Monthly Archives: October 2023

Guesswork

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My analysis is based on the following assumptions:

– Israel uses the USA to protect itself, however this has limits and is most effective if Israel is in an actual and acute danger. The limits of this were shown when Netanyahu was trying to convince the Americans that Iran is “this close” to having atomic weapons, and everybody was “naah, not convinced, but nice try Bibi, have a nice day now”.

– In case America disappeared from the world scene (for instance, due to financial collapse that would make it unable to project military power for decades) Israel would find itself in immediate danger of being destroyed by the neighbouring Arab countries and Iran.

– Israel’s approach to this problem includes efforts to divide Iran from the Arab countries, and Arab countries among themselves, in order to prevent the situation where all their enemies present a united front. Also, keeping the world in perpetual dependence of the American financial system makes the situation where any oil-producing country risks American sanctions a very good weapon of deterrence.

– Recently, however, the entire fiat currency system has been showing signs that usually indicate imminent collapse, due to American abuse of the system to sanction rival powers under every silly excuse. Also, the fact that America has been exporting its own inflation and financing their prosperity by exporting misery to the rest of the world has not been unnoticed, and the BRICS countries are very close to completely leaving the dollar-based financial system and migrating to something of their own design.

– Furthermore, China and Russia managed to broker peace in Yemen and peace between Iran and Saudi Arabia, mostly because Saudi Arabia has been pressured, blackmailed and abused by America one too many times and decided to seek refuge in the BRICS system, along with Iran, and they decided that they both have more issues with America than with each other. This is a very dangerous thing for Israel.

– Israel is having a problem with their own younger generations, who don’t understand the precarious position their country is in.

– Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, is accused of corruption and if he leaves office, he is likely to go straight to jail. He is therefore highly motivated, for personal reasons, to cook up a serious war that would make it possible for him to avoid unpleasant personal outcomes. It just happens that the international situation of Israel is as dire as his own, and their high political, intelligence and military circles must be aware of this, and willing to cooperate with him in order to cook up a situation that will pre-empt the natural and highly probable outcome for Israel in case no aggressive action is taken.

– America needs a precedent where nuclear weapons are used in war, but they don’t want to do it first; they just want a green light for their own use, either in response or according to a precedent. So far, Russia proved resistant to being goaded into first use, which is seen by the Americans as a nuisance and an aggravation.

So, what does Israel want? They want America to destroy the enemy states that surround them, most importantly Iran, because everything else is either already degraded, or is merely a gas station masquerading as a country (talking about Saudi Arabia and the Emirates here) without any industrial capacity. Also, they want all of their potential enemies degraded to the point of not being able to threaten Israel. They are not threatened by goat herders with AK47s.

The most straightforward way to achieve those goals is to wait for Iran to organize one of those inevitable attacks they are always planning, via their sock-puppets Hamas and Hezbollah. This attack must be allowed to succeed, at least to the point where it creates a legitimate threat, but not to the point where the actual existence of the state is at risk. Israel will then be seen as justified in taking revenge upon the perpetrators, but as this revenge becomes severe enough, Iran will act to protect its assets in the region, and Israel will declare war upon it. America will become involved, of course, but will try to no get into an open war with Iran; they just want to protect Israel from unmanageable consequences. As situation in Israel gets worse, they will nuke Iran, and possibly also the Hezbollah central in Lebanon. America will use its international influence to present this as legitimate self-defence, and in order for this to look credible, it would be helpful if Iran sunk an American aircraft carrier, hopefully the new one that’s been plagued with issues and is a failure anyway. Once the precedent of using nuclear weapons “for defensive purposes” has been established, further nuclear escalation will ensue.

I can’t quantitatively assess probability of this course of action at this moment, but I believe it is not less than 30% or more than 70%. This means there’s a good chance for a more moderate outcome, but still a quite high likelihood of things getting really bad really quickly. My personal feeling says this is very serious and not business as usual.

Probability of oil prices going up is almost 100%.

Probability of a refugee crisis in Europe is over 90%.

Probability of nuclear weapons being used in the following year is over 60%.

Probability of a great economic collapse of the West in the following year is 50%, almost 100% in 5 years.

Probability of the West losing the ability to control the price of gold is very similar to the probability of the great economic collapse of the West.

Probability of a great supply-side collapse in Europe in the following year is over 50%.

My recommendations remain unchanged from before, because the specific events might be unexpected, but the entire situation was predictable.

About conspiracies

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I keep hearing people talking about conspiracies, and they are obviously something they are fond of – they give the powerless the illusion of having power, in a sense of at least understanding what’s going on in the world. However, since their reasoning power and understanding of the world are usually poor, the “conspiracies” they come up with are invariably false. No, the Earth is not flat, and people really did land on the Moon, and two planes did indeed crash into the WTC. However, there are some conspiracies that turn out to be true – covid is an American bioweapon, for instance. America blew up the Nord Stream pipeline. Some “conspiracy theories” are branded as such probably only because the official history is counterfeit for political reasons.

However, I think people have a fundamentally mistaken view of conspiracies. They think the conspirators must be some powerful elites, the invisible secret societies that pull the strings of history, and it’s either the Illuminati, or the Templars, or the Freemasons, or the Jews. They think the conspirators manipulate the events to their benefit, and to the detriment of others. I think this view is fundamentally mistaken.

Yes, there are conspiracies and conspirators. They do make plans and execute them. They frequently manage to do great harm and change the course of history. However, even when their plans are successful, I don’t think they fundamentally change the conspirators’ strategic position.

I will cite two examples – the assassination of Julius Caesar and Lenin’s revolutionary movement. The conspirators against Caesar wanted to stop Caesar from concentrating power in his person. They succeeded and Caesar was killed. The civil war ensued, and ended when Octavian, the ultimate winner, proclaimed himself emperor and concentrated all the power of the state in his person. Caesar was killed, lots of other people were killed, and nothing strategically changed for the Roman state, because concentration of power in the Emperor was actually the logical solution for the problem of the state’s fragmentation of power at that point, which Marius, Sulla, Caesar and ultimately Octavian merely had taken advantage of and solved.

Lenin’s success in spreading the communist propaganda in the Russian empire was the result of a conspiracy of the German political leadership to finance Lenin, whom they saw as a disruptive element that would destabilise Russia and make it exit the war. They gave him tens of millions of marks, which was sufficient to finance the huge and ultimately successful propaganda effort. The conspiracy was successful, and Russia surrendered and exited the war, had a terrible internecine civil war, and its historic progress was degraded. However, none of this helped Germany – it still lost the war, had a terrible period of poverty that caused the meteoric rise of Hitler, which caused the second world war and Germany’s ultimate destruction by the hand of those very Russian communists they helped create.

Basically, what we see are two examples of conspiracies that are a tactical success and a strategic failure – they accomplished the immediate goal, but failed to achieve the actual goal.

What does this tell us? First of all, it tells us that people are mistaken in their view that great historic trends can be changed by influencing one thing – for instance, if you killed Hitler in time, there would be no WW2. This is the mistake the Caesar’s assassins made, thinking their problem was Caesar, and all they did was get themselves eliminated, get a lot of people killed, and promote Octavian to Caesar. If you killed Hitler, the problems that made him rise to power would make someone else rise to power, and that one might not have had Hitler’s weaknesses, making the problem potentially worse. What we see is that conspirators are often successful, but short-sighted, and with a flawed understanding of the issues at hand. They are not some all-powerful, all-knowing cabal ruling mankind from the shadows; they are just men with flawed understanding, who use their power to succeed tactically, get many people killed and often cause terrible suffering for many more, and still fail to accomplish their actual goal.

An example of this are the Jews, with their Zionist efforts. Every single move they made seems to have been successful – get the state of Israel, move there, protect it using the power of America, make it modern and powerful. However, strategically they painted themselves into a corner. They have the worst piece of real estate in the Middle East, which is mostly desert and doesn’t even have oil. They don’t have the majority there because they couldn’t get rid of the Arabs, who hate them and perpetually conspire to destroy them. Their international protection is America, whose power is waning. Essentially, they managed to all move to a single place and make their collective destruction more likely, while still failing to accomplish a Jewish-religious state populated only by Jews, that would be safe for them and allow them to practice their religion and maintain their society, and not assimilate.

Sure, we must be mindful of conspiracies, as history teaches us that they exist, and can produce great harm. However, history also teaches us that conspirators don’t really benefit from their actions, and often succeed tactically only to be doomed strategically.

The ultimate lesson is that if you don’t know what you’re doing, being able to actually do it successfully can be more of a curse than a blessing.

New developments

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Today the Palestinians performed a very well planned and executed attack on Israel, so successfully that I have to suspect Iran to have been behind it, and the most incredible thing is that Mossad didn’t sound a warning ahead of it, at all. Unlike the previous Palestinian attacks, which were purely terrorist exercises, this one actually looks threatening, and is at least revenge for general Soleimani and all those sabotages of the Iranian nuclear programme in the past years, and things might get even more serious in the following days. 

The most important thing is that both Israel and their allies depleted their heavy artillery stockpiles in their misguided attempt at weakening Russia and helping Ukraine, and they might have critically weakened their ability to defend themselves against this, and nobody will be there to help them, because all of their allies are in the same pickle. 

As for Ukraine, judging by the changing tone of the Western press, the public in the West is being prepared for either the inevitable Ukrainian defeat, or for the next round of extreme NATO escalation. However, there have been clear signals sent from Russia and Belarus that providing Ukraine with long-range missiles that can target the interior of Russia will have a nuclear response.

ps.:

I’ve been thinking about the most likely explanation for this.

Mossad seems to have failed. However, this is very unlikely, since lots of things must have been in motion on the Palestinian side, lots of weapons were imported, lots of communications must have been going on. Then I thought, what if Netanyahu told them to sit on the information, after he’d been informed? What if he deliberately allowed it to happen, so that all this chaos would erupt, and he’d go into Gaza, kill everybody and be the saviour of Israel? Possible, but what would have been his motivation, considering the cost to Israel, in lives, equipment and prestige?

Then I thought – hmm, he’s been having a serious investigation/trial against him over there, for bribery, fraud and what not, and a trial is still ongoing. He must think that if he leaves office, he’s going straight to jail… unless he does something that will make him so popular, that his political opponents will prefer to drop charges against him. Or he just keeps riding the emergency powers forever.

I don’t know whether this is true, but it certainly makes more sense than Mossad not seeing this thing while it was still in the planning stage.

Implications

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I find it amazing how people can have the strangest opinions, without stopping to check what this says about the universe they live in and the way it functions.

I’ll have to explain this; for instance, in Star Wars, you have physics of the Universe that makes sense – there is Force, the living beings have a certain number of cellular organelles called “midichlorians”, which are something akin to mitochondria or chloroplasts in our universe, and they essentially connect your living tissues to the Force, and if their count is significant enough, you become “Force sensitive”, and if a Force sensitive person receives proper training, they can develop abilities to use the Force for things such as telekinesis, telepathy or whatever. It all makes sense, the way plants being able to convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into sugar makes sense. However, X-men don’t make sense. The underlying premise is that you have mutants with special abilities. I have no problem with that if “special abilities” are enhanced hearing, ability to perceive more colours or even the ability to hear radio. That is all possible without changing anything with the universe. However, when you have a mutant who can stop time, use extreme telekinesis or read minds, this is a “stop right there moment”. Here you need a universe with different laws of physics that make this possible, you can’t just have a mutation that introduces midichlorians in a universe without the Force, and expect telekinesis to be possible. Yes, you can develop cellular organelles or tissues that transduce radio waves into electricity and feed it into the brain, giving you a sense that “hears” radio. It’s not all that different from the way eyesight works. However, to be able to read minds or perform strong telekinesis, there must be an underlying physics that makes it possible. If something works, the question you need to ask is what underlying conditions need to be met in order for this to work, and what does this say about the universe we live in.

Let’s return to my initial conundrum. I had people making claims such as “if someone doesn’t have money, it means he can’t be of God”, the assumption being that God is the ruler of this and every other world, and nothing happens without His sanction – basically, God will provide for His own people, and they will never have to worry about money. On the other hand, those same people will make negative claims about very rich people, assuming that money is the thing of the Devil, and all the rich people must have sold their souls in order to become that rich.

So, which is it? They apparently never stopped to think that the first claim contradicts religious teachings; Jesus was born in a barn and Krishna was born in a dungeon, so it’s not like there’s actual evidence for the claim that those of God will be provided for and safe in this world. If anything, evidence for the contrary can be found. However, I’ve seen same people have the expectation that if you have money, you must be spiritually fallen, and if you don’t have money, you can’t be on good terms with God, not stopping to think that you can’t have it both ways. There are three basic options – either God micro-manages the world, Satan micro-manages the world, or nobody micro-manages the world and it runs according to its own independent laws, which makes exceptions from those laws “miracles”. Also, the corollary of God being able to provide for His people is that He is able to control everything in this world, which makes every bad thing that happens in this world His fault, which gives you a God that is either malevolent or indifferent. If Satan is able to control everything in this world, why aren’t things much, much worse for good people? Why do evil people such as Hitler experience frustration and failure in their plans? The third option, where neither God nor Satan have complete control or influence here, but the world functions according to its own independent laws, and either side is able to occasionally “tip the scales” their way according to some complex ruleset seems far more likely. For instance, Satan can tempt you and make your life very difficult, but he can’t outright kill you. God can’t outright solve all your problems, but He can inspire you – but you have to believe it and accept guidance. Also, miracles do exist, but the defining characteristic of a miracle is that it happens exceptionally, and not regularly. If something happens regularly or predictably, it’s called the law of nature. Miracles, where exceptionally good and unlikely things happen to people who pray to God, do happen. However, so do the anti-miracles, where exceptionally bad and unlikely things happen to people who pray to God. The pattern according to which this happens isn’t obvious, but for some reason people act as if it is – of course God’s people should be rich, famous, healthy and live forever, because take the example of Jesus, who was born in a barn, was always poor, had to escape lynching mobs and was eventually betrayed and crucified; oh wait…

Most of this nonsense is caused by poor religious education people received in childhood, which is why I didn’t allow my kids to attend catholic “Sunday school”. This proved to be an excellent call when other children, who did attend, were mocking my kids saying that if they didn’t pray to Jesus they will have bad grades and their mom will die. Apparently, that’s how it works according to the religious teachings those kids received – you pray to Jesus to get good grades and your mommy doesn’t die. What did I say to my kids in response to that? “This is pure nonsense. God is the highest reality and the highest good, and you pray to God by trying to understand what is real, adhering to the highest truth you can know, and always choosing the greatest good you can see in everything you do, and prayer is good if it focuses you in those efforts. However, if you want to get good grades, you better study, because prayer won’t help there. As for your mom dying, let’s put it this way: if God didn’t strike that idiot Sunday school teacher with lightning for teaching children this stupid nonsense, it is safe to assume things don’t really work that way. God is not a vending machine where you insert a prayer-coin and get a wish, God is the greatest of all goals and the function of prayer is to align your life with this goal in order to be with Him in both this life and the one after. That teacher is an idiot and that’s why I didn’t allow you to listen to that nonsense, because it would teach you such idiotic things about God that you would end up being atheists. God is the safety line you hold on to in order not to go crazy in this world which is full of all kinds of evil and ignorance, in order to get to the other side whole, undamaged and hopefully improved by the experience.”

Yes, this is actually a true example of the kind of speeches my kids could hear from me when they were 7. 🙂