Preparations

Nothing extreme seems to be going on, but I have a feeling that “something” is around the corner and things might quite suddenly go to shit, so I’ll write down what I think makes sense to do.

Spiritual preparations

From what I can tell, the last warning was given around this time in 2020 – get your affairs in order, acquire and keep spiritual detachment from this world, orient yourselves towards God, basically live as if this might go on for a long time, and yet be ready to leave at any moment. When the warning was given I had the feeling that what follows will be a relatively long period of “nothing”, which will make people not take the warning seriously, and then the lightning will strike in an instant, and then they’ll whine that they haven’t been warned. Apparently, you can’t win – if you issue a warning and the event you’re warning against follows quickly, they whine that they haven’t been warned early enough to do anything constructive. If you warn them early enough, they laugh at you and say that obviously nothing happened and you’re deluded.

Financial preparations

You already know what I’ll say here – keep all savings in form of physical gold and silver. Ensure that you have access to it and that it isn’t kept in some building with armed guards who will keep you from entering in a crisis. Don’t trust the system – the banks and the states will conspire against you. The corporations will obey the laws, and the laws will be made by the people who couldn’t care less about you. Keep as much money in the bank as you need for the monthly liquidity; bills need to be paid and you need to be practical about it. Also, keep enough cash in case the banks become defunct, but not too much – cash is a necessary intermediary step between banks not working and you having to resort to gold and silver for expenses. My rule of the thumb for cash is always keep at least 200 dollars or euros per person, and don’t exceed the amount you need for food, fuel and medical expenses per month. This is not even that much of a “prepping” advice, it’s a common sense thing, because the credit/debit cards are known not to work occasionally and you need to have backup. Any kind of debt might become fatal, in the sense that if the banking and financial system becomes defunct, you will not be able to service your debt, but the banks and the states will conspire to simply take your collateral without even asking for your input in any way. Some kind of emergency measures will be taken and everybody will get fucked, except for the rich people in power. They will do the fucking.

Physical preparations

Shelter, food, water, medications, hygiene products. Try to stock up on things you need that might become unavailable if foreign trade is disrupted – detergent, soap, toothpaste, toilet paper, and so on. Try to have everything you need to keep in touch with family and friends in case of emergency – at an absolute minimum, a smartphone, charger and a battery pack to keep it working in case of a prolonged power outage. Keep a “return home safely” backpack ready and take it in your car whenever you go far enough that you would have a problem if you had to return home on foot in case of a total traffic collapse. Keep spare bottles of drinking water in your car – it costs you nothing to have them there, and it won’t go bad, so it’s cheap insurance. If you have multiple residences, keep a cache of food, water and other stuff at each location. Keep your car ready at all times. The absolute minimum you must be able to endure with your cache of food is two weeks; the absolute minimum of drinking water supplies should be two days, if you can rely on the utilities working. In any case, do the best you can. I am aware that if the water and electricity are permanently disrupted, it’s game over, and having your own off-grid water and electricity supply is just not an option for most people. However, assume that what you have locally will keep working, and whatever is sourced remotely will be unavailable, so stock up on that well in advance, while the prices are still normal. As for the gadgets, having computers behind an UPS that filters power is recommended; having a radiation dosimeter that is able to detect alpha and beta sources, in order to check if food and water are safe, is great. Having a battery-powered radio to be able to hear the news in case of an emergency combined with a power outage and Internet failure is good, but you probably already have one in your car. Having a quadcopter drone in order to be able to see from a high vantage point and check the surroundings out of your line of sight is useful. Having a bicycle that will give you mobility in case there’s no fuel for the car is very good. Absolutely have at least one battery powered flashlight per person, and a cache of both rechargeable and alkaline batteries at each residence. Having a garden where you can grow some food is great in case of a prolonged collapse.

Summary

The point of preparations is to return to God with your soul in good condition, and to avoid as much of misery, suffering, destitution, starvation and other joys of material existence as possible before that.

Developments

The Western countries are continuing to stir up anti-Russian chaos in countries of the former Soviet Union – Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, where they have installed corrupt, pro-western client regimes and NGOs that spread pro-western, anti-Russian propaganda to the detriment of the local populace. The goal of this is to strategically encircle Russia with hostile nations that will follow the example of Ukraine – basically, buy into the empty promises of Western wealth and “democracy”, and get destroyed fighting Russia, so that the West doesn’t have to sacrifice their own people and vital resources defeating their strategic enemy.

This, however, is just a distraction, since none of those client states can survive the inevitable collapse of the West; the West at this point has culturally nothing to offer, other than the LGBT degeneracy that nobody wants. Their “prosperity” is debt-based, the Western societies are deindustrialising, energy-deficient and the basis of prosperity is in the process of collapse. The only thing Russia has to do is not swallow the bait, take their time destroying the West in Ukraine, wait for the eurodollar system to collapse, and when the false promise of the prosperity of the West crumbles together with the West itself, things will gradually normalise.

Unfortunately, I don’t see any probability of this happening, because of the very narcissism of the West that makes them form great plans for total world domination at the very point of their socioeconomic collapse. Such narcissists will burn everything down before they suffer the humiliation that stares them in the face, which is why I see a nuclear war as the high-probability option.

As for the immediate collapse of the Western economy, what we see is the collapse of the banking system, but I see a more important underlying pattern of the collapse of the real-estate market and its derivatives, the mortgage-based securities that back the currency. The danger to the individuals is reduced liquidity due to the banks being formally rescued but de-facto defunct. What this means is that your account might be theoretically there, but you might be unable to use it to service your liabilities, and I actually expect this to be a way for the banks and other large entities to disown the owners of real estate that is financed with mortgage loans. You see, the simplest way to do this is to create a widespread technical default, meaning that you formally have the money in the bank but you can’t use it to pay your debts, in the same way the West is forcing Russia into a technical default or delinquency on its obligations by locking it out of the SWIFT system and simultaneously requiring payment that can only be done using the system that is blocked. Then, when the Russians can’t service their obligations, use this as an excuse to confiscate their assets. I expect this pattern to be extremely widely used against the populace in the West, in order to effectively confiscate their property and turn them into serfs in some sort of a technofascist neo-feudal system that they have planned for us. Even if you actually own real estate, meaning there’s no mortgage on it, you’re not safe, because I expect the governments to invent new taxes attacking property owners, which might be technically unserviceable and delinquency on those imaginary obligations will be dealt with by mass confiscations of property. Since they have already implemented a total surveillance society, they expect that nobody will be able to escape their total control even as they go bankrupt, and they will be able to implement absolute centralized control over life and property of individuals.

This is why I see a nuclear war as a lesser evil, because “peace” brings only enslavement, destitution and despair for all of us. The worst that could happen to us is along the function of the linear progression of “business as usual”. Fortunately, I think those people are in fact very stupid and have overplayed their hand, mostly because they work with faulty assumptions, the way they expected to collapse the Russian economy with sanctions, and they in fact collapsed their own economies and improved the Russian position, because in their narcissism they are unable to understand the actual facts, and instead they consume their own propaganda as inputs for simulations and predictions. Also, they vastly overestimated their ability to control things, also because they worked with faulty understanding of why things worked so far, and why they seemed to have things under control. In essence, I expect things to increasingly escape their control and fall apart, and I expect all their efforts in fixing the problems to accelerate the rate of collapse, contrary to what happened so far.

Timeline

Recently, Mexico declared lithium a strategically important resource and nationalized all deposits.

Biljana’s comment at that point was “watch how America occupies Mexico now”.

Current news: America contemplates sending the military to Mexico, because the terrible “drug cartels” (probably CIA-run) kidnapped some Americans, and baby Jesus will cry if America doesn’t introduce democracy and rules-based order to the suffering people of Mexico whose leader is a dictator who is killing his own people with weapons of mass destruction and is a new Hitler.

Either Biljana is a prophet, or America became predictable as fuck; you tell me.

More 1st world problems

Another Norfolk Southern train derails in Springfield, Ohio after toxic East Palestine spill.

A Norfolk Southern cargo train derailed in Ohio on Saturday evening, one month after the derailment of another company train carrying hazardous materials sparked concerns about the safety of those nearby.

The Saturday incident took place near the town of Springfield, Ohio, as the 212-car train traveled south, a company spokesperson said. About 20 cars from the train, which did not have passengers on board, derailed by State Route 41 near the Clark County Fairgrounds, leading officials to advise locals within 1,000 feet of the scene to shelter in place. The derailment also caused more than 1,500 residents to temporarily lose power.

This is, of course, anything but unexpected, if we remember what the train tracks look like over there, and they obviously aren’t repairing them, so if the trains somehow managed to limp along in the past, and the condition degraded further with time and use, it’s obvious that at some point derailment would become the default option.

That’s privatisation for you – it’s unprofitable for the company owning the tracks to invest in repairs, so they milk it for as long as possible, bribe the politicians to leave them alone because that’s cheaper than repairs, and then liquidate the business, split the money between the owners and have someone else deal with the unprofitable business of repairing infrastructure, someone like the state, and then bribe the politicians again to let you “privatise” the infrastructure, promising you’ll do a much better job, because businesses are so much more efficient at managing assets.

The problem is, the businesses are very efficient at milking assets for profit, but they are very inefficient when you need to make large investments in things that will provide long-term benefits to the people at very moderate returns over the decades and centuries. Businesses prefer to make lots of money fast, and in this case we can see what it looks like – neglect, corruption, harm.

Between Scylla and Charybdis

Božo forwarded me an article by Paul Craig Roberts this morning. Basically, the man is frustrated because Putin didn’t do any of the things the Americans would expect a stereotypical Russian leader to do:

As I have pointed out again and again and now again, Putin’s idiotic–indeed mindless–way of conducting war has destroyed the credibility of the Russian military. I am becoming convinced that the outcome of the nonsensical “limited military operation” will be either Russian surrender or nuclear war. By continuing to encourage provocation on top of provocation, Putin is backing himself into a corner where his only option is surrender or nuclear war.  It is extraordinary that the Kremlin does not realize the danger in the picture of weakness and indecision that the Kremlin and Western propaganda have created.

So, basically, the Americans created this image of a Hitler-like Putin who is the ultimate tough guy who just wrecks everything in his path, and now that it turned out that Putin is in fact an orthodox Christian who tries to do things in the least violent and disruptive way possible and prefers treaties and agreements to war, which every sane person who actually watched Putin knew from the beginning, they are unhappy because in their thinking to be peaceful and reasonable is to be weak, and their reaction to weakness is violence.

The problem with the Americans is that they perceive the world in terms of a wolf pack, and they even fail at understanding wolf packs. They think that you can be either “alpha” or “beta”, either dominant or submissive, and if you’re submissive then you’re worthless because only dominance matters. They don’t care about the engineers or any of the people who actually make things work – only the leaders matter, only the politicians and managers who are “dominant” and “in charge”, regardless of the fact that those are the people whose main tools are excel and powerpoint, for presenting their “narrative”, and not Autocad or CNC grinders and plasma cutters. They think submissive people need to be kept weak and afraid to not give them “ideas”, and if someone loses his position of leadership and control, he no longer matters. Basically, America functions exactly like a society of Satanists would be expected to function, and this doesn’t seem to be an accident. America looks very much like Satan’s pet project.

So, Putin has basically two options: the one where he conforms to American crazy ideas of him, and thus justify total war against him because he’s “literally Hitler” and must be destroyed at all cost, or he can try to de-escalate, keep the war “boring”, work to slowly grind down the enemy’s resources, avoid critical “Pearl Harbour moments”, use economic forces to divorce America from its actual source of power, which is the fact that people elsewhere have to get dollars in order to buy energy to power their societies and America is the only one who can print them.

So, option one, Putin responds to American encroachments by turning their bases in Europe into a glass parking lot and crushes Ukraine like an empty can of soda, which would be perfectly easy if he had more than the current 5% of his forces doing something about it. As a result, the American hawks would say “see, we told you so, he’s dangerous, he’s literally Hitler, we need to destroy him”, and America uses a decapitation nuclear strike against Russian leadership, Perimetr issues a strategic response signal, half an hour later America is a glass parking lot, the rest of America launches everything they have at Russia and China, about 2000 nuclear warheads go off within a day and the northern hemisphere is about as fucked as that carousel in Pripyat facing the Chernobyl reactor.

Option two, Putin grinds the Ukrops down slowly, allows all his enemies to throw everything they have into the meat grinder, slowly deplete their resources, and simultaneously works on establishing ties with other countries and re-route the lines of power and control that used to go to the UK and America, and now increasingly to Russia and China, and the kind of war the Americans get to have is the one Asimov described in his Foundation series, where there’s no shooting, but lots of dishwashers, washing machines, computers and cars breaking down and leaking fluids, with no replacement parts and no new stuff, and there are lines for bread and gas, and money is worth increasingly less, until the populace had enough and there’s a popular uprising in the West, taking down the governments who are utterly undemocratic anyway.

Option two is the only one that gives a non-negligible chance of a survivable outcome, because I expect there to be a limited nuclear exchange, but the overall emotional power of the conflict is intentionally kept low, which frustrates the attempts to justify a total escalation. This is the Scylla vs. Charybdis stratagem: you need to pick between a sea whirlpool that will destroy your entire ship, or a monster on the shore that will eat some of your sailors. So far, Putin has made the choice of Odysseus, and chose Scylla who will eat a few of his men but hoped that the rest will live. The warning of this stratagem is that Odysseus in the end had the worst of both options – Scylla first ate a few of his men, and then Charybdis swallowed his ship and the rest of his men, and he himself barely survived.