Monthly Archives: April 2022

Ukraine sitrep

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First of all, let’s see Scott Ritter’s take:

Basically, the Russians structured the battlefield in a way where they have very little if any casualties as a function of time, the Ukrainians are sustaining huge casualties and material losses as a function of time, and now the Russians are basically doing to NATO what NATO was planning to do to them – they are bleeding the enemy and letting time do the work for them. NATO attempts to target Russia proper show desperation on the part of NATO – basically, they understand that they’re fucked and now they are trying to escalate things and change the setup so that the function of time doesn’t cause so much of a one-sided loss.

I would say that Russia will have their hands full with saboteurs, because some of the damage they’ve sustained is internally caused.

Economically speaking, the EU is sustaining the worst damage, and the gas is still flowing. When that changes, time will start running out for the “united Europe”.

The statements made by NATO countries are getting more and more, should I say, nervous? in ways that are diplomatically ill-advised unless you want to get nuked. This behaviour seems to be caused by the fact that they are losing Ukraine, in ways they didn’t predict. What they predicted was a quick war where Russia takes Ukraine but then they have a long-term guerrilla warfare on their hands, basically a second Afghanistan, where the West will keep feeding the slow fire that will bleed Russia into bankruptcy and social unrest, causing the second 1990s that will lead to the country’s breakup and destruction. What they got is prolonged “hot” warfare in which Russia keeps destroying the ammo and weapons the West keeps sending about as fast as it arrives, they neutralised the Ukrainian army to the point of a rat hunt, Russia is having less economic difficulties with the sanctions regime than the West, Ruble is actually above the pre-war levels, the Russians keep testing and improving their tactics and weapons, Putin is more popular than ever, and the West is less popular in Russia than probably at any time since the late 1980s. Also, NATO had to increase the support to Ukraine to the point where America, Britain, Poland, Romania and Germany, to name a few prominent ones, are in de facto open war with Russia, and the only thing missing is the official acknowledgment of this fact by Russia, followed by hypersonic missiles (nuclear-tipped or not) hitting the NATO bases. Putin already warned of such an outcome:

Russian president Vladimir Putin has warned outside forces against interfering in the Ukrainian conflict, promising a “lightning-speed” response to such actions, with the use of Moscow’s most advanced weaponry.

“If someone decides to intervene in the ongoing events from the outside and create unacceptable strategic threats to us, they should know that our response to those oncoming blows will be swift, lightning-fast,” Putin said in an address to lawmakers on Wednesday.

“We have all the tools to do this. Tools that no one except us can brag about. But we’re not going to brag. We’ll use them if such a need arises,” the president said, without specifying which tools could be deployed.

Russian authorities have already made all necessary decisions to prepare for such a response, he added.

Also, I would expect the strikes on Russian territory to be answered soon, and not necessarily in ways one would expect.

Edit: American troops are moving to the Romania-Moldova border:

My interpretation is that the Americans will try to militarily seize Transnistria in order to prevent the connection of the Russian forces in Ukraine, on the Odessa side, with Transnistria, which would greatly improve Russian position and make any attempt of Ukraine to achieve exit to the Black Sea very difficult. The problem with this idea is that the Russians are very unlikely to allow it.

Legitimacy of deep strikes

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I just found this:

“It is completely legitimate for Ukraine to be targeting in Russia’s depth in order to disrupt the logistics that if they weren’t disrupted would directly contribute to death and carnage on Ukrainian soil,” Heappey told Times Radio.

Let’s enter slight reciprocal corrections, shall we?

“It is completely legitimate for Russia to be targeting in NATO countries’ depth in order to disrupt the logistics that if they weren’t disrupted would directly contribute to death and carnage on Ukrainian soil”

I can’t say I would disagree with that. It’s obvious that NATO is the actual party at war with Russia, providing logistics and weaponry to Ukraine.

Besides, America already stated that they are at war with Russia:

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin told reporters after a trip to Kyiv that “we want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.” The new US goal is “to defeat Russia on the battlefield so decisively that it will refrain from any new attacks.”

It’s obvious that they are pissing on Russia, and Russia is trying to keep the pretence that it’s raining.

About deterrence and genocide

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Paul Craig Roberts wrote an article in which he expresses a viewpoint that the Russian gradual and slow approach to the Ukraine war will only encourage American war hawks, giving them the false impression that Russia is weaker than it is, and that attacking them in a nuclear war might actually be a good idea. He thinks it would’ve been better if Russia ran over Ukraine with overwhelming force and simply killed everybody. That would supposedly give Americans pause.

Dmitry Orlov responded on the Saker blog with an emotional article that accuses Roberts of advocating for genocide of Ukrainians, accuses Roberts of pontificating to Russia, and argues that Russian approach will flood the Europe with Western Ukrainian refugees which is good because it will harm Europe, free Ukraine of people who hate Russia, and so on.

I think both sides are under a misapprehension of some kind; Roberts thinks that the nuclear war is preventable. I don’t think it is, because the clique in America that holds literally ALL the power sees such a war as a necessary part of re-arranging the world so that America can have its collapse and emerge as the dominant force decades later. Whatever Russia does or doesn’t do, the outcome will be the same, because it isn’t about how weak they think you are, it’s about what they actually want to do. What they want to do is degrade all possible competition to a position worse than their own for at least the duration of their collapse and presumed recovery.

Orlov, on the other hand, is working under a misapprehension that the amount of killing that would in present circumstances be called genocide matters in the large scale of things. I don’t think it does; even the most strong-armed approach by Russia would probably only increase the speed of killing, not change the ultimate outcome, if Mariupol is any indication, and I believe it is. Basically, with more troops and bombs you end up with the same level of destruction in the timeframe of days instead of weeks, which might actually reduce the time civilians spend in basements starving or risking their lives looking for food and water. Also, he is thinking emotionally and not strategically, and that’s good if you’re taking care of individual people, but it’s not good if you’re trying to come up with some kind of a stable and livable scenario. For instance, let’s say Russia spares the West Ukraine. There’s no bombing, no civilians killed there. It leaves them in a better position to attack Russia later, and they have no personal experience that would advise them against this course. This results in postponed bloodshed, where Russia still has to run them over, but likely more people die, and, more importantly, more Russians die, because I don’t really care that much about the Banderites, considering how they are likely the worst people in the world.

So, the real question isn’t genocide or not. There’s going to be genocide regardless. The Ukrops are going to kill all Russian speaking Ukrainians after this. Unless they are killed, they will make a hell on Earth. Deaths and suffering are inevitable, it’s just a matter of who dies, in what way and order, and how quickly. Also, having in mind that the nuclear war is inevitable, leaving a country full of vile indoctrinated Russia-haters at your doorstep, leaving it intact and with no worry other than how to harm you more when you’re down, is a very bad idea. I agree with Roberts that Ukraine would be best completely wiped out; it would be perfectly unwise to leave them sufficiently intact and able to form a threat in the quite probable near future. However, the fact is that both Russian people and their political leadership are incredibly unwilling to have a nuclear war with the West, and their “weak” approach reflects this unwillingness. It is also the fact that the Americans see this as encouragement and proof of their supremacy, which is a grave mistake, because Russia is actually stronger militarily. However, I wargamed a very large pool of options and the only situation where there isn’t a nuclear war is if something disrupts everything out of the blue, to the point where it makes American plans obsolete – a supervolcanic eruption in America, a huge asteroid strike, a gigantic solar flare that wipes out the technosphere and so on. In any normal scenario, it doesn’t really matter what Russia or China do, because they are not the ones trying to have a nuclear war; they are playing with black figures, so to speak, and America doesn’t really have a de-escalation mode in their political scene.

Artificial shortages, inflation and fuck the governments

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I heard something interesting recently.

Everybody following the silver stacking community knows there are huge shortages and resulting huge premiums on American silver eagles, the most popular 1oz stacking coin in America. It is also known that the US Mint has been causing the shortages by not producing enough coins, and this has been attributed mostly to covid lockdowns, but apparently the whole thing was misunderstood, in light of what I’ve heard: that the US Mint actually can’t source “blanks” (essentially “empty” coins of correct dimensions and purity produced by a third party, which are then bought and finished in the sovereign mint) because of a law that forces them to source the material at spot price, and the spot price is artificially kept so low using various paper trickery, that nobody actually wants to sell them silver at that price. Since absolutely everything is sold at a “premium” over spot, including 1000oz industrial bars, “spot” price is actually the price of absolutely nothing at the moment.

This made me think about such laws, combined with fake “official” prices that don’t reflect market realities, and what happens when physical realities assert themselves, and I remembered shortages in Yugoslavia. It’s not that the shortages were necessarily caused by lack of goods; they were caused by the state attempt to keep the prices low, and basically at those prices the manufacturers had no incentive to produce and sell, because they would do so at a loss. Failure to allow prices to surge upwards in an inflationary environment causes shortages. The more the state tries to intervene, the worse it gets. That’s what happened in the occupied Germany after WW2; the Americans implemented a tight price control which caused shortages. The only way someone actually fixed the problem was when they removed all price restrictions (the wording of the American-written law prohibited changing the restrictions, but didn’t say anything about removing them altogether), allowing the prices to go wherever the market dictated, which almost immediately created supply and normalised the market. One would expect that the Americans, with all their talk about free market economy and all, knew better than to impose price restrictions, but apparently not. However, the correlation between governments trying to control prices in an inflationary environment, thus trying to hide inflation, and trying to implement misguided social policy by trying to keep food and energy prices low after they successfully destroyed the purchasing power of the currency by money printing, is historically well established. In such a country you can always see official, “legitimate” stores with empty shelves and low prices, and “black market” where you can buy anything, but at the actual market prices, and for “real money”.

Another thing crossed my mind recently, when I had to pay cash for hotel because due to all sorts of Easter holidays I could not transfer money between accounts, and I almost ended up sleeping in the car because the entire booking process was done digitally on the Internet, and I got a confirmation of the reservation and all, but the trick is, it all existed only between computers, and no human ever saw any of it because they were all on holiday, and so nobody was there in the hotel reception and nobody knew we were coming. We did manage to contact someone through a phone number handwritten on a piece of paper at the reception door, but it was a close call indeed. The point I’m trying to make is that I joked with the receptionist that people are wrong when they think that the computers will kill us by making Terminator-like extermination robots; no, they will kill us by digital money simply not working, after all the physical cash is withdrawn from circulation as “primitive” and “obsolete”. Also, the Croatian tax service introduced something called “fiscalisation”, meaning that every retail transaction has to be registered online with the tax service in order for the seller not to be liable for a tax evasion fine. Imagine how well that would work if the Internet went out. Also, imagine if they replaced conventional money with something that relies on the transaction being registered on the blockchain. Basically, the Internet goes down and everybody is suddenly reduced to bartering things for food, because we all got suckered by our God damn thieving governments, and I mean ALL governments everywhere. They are all thieves and bastards. They initially sold us the fashion of using paper notes instead of gold and silver coins, because it’s more modern, more practical and elegant. Peasants use coins, gentlemen use banknotes, so we all used banknotes, but don’t you worry, banknotes are as good as gold. Ooops, convertibility of banknotes to gold was “suspended indefinitely”, but don’t you worry, it’s just to prevent “gold hoarding”, it’s still good money. Ooops, no it’s not, it keeps devaluating. Also only criminals and terrorists use cash, and all sorts of diseases spread through cash so don’t use cash, use credit cards and digital payment, it’s as good as cash but oops, the governments can now trace every transaction, and not only that, they can “sanction” you if they don’t like your political attitudes, and “freeze” your digital assets and make your cards stop working if you’re not obedient to the current democratorship. But don’t you worry, when they completely remove cash, because terrorists and drug dealers, and because little babies will cry if they don’t remove it, and they can control everybody’s money from a central point, everything is going to be great, because only the crazy conspiracy theorists don’t trust the government, right? We need to prevent financing terrorism and “money laundering”, right? Actually, when truckers protesting against vaccination mandates are “terrorists”, and avoiding insanely excessive taxation introduced because the governments have to somehow pay for all the spying, restrictions and oppression is “money laundering”, I reserve my God-given right to be a terrorist and to launder my money as much as I feel like, thank you very much for your concern and please accept my dick up your arse if you don’t like it.