Author Archives: danijel

Gold price

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With the current inflation surge, the precious metals have been acting disappointingly, despite the fact that they showed growth, because everything else grew more – food, fuel, cost of living in general. However, let me just show you this:

So, we have a situation where gold is being a “poor performer”, and the central banks are buying it at almost unprecedented rates, as if it’s a hot commodity on discount. The explanation for this apparent paradox is that the spot price of precious metals is, basically, the price of “paper” that says “gold” or “silver”, because that’s what most of the spot market consists of. This spot price is controlled by the UK and the USA, with the purpose of propping up their own paper currencies. The problem with controlling the price of gold by making it artificially lower is that the people “in the know” will buy all the physical metal you are holding, and they won’t even consider the “paper” gold. That’s what the chart is showing – the central banks are hoarding physical metal, while all the ignorant actors look at the gold price chart and think there are better deals to be had elsewhere. At some point, if things continue like this, the large buyers will leech all the physical metal from the market, and then the price will start spiking and everybody else will wake up and smell the coffee, but by then the scarcity will hit the market so hard that the price of gold will start following the pattern of Bitcoin (I mean the prices in the range of $60k per troy ounce).

 

Edit: It turned out there was an error in the chart above, and it was actually the record year:

Justifiability of aggression

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I read some comment stating that invasion of another country could never be justified (in the context of Russia and Ukraine), and decided to write down a non-exhaustive list of several scenarios that come to my mind, that follow the Augustinian principle of justified war.

1. State A is committing genocide against nationals of state B within its borders. State B wants to protect its expatriate nationals by invading state A, stopping genocide and changing the regime of the state A into some non-genocidal option.

2. State A has complete control of a vital resource (i.e. water) which it refuses to share with state B (for instance by diverting a river flow) with the understanding that the state B will be weakened and easy to conquer later, or perish on its own and be removed as competition. State B attacks state A and forces it to share the vital resource.

3. State A attacked state B with the goal of conquest and genocide, but the tide of war turned and the state B now invades state A and takes it under control in order to remove the threat. (Example: German invasion of the Soviet Union in WW2 and Soviet eventual invasion of Germany)

4. State A is a persistent threat and implacable foe to state B, performing constant hostile actions that kill its citizens, damage its infrastructure, degrade its economy and remove the feeling of safety. Having exhausted diplomatic options to resolve the situation, state B invades state A and regime-changes it.

5. State A (bordering state B) serves as a proxy for state C, who is a strategic enemy of state B, and allows dangerous weapons of mass destruction to be placed on its territory, increasing the vulnerability of state B to a strategic threat. State B threatens invasion of state A and immediate strategic retaliation against state B unless the threat is removed. If threat doesn’t work, it follows up on it. (Example: Cuban missile crisis)

6. State A is blocking trade routes over sea, land or air, or in other ways inhibiting trade, performing acts of piracy and so on, consistently harming the interests of state B and demonstrating implacable hostility. State B invades state A, changes its regime and removes the obstacle to free international trade.

Basically, all of the above examples imply self-defence, or defence of one’s own vital interests, and imply using only the minimum of force necessary to accomplish goals.

Russian invasion of Ukraine is justifiable according to principles in examples 1 and 5, and possibly 4; Ukraine was performing genocide against its Russian population, and served as a proxy for the strategic enemy who was using it as a platform for several attack vectors. The conditional classification under example 4 is justifiable by the fact that its government is an insanely criminal Nazi regime that is based on hatred against Russian people and state and is put into power and financed by Russia’s strategic enemies who are developing biological weapons there, targetting Russians, and performing international pressure against Russian attempts to diversify ways of exporting gas that wouldn’t include Ukraine, basically subverting Russian economy by direct hostile actions. They also openly stated the desire to acquire nuclear weapons. The combination of local ill-will and cooperation with strategic enemy creates a very serious threat level, but the concrete and persistent genocidal actions against the Russian population of Ukraine push the thing very strongly into the area that makes military intervention justifiable, especially since a peaceful solution was tried (the Minsk accords) and it turned out to be only a ruse with the purpose of buying time in order to create a more powerful military that could defeat Russia. It would be hard to imagine a clearer case of justifiable military intervention.

About human conceit

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Years ago, I noticed a very strange and ugly aspect of human psychology when I talked to people, especially the Americans.

They are inundated by constant ads attacking them from all sides; everybody seems to want something from them. Everybody who sells anything seems to want their money. Political parties vie for their vote. Religions are competing for their souls. It’s as if there’s a cosmic battle where angels and demons, and in fact God and Satan fight for them as a prize.

As a result, they seem to find themselves in a position similar to that of a teenage girl, who all of the sudden realises she’s the centre of male attention, and it seems that every man in the world wants her. On one side, it’s extremely intoxicating, and one can develop quite an ego, but the smarter ones among them realise that it’s not about them at all, that men would just want to use them for sex and abandon them, and so they develop a defence mechanism against all that predatory attention, and they also develop cynicism and bitterness about the whole thing. The not-so-smart are in more of a pickle, because it’s a dangerous combination to have someone without any particular qualities believe they are ultimately desirable and a centre of everybody’s attention. The very smart ones very quickly understand that they are in fact the ones with a problem, because the apparent abundance of choice only masks the fact that their choices are all bad, and they are in a position where they are dying of thirst, and everybody is offering them a drink, but none of it is water. Those very smart ones are commendable in exact proportion in which the stupid ones are contemptible.

What people don’t seem to understand is that all those who vie for their attention are the analogue of a lion, a hyena and a vulture, arguing over who is going to kill and eat them first, and in what order. It reminds me of a joke about a young mosquito’s first night out in the world; in the morning, her mom asked her how it was, and the daughter replied that it was wonderful: “All the people loved me, everywhere I went they clapped their hands in applause.”

The spiritual reality is in fact so unpleasant it is understandable why people would prefer the ego-trip of the cosmic battleground for their souls, that religions so incessantly try to sell. Satan doesn’t care about you even if he owns you; you are merely a means to an end. You know very little or nothing about God, and what little you think you know is wrong. To paraphrase Buddha’s four truths:

1. You are in very deep shit.
2. The more you stir it, the deeper you sink, and it stinks more.
3. It is possible to get out.
4. However, in order to get out, you’ll have to understand that everything you know is likely wrong, that you’ve been doing everything wrong for far longer than you can remember, that you’ll have to let go when you most want to hold on, that you’ll need to release when you most want to lash out, and so on. Since everything you know about the world is wrong, everything you’ve been doing had the result of furthering your predicament, and if you want things to improve, you’ll have to do things differently, and in a very fundamental way. You’re not an important person, picking between Jesus and Buddha and nitpicking between them because you’re so important you can’t rush your choices. No; you’re a drowning person, and having a vast sea around you doesn’t mean you have many options. You are utterly and profoundly fucked, and you need to understand absolutely everything in your life in this context, and you need to reach for and hold on to everything that can improve your position even a little bit; hold on to a piece of wood if there’s nothing better, but exchange it for a raft if it appears, and exchange the raft for a helicopter later on, if the possibility arises.

People argue about the first noble truth, whether it means that suffering exists, or that everything is suffering, or that suffering permeates human condition, but the reality is that they are too stupid to understand the simplicity of it, and it’s in fact the fourth truth that they should be contemplating, the one of counter-intuitive solutions to the problems they don’t even understand they have, and re-shaping their perspective in ways that never even crossed their minds. Your emotions are the energy-whirlpools that perpetually recycle because you re-invest before there could be a chance of release. Your desires are projections of fulfilment into a sphere that is inherently energy-starved and needs you to feed it with your soul, and will promote your desires because that’s how it gets you to give yourself to it as food. You desire, and thus give yourself to the world, by recognizing it as a source of what you want. You are frustrated in your desires, so you strike and lash out, thus giving it more importance and energy. After enough iterations, you forget what is it that you were after in the first place, but you keep struggling against all sorts of things, and striving for all sorts of others, and you think you can’t stop because all of it is so important. It’s not. Also, you are not important, and your survival is not important. Nothing you are doing is important. God is important, but what do you even know about God? Less than nothing, which is to say, no actual knowledge but lots of nonsense, which is why Buddha refused to even talk about God. Talking about God is basically useless if you’re not experiencing God at that moment, and if you are experiencing God at this moment, you will utter words of praise, but they will be a consequence and manifestation of the experience, and they won’t matter. Your thoughts and words are merely a re-hashing of your memories and experience, which means they are useless garbage if you’re not experiencing God, and if you are experiencing God, they are noise that detracts. There’s one thing that could teach people humility in very short order, and that’s to understand how God, saints and angels would perceive them. They would look like clutter, attachments, noise, chaos, weaving of low-order energy in and out of chaotic whirlpools of thought-emotion, illusions of all kinds, ignorance of everything real and important, susceptibility to all kinds of falsehoods and lies, and all of it so far from God, that almost nothing in your entire existence is real and valuable, because God is where everything real and valuable is. You are darkness, ignorance, sin and nonsense dressed up as self-importance and false purpose. To the Gods, you look and feel worse than dog shit looks and feels to you. The best you can hope for is that they will see you and cry tears of compassion for your misery, feeling the pain of your kind of wretched existence, and in seeing their pain you might get some glimpse of its cause and thus have darshan of God. To think that God loves you and fights for your soul is the epitome of conceit and ignorance. No – you would first have to develop a soul by being in God’s presence, because that’s how it’s developed, and it’s developed by surviving the immense blissful joy that is of God, by releasing the non-God from your existence so that only God can be, because nothing else is worth keeping. When you actually develop a soul that way, you will understand how stupid every idea you ever had about reality actually was. No, God is not fighting with the Devil for your soul. You are the one who should be fighting to grasp every tiny aspect of God you can reach, feel and know, and hold on to it as if your survival depends on it, because it does. Without God, you are less than shit, because unlike yourself, shit can actually be useful. It can make roses grow. Being shit would actually be an upgrade for most people, because most of them are like toxic or radioactive waste that creates a zone of death around itself. Spiritual growth is not realizing you’re valuable and everybody wants you, and then giving your super-important soul to God. No, spiritual growth is realizing you’re a barrel of toxic waste on some dump, that needs to be contained in order not to spread death and destruction, and, understanding that, strive to become shit by feeling whatever aspect of love, beauty, purity and knowledge you can touch. When you become shit, strive to be food for the roses, so that there is beauty and purity because of you, and when there is purity and beauty, understand that it is God who is doing his thing, removing the non-God things, and the more you are of God, and less you are non-God, the more you partake in beauty, bliss, knowledge, reality and all other unspeakable forms of magnificence that lie in the direction the lesser beauties and truths point to.

It’s not about you. You don’t matter. God matters.

Blaming the boomers

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I just watched a video by Wranglerstar where he blames the “boomers” and their selfish greed for the conditions in the present-day America, and I wasn’t very happy with him, so I wrote a comment which I’m reposting here, so that it wouldn’t get lost:

It has nothing to do with the “boomers”. The problem is that America attracted all the wealth and human capital from Europe that was destroyed in WW2, this human and material wealth created a burst of prosperity, which was spent, and when it was spent, you went into debt in order to continue riding that wave long after its momentum was exhausted. Not only that, but the petrodollar scheme meant that you could export your inflation to the rest of the world, because people outside America had to buy dollars with real assets in order to buy oil, and you could just print the stuff. That’s why the standard of living in America used to be so outrageously higher than anywhere else in the world. It’s not because you have such a great constitution or anything; you were just the only ones undamaged by the two consecutive world wars. Before WW1, there was no difference between you and Argentina or Chile. Now that you spent everything and went tenfold that much into debt, you’re starting to have the kind of life we in Europe had for a very long time, and of course you’re not happy about it, so you started another war in Europe in order to, again, wreck it for everybody else and hope to be the last ones left standing, and repeat the post-WW2 era that went so wonderfully for you. What you might find out is that the times where wars could not reach your shores are long gone, and the rest of the world doesn’t hate you because of your freedom, they hate you because you extracted resources and propagated wars and corruption in other countries, as can be seen in Biden/Burisma files. So, don’t talk to me about boomers, because in my country the boomers worked very hard and had nothing to show for it, and had to grow up in countries pulverized by war, suffered from malnutrition and they still managed to create the post-war Europe, and they had to compete with America – unrazed, with all the world’s gold and all the best engineers and scientists attracted from Europe. You went to the Moon with German scientists and Bretton Woods gold, while my boomer father had rickets from post-war malnutrition and worked very hard every single day translating scientific and engineering materials from and to French and Italian and had to go work as a translator on a construction site in Algeria among vipers, scorpions and heat to be able to afford the down payment for a small apartment. So, you Americans can now cry me a river and I will bathe in your tears.

Bait and switch

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Told you so; “the grid can’t handle electric cars so I guess you’ll have to do without cars in the future”. Electric car transition is in fact a way for them to take our cars away, it was never about giving us electric cars, which I figured when I observed that they are not building new nuclear power plants to energetically finance the new anticipated power expenditures from electric cars. The wind and solar power is all a fraud – it’s intermittent, dirty and weak, and the only truly good sources are nuclear, hydroelectric and geothermal. The problem with “green” advocates is that they want to transition everything to electricity “because it’s cleaner” and then they want to ban most sources of electricity, except the “feel good” stuff that actually creates availability and quality issues, not to mention toxic waste, because solar and wind don’t produce electricity from sun and wind, they produce electricity from environmentally toxic hardware that eventually has to be disposed somewhere.

Basically, it’s not about “green” anything, it’s about destroying the underlying assumptions of a technological civilization, which would result in more dead than a nuclear war, and if you think the WEF people don’t know that, you have a surprise coming. The entire thing looks like somebody’s long-term depopulation project, considering how they seem to be undermining the moral and intellectual basis of society, energy, agriculture, manufacturing and finances all at the same time. It’s a full-spectrum degradation. Russia is the only major country that has a sustainable economic structure at the moment, which was actually helped by the sanctions, which is an incredible irony; they have independent energetics, petrochemical industry that produces fertilizers, agriculture, heavy industry capable of producing machinery, they have all the raw materials they would ever need, they have educated people to work on solving actual problems, and they have the morality and worldview to back a healthy society. Basically, the only places where Russia needs to improve things is semiconductor lithography in the single-digit nanometer scale and, possibly, some other specialized areas such as optics, which is more-less trivial and seems to be in the process; what’s actually hard to do is educate scientists and create a morally and intellectually healthy society with a free market economy that incentivizes innovation and progress; technology follows easily.