly, secrecy was not as much of an issue since there was no instant communication, and there was just less need of deep integration between the military and the logistics and maintenance parts of warfare.
This is an old problem, and the old solution is deputization as auxiliaries. Not warrior caste status, but still with discriminating selection mechanisms for the merchant or labour caste folk doing the work.
Until after 1860, every army marched with a sea of camp followers to do the non military stuff. It worked.
Advanced technology makes socialism harder, not easier. Socialism is bad at providing army food, worse at providing army rockets.
In the US, Amazon was able to set up a <6 hour food delivery service during covid. Conventional supermarkets in Europe set up <2 week food delivery service. The government, while claiming to believe covid to be an awesome and terrible demon, was never able to close the supermarkets, and made no substantial effort to do so.
I would not like to rely on the government to deliver my ammunition in war.
Could someone please screen-scrape Twitter for all the handles that include Ukraine flags and publish them as a list OK thanks.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/doj-inspecting-hunter-biden-for-potential-foreign-lobbying-violations-report
Looks like they ARE chucking Biden…
What? This obviously Jewish DoJ lawyer just noticed the case file on the floor and had nothing else to do that day? How in the world does this make any sense at all, except in schitzo mode?
“How in the world does this make any sense at all, except in schitzo mode?”
They are demonic evil (aka chaotic evil).
https://nypost.com/2022/03/17/lawyer-for-mother-of-hunter-bidens-child-lunden-roberts-says-he-expects-presidents-son-to-be-indicted/
More on this… they’ve had the evidence for almost two years at least but they’ve recently got the okay.
If the derp state allows attacks on crackhead Hunter (no problem with his stripper banging since I also like that and shes a cute one too) for this… they plan to remove Biden.
You must be right. I can’t think of any other reason either.
Right when his crew are out on a limb because they’re trying to avoid WWIII with Russia. Horrifying.
The White House already tried to start WW3 unilaterally with Poland and the Pentagon pozzed though they are successfully blocked it.
What seems curious to me is why would a stripper he banged have access to his financial records? Also there’s the curious case of the laptop. Lots of strange things around Hunter Biden.
She was like a long term mistress he got some service job at his “law firm” (he was no doubt a political fixer hired for connections not a real working lawyer).
>he was no doubt a political fixer hired for connections not a real working lawyer
Well, to the extent there is even a difference.
A good lawyer does not represent you at the trial. He arranges for the trial to somehow go away.
Pretty much, and go away on acceptable terms–that’s the real skill…
Making trials go away is easier, quicker, and cheaper the lower down on the chain of command that you can send it away.
And obviously no problem with Hunter screwing his 14yo (13yo maybe) niece and posting her nude picture on his laptop…
Hes a YUGE degenerate with the incest and the crack (not sure how he was at all functional normally crackheads just age 100 times as fast as a normal person and then die).. the stripper banging is the most normal thing about him.
But the most relevant thing the media suppressed was that he was Joe’s dirty money bagman.
>(not sure how he was at all functional normally crackheads just age 100 times as fast as a normal person and then die)
Probably cut in on some of the fresh baby extract supply.
In DC, the fix switch is either ON or OFF, if it’s off, Hunter’s going to jail…
Hunter going to trial is likely the represent the beginning of the end for the Brezhnevite faction. If so, took considerably longer than I predicted. If that is the outcome, another prediction made on Musk time.
Biden’s chief of staff Ron Klain is a radical… and he all but controls Biden.
Could be the Brezhnev faction getting rid of him.
I would be utterly shocked if Hunter Biden went to trial. The story is being buried by the press. I don’t know why people here think this is a big deal. Sounds like another nothingburger.
It was buried. Shot and buried, then erased from pictures. Now it’s back. Given the level of narrative control exercised by the Brain over the Voice, MSM doesn’t just dig up dead, buried, and forgotten stories from the memory hole.
How fares the US hypersonic missile technology compared to Russia, China and India? How important is it?
I don’t know how important it is, but U.S. is behind Russia and China. They have working hypersonic missiles, U.S. does not. CEO of Raytheon, in recent interview on CNBC, stated regarding hypersonic missiles, “We are behind.” (If you search YouTube for “CNBC US behind in hypersonic missiles” the vid should come up.)
Col. MacGregor is more based than I imagined.
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/tucker-carlson-favorite-douglas-macgregor-stone-age-indigenous-people-south-asian
He praised the Russian military in a September 2021 radio interview, saying, “They’re not going to push women into combat. They’re not going to push women who are vulnerable, who are important to the nation, to whose principal mission is to sustain the nation, and bear children, and raise families, and reinforce the social and political and economic identities of the country.â€
I posted a link to a 55min interview a few comments below this one. The interview is recent and talks about Ukraine. May be relevant to your comment.
Col. MacGregor holds fairly typical views among the O1-O6 Officer ranks (at least for the Army and Marine Corps, not sure about Air force or Navy culture). I’ve mentioned it prior posts, but such views are weeded out when promoting to O7 and above.
A conservative president will need to mass retire the BMLG ranks and force through O6 candidates fast enough congress wouldn’t be able to purge the thought criminals.
There’s a reason why it’s Col. MacGregor and not Gen. MacGregor
On frozen assets.
Just found out that, a US bank froze 40% of Kazakhstan’s assets in October 2017
https://www.gazeta.ru/business/2017/12/27/11555102.shtml
They were unfrozen in July 2019
http://www.matritca.kz/news/63515-v-ssha-razmorozheny-215-mlrd-dollarov-nacfonda-rk.html
Also, lest we forget, in 2020 London stole Venezuela’s gold
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-53262767
because Maduro isn’t the real president or some such
I no longer think Russia left 300 billion to be poached by the west by accident.
I am starting to think this was on purpose. That this was bait, which was swallowed.
With smaller countries people can shrug and be welp that’s just one of those things. When a more visible player gets shafted like that, the whole world realizes that by new globohomo rules your money isn’t your money and your gold isn’t your gold. This can’t be swept under the carpet like with smaller countries.
Globohomo was baited into making an abrupt jump from their new internal social credit system that they’re trying to apply, into rashly starting to apply it on the world stage to other countries. “I hold your money, and if I don’t like your behavior you no longer have access to it.”
It’s one thing to do this to your own cowed and brainwashed populace. It’s another thing to start throwing your weight around the planet like that. To show that not only do western states increasingly act as if their jurisdiction covers the whole planet and supersedes the native jurisdiction of sovereign countries, but now their corporate pals are doing the same very visibly.
At the cost of Russia’s 300 billion, everyone with half a brain realized roughly how things stand from now on.
No one will use 300 billions as bait.
That sounds plausible, but I think that 300 billion would be overpaying for this effect.
If I had implemented such a thing, I’d have made sure to have obligations of a comparable size that are not yet due. When the time comes to fulfill these obligattions in a year or two, I could then point out that I’d love to pay my obligations and debt, but that unfortunately all my Western assets were sized and that payment of my Western obligations is now impossible.
Do you know anything about the size of Russian obligations to Western entities that are due in a year or later?
I already posted 1 piece of the Beyond Mathematical Probability series. Reading through it is insanely uncomfortable, because I don’t really understand a lot of it, and what I do understand is just dumping cortisol into my brain. Here are the links, in order (9 parts so far). I’m not advocating for the substack’s author, but I’d like to know if this guy is onto something, or if he’s just fearmongering.
1) https://worldedge.substack.com/p/beyond-mathematical-probability-hybrid?s=w
2) https://worldedge.substack.com/p/beyond-mathematical-odds-all-out?s=w
3) https://worldedge.substack.com/p/beyond-mathematical-odds-iii-death?s=w
4) https://worldedge.substack.com/p/beyond-mathematical-odds-iv-cascade?s=r
5) https://worldedge.substack.com/p/beyond-mathematical-odds-v-second?s=w
6) https://worldedge.substack.com/p/beyond-mathematical-odds-vi-the-shadow?s=r
7) https://worldedge.substack.com/p/beyond-mathematical-odds-vii-the?s=r
8) https://worldedge.substack.com/p/beyond-mathematical-odds-viii-full?s=r
9) https://worldedge.substack.com/p/beyond-mathematical-odds-ix-the-critical?s=r
I disagree with his interpretation of the evidence.
My interpretation of the evidence is that the paper mechanisms that enable the smooth flow of physical things are coming apart, and this is causing disruptions in the flow of physical things, and, in a different problem caused by the same underlying problems that are causing collapse of the paper mechanisms, we have idiots in charge of physical things.
The physical things he is talking about need to be seen as a manifestation of organizational things. The market economy is coming apart because it relies on dysfunctional paper and dysfunctional government regulation.
What about his assertions regarding “hybrid warfare?” He asserts that we are already in a hybrid war between the “Eastern Alliance” and the WEF/GAE. The EA is attempting to take all raw materials industry offline to force the world to rely on their production, while WEF/GAE is trying to demand destruct petroleum to bring about their Green Utopia. 2 different strategies for world domination.
That he subscribes to the “empires fall and revolutions happen because uh, it got a little colder and the crop yield was bad” biases me against the rest of his theory. That sort of Jared Diamond-esque environmental determinism, when not intentionally mendacious, always leads to Gaea worship, to begging the cold gears of the universe to not crush you, to throwing the child in the volcano to keep it from erupting. This supposedly most scientific and autistic theory of history, of “cascade effects and complex systems”, becomes in fact the most superstitious and gullible theory of history, because outside of the narrow data, like wheat prices and economic productivity, that he can study and incorporate into his model, lies a titanic amount that he cannot model, and so he ends up pushing things like crop yields as explanations for things that rely on the most powerful causative force in history; the will-to-power of men.
He is trying to untie the Gordian Knot, but we must remember Alexander’s answer.
The great value of Jimian analysis is that it sees complexity as a second-order effect and prefers to focus on the upstream cause. “The Afghan war was fought to teach nine year old girls to put a condom on a banana” is fundamentally more true than the ten-essay analysis that this guy would post on the causes of the Afghan war.
There is certainly a possibility that this “hybrid warfare” is going on; if it is, it is because Xi and Putin sat down together and agreed that their mutual security and stability is threatened by letting the fag empire continue to run global finances, and they hashed out a plan to break and then rebuild international trade without the US dollar.
Yeah, if he didn’t explicitly bad mouth the vaxx, call out climate hoax, and reference normalcy bias, I would dismiss it out of hand.
Well, his predictions are about the next few weeks out to the rest of ’22, so we’ll see what’s what.
I don’t think so.
The US is breaking international trade and the dollar all by itself without external assistance.
On the contrary, Putin is doing all sorts of things to try and keep the system working – most of which are likely to be counterproductive, but they seem intended to be productive.
There is definitely a massive cyberwar going on, which the Russians started, or massively escalated, with their cyberattack on Ukraine, and these attacks are getting out of hand causing no end of collateral damage. They are also revealing NSA backdoors to hackers, or maybe hackers in NSA employ have just found hostile NSA source code and repurposed it but the rest of it is primarily self destructive actions by governments – for example Germany cutting off the fuel on which it runs, thus causing an ammonium nitrate shortage.
German greens hate Germans more than they hate Russians. Though they hate Russians more than they hate dot Indians, and dot Indians more than they hate Chinese, and Chinese more than they hate Africans.
I’ve been following this debate on Putin vs the West with some interest and like to weigh in here.
It’s obvious that in the context of Dharma, the person who follows rational self-interest (even if he is adharmic) is obviously lesser evil than the one who is blinded by doctrine and is ready to inflict harm on himself and the world in order to uphold that doctrine. It is obvious that Putin is acting in rational self-interest, even assuming that he might be otherwise adharmic.
The criticism of a person acting in rational self-interest is basically stating that the thief who steals out of necessity is actually more evil than Leftists who want to dispossess the wealthy and topple apple-carts simply because that is their “religion”. It is putting primacy of doctrine over reality.
Truth is, even assuming that Putin is not the Dharmic Hero that the world needs right now, he is clearly engaged in conflict with the greater evil. And while one need not cheer for Putin actively, it is important to realize that, focussing on Putin’s adharma at the moment is almost endorsing the position of the greater adharma of the Global Adharmic Empire.
Pursuing rational self interest is Evil according to the Globohomo. Clearly their evil is more demonic than the evil of the rational self-interested Putin.
If someone is acting in rational self interest to gain something at your expense, you can make it unprofitable, or cut a deal with him – possibly a deal that is badly in your disfavor, like the deal that everyone winds up cutting with a stationary bandit.
If someone is acting self destructively, there is no dealing with him, you are likely to end up needing to destroy him. That is demonic evil, and may well end in nukes.
Putin is acting rationally to prevent globohomo from doing harm to him. Ukraine is acting rationally to make this expensive for Putin, though it would have been easy and cheap to cut a deal for neutrality, like the deal Finland cut with Stalin, because Putin is a rational adversary. In choosing to go with globohomo, when globohomo had designs on Russia, Ukraine was acting irrationally and self destructively.
The persecution of Russian speakers in the Ukraine is largely being carried out and implemented by Ukrainians whose primary language is Russian. It is self destructive and an irrational provocation of a dangerously powerful neighbor.
Yes, and in this conflict, it is very obvious which side increasingly wants the whole world to burn in order to uphold their “values”.
Not only is he acting rationally, his latest speech shows that he and the political elite in Russia understand they may very well be in a total war situation. Any forceful attempt to remove or assassinate Putin by the West may result in the launch of Russia’s entire nuclear Arsenal at the West in a first strike.
Putin and the rest of the russian elite aren’t insane enough to start a nuclear war. At most they will keep their doctrine that they are allowed to use nuclear weapon on their territory to stop a enemy army.
Unfortunately if someone ever tries a strategic first strike would be the west.
If Russia understands itself to be at total war with the West, is it insane to launch a nuclear attack first, destroy nearly all of America’s arsenals and most important population centers, disorganize or frustrate any counter attack, and rely on its well developed anti-ballistic missile defenses to ward off any of the residual U.S. capability?
Not only does this sound completely sane, it would be completely insane not to do this in a total war.
Lol sure lets all wake up tomorrow and start a nuclear war in the hope the other side will not be able to immediately retaliate.
Not tomorrow because not yet in total war, but it seems things are trending towards total war, which Putin seems to be aware of.
What I’m worried about from a total war perspective is all the embargo/boycotts on Russia by private corporations trying to signal their Cathedral loyalties. This has the potential of being a lot bigger than the formal sanctions and I could see Putin deciding to deal with the million snowflakes making up an avalanche by melting the lot of them.
I wonder what would happen if Putin nuked Boston, incinerating Harvard and basically told the world, if you retaliate in any way, I’m going to nuke the rest.
A full on first strike aiming at decapitation might be a better percentage play.
First Strike has to be only strike, and it has to get around MAD. This may be not so hard to do, particularly if the Arsenal is largely smoke and mirrors. Regardless, the only side that will first strike is either days away from collapse/defeat, or absolutely certain there won’t be anyone left afterward to provide a counter-narrative. I feel like that is GAE on both counts.
The last few days have been incredibly depressing. I keep vacillating between deep depression over not being able to feed/protect my land and family in a domestic collapse, and becoming quite convinced that GAE is going to nuke/dirty bomb an American city or 3, the царь-бомба of all false flags. I just can’t see the power mad radicals letting Russia “get away with it.” The unfolding Hunter Biden thing is just so strange, like, why now?
I never expected Biden to last this long. I would conjecture that his removal, and the removal of the rest of the Brezhnevites, is coming up fast.
History doesn’t repeat, it rhymes. A trope worth considering. We’ve been discussing this stuff for years, but as we actually progress through it, I keep being surprised and shocked. Yeah, we aren’t so good at precise timing, and plenty of predictions might be more incorrect than correct, but that could also be a timing/incidence thing, too. It is well known in our circle that a successful coup makes the next coup easier. 2020 was a successful coup, so obviously the next will be easier. But that is in retrospect. You know how going through a disaster or heightened awareness experience, time seems to slow down? As well, when there’s a firm date for something unavoidable, time seems to speed up? Hard to factor this effect in. If Biden was deposed in 2023, that would still be much faster than the previous coup/removal. Though to us, here, we’d feel as if your (Jim) prediction was wrong.
We knew war was coming. We knew things were speeding up. Knowing there’s a storm on the way is not the same as saying where the lightening will strike, or when the river will flood.
Based on all the stuff that we are seeing, all that has come to pass, I think we’ve crossed that threshold, that moment of weightlessness before the G forces start to ratchet up inexorably. I hope I am wrong because I’m not ready, and I want more time for the mundane pleasures God gifts us.
This is highly unlikely, but what is the game plan if we somehow see an ending to internet connectivity before it happens? Any plans to start a HAM radio blog, Jim? I’m kidding… unless you do…
If Biden is not removed until 2023, I will still be pretty good at predicting, but I am going lose some bets I made on the 2022 election. The Brheznevites want to keep a fake opposition party around so that they can blame them for stalling the radicals.
The idea has occurred to me that this whole circus is really intended to destroy America, or at least Americana, by elements within GAE. Sort of like opening the gates of Toledo. All the NPCs have been manipulated into a self defeating strategy where the sanctioners are harmed more by the sanctions than the sanctioned.
I suspect the Cathedral would have been much more respectful of Putin if he had organized a color revolution style rally at Kiev, protesting the racist violence against the Donbass and discrimination against Russian speaking Ukrainians. This would all be legitimate. Even the Canadian truckers got some press against the great covid demon, a far stronger adversary than mere geopolitical nuance.
The journalists and priests are angry that the Russians just rushed in without letting them have their say, their rituals. A couple weeks of peaceful protest in Kiev before the invasion would have satisfied much and probably most of the Western intellectual class, giving them their due. Brute force just to send a message is stupid if it isn’t going to produce a quick and perfect victory.
Accommodating the holier than thou does not work. It just excites their bloodlust.
Also, complaining about injustices on good progressive grounds simply never works. Observe their cheerful acceptance of numerous genocides, even though genocide is theoretically the worst crime ever.
One of my sons was in junior school, and they were catechizing him on the holocaust, and required him to say that it will never again happen, because we are so much morally superior now. He inconveniently pointed out that a Cathedral approved genocide was happening as this class was being given. Got in big trouble.
[*deleted for grotesque misinformation that I am disinclined to waste time rebutting*]
Russia’s lack of any propaganda, even when they know journalists are whores who will report any street theater they see,
[*deleted for grotesque misinformation that I am disinclined to waste time rebutting*]
Russia is pouring out piles of propaganda. You just don’t get to read it because you are isolated in shrinking bubble of the Cathedral narrative.
No they will not. We tried it, the rest of the alt right tried it, Russia tried it.
Journalists will only report street theater when authority sends them the script for the theater in advance, so that if anything should fail to follow the script, they can piously ignore it, for if any unscripted events should happen during street theater, a journalist who reports the off script events is might get into big trouble.
A whore is a available to any bidder. Should a journalist take unapproved bids, he will lose his job.
Your bubble of grotesque unreality is locked down hard against dangerous thoughts, and dangerous news.
Hmm. So the Canadian truckers were fake? Or the Charlottesville protests? Or Occupy Wall Street
[*deleted because too tedious to correct all of it.*]
Charlottesville was exactly the case I had in mind when I said that it does not work for the right, because journalists will say what they are told to say, and see what they are told that they are seeing.
Occupy wall street was totally fake and scripted from beginning to end. All participants were directly or indirectly on the government payroll – professors, students sent by their professors, ngo employees sent by their ngo, and government employees dragged their by their union and given time off by the government.
If you were not inside your bubble, you would have heard how utterly and hilariously fake the occupy wall street protests were. Empty tent cities with tents sourced and funded by quasi government organizations and set up by quasi government employees on government and quasi government land. Street theater confrontations with police and protesters, and the police objecting to the script.
They’ve been using the term “useless eater” to label the out-group. Someone who can’t retaliate. When they come, make it expensive.
“If RF had given GAE a few weeks warning, things would have gone better.”
Retard alert.
The holiest of holies and an open letter
https://www.eutimes.net/2022/03/archbishop-vigano-the-coup-detat-by-the-new-world-order-is-almost-complete/
Archbishop Vigano needs to have a leading role in the Inquisition to retake the Vatican.
Bit of a dumb question. We likely have supply chains failing and inflation going crazy in the very near future. Are states/countries with a lower cost of living going to get hit harder, less hard, or proportionally? That is, if I relocate to somewhere that is dirt cheap to live, in a year’s time my cost of living will be similar to what it is in my current location? I can see it going either way, and probably depends on the country and what they import/export. Best to live in places that grow food nearby?
If a currency inflates, it inflates every where. This disrupts long supply chains involving substantial delays, and projects that take a long time to produce goods and involve large committed capital expenditures, such as building something or drilling for oil.
So you don’t want to be at the far end of a long supply chain for food. But you had better stockpile tech.
I don’t think lower or higher cost of living is really the right criteria here.
Complex supply lines are one thing, as Jim said, so the places that are at the very top in terms of cost might be the worst. Low prices is usually not a sign of long supply chains.
But in poor places, it will take less convincing for the local population, if they are starving from being just a little more impoverished, to turn on some relatively wealthy foreigner and steal his apple.
The question should be which countries will be more politically stable, and which populations are less likely to hate you for being white.
When I go shopping for food, the good stuff that is grown an hour from where I live is usually more expensive, and the store brand that is shipped from halfway across the country is cheaper. But this week, the stuff that is grown an hour away stayed the same price, and the lower-quality stuff that is shipped a long way is now more expensive than it.
So, best to live near where the things you want and need are produced. Local goods are going to be the least volatile in price and availability. And if those things are produced nowhere near you or anywhere you can move, time to buy them now and hope they last.
https://nitter.net/TheRealKeean/status/1504847690739331077
Apparently Canada gave Ukraine everything they have in terms of equipment. The utter lack of any sense of national self-preservation is expected when you take power for granted, and have the US protect you, but this just goes to show how incredibly helpless the vassals of the Empire are by themselves.
Power is just laying there for someone to take it. If the US is weak, the rest of NATO is a joke.
Certain IR think tanks are asserting that, with the exit of all the petro majors from the Russian extraction and processing industry, their oil supply could diminish by ~50% This is due to scarcity of replacement parts and skilled labor. The source is 100% GAE mouthpiece, but it was one of those “this terrible thing is happening but don’t worry because it is actually a good thing” pieces, so I am inclined to believe that there is an issue. Any thoughts on this?
Additionally, rumors floating around that RF and UKR collectively supplied most of the noble gasses needed for chip manufacturing. I know that fab is really quite complicated, in terms of both requisite parts/processes and actual fabrication. Said rumors state that China will basically control the vast majority of fabrication, and that once parts on hand run out (1-12 months from now, across all industries in GAE), there will be no solution as it takes years to get the facilities going, and that’s assuming you have ample supply of raw stocks/constituent parts.
The wheat shortages are probably a real thing. The fertilizer shortages are probably a real thing. If the chip shortage is a real thing, what does this mean for conventional warfare going forward? If you can’t make bullets and bombs, feed your troops and workers, and cannot fabricate drones and replacement fighters, then you can’t fight a successful remote conflict. Add to this the possibility of so-called hybrid warfare (protests, worker strikes, logistic bottlenecks, sabotage/targeted incompetence), and it looks like any semi-sane actor leading the GAE will be forced into unconventional territory.
It could also mean that advanced warfare doesn’t happen, and there’s a pretty much global reversion to analog warfare.
> Said rumors state that China will basically control the vast majority of fabrication, and that once parts on hand run out (1-12 months from now, across all industries in GAE),
Fabrication of what? The most advanced chips are made in Taiwan, not China. Less advanced chips are made in many places even in Europe, US, and the rest of Asia.
The machines Intel, Samsung and TSMC uses for fabricating chips are built by one company, ASML in the Netherlands, and I doubt they outsource that, given it’s both high tech and not super high volume (fabs themselves aren’t a mass market product are they?)
I don’t really know the full supply chain need to make the actual chips, though. Surely something might come from China mainly. No idea.
There’s quite a few very exotic materials that are required, for example quartz of such a purity that it is only mined in a few places, and processed by a handful of companies. They use this quartz to make, I think, crucibles for the molten silicon, that don’t leave impurities in it? I am rusty on the details.
Regardless of how advanced a nation’s chip fabs are, if a crucial ingredient comes from Russia, and you cannot trade with Russia, you have to buy that ingredient from people who are still trading with Russia. That means China, that means China can tell anybody “no chips for you”, that means China controls chip fabrication.
Putin signed a whole lot of export bans last week. No idea if noble gases were among the things Russia is no longer selling to the world. Jim replied to me below that the Rainbow Empire is already destroying itself, and does not need anybody’s help. He’s right, but if I were in Xi or Putin’s shoes, why not put a little squeeze on and make it die faster?
For those that didn’t see the node-ipc stuff:
https://github.com/RIAEvangelist/node-ipc/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aclosed
Basically the soyboy developer of node-ipc added malware to his software (or added a new dependency, which is malware?). Apparently, for those outside Russia and Belarus, you’d just get some gay message about peace and love, but for those with Russia or Belarus IP addresses, running it would cause every file on your system to be overwritten by a love heart.
I don’t know much about node-ipc, but apparently lots of projects use it as a dependency. Vue, Unity, truffle, and many more. Full list here:
https://github.com/zlw9991/node-ipc-dependencies-list. If you were using one of these and had automatically updated dependencies, and were using a VPN located in Russia or Belarus, your data would have been wiped irreversibly. Scary.
Read this post:
https://github.com/RIAEvangelist/node-ipc/issues/308
Allegedly a globohomo NGO had their data from anti-Russian and anti-Belarus whisteblowers wiped out. The story is probably fake, but demonstrates the sheer retardation of this faggot.
In theory, this guy could face up to 10 years in prison for this. Whether or not he will face any consequences is another story.
I’m wondering what’s the most effective way to avoid anything like this happening going forward. I’m obviously not going to sift through every update for every package I ever install. Should development be done on a virtual machine or something like that? Jim/others, if you do any kind of webdev/javascript stuff, what setup do you use? node? frameworks like react? I’ve tried setting npm stuff up before and it’s often a pain in the ass dealing with dependencies.
There is a whole lot of this going around.
And I don’t have any solutions.
I try to minimize dependence on stuff that I think is likely to be corrupted, but it is not really practical to do a thorough job on that.
You could also develop things on, say, a throwaway digital ocean droplet where damage can be limited. In this case, which does have a whiff of fake of it but could be seen as representative of the bottom feeder IT tier, the system owners appear quite hapless and unaware of basic practices. They won’t get it right.
In the longer run, permitting these activities will poison npm, github, etc. We have previously seen semi-malicious University of Minnesota submit bad patches to Linux. among a number of similar examples. It’s a weakness of the current open source model.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/04/linux-kernel-team-rejects-university-of-minnesota-researchers-apology/
It broadens these attacks from being produced by specialist groups to any trans virtue signaler, which is quite bad. Perhaps mere banning will not be enough.
But in essence, if the very source is poisoned and untrustworthy, yes, you WILL have to sift through every update.
This question is based solely on the link you provided: how was the UMN research team being malicious if they immediately identified the “trojan horse patches” immediately after their scheme worked? Genuinely curious, because I feel like, if they were malicious, they would have continued the “game” until caught, then pretended “it was a social experiment dawg.”
then pretended “it was a social experiment dawg.â€
That was basically what they did, though the experimental subjects took a dim view.
I’d summarize it like this: they had some trust — as university researchers, let’s pause for a chuckle, but such are usually viewed as serious people — and abused it, even if they appended “lol j/k”. Untrustworthy contributors are not worth keeping around.
Ah, ok I think I see.
Agreed on use of some sort of virtualization for dev and testing. For any package manager you should always be using a “lock file” like package-lock.json in npm, such that your exact top-level and dependency package versions are locked in and not selecting latest implicitly every time you ‘npm install’. Add in extensive regression testing of whatever your software is, including user interface testing (which might have caught this if a savvy dev or tester had looked at the outputs). Then on top of that add a monthly cadence, a repeating calendar item essentially, in which package upgrades are done by a developer. You can use a policy of advancing to head/latest for each package, or you could set a policy that you don’t want newer package versions than, say, 2 weeks ago, just in case something bad is being discovered during that time period. Adjust all this to your level of paranoia or worry or need for security.
The intent with this policy is to keep up with patches in a reasonable timeframe. Obviously if you are getting word of a serious zero-day attack and you need to patch in between, you do so – but just as carefully, with regression testing both automated and manual. And preferably looking at the diffs between your package version’s commit and what was added for the new patch.
In the end though if you’re a business owner or engineering manager in a larger organization, every line of code you ship is on you, no matter whether you wrote it. Liability is on your company, and your company is protected by your diligence. Used to be that organizations owned most or all of their code but kept re-inventing the wheel. Now we outsource to open source and presume security and well-tested-ness, or maybe you have your team contributing to certain projects but not everything you use.
If all this worries you – maybe keeps you up at night – you have the right attitude. It should.
If you’re very paranoid, own all your code even if costly. And even then you have to trust your devs, but an engineering manager role includes being aware of every single line being committed, whether that means approving each pull request or doing an audit of diffs in your codebase before releases, for all commits since the last release.
Linus is no longer working on Linux… biggest worry is insertion of bad stuff there now that he’s not watching every line of code. Then add supply chain attacks like this (and SolarWinds and so many others), times every package manager and even compilers and other toolchains themselves.
>a throwaway digital ocean droplet where damage can be limited.
That’s fairly involved and limited. Much easier to just use containers (ie Docker) for each application you run on your server, as I already do.
Docker containers cannot access the rest of the disk, only their own per-app virtual file system, and the virtual file system is ephemeral. Containers are restarted if they fail and return to their previous state.
No damage is possible.
If they need to persist data in a folder, you typically just connect that specific folder to it, so any damage is limited.
For a node.js application like the one described in the incident from OP, there’s no need for any persistent storage, most of the time. It would communicate with a separate container running a database, which holds the data. Databases don’t have this issue of random unvetted libraries becoming part of them, so this wouldn’t normally happen.
Basically, with my docker setup, which is a normal docker setup, something like this would have no effect. A more malicious and sophisticated library could still do a lot of damage though.
If node.js has access to the database, as is usually the case, the database could be wiped, or worse, the data leaked to the attacker. The former problem is solved by incremental backups.
The latter is an open issue.
I’m a bit burnt out on docker so I suppose I blocked it out, but good point. Just setting and running under appropriate permissions would stop node from rampaging to a great extent (for this specific case, at least). In the described incident, whether genuine or not, the underlying problem appeared to be overall incompetence and carelessness.
Still, the problem remains of libraries with deliberately introduced malware. Perhaps the next ones will mine crypto for the children of Ukraine (of course).
The soyboy got his Twitter hacked after he got doxxed.
His Twitter:
https://mobile.twitter.com/electriccowboyr
The dox containing everything on him, including his Ashley Madison stuff and his home address.
https://doxbin.com/upload/BrandonNozakiMiller
I just got hit on my personal NAS with icefire, some ransomware. Gay, I had a nice movie server on there, but apparently hitting some actual targets. I probably could have done more to protect it, and it sounds silly but figured I’d share since I’ve never had anything get through to my personal computers or devices in the past of any real significance. At this point I’m not feeling like remaking anything like it, and just printing out or burning to DVD anything really important to me. As the internet gets less reliable older tech could be making a comeback, it sure has been in my house.
India formally bought oil from Russia in a direct rupee-rouble exchange today, ignoring the threat of sanctions and bypassing the petrodollar altogether. And so another pillar of globohomo teeters.
And now it has come to pass that the majority of the worlds oil supply and the majority of the world’s industrial capacity has stepped outside of GAE’s financial umbrella, in passive opposition, with a likely active opposition when pressed.
That was the Eurasian moment. Right there.
I can just imagine the froth-in-the-mouth righteous indignation of the (dot) Indian-American libtard diaspora and also the local Cathedral mouthpieces at this deal. 😀
Modi has clearly put rational self-interest above doctrine and it’s quite heartening to note.
Can you elaborate, or point me to an elaboration, on exactly how they paid them? Was it all electronic, or did someone show up to the Russian embassy in New Delhi with a truck full of cash?
I’m self-consciously out of my depth on this one, but I can’t stop wondering if some kind of computer-free (phone calls and color-coded paperwork only) payment system might be of help right about now.
I guess an Indian bank’s branch in Russia and a Russian bank’s branch in India will agree to hold each other’s currencies of a specified and agreed upon exchange rate in lieu of the goods and service as in old times:
https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blexplainer/bl-explainer-rupee-rouble-trade-arrangement-will-it-work/article65200627.ece
I’m no financial expert but I guess it works something like this
1. Indian bank opens an account in Russia and holds Roubles and a Russian bank in India holds rupee equivalent of those roubles at a agreed exchange rate.
2. A Trader in India imports goods from Russia and he pays in rupees to Russian bank account in India and the Indian bank holding roubles in Moscow is instructed to pay rouble equivalent to the Russian supplier.
And vice versa.
Obviously it must be a bit more complicated than that and somebody better at international finance can correct me if I’m wrong.
A minor Correction: I think the Indian trader would pay in rupees into the Indian bank branch in India which is holding Russian account and the corresponding account of the bank in Russia will pay in roubles equivalent to the Russian trader.
Similarly the Russian trader would pay in roubles to the Russian bank which is holding account in India and the Russian bank account in India will pay equivalent rupees to the Indian trader.
There will obviously be commissions charged on transactions by both banks. Or maybe the governments may foot the bills temporarily.
Makes sense.
Why is this a big deal?
How lazy are these people? So a few lackeys have to send some faxes, do some conference calls and wait on hold with their banks to buy and sell millions of dollars worth of something. So fucking what? This is weird.
I may be missing the spirit of your question, but roughly ~70% of international business transactions use USD as a middle step if it is being converted. That number is out of date, could be higher or lower or fluctuate, but under Bush, or Obama or both, this was how the US squeezed anybody on the Unacceptable Terrorist De Jour List. One example was the Tamil Tigers, who previously got something like 80-90% of their financial support from Tamils in the US via remittances. I’ve read about it, I don’t actually know, so apologies if I’m way off the mark. As I understand it, the USD has a few pillars that make it what it is (maybe was?):
-You can’t print too much, because every dollar printed works pretty much everywhere
– It is the world currency in terms of cash reserves
– It is a prerequisite for complex and/or massive business deals at the multi-regional and global level
These are obviously very interrelated, and if big transactions start skipping the dollar step, the necessity for USD reserves might diminish, which in turn exposes USD to the dangers of inflation that it has not had to deal with for decades.
It is a great deal harder than you think.
The US and England have institutions to make it happen, which extremely complex institutions have been becoming increasingly dysfunctional.
Replacing them is far from trivial
The rupee rouble exchange is a Cold War era technology which used non electronic means. India’s relationship with the American empire was worse in those days than it is now and India Russia deals were in local currencies only in those times. I’m sure bypassing the dollar in this case is not so tough. The complications are political not economic.
The actual payments or transactions under this seem simple enough. The Indian and Russian governments can even back their currencies with gold rather than USD for the time being. The complications arise because these banks also need to deal with the dollar economy and bypassing the dollar in this case might bring down the wrath of the Global adharmic empire.
More political than economic complications.
Ann wants to pay in rupees.
Bob wants to be paid in rubles.
How do you magic rupees into rubles?
Suppose a bank in Russia ends up with an account in rupees on an Indian bank.
Now it is the red on rubles, and in the black on rupees. Accountants throw a fit of hysterics, because in the red on rubles, which is a massive violation of all sorts of things. Assume the manager tells the accountants that Putin will shoot them, so they had better shut up.
Now he has rupees. What does he do with them. Presumably, someone is going to want to buy goods from India?
In that case he can just ask the guy who wants to buy stuff from India to pay him in rubles, and he pays the guy in India in rupees from the Bank’s Indian bank account, and now he is square again, and the accountants subside. Everyone would be happy.
Unfortunately, no one with rubles one wants to buy much stuff from India. They do however want to buy something from someone who wants to buy something from someone, who wants to buy stuff from India.
Sorting that one out is not simple, and doing it in such a way that everyone knows that everyone else is not stealing the money in movement is a lot harder.
I get your point. The present arrangement seems temporary and to complete existing transactions and that too only for major government contractors. I guess both india and Russia would want guarantees in a standard like gold if dollar is not feasible.
An alternative to SWIFT might take a while but I think China and Russia would work on it with cooperation from non GAE states.
A strange, probably trivial, thought occurs: the Faith Scarcity is kind of the consistent X factor in most of modernity’s big problems. (I’m speaking of course of the “dharmic” folk; the diabolists don’t share our Problem.)
Lack of Faith for armies.
Lack of faith in elites.
Lack of Faith for Elites.
Lack of faith in science and technology.
Lack of faith for our domestic allies.
Lack of faith in the honesty and honor in fellow travelers.
Biggest one: lack of faith in Faith as a solution.
Defection, the superweapon of Our Foe, is the root of The Lack. This is elementary, but the Cathedral’s magic bullet was basically enshrining defection at the personal, familial, communal, and societal levels, then rinse and repeat for a couple generations. It’s almost like we need a slate wipe just to have a chance of rebuilding anti-defection.
The faith deficit is a spiritual problem for which the solution is a spiritual revival. I know Jim thinks that a change in the state religion to a sane state religion will bring about restoration, but I feel there’s more to it than that.
Need a cohesive, virtuous, elite.
King Alfred manufactured such an elite. So did Charles the Second. The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.
And, as I am fond of pointing out, was not won in the classrooms of Eton – this attitude to elite cohesion was still live all the way to 1930, though it started taking massive hits at the start of the eighteenth century.
Thanks everyone. This helps.
Given that it’s 2022, a rouble-rupee-yen-baht-yuan-whatever trade system seems perfectly doable technologically, but I can just make it out that the real weakness is on the people side. So many different people, in different places, promising to transfer money when A, when B and then when C, that it’s hard to trust that no one will scam it or just fuck it up.
That said, I understand that the Muslim world has this going on already, kinda-sorta, with the various kingpins’ public obedience to Allah holding the trust links together.
So either crypto wizardry perfection, or we need some kind of Pax Somebody to keep an eye on things and always punish defectors.
From this point of view, the USD-centric system is just what’s convenient, and the USD is the “global reserve currency†simply by default, because it’s what net-exporting countries always end up having lying around in piles at the end of the financial year.
And let me guess, this is what the Global Jew was doing for centuries beforehand? Didn’t some weirdo on YouTube tell me that George Soros grew up running around exchanging currencies in Hungary back in the day? To straighten out situations just like this? Must have been a big fucking job.
“The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.”
I don’t think Field Marshal his Grace the Duke of Wellington ever said this. The Duke of Wellington from what I read was very unambitious (described as a “wastrel”) until the girl he had oneitis for rejected him (probably meaning his family rejected him) and then he became suddenly a serious army officer. He by all accounts didn’t like school at all in his youth.
He did not like school, but he did not say the war was won in the classrooms of Eton. Is was won on the playing field. Not the studious types, but rather the rugged, manly team sports types. It was the lessons they learned on the field that brought them victory.
We all seem to have a slightly different interpretation of who is a Leader and who are Followers; what makes one a PC v. NPC.
https://youtu.be/s-oNaU-gzJw
Who is an NPC in that clip? Is NPC a static description, or can one be an NPC in certain situations but have culpable agency in others? I’m not taking a position that I’ll hold fast to, but I currently feel like NPC status is variable.
Retired commentator “Yggdrasil” has an interesting professional trans athlete related anecdote from 1979 in his review of the movie “A Clockwork Orange”. Below is the lede.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170224123353/http://www.whitenationalism.com/cwar/orange.htm
From inner party chick’s POV, the real reason why Dr. Raskind lost the match is obviously because Yggdrasil’s comments produced transphobic vibes that denied the trans athlete hser existence. It is a profound proof of the insidious power of transphobia.
Fascinating piece. Fascinating and sad.
“On a more refined level, contrast Notting Hill, which gets the aesthetic of love and survival among the ruins of culture destruction exactly right (in a low testosterone sort of way), with the potty mouthed Bridget Jones’ Diary, which is similar but slightly off key. Notting Hill will be selling DVDs for generations, while Bridget Jones will die within a decade of its birth.”
Even the evil can evolve.
The term “NPC” refers to robotic communication. NPCs fail to communicate in a human manner because of the policeman inside, or because they are following a script, and respond repetitiously and meaninglessly to off script responses, just as non player character in a video game responds repetitiously and meaninglessly to off script responses.
Probably, mobilization is needed for a real victory. At present, the Russian troops are marking time, which means a bloodier and more brutal inevitability associated with greater sacrifices, or Putin is set for a symbolic conquest in the spirit of the Kherson People’s Republic. Most likely, there will be mobilization, because Putin has already said that there will be no mobilization. I also liked the way in his speech he puts Russia on a par with Brazil and India, countries with much larger and much younger populations in his speech and talks about traditional values, implying the values ​​of the Soviet era.
I want to see at least something good in the situation, how realistic is the likelihood of meeting millions on the road from hunger due to problems with the supply of fertilizers? Or is the ordinary Hans paying again to feed Mubamba’s children?
Nah.
The problem is that Russia was carrying out twentieth century warfare, blitzkreing and tanks, which has been stopped by twenty first century warfare, man carried autonomous self guided anti tank missiles. You point the missile in the general direction of the tank, and tell the missile to take care of it.
Now that the Turkish drones are also capable of autonomy, flattening cities will not be possible either. Takes artillery a while to flatten a city, and it is not going to survive long enough to do so. Ukraine recently received a shipment of the latest Turkish drones, which are capable of autonomously targeting something and then flying back and landing by themselves. On each flight, one drone will take out four artillery, if it does not get shot down. It has good stealth against radar, and a low infrared signature.
To counter, needs a similarly autonomous missile that can see it and home in. Trouble is, it is hard for troops on the ground to see it, so difficult to counter even if they were equipped with such missiles.
Flattening cities is still possible with nukes
Can’t drones be jammed…
The latest Turkish drones cannot be jammed.
They are capable of autonomous warfare, and figure out where they are by looking at the scenery.
Giving them the instructions they need to carry out an autonomous mission is difficult, and the UI is dreadful, which does not make it any easier.
But if the Ukrainians manage to figure it it out, it will be impossible for the Russians to bombard cities.
Needs smart operators and a better UI, but if directed to go on an autonomous mission, they take off by themselves, fly to the destination by themselves, recognize four targets in succession, take them out, find a friendly airstrip by themselves, and land by themselves. Difficulty is telling them how to recognize the targets. UI needs to be improved.
The Russians destroyed all their Turkish drones a while ago. Apparently the US is giving them US drones now in military aid. Unknown if they have hit the field yet.
Turkish drones under remote guidance are easy to destroy. You jam them, they become stupid, then you kill them. The latest drones are capable of autonomy. I am not sure whether the Ukrainians will be able to use this capability, (you have to designate the targets, then the drone takes off, performs the mission, and returns without human guidance, but designating the targets so that the drone can understand is strangely difficult) but if they can, the Russians are in big trouble.
“The latest drones are capable of autonomy.”
I find it hard to believe they are all that smart in their autonomy…
I have indirect evidence that suggests that their autonomy is very good, but the interface between the mission planner and the AI is not so good.
They operate off autonomous AI?
So the Turks say. I hear that the UI for giving the AI instructions to fly an autonomous mission is not easy to use.
Now I hear the Ukrainians are managing to do it.
High ROF autoloading artillery systems (like archer) are capable of quickly switching between munition types. Good fire support in advanced conflicts should come with a range of ballistic and guided munitions for engaging a variety of targets, both in the air and on the ground.
The value potential of integrating battlefield awareness with kill-chains as fast as a press of a button (detect target, ping assets, drop ordnance on them) was understood by both soviet and american planners a long time ago (eg, https://warontherocks.com/2014/11/the-cold-war-offset-strategy-assault-breaker-and-the-beginning-of-the-rsta-revolution/ ); but like a lot of things in a demotist environment, it was as if there was a mass brain-fog that prevented everyone from ever really putting all the dots together as a whole; ‘the system’ could not remember what it did yesterday, nor relate it to what it would do tomorrow; every day was a new day zero.
Like the airplane before it, drones can be viewed as in essence another form of guidance package for munitions; or from another angle, you could see guided missiles as basically a special kind of drone, with aerodynamic vehicles as a reusable boost phase.
Somewhat tangential, but touching back on the Gerald Bull reference last article, there is a further use-case for HARP gun space tubes that is a killer-app all by itself (literally), which is pumping out clouds of boosted god rods to high orbit, which can be used right away or at any time on demand for global precision strike of any hard target; once you go past a certain point, you essentially gain the ability to ‘store’ the force of an exoplanetary cannon shot indefinitely.
Twentieth century weapons.
You see a UFO rolling up, and launch your own bogey to shake hands with it.
The difference between 20th century and 21st century is whether singular units need to be their own kill-chains in isolation (detection, fire control, and ordnance), or whether the fighting force as a whole can act as singular kill-chains.
“Biggest one: lack of faith in Faith as a solution.”
Speaking as one theologically trained in a certain confession: faith is only as good as the object of faith. Faith itself is not really a solution to anything. Faith is inevitable; it’s just that people usually have faith in idols rather than Christ. The problem with modernity or globohomo is not “lack of faith” but wrong faith. Globohomo still believes in the possibility of heaven on earth through the exercise of human will and intellect. It does not believe in original sin and redemption through Christ.
Consider how deeply, as someone else noted, the plebs believed what the priests told them about Covid and vaccines and masks. Most of them still believe, even in the churches. The problem is not no faith, but idolatrous faith.