Monthly Archives: February 2023

Developments

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The Americans (using local traitors and useful idiots) destroyed a Russian AWACS plane (Beriev A-50). It is not reported, but I would venture a guess that the plane destroyed was the A-50U variant, modernized with state-of-the-art electronics.

This is the second large mobile radar the Americans destroyed. The first one was on the cruiser “Moskva”, and I always suspected that they used diversion in order to blow up the ammunition on the ship. The strategic intersection of those two is the ability to monitor the Western airspace with high resolution. The reduction in nearby radar coverage is likely to degrade Russian early-warning abilities related to American stealth aircraft, which means a delay in response to an American strike, possibly using stealth aircraft to launch nuclear-tipped cruise missiles. This is the attack of the kind Americans would answer with a nuclear strike, were it performed against their strategic assets, especially since Russia seems to have only seven or nine of those modernized flying radars, depending on various reports.

This took place because Russia encouraged such attacks by not responding to the first few, and if they continue playing this game, it will get worse.

Edit: There were no confirmations of this, and Intel Slava Z channel claims it’s all fake news.

Edit2: Intel Slava Z reports that “In Belarus, a terrorist of the Ukrainian special services and his accomplices were detained, who are involved in an attempt to sabotage an A-50 aircraft at the Machulishchi airfield, – said President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko”, so I would say that something obviously happened; either 1) an attack was attempted and failed, or 2) it succeeded but the consequences were of such strategic importance that the Russians preferred to just swallow it, fly in another plane, take pictures and pretend nothing happened, rather than escallate this to the level appropriate for such a transgression.

Edit3: “The aircraft was transferred to Russian for maintenance and another Russian A-50 should be sent to Belarus.” (Southfront)
Yeah, second interpretation from edit2 confirmed.

 

Nuclear misapprehensions

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There’s something I’ve been thinking about regarding nuclear weapons. You see, we’ve been exposed to the incredible amount of propaganda stating that the use of nuclear weapons is an “all or nothing” proposition, meaning that if nuclear weapons are used at all, it will eventually lead to a total, unlimited nuclear exchange destroying at least our civilization, if not all life.

This is not necessarily bad, because it probably contributed to the fact that nuclear weapons have not been used in war since Nagasaki. However, as we approach the point where nuclear weapons might very likely be used in war, it might become a double-edged sword of self-fulfilling prophecy.

Ask people what would happen if 500 nuclear weapons were to be detonated, and they would tell you it would be the end of the world, mostly due to radiation and “nuclear winter”. I’m not saying that people in the fireball and shockwave radius of those 500 nuclear weapons would not have a very bad day, but let’s look at this rationally. There were over 500 atmospheric nuclear tests, before they were banned. There were over 500 megatons of total yield of those weapons. Some, like Castle Bravo, were extremely “dirty”, producing record amounts of fallout. Not only did mankind did not go extinct, but the number of people in fact doubled since then. The total result of 500 nukes going off in the atmosphere was, basically, negligible, unless you happen to be one of those few unfortunate people near the Nevada, Semipalatinsk and Bikini test sites. For those few, it was a life altering (or ending) disaster, but considering how many nukes we detonated in a very brief time span, the total effects were incredibly close to zero. Also, I don’t seem to recall there having been a nuclear winter of any kind, the greatest by far event of this kind during my lifetime being the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo. No, there would be no nuclear winter, and you could blast 500 nukes, wait a few weeks for the dust to settle, and in most of the world the radiation would be low enough not to matter. How do I know? We’ve been there, we did that. Unlike the “scientists” who like to talk about those matters, I’m not guessing, I’m working with historical data. We detonated 500 nukes and, outside of the testing polygons, the total cumulative result was negligible. This means that the casualties from nuclear war would amount to those in the impact zones, and those who died due to infrastructure failure – electricity, heat, fuel, transportation, refrigeration, agriculture, basically they would die from poor hygiene, neglected medical issues, water-borne disease, starvation, exposure to elements, looting and similar things you can expect if big cities are struck by an earthquake of great proportions and there’s no outside help for months and years. It would be a great disaster; imagine a combination of the Asian tsunami and this Turkey-Syria earthquake, and multiply it by a hundred. That’s what total nuclear war would look like. However, the problem with the “suicide pact” of NATO is that it basically guarantees escalation to exactly that point if, for instance, several nuclear weapons mounted on cruise missiles get to be used in Europe, against the American bases that coordinate the war against Russia. What would actually happen in such a case remains to be seen, but I guess some rational people would try to limit the conflict to a dozen or so warheads deployed against military targets, because I don’t think a rational person would assume that use of nuclear weapons against strictly military targets in a big war between superpowers is something extreme, irrational and something that needs to be escalated to the point of complete destruction of civilization.

The second thing people get wrong is the concept of a “nuclear button”, where the presidents of superpowers give authorisation and hundreds of ICBMs launch simultaneously. Yes, a final phase of a nuclear war would look like this, but I would expect a dozen or so military installations to be hit by nuclear-tipped cruise missiles or ordinary bombs at that point. The nuclear response is so hardwired to full retaliation at the sight of ICBMs flying, I actually don’t expect ICBMs to be used in war; they are “for later”, if everybody goes bat-shit crazy. In an actual war, expect ordinary cruise missiles of the kind Russia routinely uses in Ukraine, the kind that can hit a single building from 1500 km distance, or nuclear-tipped hypersonics, that are immune to detection and interception. The difference between using conventional warheads and using nukes is that one nuke with 10kt yield is more effective than many, many conventional warheads. How much more? One Kalibr carries 500kg of explosive; this is 0.5 tons. 10kt means ten kilotons, or ten thousand tons. This means that one thermonuclear Kalibr with low yield has the same destructive power as 20000 conventional ones. There’s been talk about Kinzhals, Zircons and other hypersonic being a replacement for nukes because of sheer kinetic energy equalling around 7 tons of explosive. Well, a single low-yield nuke is equivalent to around 1400 hypersonics. A typical modern thermonuclear warhead with 100kt yield equals around 14000 hypersonic strikes. A big, obsolete thermonuclear warhead would be around 20 Mt. This is 2000 ordinary 10 kt nukes, and that’s the kind of stuff people scare children with, but that’s also the kind of stuff that’s unlikely to ever be used. What’s actually very likely to be used is the kind of stuff you put on a Zircon hypersonic and turn Ramstein base into a glass parking lot to let Americans know you’re done fucking around. That kind would produce very little effect outside the area of immediate impact, but the main effect would be complete panic and lunacy everywhere, because everybody is conditioned to believe that the world is about to end as soon as the first nuke is detonated anywhere. In reality, it could be 2-3 nukes in one strike, then panic, then a response within a few weeks, then panic, and then they either start talking to each other and stop posturing like they’re Churchill staring down Hitler, or they escalate and really bad stuff starts happening. Because, you see, if the impacts are reserved to the military installations alone, the total overall effect of that would be 99.9% psychological, on everybody but the soldiers killed, but they already participate in war and as far as I’m concerned, being killed by a nuke or being killed by an artillery shell is pretty much the same, except that in this case the American cowards piloting drones and plotting attacks from a safe distance would learn that there’s no such thing as a safe distance. In fact, there would be much less civilian casualties in a limited nuclear war, than in a conventional war of the kind we’re having right now, because I am absolutely sure that the first nukes would be targetted at very symbolic military targets, of the kind absolutely everybody would agree are legitimate, and everybody there got what they had coming. For instance, Ramstein base, or a similar one in Poland, or Deveselu installation in Romania, or Aviano base in Italy, or something similar in Britain, or American aircraft carriers, they are all guilty as sin – those are the bastards who bully other countries into submission just because they can. It’s not like Hiroshima or Nagasaki, where civilians were deliberately hit to showcase the weapon to Stalin. The idea people have, that somehow Putin would use Sarmat missiles, that’s just because they are absolutely clueless. Sarmat and Yars is what you use to turn America into a glass parking lot, and that’s no longer war, it’s retaliatory extermination of the enemy. The actual weapon of war used to compel the enemy to stop fucking with you permanently is a nuclear-tipped cruise missile, and they would all be targetted at the American bases, not at the poor bastards in Ukraine who are stupid and villainous enough to fight for them.

 

Lies, politics and reality

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Since I’m following lots of politics, the issue of lies and deception obviously comes up, so let’s introduce some analytical clarity.

People usually define lying as telling things that are not true, but that trivial definition is not valid. You see, one can say things that are not true, but he doesn’t know that. That’s not lying; that’s being under a misapprehension and uttering falsehoods.

To lie means to deliberately create a false impression upon others, in order to deceive them. One can use any combination of truths and falsehoods in one’s statements, and the thing that separates misapprehension from a lie is intent. Also, one can hide truth by omission, which is also a form of deception. One can use a combination of true statements that is expected to cause the listener to draw the wrong conclusion. One can use obscure speech that doesn’t necessarily contain outright falsehoods, but it’s not conducive to producing correct understanding.

So, we have a matrix where a statement can be accurate or inaccurate, and intent can be honest or deceptive. Let’s ignore the cases where intent is neutral or a statement is vague, for the sake of simplicity.

An accurate statement is something like “Rome is the capital of Italy”, or “Monday is followed by Tuesday”. A false statement is something like “Madrid is the capital of Japan”, or “Boolean algebra is the way to count booles”.

Honest intent is where you intend for the listener to gain correct understanding of facts, and you attempt to formulate statements with this goal. Deceptive intent deliberately aims to create a misunderstanding of facts.

This gives us four possible combinations of types of statements and intents with which they are spoken; accurate and honest, accurate and deceptive, inaccurate and honest, and inaccurate and deceptive.

Accurate and honest statement is obviously what is meant by telling the truth, and inaccurate and deceptive statements are obviously what is meant by lying, but there is a grey zone of inaccurate honest statements, and accurate but deceptive ones, and this is where people with inadequate training tend to get lost, because in the world of politics we are dealing with professional, very skilled liars and deceivers. This is why we have to open the next issue – the ethics of lying.

One would expect me to say that one should always tell the truth and never lie, but this is actually not the case. As Krishna said in the Mahabharata, there’s nothing more important and valuable than the truth, however there are times where truth needs to be hidden, and times where lies need to be said. This means that when you see a man running from murderers and hiding in a barn, followed by the murderers who ask you if you saw the man they were pursuing, it would be sinful to tell the truth, and even the fact that you know it can lead to harm. Also, truth in deceptive context can be used for creating a false impression with very bad intentions, and there are expert liars who are trained to do exactly that. That’s how governments write reports. 🙂

If you followed Putin, you know he’s usually a very honest and straightforward person who usually tells the truth. However, there are cases where he made deceptive or false statements. For instance, when he deployed special forces in Crimea to keep the referendum safe. Those forces didn’t have visible insignia and were mockingly addressed as “little green men”. Putin at first pretended not to know anything about them, but later admitted it was his men. The reason for this is potential issues with the Russia-Ukraine relations, because they had a contract according to which the Russian military in Crimea wasn’t supposed to leave the bases, and Russia was in violation of this contract in case the referendum didn’t pass. However, when the referendum did pass, and Ukraine started killing the Russian population of Donbass and in Odessa, Putin decided that his minor infringement of contract was the least of the issues at hand. Similarly, when the Russians accumulated military forces prior to the invasion of Ukraine, and they were confronted about it by the Americans, their response was that they are fully within their right to move their military within their territory. This is true, yet deceptive, and if they wanted to be completely honest, they could have said that they are preparing their military in case their diplomatic efforts fail, but this would have been rightfully construed as a direct threat, and the other side would have been under pressure to “refuse blackmail” and war would become more likely. The way the Russians formulated it was “don’t mind our military doing things on Russian territory, instead focus on our proposition for Ukrainian neutrality and withdrawal of NATO to pre-1997 borders”. This is an example of a statement that is true, but deceptive – the truth is that the military was being prepared in case the West didn’t accept the Russian “non-ultimatum”, but it was deemed prudent not to formulate it as an outright threat of war if Russian conditions aren’t met. This is a lie, but its purpose is to allow the opposing side to save face, and if we understand diplomacy primarily as an effort to avert war, a lie whose purpose is to make a peaceful outcome more likely is not an instrument of evil. This is very much unlike the American deceptions with the supposed Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, whose purpose was to give legitimacy to war.

What we can see is that the Russians often don’t reveal the truth, and they occasionally use true but deceptive statements, but they very rarely use outright lies, and when they do, they look so uncomfortable about it it’s obvious that something’s up. They also occasionally use deceptive statistics, for instance when reporting their military dead, I think they used to omit the Wagner group and the Donbass militia, but outside attempts to independently establish the number of Russian dead actually gave the upper limit of 20000, and that’s using an AI to comb through raw data. This means that the Russian official reports are in fact quite accurate. Considering how the other side gives estimates that are false at least by an order of magnitude, it shows a pattern: the Russians are uncomfortable with lies and prefer to remain honest and straightforward as much as possible, but they try to avoid going so far as to actually cause harm by telling the truth.

Also, so far their warnings have always been very conservatively formulated, and they avoided outright threats and ultimatums, in order to prevent situations where the other side would lose face and appear humiliated by accepting peace. The problem is, the West painted itself into a corner by falsely portraying Putin as some kind of a new Hitler, with whom there can be no talks, and every compromise is seen as “appeasement” which would only encourage further encroachments. Since it is very unwise to do such a propagandistic preparation unless you intend to go all the way in total war, it can be concluded that those in the West running this show either don’t understand how this works, or they actually intend to produce a scenario of escalation to the point of unlimited nuclear exchange.

It’s interesting how the Russian side is more useful for illustrating the concept of diplomatic deception; it’s because they are very nuanced, deliberate and they use mostly straightforward truth, and only shade things occasionally, to either assist the diplomatic efforts or hide some embarrassment. This is what you would expect a normal person to do; tell the truth most of the time, but avoid offending others and creating awqward social situations, and try to present yourself in as positive light as realistically possible, while remaining constructive about possible improvements. The Americans (and the entire collective West they are controlling) are a different story, because they have a tendency to define their objective, and they have absolutely no respect for either truth or facts whatsoever. They recognize only “narratives”, which means story-telling with the purpose of achieving their goals, and those narratives can be utterly fictional to the point where they have only a tangential relationship with reality, if even that. Their positions are false to such a degree, they are not very useful for this type of an analysis, because they tend to create outright fairy tales, where “Russia” and “Putin” they talk about exist as imaginary cartoon characters, which is why they always serve their audience only short, edited and heavily commented snippets of the enemy, because they are aware that their “narrative” would immediately crumble in an environment of unlimited access to raw data.

This is not limited to American foreign policy, where each enemy is portrayed as a “new Hitler” that must be defeated or else no virtue has any meaning; they use the same concept of “narratives” in their economy and internal politics, where they cook the numbers in such a way as to present a “more constructive” picture, for instance if someone is unemployed for a longer time, they stop counting him as unemployed because he “exited the workforce”, which is basically the same as counting people who died of an illness as cured, or cooking the way they calculate inflation in ways that greatly under-report actual expenses the people realistically have, or print money that is deployed through investment banks into the artificially inflated valuations of companies, that creates GDP numbers that are hugely inflated, and used to retroactively justify the money printing, and so on. This pattern of painting a picture where their problems are insignificant, their strengths are magnified, and their enemies are portrayed as weak and incompetent, is a rather new occurrence. For instance, I watched military videos from the second world war, where the Americans told their bomber pilots exactly how the German anti-aircraft systems work, and how they must use complicated mathematical methods to deceive and evade them, because the Germans are sophisticated, technologically extremely advanced, competent and disciplined, and if you are in any way predictable, they will take you out of the air with perfect certainty. If such a video was made today, it would mock Hitler as a caricature figure, portray the Germans as weak and already defeated, and tell the pilots it’s all going to be a piece of cake, because they are Americans and thus destined to be invincible and victorious. Similarly, during the cold war the Soviets were feared; they were portrayed as technologically extremely advanced, strategically wise and powerful to the point of having a constant advantage over America, even when it wasn’t true. If anyone during the cold war tried the kind of a narrative that’s popular today, saying that the Soviet Union is weak, overrated, corrupt and their stuff is rusted-out junk that mostly doesn’t work, they would immediately put him under surveillance to see if the Russians are paying him to lull the Americans into complacency with false stories. It’s interesting how they used to err on the side of overestimating the danger; underestimating it and being proved false was seen as the greatest danger. Overestimating the enemy meant you were more prepared, and no harm can come from that. Something, somewhere, apparently changed since the 1990s; not necessarily in the sense that they lie more than before, but rather in the sense that they seem to believe in “positive thinking” and “creative power of thought”, meaning that you wish things into reality and what you say becomes true. This looks like those weird New Age philosophies that were ubiquitous in the 1990s, and some of that apparently influenced the way the Americans perceive reality. I might be wrong, though; it might be the other way around, that something changed in the way Americans perceive reality, and this resulted in creation of the New Age philosophy, among other things. In any case, there was some new psychological momentum that seems to have coincided with the fall of the Soviet Union and the defeat of the communist block, where the enemy that was previously thought to be invincible crumbled due to no more than persistence and “correct ideology” on the Western side. This would require further analysis, but the fact is that something changed in the American thinking about that time, and they seem to think that reality will be influenced by their narratives to the point where they don’t care about the facts at all, and merely attempt to suppress them with the story they present and stubbornly defend. This is autosuggestion, and is utilised in self-hypnosis and autogenous training with great effect, but the power of belief must never be overstated. I learned that the hard way in driving school, when I concentrated on thinking about success instead of driving well, and I failed. It is then that I realised that positive thinking can be actively harmful, and the next time I concentrated on doing everything well, and I passed. Basically, in autogenous training you get used to the “fake it until you make it” approach, where you think that your hands are warm, and when you believe they are, they actually get warm, and after you get used to this working, you tend to get ahead of yourself and start thinking that this is how things work elsewhere – believe you’re rich and you will become rich, believe you’re beautiful and you will be seen as beautiful, and so on. I don’t know if belief in such reality-changing power of bullshit came first, or if it’s the result of something else, but I see this crazy ideology everywhere, from economy and geopolitics to people trying to bullshit others by pretending to be rich and cool on the Internet. People have incredible faith in the power of their thoughts and beliefs to change reality and mould it, the way a magnetic field can shape a ray of charged particles. Basically, they believe in the power of lies, because if you lie with sufficient conviction, the reality will conform.

The most dangerous aspect of this is thinking that the things that are so scary that they are “unimaginable”, will literally be forced out of reality if you dismiss them as a possibility. You then act as if they are not possible, and act in ways that make them inevitable. This is how we got from the point where Russia was a friend of the West and tried for decades to find some equitable accommodation, to the point where nuclear war is almost a mathematical certainty. The Americans believed in the creative power of bullshit, and they believed that if they portray Russia as small, weak and unimportant, that it will just vanish from the radar, and they acted as if it doesn’t matter. By acting as if it doesn’t matter and by encroaching ever deeper upon its fundamental interests, they motivated Russia to start seriously working on protecting itself. By presenting Russia’s self-preservation as aggression, the Americans made sure they can never make moves that will remedy the situation, and assured that everything they do will escalate the conflict.

So, it’s very easy to play with the definitions of truth and justify lying – when it’s useful, when it prevents harm, when it shapes reality into something better instead of just accepting it for what it is. However, the problem with lies is that you tend to start believing them yourself, and you enter a feedback loop, where your own lies get fed back to you as “facts” confirming your actions and ideas, and the tricky thing about reality is that it doesn’t give a fuck.

Reality doesn’t care about your creative visualizations, it doesn’t care about how many people you’ve persuaded, and reality isn’t Facebook or Instagram. If you fuck with reality, you die.

Dangers of compliance

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Brain and heart damage caused by the COVID “vaccine”:

Getting “vaccinated” or complying with the government’s mandates just to get along, fit in, not be bullied or discriminated against, is a dangerous sport. It’s not a free and safe choice.

Implications

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What does Russian suspension of START mean, in practice?

The basic assumption is that both sides are out of compliance with its provisions for quite a while now, since the inspections have been defunct for, I don’t know how long, but I would say years. Suspending it means acceptance of the new reality, which, in Russian case, probably means that all strategic nuclear submarines have a full complement of warheads (Bulava has 6-10 MIRV warheads per rocket, which means that my expectation is that they are all fully armed now, when there are no considerations of the upper limits on deployed weapons. By default, they were armed with 6 warheads, accuracy in the circle of 350m. Every Borei submarine is armed with 16 Bulava missiles, which means a (theoretical until confirmation) complement of 160 warheads per submarine, from the previous default of 96. There are 6 active Borei submarines in service, and an additional one recently launched. This means 960 nuclear warheads, realistically 1120, and that’s not counting the one remaining Typhoon submarine, Dimitry Donskoy. In addition to that, there are the old Delta IV strategic submarines, carrying Sineva rockets, circle of accuracy 250-500m. One would be tempted to dismiss those as “obsolete”, but have in mind that they are as old as the American Ohio class submarine fleet, and since they work just fine, the Americans are forced to treat them seriously and dedicate sufficient resources to tracking them. Each carries 16 missiles with 4-10 warheads each, which means that the START restrictions would have them limited to 4 warheads per missile, and the Russians can now fully arm them, to the full complement of 160 warheads per submarine, from the default of 64. Let’s say there are 6 active submarines, which means 960 warheads, from previous 384.

As for the ground-based missiles, the Yars carrier (circle of accuracy 150-200m) is armed with “3-6” warheads, but realistically it’s probably 10, and the lower number implies the START restrictions. There were more than 150 (mobile and stationary) launchers as of November 2019, with the number growing by approximately 20 per year, the total expected number being around 200. This means that the maximum armament of the deployed Yars systems is 2000 warheads, but realistically, the number of rockets is likely around 150 and the number of warheads is closer to 1200. The yield of the warhead is variable, between 100-300kT.

In addition to this, there are 60 older silo-based and 18 mobile RT-2PM2 Topol-M as of March 2020. They carry a single warhead around 1MT (circle of accuracy 200m). Topol-M is being routinely replaced with Yars carriers as they age out of service. Also, there are the old Voevoda missiles from the 1980s, that used to be manufactured in Ukraine and are considered obsolete or nearly so, and are being quickly replaced with Yars and Sarmat designs. As of January 2020, the Strategic Missile Troops had 46 R-36M2s in active service. They used to carry around 10 warheads per missile, 500-800kT per warhead, and potentially a large number of decoys.

The Sarmat rocket is basically new and improved version of Voevoda, of fully Russian design, and with greater payload, designed to carry either large single warheads, MIRV cluster of 10, or multiple (likely 16) Avangard hypersonic reentry vehicles, and many decoys. There were several delays in production but around 50 should be deployed by now, or soon enough. Their circle of accuracy is 10m. Since they are in the early phase of adoption, almost nothing is known about their number and armament, but I would expect them to routinely replace the Voevoda missiles, and the total payload of this complement is expected not to vary greatly – 46 missiles, 10 warheads each, 460 in total.

In addition to this, there are the tactical nuclear weapons – torpedoes, cruise missiles and bombs – and without START restrictions, and in light of the recent news about Russian ships being issued nuclear warheads, I would expect that every newly armed naval unit of significance is issued nuclear weapons. I would also expect nuclear-tipped cruise missiles to be available as armament for the strategic bomber fleet, and one must expect nuclear weapons to be flown routinely.

The total number of Russian strategic launchers would thus be estimated around 448 launch vehicles, most of which are MIRVed and carry a complement of 6-10 warheads – 2688 warheads at the minimum. The total number of tactical warheads that can be mounted on either the cruise missiles, hypersonic missiles, torpedoes and similar devices is much greater, but their utility is questionable since it would be expected that only a few of those would be launched before the need arises for the strategic ones.

As for the Americans, each of their bombers should be suspected of carrying a payload of nuclear-tipped cruise missiles. The same applies for their heavy drones. Each of their stealthy airplanes or heavy drones that approaches Russian borders should be suspected of attempting a clandestine decapitation strike.