Category Archives: politics

Popcorn time

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Israel attacked Iran – and quite successfully, killing most of their top leadership and nuclear scientists, sabotaging air defence, infiltrating who knows what; essentially, it’s a typical first-strike done American way, which is to say in a sneaky, treacherous, cloak and dagger way. The Russians and Chinese should take notice, because they are next. Basically, Iran’s mistake was wishing to have the “moral high ground”, the way Putin does, and their enemies don’t care about that; they merely own the media and lie, and sheeple believe them.

Iran eventually got their shit together, which is to say they got their air defences working again, and they retaliated somewhat, but they are still running around like headless chicken, because Israel pulled off a successful first strike, and the side that does that has a huge advantage in a modern war.

Now Israel has the balls to publicly cry and pretend to be some kind of a victim of the whole thing. No you’re not a victim. You started a war, the enemy fought back, now you are hurt and understand why war is a bad thing and reasonable people avoid it.

I wonder whether Iran was smart enough to buy plutonium for the first dozen or so nuclear warheads from North Korea, in case of such contingency, where Israel attacks them and damages their nuclear programme, they decide that their refusal to build nuclear weapons was a mistake, start a nuclear programme in earnest, and in the meanwhile, which is to say 6 months, they have several weapons as deterrence, because let’s be clear, it’s obvious that Israel is going to nuke them next if they think they are going to get away with it, which translates to “if Iran doesn’t have nukes of their own with which they can retaliate in kind”.

In the meanwhile, since there’s nothing I can do about it, I’m finding inconsequential things to do. Clearing fallen trees with a chainsaw, backing up computers, getting a Skylake mini pc that won’t run win11 for almost free on ebay, and I don’t care because I’m putting Debian 12 on it anyway. Things like that. Listening to ’80s music in the background. Waiting for the time to pass, because my work here is done.

Amazeballs

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I am simply in awe of human faith in the creative power of their thoughts and beliefs – or, in other words, belief that they will override reality and substitute their own if they put fingers in their ears deep enough and yell “la la la” loudly enough.

It’s not just one thing in isolation, it’s a pattern. For instance, the Italians built a city of 6 million people between a stratovolcano with a history of explosive catastrophic eruptions and a supervolcanic field, where they literally intended to build a new spa resort at the edge of the solfatara crater in the smack-middle of what is equivalent of the Norris geyser basin in Yellowstone, and now that the supervolcano is acting up and the experts are advising immediate evacuation of at least the village in the red zone, everybody is acting as if the problem is going to go away if only they stopped noticing it.

On a political level, we are in a situation where nuclear escalation of the conflict in Ukraine didn’t happen yet only because Putin was so opposed to starting the nuclear war himself that he’s trading immediate retaliation for loss of deterrence, basically making it more likely in the long run. This, of course, is only a symptom of the global destabilisation due to a systemic collapse of the entire West, which became so ideologically unhinged it’s acting like a retard with a gun; economically, sociologically, politically and in all other relevant terms, the West is doomed.

And this is the situation where the Internet is full of people who:
– obsess over new gadgets
– obsess over vacation spots
– talk about “1st world problems” ironically while California is either on fire or having an open insurgency or not having water
– ridicule “doomsayers” who are concerned that the world as we know it is fucked
– obsess over CO2 emissions, gender and plastic straws.

The entire news feed looks like something that would have been on “Onion” or some other satire fake-news site a decade ago. But yeah, everything is fine, people have been saying the world was going to end thousand years ago and it’s still here.

That’s true, people have indeed been predicting the end of the world since antiquity. However, people in the fifth century have been saying that the Rome is falling and the anti-doomers, starting with St. Augustine, replied that people have always been predicting the fall of Rome and yet it’s been here for a thousand years and it will be here for another thousand at least.

I wonder whether the dinosaurs would think that the world is still here. Let’s ask them. Oh wait…

America

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I’ve been listening to a song and the lyrics made me think… there is a country where a poor street kid can grow up to become the President of the most powerful country in the world.

That country is the Russian Federation.

🙂

I was wrong

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I expected the Ukrainian invasion of Kursk to be mopped up within days of it having started; essentially, I thought it was a diversionary force of a few hundred men, essentially a motorised battalion at most. Nobody in their right mind would have sent anything more on a guaranteed suicide mission on the territory of Russia proper, in a situation when they are already lacking manpower.

And I was right – nobody in their right mind would. However, the Ukrainians sent more.

They sent an entire army corps, of over 100000 men, with all the best Western armour and other motorised gear they could muster. Not only that, but they kept sending re-enforcements for lost men and equipment. Almost all of those men are now dead, and I don’t think there are any wounded because they were logistically too deep and all their wounded men died. All the gear is lost, too. Absolutely nothing was achieved, other than pissing off Russia more.

And since they re-routed men and equipment from their main defence positions into this cul-de-sac, their defensive positions were either lost or are currently at risk, and they de facto lost the war, which makes it understandable why Trump is now doing the peace talk, under false pretence that both sides are stuck and he’s offering a solution. Yes, he’s offering a solution to himself – Russia essentially broke NATO’s back here, and Trump is trying to avoid a shameful defeat and turn it into some kind of a victory.

 

Assessment

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There was a relatively strong earthquake in Campi Flegrei last night, initially assessed at 4.4 MMS, later revised to 4.2. Everything above 2 there is significant, as it indicates magma movements and possible ruptures. 4.2 is really serious, and adds serious weight to the Bayesian probability of explosive eruption in the near future. Whether the eruption will be phreatic or supervolcanic, it is impossible to say. A phreatic eruption is what happened at Krakatoa, when magma and sea water came into contact within the enclosed space of the half-emptied magma chamber. It is what a pressure cooker would do if the pressure inside exceeded the cohesive forces within the containment vessel. It means a big boom that cooks the people of the local village in superheated steam. That place needed to be evacuated weeks ago. However, other than boiling a few thousands of people alive, the phreatic eruption poses no danger to the wider area. A supervolcanic eruption, VEI 8, however, would end most of Europe. So, the danger of natural events regionally remains high.

As for the political and military events, Trump is performing a circus where America, as a party in conflict that attacked Russia and wanted to destroy it as a country and surround it with enemies and do a regime change in every country that believes in two genders, is now roleplaying as a peace maker of some sorts, as if they’re a school teacher forcing some kids to make up or else. The Russians will politely tell him to piss off, to which he’ll do the typical Trump thing and threaten them with a big stick, forgetting that the Russians have already destroyed more than half of US and European military in Ukraine, and that American “mercenaries” have been killing Russians in Kursk, Russia, for months. This has all the potential of ending badly, because the Russians have already told Putin not to even think about any kind of “truce” or “ceasefire”. I see people behaving as this war is about to end, but on the contrary, I think it’s nearing the most explosive phase, where one bad miscalculation by America will result in instant massive retaliation. I am treating this as “all hell is about to break loose” until proven otherwise.

If you ask why is France so pissed at Russia, it’s because the entire West had a plan of blocking Russia, and intending on compensating for the raw materials they were getting from Russia by turning to Africa, and the Russians understood the plan and completely destroyed it by making deals with African countries that resulted in France and other former colonial powers being unceremoniously evicted and their access to near-free resources ended. As a result, France’s access to low-cost uranium for their power plants and military has been compromised and they are strategically fucked.

Trump, on the other hand, is acting as if America is the big boy in charge, but this is all a bluff. America is bankrupt, their military is defunct and depleted, and other than the decrepit nuclear weapons that are way past their expiration date, they have nothing except the printing press for money, which is currently backed by nothing but brute force. Essentially, the entire West is a starving parasite trying to latch itself onto resources to prolong its doomed existence, and in absence of the usual victims, the vampires are now trying to suck off each other, and it’s going to be a nasty sight.

So yeah, far from it being over; we haven’t actually seen anything but overture yet.