These days we witnessed the death of yet another American myth: that Russian bombs are “dumb” or “inaccurate”.

The H-29L air-to-surface missile armed with 500 kilograms of military-grade explosives is accurate to within two meters and has a combined high explosive and fragmentation effect.

“After the missile is launched, pilot illuminates a target with a laser-controlled aimer while the fighter jet continues to maneuver,” Klimov said.

The H-29L air-to-surface missile is being used by Sukhoi Su-24 and Su-34 bombers.”(RT)

In fact, the evidence shows that their weapons are even more accurate than the American counterparts. Some have accuracy within 5 meters, some within 2, but they are all extremely modern, sophisticated and high-tech.

The Russians also extensively use drones for battlefield surveillance, and the entire operation so far showed how you do things properly.

So, essentially, the myth that America would have some great technological advantage in a conflict with Russia is a myth. The Russians are efficient, sophisticated, armed with the world’s most modern weaponry, and are essentially deadly. The effect is ever more pronounced since Russia, unlike America, didn’t use overwhelming numbers of airplanes, aircraft carriers and cruise missiles against their opponent. All it took was one airbase with some 30 planes.

America, meanwhile, spreads propaganda in order to propagate the lie which states that America and its allies have 21-st century weaponry, while Russia has rusted Soviet junk. That reminds me of the South Park “BLU” parody of Canadians having “their pogo sticks or whatever” against American tanks. In this parody, underestimating the opponent had the purpose of inciting a war. Is there really a good reason to assume that, in the real world, the goal would be different? “Oh, the Russians have the rusted Soviet junk for weapons, we can fuck with them all we want, and what can they do to us, nuke us?”

Oh wait…

I started this article with the intent of writing a simple explanation of the Greek crisis, but that is impossible, since any attempt of a simple explanation branches off into an infinite recursion of issues involved. But let’s attempt it, anyway.

The first thing we should make clear is that it isn’t about Greece. It’s about EU. Also, it’s not only about EU, it’s also about the way the world’s finances are interlinked with political interests.

Yes, Greece is in debt, it is bankrupt and its economy is unsustainable. But Greece has been that way since I remember it – “indebted like Greece” was a popular saying in Yugoslavia decades ago. How did such an economically unviable country manage to get such an avalanche of new loans in the EU, which is professing financial discipline?

Therein lies our little pickle. You see, one must ask how did the political elites in the Western Europe convince the smaller, economically weaker European countries to join the European free market project, which is hugely detrimental to their economies? You see, there’s that thing called the economy of scale. The more copies you make of a product, the cheaper you can make them. If you manufacture goods for a domestic market of hundreds of millions, you can produce things more cheaply than someone who makes the products for a market the 1/10th or 1/100th the size. You can also reduce your profit margin in order to sell things more cheaply, because you sell so much more stuff. The purpose of import tariffs is to protect the economies of the smaller countries from the flood of goods cheaply manufactured by the bigger countries, which are manufactured and sold so cheaply that the local goods have no hope of competing with them and the manufacturers will go out of business, creating a surge of unemployment and the collapse of the local economy. It’s the cycle of doom, because the consumers are actually motivated to kill themselves – they will prefer to buy the cheaper and often better made imported goods, merrily destroying their own economy and jobs in the process, and will feel an initial rise in the perceived quality of life, up to the point where they lose their job and are left to die.

So how did anyone in their right mind agree to join a tariff-free economic zone that is the EU? Well, there’s that thing called propaganda. If you perceive your own reactions to the terms “open market” and “free trade”, as opposed to “closed marked” and “restricted trade”, you’ll find it easy to figure out which set invokes the more positive emotional response, but what you’ll find more difficult to understand is how you were conditioned to feel that way. This is how this shit is sold to the ignorant electorate. Then there’s the logical argument, saying that creating a bigger market is essentially the thing that is so good that it creates those huge corporations in the big countries, and that if Europe wants to be competitive with USA and China, it needs to create a unified market. What they failed to mention is that this would immediately destroy all industry in all the European countries save the most developed ones. Of course, propaganda alone didn’t sell the idea; it was lubricated with copious amounts of money in form of very affordable and readily available loans, which were supposed to “increase competitiveness” of industry in the less developed EU countries, but this translated into bribing the electorate by artificially increasing the standard of living far beyond what was possible economically, and the myth of the great EU which benefited all the joining countries was born.

So basically, EU bribed the PIGS into joining by signing on a huge line of credit, which of course had to be repaid, and destroyed their industry, making them unable to ever repay their debt. The people didn’t complain because the loss of jobs in real economy was offset by an increase of jobs in bureaucracy, paid of course by foreign debt. And nobody complained about that until now because it was in nobody’s interest to publicize the fact that EU is a huge failure and the most harmful thing possible for the developing EU countries, which it intends to turn into colonies of the “prime” EU countries.

So if you want to find who’s responsible for the Greek crisis, find the ones who benefitted the most from the European free market project, which would be the countries with greatest and most competitive export capabilities, and guess what, it ain’t the PIGS.

The “open market” policies are beneficial primarily to those who have stuff to sell you, stuff they are able to produce cheaply and in huge abundance. It’s like the male-female sexual game: if you’re female, of course the males want you to be “open” and “free”, and they make propaganda about all the benefits of unrestricted sex, but you kinda know it’s not in your best interest, because this kind of “free” gives them everything and gives you nothing. You want “free” of the kind that is called “marriage”, where you give all of you and he gives all of him. “Free” and “open” are not necessarily good things; essentially, they are good only if you are the country with the greatest internal market and greatest industrial capabilities, and now that we think of it, which country is actually peddling this kind of bullshit for decades already? Hmm…

Essentially, the free market thing is a win-win for big countries: they get you as a new market for their products, and in order for you to be able to afford them, they will issue you loans, and the greatest hypocrisy of all is, this is not something that is talked about. All that is talked about is the fact that Greece took the loans and cannot afford to repay them. What is not talked about is why it took them, or why it cannot repay them. It’s presented as if the PIGS countries are populated by greedy lazy bastards who like to spend the money and then not cover the bill, and the role of EU in breeding corruption in all member states in order to benefit all sorts of nefarious agendas is overlooked. What would actually be fair is EU to have given its undeveloped members all the money that was produced by the increase of sales of goods and services due to their membership, in form of corporate shares in the corporations that benefit from the unrestricted export. Essentially, if the market is single, why are the wallets separate? It’s as crazy as if I kept lending my wife money and expected her to repay me. What mockery of a marriage would that be?

But that’s exactly what EU is: a mockery of a structure, doomed by the idiocy of its poor design, by which the powerful member-states can block everything that doesn’t directly benefit them, thus determining the direction of the money flow: always towards them, never from them, and if they appear to give, it’s all an illusion, because it’s only a loan. What you took from them is noted and will need to be repaid, but what they took from you is obscured by seven layers of deception. It all resembles a bad marriage resulting in a bad divorce: “I don’t know who she is; I know her but we didn’t have sex; We had sex but the child isn’t mine; Ok the child is mine but I can’t afford the alimony; But the money we used for life expenses during the last 5 years of living together, that was all a loan and I expect it back with interest; What do you mean it isn’t legally a loan if it was used to cover the costs incurred for my benefit?”.

I’ve been listening to many political Youtube video clips recently and a recurring theme among the pro-Russian and anti-NATO speakers seems to be that NATO bombardment of Serbia was an act of vile aggression and the breakup of Yugoslavia was somehow American fault.

This motivates me to write my own personal account of the breakup of Yugoslavia from the position of someone who lived through this period, and whose family members were the refugees from the war; I think this makes me significantly more qualified than the guys who watched this all on TV somewhere in Europe or America.

One of the problems that I face in an attempt to convey my perception of the situation is the immense richness of history of this part of the world. In almost every village here in Croatia there’s a church that dates from at least the 15th century – that’s a hundred years before Isaac Newton. For instance, in a suburban village near Zagreb, where I live at the moment, the church was built in 1476th, and guess what, it was the new church, built on the spot of the older church from 1276th, which was built in place of an even older wooden chapel, dating all the way back to the year 1076. That’s 939 years of history of that one small village, which is not nearly the oldest thing here, because in Split, the Emperor Diocletian’s palace and the aqueducts are still in use, continually, since the Roman empire. There was never a discontinuity of history. People still use the Roman arena in Pula for purposes very similar to the original ones. The art festivals that took place during the times when the Republic of Dubrovnik was a medieval independent state still take place, the Alka of Sinj, established in medieval times to commemorate a battle with the Turks, still takes place. We have local customs so ancient in origin, they probably date all the way to the last ice age, or at least to early Holocene period. The ancient pre-Christian religion of this region is Vedic-Aryan in origin, and its religious topography was recycled by Christianity by building churches on the spots of the ancient temples. A thought crossed my mind – take a look at the Witcher series of videogames, the medieval-themed thing, or the Game of Thrones series, which is actually recorded in Croatia (guess why). People dressed like that, with spears and swords, believing in dragons and monsters, actually lived here, and Roman emperors were born and lived here, and even older Roman and Greek settlements exist here, on top of the stone age settlements, on top of the caves in which the Neanderthals lived. There is a continuity of 125 thousands of years of human habitation in this very area. Here, history spans across geological epochs, and some of it still exists in the most ancient of customs. The Vučedol culture is contemporary with the Sumer period of Mesopotamia and early dynastic period of Egypt. When I say we have history here, I mean we have history that is so old, that it’s among the oldest of any human culture or civilization, surpassed only by the Leakey findings in Olduvai Gorge, Africa. Essentially, this place doesn’t remember the times when people lived on the trees, but it remembers the times when they lived in caves, hunting a wooly rhinoceros.

Why am I making this lengthy introduction? Because to us, the Turks were on our borders and preparing an invasion of Vienna yesterday. The Roman emperors Trajan and Diocletian were here here day before yesterday, and somewhat earlier than that people were making human sacrifices to the Great Mother. On the edge of our known timeline, the Neanderthals were hiding from winter in Vindija cave. The Neanderthal genome project got their finest DNA sample from us. We are not a new people, a new country or a new nation. Our people were thrown to the lions by the Romans and we still remember their names. The chessboard shield decorates the medieval churches here. The chessboard shield was the constituent of the shield of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Empress Maria Theresia was the sovereign of Austria, Hungary, Croatia, Bohemia, Mantua, Milan, Lodomeria and Galicia, the Austrian Netherlands and Parma. We are not some shitty little country created with the breakup of Yugoslavia, we are among the oldest on Earth, the cornerstone of European civilization. Europe might have forgotten this, but this is a normal part of life here, being surrounded by ruins and buildings so ancient, that Chinese tourists drool all over the place with their cameras, unable to believe that this all actually exists in reality and not only in some history-themed movie or a video game. I cannot start from the beginning, because our beginning goes back to the beginnings of human existence in Eurasia. I will have to start somewhere more recent: with the Turkish occupation of Serbia in 1389. This is where the serious trouble started, deeply marking the Serbian national identity to the point where nothing before or since matters to them. The Kosovo battle was a draw, but Serbia lost its entire army and the Turks just came back with a new one and overran them. The Turks impaled men and raped women. A significant part of the Serbian genome (20%) is Anatolian haplogroup. The Serbs had the misfortune of being close to Turkey, and were thus overran and raped as a nation; the Turks are still remembered as the worst of pests in these areas, something subhuman in its cruelty and viciousness. Unlike the Serbs, who were hit early, the Croatians, Romanians and Hungarians had time to prepare – especially the Croatians. The Turks still remember us as their most vicious enemies, and we gave them such scars they will never forget. In the process, the soldiers of the “military region” of Croatia, the “vojna krajina”, were the most vicious, best trained, most cruel military force on Earth during that time. Napoleon recruited the members of his personal guard among them, and they were the scourge of the Earth.

We saw the Serbs as a brotherly nation. We gave their refugees land in Lika and Mountain Shire (Gorski Kotar) to make their homes there. We protected them from the Turks, and celebrated their victories and eventual liberation as if it were our own. We did not see the Serbs, Montenegrins, Bosnians and Croatians as separate ethnicities, because that didn’t mean anything at the time. There were the Christians, and there were the Turks. Croatians were deeply sympathetic to Serbs and their suffering under the Turks, to the point where panslavism was extremely popular among the intellectual elites here in Zagreb, prior to the first world war, and, and when Serbia freed itself, they were dreaming of being “liberated” themselves, from the union with Austria and Hungary, which they perceived as stifling the Slavic identity of Croatia – essentially, they were planing a common state of all southern-Slavic nations, and this weird surge of nationalism and separatism actually contributed to the downfall of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The Serbs, on their side, had a different agenda. Having liberated themselves from the Turks, they saw all Slavic Christians as Serbs that need to be incorporated into a Great Serbia, which is why they assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, leading to the world war. When the war ended, the Croatian slavist intellectuals ran straight to the Serbs and proposed the formation of the new state of the Slovenians, Croatians and Serbs, which the Serbs accepted, but with completely different ideas in mind. Somehow, the Serbs got it into their heads that they “won” those territories in the war, and started treating them as conquered lands, gravely abusing the trust vested in them by the Croatian political elites. This went so far, that the vehemently pro-Slavic political trends in the Austro-Hungarian Croatia gave way to the genocidal anti-Serb policies of Ante Pavelić and his “Ustaše” movement, which eventually made an alliance with Hitler and committed great crimes against Serbs, Jews and all political misfits.

One needs to stop here and think how badly the Serbs must have fucked up in order to turn the Croatians from deep sympathy and compassion for the Serbs, to a vicious genocidal hate. But, the second world war started here, and the only organized opposition to the German and Italian occupying forces and their quislings was the communist party under Josip Broz Tito, which managed to hold its own during the war, and after the Nazis withdrew, together with their pathetic servants, they remained as the only force standing and proceeded to butcher the quislings and everyone else they didn’t particularly like. The crimes they committed against the civilian population after the war were at least as great as the crimes committed by the Ustaše and other quisling forces during the war, and the only righteous part of the population were the civilian victims of both criminal gangs in question. Tito rebuilt Yugoslavia as a communist state, first according to Stalin’s Soviet design, but later went his own way, parted with the Soviet model of government and created a state that was halfway between the Warsaw pact and NATO, in both way of life and political alignment. In fact, he and his foreign allies, Nasser, Nehru and Sukarno, formed the core of the non-aligned movement, which grew to include all the countries that were tired of the bloc policies of the cold war. In the early 1970s, the first signs of trouble started as some Croatian intellectuals started making waves about how Croatian culture and language were drowned under the Serbian-centric rule from Belgrade, and how money from Croatian tourism was unjustly distributed across Yugoslavia and didn’t sufficiently benefit Croatia. Tito resolved the matter by arresting all the troublemakers and throwing away the key, and then basically did everything they requested, at least formally. Zagreb was made the cultural and intellectual capital of Yugoslavia, while Belgrade remained the administrative and military center. The money continued to flow to Belgrade first.

After Tito’s death, inertia carried Yugoslavia along quite nicely, with only occasional stirrings of trouble. After all, Yugoslavia was rather well off, as communist states go. In science, technology and prosperity, it didn’t lag all that much behind the West, if at all, but the common themes of inefficient, ailing economy, and belligerent Serbian nationalism under Slobodan Milošević became troubling. Serbia intended to promote centralization of everything under Serbian rule, which Croatia, as the second most powerful constituent opposed, because Croatians never really understood why they would let themselves be ruled by the Serbs, since they had more advanced industry, earned most of the federal budget by tourism, and had actually lead the communist resistance movement during the second world war; in fact, they liberated Serbia, not the other way around, and the Serbs really joined the partisan movement only when the war was already over.

I don’t know what exactly happened behind the curtains slightly before and during the year 1990, but it seems that the political elites in the Croatian communist party decided that Yugoslavia is doomed, that Milošević will ride the beast of Serbian national myths and basically transform Yugoslavia into the Great Serbia, and sought to form viable opposition to that trend on the Croatian side, choosing Franjo Tuđman as the most suitable candidate. He won the first democratic elections, and proceeded to transform Croatia into a viable state, with separate finances, army and all. What decided the course of events were, essentially, two things. First, Tito formed the Yugoslav People’s Army as a Serb-lead force, to appease the Serbian heroic myth, like he appeased the Croatian cultural myth by giving them control of the Yugoslav encyclopedic society and other important cultural institutions. Milošević quickly came to an agreement with the Serbian generals, who agreed to militarily quench the separatist movements in Slovenia and Croatia. Second, Lawrence Eagleburger, American secretary of state under Bush Sr., went to Belgrade and apparently gave the Serbs American blessing for their plan of quickly ending the separatist movement in the republics, and when the Yugoslav Army started its military activities, an arms embargo was imposed to “all sides”, which basically meant that the Serbs had all the weapons in the world except the nukes, and Croatians had what they could steal from the Serbs and buy on the black market. Still, Croatians managed to hold their own, losing only the part of the territory that was populated by the Serbs and held by the Army, and managed to lose only Vukovar while inflicting grave losses to the JNA. The Serbian failure to end the Croatian rebellion showed the “international community” that Yugoslavia was doomed and could not be healed, and the separatist republics were internationally recognized as sovereign states.

Serbia then proceeded to “ethnically cleanse” Bosnia, meaning, to draw some arbitrary line among the ethnicities and kill all the non-Serbs on the “Serbian” side. Croatians held their own well, but the Muslims were not prepared for the war, neither militarily nor psychologically, and had poor leadership. The “international community” continually misrepresented the conflict and mostly just encouraged the Serbs by their lack of decisive action or clear attitude, and most actually favored the Serbs, since all the Yugoslav diplomats were appointed from Belgrade and formed a positive attitude towards the Serbs and negative attitudes towards the Croatians in their host countries. This lead to the expectations that Croatians cannot match the Serbs militarily and allowed the Serbs to control most of the narrative, which slightly changed only as news of the slaughters of Vukovar, concentration camps in Bosnia and mass executions of Srebrenica leaked into the world, but matters changed significantly when Croatians, having used the hiatus to arm themselves, had enough of that shit and destroyed the Serbs militarily in Croatia and proceeded to hand them their ass in Bosnia. That’s when America finally intervened and brokered the Dayton accord, which allowed Croatia to retain its territorial integrity, while Bosnia was split into Serbian and Muslim-Croatian entities. Things would have ended there, but the Serbs apparently just needed to kill people to feel good about themselves, so they proceeded to exterminate the Albanians in their ancient historical province of Kosovo, and only when they made it apparent they would spill the conflict into Macedonia, which could then spill further, Americans decided that they had enough of Serbs and started bombing the shit out of them, until the Serbs finally admitted defeat. America turned Kosovo into their military base, Macedonia was unharmed and the Albanians proceeded to reproduce at a geometrical rate.

So, let’s finally get to the point I initially wanted to make. First, the dissolution of Yugoslavia was not the result of American meddling; however, the Serbian military aggression and an attempt to crush Croatian opposition and reform Yugoslavia as a Great Serbia was in fact directly caused by Eagleburger’s visit of encouragement to Belgrade, and by a huge reluctance in the international community to make it clear to Milošević that his actions are unacceptable. Had America made it clear to him that he’ll end up like Iraq if he tried to solve matters militarily, there never would have been a war here. The Croatians certainly weren’t in a position to wage one, nor did they have any intentions to harm the Serbs in any way; they were just sick of bleeding the tourism money to Belgrade and wanted to try something other than communism. Sure, some hooligans and football fan groups wanted to duke it out with the Serbs, but that would never go beyond minor fistfights. The Serbs started spreading paranoia about Croatians coming to kill them all and started an insurgency in parts of Croatia, but without the military support from Belgrade, that would have ended in a week, with minor casualties and a few arrested leaders. Essentially, what caused the war was the fact that America gave the Serbs a green light to go ahead with a military solution. The fact that America finally saw the light and decided to make it clear to Serbia that their bullshit won’t be tolerated was probably the only good thing they did here, but even that would not have been necessary if they only played it differently in the beginning. The states would have gone their separate ways, but soon would have joined again in some form of a free market union, because their economies were deeply interlinked. There would never have been a military conflict. All would be a part of the European Union by now.

So, essentially, thank you Lawrence Sidney Eagleburger, and thank you George H. W. Bush. Fuck you very, very much.

The problem is, this is not over. The Dayton accord had frozen Bosnia into something inherently ungovernable, and it progressed to degrade economically and culturally to the point where a rupture along at least one of the frozen fault-lines seems inevitable. Also, the Bosnian conflict served to transform the Muslim ethnicity into a more fundamentalist variety of Islam, which might yet end badly. The entire political elite of Bosnia is incompetent and corrupt, and the economy is almost nonexistent, which is bound to explode sooner or later. All former Yugoslav republic are economically crippled, mostly by a combination of transition from communism, loss of the common market, war and corruption, and although I fully supported Croatian independence at the time, I regret that Yugoslavia had to end in such a bad way, and not be reformed into something better by nonviolent means, without Serbs at the steering wheel. The thing with the Serbs is, they suck at governing. They want to rule, to show they are in charge, they want to own others, and that simply doesn’t work with Croatians, who had a history of giving very strong foes a bloody nose, and don’t like anyone to fuck with them. And the joke is, the Croatians didn’t even want to rule Yugoslavia or anything. They just reacted badly to Milošević and his bullshit, which makes me believe that the Serbs need to do some significant soul-searching and redefining of their own national identity before being able to peacefully coexist with others. The Russians see the Serbs as brothers – both Orthodox-Christians, both write in Cyrillic alphabet, stuff like that, but I think they fail to perceive the more profound differences. Russia, despite superficial differences, is more like Croatia in essence: inherently non-aggressive, but never, ever piss it off unless you have a death wish. The Serbs are still butt-sore from the Turkish occupation and appear to cultivate a myth of military strength in some strange inversion of history: the eternal military loser sees itself as the conqueror, who loses in peace but wins in war. Unless the Serbs get over this shit, they will remain a danger to their neighbors. They behave like someone who was butt-fucked in prison for years and then proceeds to act like a super-tough macho badass. The Croatians, however, have a different problem. They see the EU as the substitute for the long-lost beloved Austro-Hungarian empire, which they perceived as their own. Unfortunately, EU proved to be a bitch step-mother to Croatia, and a worthy successor to Yugoslavia in all that is bad.

I have an extremely heretical idea on how to reform the payment industry.

People should be allowed to pay and receive payment for any kind of goods or services whatsoever, with the sole exception of a proven criminal activity, and by “proven” I mean a valid verdict by a court of law.

Now, I know that this will come as a shock to people, for two different reasons. The majority of people will be shocked because they think they live in a free society and they think this is exactly how things do work today.

The other group are the Nazi scumbags that actually control the payment industry, and who imposed the regulations demanding that every participant in the payment industry polices himself and others, completely outside any form of a legal system, and decide who can be allowed to receive money for goods and services, based on completely arbitrary lists that are based on all kinds of political and religious restrictions. Most of the time it’s cloaked under the guise of “risk aversion”, but honestly, the things that are on those “high risk” lists are in reality among the lowest-risk things you can imagine. I had webshops selling cameras, dating sites, tourist sites renting apartments in vacation resorts, gambling sites, gaming sites and, basically, everything else you can imagine, rejected by the banks as “high risk”, in spite of the fact that “high risk” is defined through probability of incurring a high rate of chargebacks, and that in my entire history of working in the payment industry since 2004, with hundreds of merchants, I only encountered two or three seriously high risk merchants who actually committed fraud and/or produced chargebacks. Essentially, the whole “high risk” concept is a ruse, it’s a deceptive label for something else: imposing American control over the global markets, with questionable goals. Why American? Ask yourselves, who owns the greatest credit-card companies? And that’s where the rules come from.

What I can assure you is that the entire thing is completely extralegal. You can be forbidden from selling goods and services online, and you cannot appeal the decision in any way if you think you had been wronged. If there is any validity to the crypto-currency thing, it is evading this massive project of controlling what people do with their lives and money, silently, extralegally, behind the curtains, without any outsiders being aware.

I understand that someone will say that allowing anyone to receive money for anything will facilitate all sorts of boogeymen, such as terrorism, pedophilia or the famous “money laundering”, but I say it’s bullshit. The real criminals already own the banks and the criminal transactions are whitewashed there into looking so pretty one would never suspect them. Bin Laden successfully financed his projects in spite of all American attempts to suppress him. Rich people launder money with ease. However, if you want to stop such things, you need to resort to conventional investigations and courts, after which blocking the assets never poses a problem. The way to stop terrorists isn’t preventing them from receiving money, it’s arresting both them and those who financially support them. So if those policies intended to suppress online crime, they failed miserably. What they succeeded at at is evading legal methods of fighting crime (because “they don’t work”), and impeding normal economy by banning more than 75% of everything by declaring it “high risk”. I don’t know where those people learned their statistics, but if you’re dealing with 75% of something, it cannot be high risk, because normally you would have a Gaussian distribution of risk and you would have high risk on the extreme right, normal risk in the middle and low risk in the extreme left. If you place 75% of commerce on the extreme right, it means you either just failed at math, or you are hiding some very nefarious political agenda as Basel II risk management. After all, is it so difficult to accept that a court of law should be the only judge of whether something should be allowed or prohibited? And if someone vehemently opposes that, you should look for real criminals at his address. The criminals of the kind that historically used to wear black uniforms, turn their own state into a prison and surrounding states into graveyards. Those are the people you should fear, not the terrorists, not the pedophiles or other “immoral people”. It’s the highly moral people intent on maintaining order and discipline that you should fear, and remember that it’s supposed to be about freedom, not about security, or avoiding risk at all cost, because if you remove risk from commerce, you remove commerce from the economy. Risk needs to be managed, by quickly figuring out who is causing problems and blocking him, not proactively removing anything that resembles anything that could be imagined to pose a problem; if that was permissible, then we might all as well end up in some prison because we all have the potential of being murderers, thieves and rapists. We can all do it. It’s not who is capable or even likely to do something, it’s who actually does something. When you start judging people not for what they actually do, but what they look like, or what you think they are capable of, you get the Third Reich, and honestly, we’re very much there. And when you start preventing people from doing business not because it’s illegal, but because you think it’s immoral, it’s called the dark ages. And yes, we are very much there, too.

And if that isn’t enough, remember that it was the highly moral people of the Sanhedrin who had Jesus killed, because his continued existence was deemed to be “high risk”.