Category Archives: politics

About Donald Trump’s campaign

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The cornerstone argument of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is that open borders, and especially free trade agreements, are harming America and weakening its economic position.

When a country that has dominant economic position, in a sense that it has internal markets sufficiently big as to reduce the costs of manufacturing goods to the point where no other power can compete with it fairly because they can’t produce goods cheaply enough to make a profit selling them competitively, this country will benefit from advocating open borders and free trade agreements, because open borders mean that their industry will destroy the weaker countries’ industries, and opening borders to the free flow of people, goods and services only benefits them because they will get the best migrant workers from abroad (because, since the free market industry is competitive, there simply isn’t room for anyone who isn’t up to par), and foreign products cannot compete with theirs on either price or quality, so that isn’t a danger either.

A weaker country needs to close its borders to imported goods and services because a stronger country will always be able to leverage its greater markets in order to reduce manufacturing costs and will always be able to destroy economies of weaker countries and essentially turn them into colonies that need to import everything and finance it with debt.

You can recognize a strong country by the fact that it doesn’t need to introduce tariffs on imported goods, that it advocates open borders and that it issues credit to others in order for them to be able to buy imported goods.

usa_federal_debt

If we take a look at the general trends of American economy, it has been financing its expenditures by debt, it’s been artificially inflating its GDP by issuing cheap credit to the venture capital firms who have been investing heavily into technology startups and inflating their market value far beyond any reality, and the purpose of that is to use the inflated GDP as backing for printing its fractional reserve currency. This means the Dollar is overstretched and maintained by artificial means. Also, the debt has been growing out of control. Debt to GDP ratio has exceeded 1, which would be worrying by itself, but since debt is real and GDP is artificially inflated, this is especially bad.

What it all actually shows is that America has been consistently spending more than it was making, and that’s been going on for the last few decades. In fact, since the debt graph looks like a good approximation of the exponential curve, the causes seem to be systemic.

But the greatest indicator, to me, is that a candidate advocating against free international trade seems to be winning the elections. So far, all CIA policy recommendations that advocated open borders and free trade came with a disclaimer which stated that such recommendations rest upon the assumption that America is the world’s strongest economy.

More than anything, Trump’s stated policy, its validity in the current state of the global economy, and its support by the disenfranchised citizens of USA, show that this implicit assumption is no longer valid.

Let’s assume that Trump does indeed win the presidency. Let’s assume that he implements his stated policies; he closes the borders, he stops immigration, he imposes obstacles to imports of goods and services into the USA. The USA companies are forced to concentrate on the domestic markets.

My quick-and-dirty simulation of the effects indicates that this will deflate the stock market bubble that maintains the fiction of the huge GDP. This will collapse the Dollar. USA will default on its debts since they are unserviceable in any case, and the entire economy will collapse into a stable state that reflects the actual market conditions. And this doesn’t even attempt to deal with the international fallout of such a huge disruption.

But this has nothing to do with Trump. If anything, he might actually make the transition more abrupt, but eventually less destructive. The current policies, that attempt to create some kind of a soft landing for America, are doomed and are only making the problem worse. In both cases, America will collapse. The indicators for that are overwhelming. However, with Trump America actually has a chance of achieving a stable state as an industrial, free-market country. With the socialists in power, it will achieve a stable state as a military dictatorship. People who see Trump as Hitler are wrong. Hitler was someone who was nothing without the power of the state behind him. As a free entrepreneur, he was nothing. Trump is the opposite of that. His entire power stems from his success in the free market. He doesn’t need the state to attain power, and is therefore not likely to start relying on the state as an end-all solution to all problems, as Hitler did. He’s going to rely on the real economy, on the healthy tissue. Hitler relied on the megalomaniacal fantasies of the state to compensate for his personal failures. Essentially, they are the opposites, and all similarities are actually fabrications designed by the socialist media in order to slander him, because they cannot stand his reality-based thinking.

The problem with Trump is that he relies too much on brute strength in solving problems. His attitude regarding torture and encryption shows that: Apple should yield to state authority and agree to break the encryption wall that protects its customers, torture should be used to extract data because America is in the position of strength there, and should use it in order to attain its goals. The problem is, the primary goal of America isn’t being strong. The primary goal of America is to be America. The primary goal is liberty and freedom and possibility, the primary goal is to abolish tyranny. The primary goal is to have a country in which those in power cannot imprison you without a trial and a due process, the primary goal is to limit the authority of the state over an individual, to make one’s property sacrosanct, to enable the individual to use force to defend his own, even against the state, because a state can become tyrannical. So the problem with making America great by Trump’s means is that it will no longer be America if it tramples on all the precepts set by its founders. Not using all means to achieve its ends, and not using the power of the state to pressure companies and individuals is what made America different from tyrannical superpowers like the Soviet Union or the Third Reich. What made America better than the Third Reich wasn’t technological supremacy. In fact, the Nazis had that. What made America better is that it was a place worth living in, as an individual. It had habeas corpus, it had The Bill of Rights, it had prohibition against unlawful detention, it had prohibition against cruel or unusual punishment, and it didn’t have the all-powerful state police.

So, what Trump should learn is that wielding a big stick can be a problem if you stumble and poke your eye out with it. Big sticks are not only a danger to others. There’s nothing wrong with the concept of making America great again, as long as you remember what made it America, and what made it great.

War as a thermodynamic phenomenon

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When people think about hurricanes, they think of them in context of bad weather. I, however, think of them as a thermodynamic phenomenon of cooling the ocean, which accumulated too much energy from the Sun and, in context of seasonal change, releases the excess via entropy into the atmosphere until thermodynamic equilibrium is established.

People also think of war in terms of bloodshed and conflict of nations and ideologies and interests, but the more I think of it, I think of war in terms of a sociological hurricane – a thermodynamic phenomenon of equalizing energy potential (wealth and control of resources) of different groups of people in a situation when current distribution of resources doesn’t match the balance of power between the groups.

Let’s test my hypothesis on the example of two world wars. I am yet to see the satisfactory explanation of the First World War. Nobody seems to be able to tell the root cause. They can tell you the unimportant stuff, they can tell you how the events themselves unfolded, but none of it explains why the great colonial powers felt such a strong itch to go into war, jumping on the first casus belli that presented itself as if war promised more than peace. None of it makes sense – the Austro-Hungarian empire, for instance, was seriously itching to go into war, for which it was the least well prepared of all great powers. Germany was better prepared, and it too itched to go into battle against Russia before it grew unstoppably powerful due to its ongoing industrialization, and yet the end result of the war was a near-destruction and humiliation of Germany. Austro-Hungary didn’t survive the war – it broke apart and its constituents started their independent lives as unstable, immature states, whose erratic behavior seems to have boiled over into the second world war, and the process doesn’t seem finished even now. What are we seeing here, since it doesn’t seem to be motivated by obvious self-interest? We have a war that transformed the society and yet none of the parties involved seems to have benefited from it; all seem to have been disrupted and brought out of balance as a result.

As an alternative explanation, I came up with modernity. You see, the most significant aspect of modernity is change of the entire energy-structure of society. Prior to the explosion of science and technology, the entire society was solar-powered, in a sense that you had land on which you could grow plants, and domesticated animals which fed on those plants, and the amount of resources available to the society was more-less constant and determined by the amount of people who worked on the available land with primitive agricultural technology. Those people were treated as a basic resource that came with the land, and were divided among the warrior class which used force to conquer and dominate. Political power was measurable through the amount of agricultural land populated by serfs, that a nobleman controlled. Each nobleman could directly control only as much land, and the pyramid of power was established, with lower-tier noblemen who directly controlled the serfs who in turn controlled the land, and higher-tier noblemen who had lower-tier noblemen as underlings. The higher-tier noblemen were subjects to a king, who in turn was subject to the highest entity of civilizational cohesion, for instance the Pope. As long as the basic energy source of the civilization remained constant, this was a stable system.

However, with the ascent of technology, industry and free market, the energy structure of society changed, and it became possible to acquire wealth by means other than top-down distribution of force-acquired solar-powered resources. Inventors, industrialists and bankers acquired wealth that rivaled and soon greatly surpassed that of feudal solar-powered structures; the social leverage, essentially wealth, that was created with the invention of the steam engine or the mass-production of high quality steel, or fractional distillation of petroleum, or electricity, or artificial fertilizers, changed the entire energy structure of the society, while the entire social system relied upon an obsolete hierarchy that was established in the pre-industrial age and was ill-suited to handle the needs and challenges of modernity. This is why the entire society boiled over in order to establish a new thermodynamic equilibrium, a political and economic structure that was better suited for the open-ended energy model. One example of that is the abandonment of the gold standard of currency and adoption of the fractional reserve fiat currency, which is able to create new money based on GDP in order not to artificially constrict the economy of the state. This is absolutely necessary when you have a situation where a Rockefeller or a Tesla can invent an entirely new open-ended energy model which creates an extreme amount of new wealth that is not covered by the gold reserves. Unless you want to artificially appreciate gold and thus give the owners of gold reserves an unfair and undeserved amount of wealth, you need to grow the monetary supply by the amount that at least equals the growth of the real economy, and in fact anticipates further growth. Furthermore, you need to acknowledge that nobility no longer controls significant enough portion of the economy to warrant their special status, and political control of the country must take the new balance of power into account.

I see the two world wars as hurricane 1 and hurricane 2 of the same season, where the second one continued where the first one failed to finish the process of achieving thermodynamic balance. Whenever a group of people controls too much resources for the amount of actual power their wield in the current state of affairs, there will be a violent conflict that will establish the real state of affairs. An example of this is the conflict between the Europeans and the native Americans, who controlled too much land for their state of technological and military power, and were therefore wiped out in order to establish a thermodynamic equilibrium.

The Second World War and its aftermath allowed modernity to run its course and try to fulfill its promise, and when it mostly failed, it resulted in profound soul-searching and often destructive self-criticism within the Western civilization, which is now trying to figure out its fundamental guiding principles and its reason for being; essentially, it is trying to figure out whether it has a mandate, and has for the most part relinquished its dominant role, with inferior savages such as Muslims trying to fill the vacuum created by the Euro-American civilization’s unwillingness to assert itself in ways it previously did. Establishing “life”, without any further elaboration, as the supreme value, is indicative of this abdication of mandate.

To me, all the elements of a social thermodynamic storm are ready to produce an outward phenomenon that will redistribute energy across the system according to the new realities that are yet to fully establish themselves.

Leftist approach to reason and evidence

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It’s interesting how some people, usually on the left political and intellectual spectrum, recommend that we all disregard our prejudice and make up our minds based on reason and evidence, and yet, when people do just that, and based on reason and evidence come up with conclusions different from theirs, they go absolutely fucking nuts.

Well, you can’t have it both ways. If you say that I should reject prejudice, I will do exactly that. I will reject the prejudice that people are equal and see the evidence. I will look into the statistics, I will look at the results, and I will make up my mind. If I don’t come to the same conclusion as you doesn’t mean that I did anything wrong. Maybe it’s you who are not following your advice. Maybe it’s you who are prejudiced, only your prejudice is that of equality.

If you say that people should reject religious dogma and make up your own mind about the existence of God based on the available evidence, and I do exactly that and conclude that God indeed exists, and that religions are just a primitive way of dealing with that truth in an inept and clumsy way, similar to the ways in which cavemen dealt with subdural hematoma. They actually invented trepanation, removal of a part of the skull in order to let the brain expand and relieve intracranial pressure, and it was widely ridiculed in medical circles until quite recently the modern neurosurgeons discovered that craniotomy is the best way of dealing with that exact problem. So yeah, the cavemen were the stupid dumbasses who bored holes in people’s skulls to let the evil spirits out, except that the modern doctors also bore holes in people’s skulls in order to… what? So yeah, we follow the evidence. But I will also make up my own mind on what I consider to be evidence. If I’m to make up my own mind, I’ll be damned if I’ll allow someone else to dictate what I’m to do with this freedom. I will see for myself. So, if God exists, are there people who can attest to that? There are. Are they credible? Yes. Are there multiple testimonies that can be correlated? Yes. Do I have personal experiences that confirm that God exists? I do. So well, there you have it. I followed the evidence, I approached those things rationally, and I made up my own mind.

The fact that my mind didn’t turn out into a replica of yours should not surprise you, since you profess your support for “multiculturalism” and accepting differences. But that isn’t really the case, isn’t it? It’s only a pose. You only accept different opinions if they are the same as yours. You only say we should follow the evidence and reason and reject prejudice because you think you can order people around and dictate what the prejudice are, what the evidence is and what is the reasonable conclusion. Essentially, you have a playbook you want to impose on everyone, and the story about freedom and reason and evidence is just a collection of nice words that are supposed to cloud one’s judgement and blind him to the ugliness of what’s actually going on.

Bad ideas that refuse to die

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I was thinking about socialism and how wrong ideas never seem to die, regardless of how harmful or useless they proved to be. For instance, at one point more than half the world tried to implement socialism in one form or another, and it invariably produced widespread human misery. It simply does that by design, with its “eat the rich” paradigm. It eats the rich and then everybody is poor, there’s nobody to blame, and then the infighting begins, millions die, everybody is poor, and eventually people completely give up on the system and adopt some form of social Darwinism, which works excellently, produces enormous wealth and prosperity, but, of course, not everybody succeeds and then some fucking idiot re-introduces socialist ideas, like, how about redistributing that wealth so that those few poor people don’t get excluded from the widespread prosperity, so taxes are increased, the state bureaucracy is increased, free market is stressed by taxation, the worthless people get welfare and reproduce exponentially (because they are rewarded with more welfare for reproducing and failing at everything) while contributing exactly jack shit, the state goes into debt, scientific and high-tech programmes are curtailed because the socialist politicians think that all money must go to social programmes because socialism, and if there are problems, blame the evil black beast of capitalism and ask for more state control and socialism as a solution. The problem is with the concept that the poor possess virtue, that God is on their side, and that people are equal and therefore deserve the same outcomes regardless of their actual abilities and choices.

If you try to introduce some alternative to socialism or use common sense, you’re immediately attacked and “de-platformed”, as it is called – you’re a x-ist and x-phobe and all the tolerant multicultural people want to kill you. Somehow, there’s an implication that they are good, that they are progressive, despite the fact that what they are proposing was actually all tried in Stalinist Russia, and is by definition regressive because it’s a step backwards in history, and despite the fact that their socialism is probably the only political system that was scientifically tested and tried, and proved not to work, so basically if someone wants to benefit mankind, socialism is the only system he should never attempt to use because it’s worse than useless.

There are, of course, other ideas that are a disaster; determinism, for instance, which basically states that whatever you do, the end result will be the same because it’s determined by outside forces, be it God, destiny, karma or societal circumstances. By adopting such attitude you are guaranteed to fail, and this is the main reason why Catholic countries are economically usually worse off than the Protestant countries, because the Protestant countries are closer to the Jewish belief that God will reward the righteous people with wealth, while those who are not in his favour will be poor. The Catholics believe that God doesn’t work like that, and that wealth can actually be a hindrance or a temptation. Be it as it may, beliefs of this sort influence people’s work ethics and attitude, and if they believe that wealth is a reward from God, they will try to attain it, and see their success or lack thereof as feedback. I actually see the Catholic position as a contamination with Cathari beliefs that were semi-officially canonized together with St. Francis and St. Claire, where worldly possessions are seen as a spiritual burden and avoided altogether. How useful that is in a spiritual sense, it’s difficult to tell, but as an influence to economy it’s a disaster, because the wealthy and successful individuals are shunned in favour of ragged demagogues. If the wealthy aren’t respected and admired, the end result will be social apathy and widespread misery. But determinism causes an even worse problem: those who actually invest effort in order to change their situation are seen as “not having faith” or “not accepting the will of God”. This gives apathy and despondency an aura of spirituality and elevates it to the position of almost-holiness.

I understand that such negative attitudes about wealth might have been the result of unity of church and state, and that the church was so preoccupied with amassing wealth and power that it neglected its spiritual role, and that those who preached poverty might have played a constructive role of redressing an imbalance at one point, but such ideas are actively harmful from the position of economy. If you see wealth as a snare of Satan, well, nobody wants to be ensnared by Satan. I personally believe that poverty is a snare of Satan and that wealth means freedom to pursue forms of spirituality that are not pre-determined by the shackles of poverty, but I’m the enfant terrible of spirituality and nobody really listens to what I have to say.

The problem isn’t social injustice. The problem are the bad ideas that produce misery, suffering and death wherever they are implemented, but somehow still get to wear a halo of sainthood.

And regarding sainthood, it might be a very good showcase of all the widespread misconceptions and illusions which hinder spiritual and personal growth of individuals, because when you think of it, sainthood seems to be defined by poverty, self-denial, extreme compassion, self-sacrifice, detachment from all worldly issues, celibacy and, essentially, removal of oneself from all practical matters of society.

Wanna hear my definition of sainthood? A saint is a person who has a first-person realization of God, and attained success at harmonizing his/her entire life with the nature and character of God.

Which means that for me, an ideal saint is Krishna, the warrior-king who lived a life of first-person godhead and who fought, had sex, fooled around with his best friend, and inspired holy scriptures of the highest order. He wasn’t poor, he wasn’t celibate, he wasn’t self-denying, he wasn’t dedicated to “fighting his ego” or “controlling his thoughts and desires”, and to whom yoga was the art of correct action, not denial of action or removal from the world. To me, St. Francis and St. Claire are worthless examples and worthless people, because they did exactly jack shit to improve anything in the world, and if one tries to emulate their lifestyle it will be a personal disaster. The thing is, Bhagavad-gita wasn’t a result of two renunciate monks discussing haute spirituality in some cave. Bhagavata-purana wasn’t inspired by the life of Shuka the renunciate. It’s about Shuka the renunciate praising the life of Krishna the warrior king as the perfect example of what God looks like when he comes into this world.

So yeah, being a saint isn’t about being poor and naked and celibate and “controlling your ego”. It’s about being in the flesh what God is in His pure spiritual nature, and while we’re at that, we should have in mind that the probable reason why all the renunciate sages fail to understand true spirituality is that they fail to take notice of the fact that Vishnu is married to Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth and fortune. So the next time you think of how spiritual some poor person is, or how spiritual you must be because you’re poor, or how spiritual you are because you are ignorant of worldly affairs, remember that that the perfect image of God in this world fucked the goddess of fortune (who looks like a billion dollars BTW) while not otherwise preoccupied with waging wars, manipulating politics and inspiring holy scriptures. And the barefoot sages, they merely wrote it all down while trying to figure out what the fuck they were missing in the entire picture.

Tales of the glorious white men

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I’m going to tell you two short stories about “privileged white men” in high positions of power and authority.

The first story is about the “M” in MiG, Artem Mikoyan, Hero of socialist labor, order of Lenin, order of Stalin, deputy in the Supreme Soviet. He was the head of the MiG design bureau and designed some of the best and most famous airplanes in world history. As Americans would say, he was the “bad guy”.

During the familiarization flight with MiG 25 in 1969, another “bad guy”, Lt. General Anatoli Karantsov, the air defense aircraft commander in chief and a personal friend of Artem Mikoyan, was killed.

Artem Mikoyan was so distraught that he died from a heart attack soon afterward – his aircraft’s malfunction killed his friend, and it literally broke his heart.

The second story is about the flight of Soyuz 1 and cosmonaut Colonel Vladimir Komarov. Prior to launch, Soyuz 1 engineers are said to have reported 203 design faults to party leaders, but their concerns “were overruled by political pressures for a series of space feats to mark the anniversary of Lenin’s birthday”.

Yuri Gagarin was the backup pilot for Soyuz 1, and was aware of the design problems and the pressures from the Politburo to proceed with the flight. He attempted to “bump” Komarov from the mission, knowing that the Soviet leadership would not risk a national hero on the flight. At the same time, Komarov refused to pass on the mission, even though he believed it to be doomed. He explained that he could not risk Gagarin’s life. Knowing he was about to die, he made the last will in which he ordered his burial to be in open casket, for the bastards to see clearly what they have done.

During the flight, one solar panel failed, causing shortage of power to the systems. By orbit 13, automatic stabilization system was dead, and the manual system was only partially effective. Still, Komarov managed to make a successful reentry into the atmosphere, but then his parachutes failed and he crashed at full speed to his death.

So let me get this clear. I’m directing these two stories both at the American propagandists and at the feminists – at the propagandists because they portray the Soviet Union as some sort of an evil empire populated by communist zombies from hell, who wanted to unleash the “dark side of the Force” upon the poor freedom loving Americans.

You have an “evil” air defense commander who personally test-flies an airplane and dies, and as a result his friend, the “evil” main aircraft designer in the “evil” country, is so heartbroken he literally has a heart attack and dies. Just two years earlier, two other “privileged white men” and “champions of the evil Empire” had a discussion that went something like this:

Gagarin: This Soyuz thing is a death trap, Vladimir Mihailovitch. I can’t let you fly in it, let me go instead.
Komarov: No, I cannot allow this, Yuri Alekseevitch. It’s my time to go, and I can’t have my friend die in my place. But remember me and have a good life.

If you think that the story about the bastard politicians who sacrificed their best men for the sake of mere propaganda are proof that Americans are right about the Soviet Union, you can read another story, about three more “privileged white men” who burned alive in the Apollo 1 capsule which was also a deathtrap and a piece of shit no better than the Soyuz 1. Prior to that, Neil Armstrong saved Gemini 8 from being a similar disaster, when one of the roll thrusters was stuck in the “on” position and the spacecraft was rolling uncontrollably at the rate of one revolution per second. Regardless, he managed to manually control the spacecraft to a safe landing.

As a conclusion, to those who portray the Russians as the “bad guys” and ridicule them, a big “fuck you” from me. If those same Russians lived in the USA, you’d have given them a Congressional Medal of Honor or something similar, instead of the Order of Lenin, but the meaning would be the same: they are heroes, and if they were your own, you would honor them as the best of your own. If they didn’t prod you to a technological race, you’d still be in the 50s. They, together with you, helped make this civilization glorious and great.

To feminists, who in their propaganda state that men, especially white men, are privileged, another big “fuck you”, because it wasn’t women in Soyuz 1, Gemini 8 and Apollo 1, and it wasn’t the Africans, and it wasn’t the Arabs. It was white men who risked their lives and died so that you could have your air conditioning at your comfortable safe well paid office job. That’s why white men rule the world, because they made it what it is, with their risk-taking, their loyalty and courage. And since you live in the world they made for you, you might as well show some respect and some gratitude.