There are several issues I want to bring up.

Scott Ritter suddenly changed his narrative from “Ukraine is losing the war and no amount of help from the West can change that” to “Ukraine needs to hold on until the NATO trains their replacement army which is in the process right now, they just need to hold on until help arrives”. This honestly sounds like Hitler’s propaganda in 1945 – we need to hold on until the miracle weapons arrive and then we’ll revert all our losses and achieve final victory. Yeah right. Basically, I agree with Gonzalo Lira that the guy sounds as if someone gave him an offer he couldn’t refuse and he traded his reputation for mainstream acceptance. Someone from the CIA probably approached him and gave him a “are you with us or against us” offer. Basically, I would treat him as an outright CIA asset at this point.

As for the argument itself, it exists only within the Western disinformation thoughtspace; the idea that the purpose of Ukrainians is to keep dying, spending old Western weapons and laundering American freshly printed money in order to strategically weaken Russia is American idea and nobody with an independent thought in their head thinks that is a good plan, especially since the time-curve is that Russia is getting stronger and everybody else is about to have a crashing economy, mass starvation, fuel shortages and popular uprisings. Basically, it’s the Russians who have to keep the fire going and the West is going to end up in the post-Soviet 1990s. The most viable part of the Ukrainian army is being mopped up as we speak and there won’t be any of it left in the following weeks. After that, the Russians will deal with Kharkov and Odessa, probably offering them terms for surrender, because it would be either that or repeat Mariupol. What I actually expect to happen is an American intervention that would attempt to broaden the conflict significantly in order to complicate things for the Russians.

Another complication for the Russians is the fact that it might actually be immoral for them to perform tactical withdrawals from the territory they hold, because the Ukrops have shown a propensity for “cleaning up the traitors” at such areas, as shown in Bucha; basically, they execute all the civilians who in any way “collaborated with the enemy”.

Anything the Russians hold, they must hold perpetually in order to protect the populace from the Ukrainian fascists. This is not easily reconcilable with the requirement of having the least possible number of troops deployed. Also, they might soon have tens of thousands of prisoners of war, and those will be the real hardened Nazis like the ones from Mariupol, not the common soldiers whom they might interrogate and let go. It’s a serious logistical problem since they are unlikely to kill them outright, and they can’t really let them go either.

That insane thing about the American abortion law, and the instant pro-abortion protests everywhere looks very much like a psy-op, and a very weird one, because it looks as if some AI running simulations recommended introducing additional intra-societal conflict in order to keep the populace in a certain psychological state it deems desirable. The entire thing is very weird and looks very much as if someone were tweaking variables. Also, the story about the next virus out there, the monkey pox, looks actually counterproductive. I’m having a weirdness overload from some of the things I’m finding in Western press, and it goes further than just common war propaganda; it looks artificial, synthetic, like something that uses principles devised by human psychologists but turned into society-control widgets tweaked by computers. Basically, it looks like the smart humans created a complex AI system and filled it with data, the system is saying what needs to be tweaked, and then the orders are given to the moronic humans who work in the politics, NGOs and the press to create artificial issues or aggravate existing but unsolved ones. This might actually be very close to the root of the problem.

The financial system is in a state of flux preceding a major crash and is conforming to the predictions postulated by the “Dollar milkshake theory“. The cryptocurrencies showed that they are only an extension of the stock market’s high-volatility, high-risk asset pool and not a new financial system, they are as restrictive as the fiat currencies and have by all standards failed. The precious metals are behaving more-less according to expectations for the rising-dollar phase of the crash, and according to my feeling for these things, the last train for getting out of the financial bubble was the end of 2021; now it’s already late in the game because if you were in the stocks and crypto, you already suffered huge losses, and if you were in fiat currency, the metals are now more expensive but still a good idea to get in while they are still available in retail, which might not last long; also, in the later phases of the Dollar collapse when everybody attempts to get into gold, the prices will skyrocket in the Bitcoin-like manner, and availability will be severely curtailed, because the governments will suck up all the 400oz bars in attempts to shore up their currencies, which will make it hard for retail product manufacturers to make coins and smaller bars. If you have confidence in “cloud gold”, basically “gold in someone else’s safe”, you haven’t been paying attention to what’s been happening to those who held gold “in the cloud”. America and the UK will outright confiscate other countries’ gold, and countries will outright confiscate private citizens’ gold with some lame excuse.

So, the US Dollar will be the last of the Western currencies to go down the drain, but I would recommend against going into the Dollar to save yourself, despite the fact that it might look very profitable in the short term, because it might be hard/impossible to get out of it, and you’ll end up with lots of numbers on the screen, unless you’re incredibly lucky and play it exceedingly well, and ride the wave of the “Dollar milkshake” by first going from other fiat currencies to the Dollar, exploit the growth of Dollar, and then manage to get out of it and into physical assets while they are relatively undervalued. However, I think it might not introduce benefits compared to what you would obtain by going straight into physical assets immediately, but it does contain significant additional risks, such as timing the things wrongly and being unable to get out, or only being able to purchase gold at exorbitant prices and incurring huge losses. I stand by my old recommendation of keeping only as much fiat currency as you need for monthly liquidity, and putting everything else into precious metals, and staging it in both physical and “cloud” storage so that you retain the flexibility of remotely allocated gold/silver for liquidity purposes.

I’ve been thinking about something for the last few days: it’s incredible how the people in the West make counterproductive moves because they start from bad premises, and when the evidence starts showing their errors, they stubbornly insist on their original course, and use their own lies and fallacies as inputs “proving” how they are right, and dismiss facts and evidence as “enemy propaganda”, and all the “official authorities” spew ideological nonsense that is completely out of touch with any kind of reality perceivable “on the ground”. I’ve seen that mentality before, in the Soviet Union. They fought reality with ideology, and when ideology produced disasters, they attributed that to “sabotage” by “foreign agents” and “counter-revoutionary forces”, because their ideology was unquestionable, it was axiomatically assumed so the problem must, obviously, lie elsewhere. Interestingly, I also saw this mentality in various religious cults, where it’s obvious to the impartial observer that their problems follow from faulty ideology that doesn’t interpret facts and reality properly, and then they have problems which they don’t acknowledge and handle properly, and instead of that they double down on their ideology which of course is correct and is the answer to all of world’s problems, which in turn increases their problem until everything falls apart.

Basically, the West is a cult, and it lives in a similar kind of a false narrative that we find ridiculous in North Korea, but are completely oblivious to the one we live in, because we don’t know the actual facts, and instead we work with the false facts created by the cult we live in.

I will need to illustrate this by concrete examples. You see, people underestimate how much progress was actually made during the Russian Empire; they think it was a feudalist backwater, and then the communists came and industrialized it all, but unfortunately this process had a high cost in human lives, yada yada. That’s not how it was, at least not during the late imperial era. The joke is, even I believed the official Stalinist narrative, until I found out several facts:

• The Trans-Siberian Railroad was envisioned, designed and completed during the Russian Empire; the construction started in 1891 simultaneously from Moscow and Vladivostok, and it was completed in 1901, with an additional route to avoid Manchuria completed in 1916. I thought it was all done during the Soviet times, which was completely wrong.
• The agrarian reform from the serfdom model to the capitalist enterpreneurial model was implemented in the imperial times, where the serfs were liberated and were given land, and the more successful ones (later known as the kulaks) bought land from and employed the less successful ones as labor. This increased the effectiveness of agricultural production greatly, but also introduced great differerences in wealth between people working in agriculture, which the communists exploited to forment envy and hatred of the successful ones. The communists actually re-introduced the serfdom model, disowning all the peasants (“dekulakization“) and converting them from the modern and successful capitalist model to a state-feudalism “Kolhoz/Sovhoz” model, which resulted in mass starvation later known as “holodomor”.
• One of the main causes of the first world war was the worry within the Prussian elites that the imperial Russia is industrializing at such a magnificent pace, that it will overrun Europe within a century if they are not stopped. Obiviously, ther had to be great progress for such a concern to arise.
• Rocket and aircraft engineering, as well as other magnificant feats of science and technology started in the imperial era, and were merely grudgingly adopted in the Soviet era, if not outright suppressed by purges and Stalin’s lunacy. For instance, Sikorsky had to emigrate to America in order to continue his work on helicopters, and Korolev was imprisoned in a gulag because his attempts to work on rocketry were deemed “sabotage of military technology”. The foundations of rocket technology later developed in the Soviet Union were made during the imperial era by Tsiolkovsky. All the great Russian literary and music work were done during the imperial era. Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Musorgsky, Dostoievsky, Tolstoy and many others, all from the imperial era. Also, Mikhail Dobrovolsky devised the three-phase alternating current system independently from Tesla, and the Russians actually had the world’s first alternating current power plant, in 1891.

I never knew any of this until I did independent digging; this information is obviously suppressed by the mass-indoctrination and disinformation industry also known as “education” and “information” in the West. Because of this, Russia is seen as a primitive backwater, and its undeniable achievements as accidents and glitches. In reality, they are only peaks on a huge mountain range of achievement that is intentionally underestimated in the West. The socialists in the West tried to indoctrinate us into believing that Russia was a primitive feudalist shithole and then Lenin brought the light of communism and in a few decades Russia became a nuclear superpower with human spaceflight and other wonders. In reality, the communist revolution stunted Russian development by at least half a century if not more. If there were no communism in Russia, and no disasters of two world wars and a fratricidal civil war in between, and imperial Russia had the chance of progressing at its own pace linearly, it would have colonies on Mars and the moons of Jupiter by now. This is a shocking statement, I know, but imagine the shock and disbelief the Germans experienced during the WW2 when they had to deal with the fact that the Russian tanks were technologically superior to their own. Apparently, they consumed their own propaganda thinking it was fact, and when reality reasserted itself the results were unpleasant.

We are dealing with something similar now. You see, I’m very tired of listening to Western analysts explaining how Russian GDP is the size of Italy and how America spends 10x more on weapons and so is 10x stronger. If something here sounds strange and contrary to experience, then congratulations, your brain is working. You see, those numbers are the result of Western economic pressure against Russia, which prevented it from being a debt-based economy, unlike literally every single country in the West, and most countries in the world, with the notable exception of China. Being debt-based functions like this: the American-controlled credit rating assessment firms assign a rating to a country’s bonds. If the rating is good, a country can go into debt cheaply, and finance its industry and spending cheaply. If the rating is poor, the opposite happens – debt is expensive, and going into debt is avoided since it’s almost impossible to pay it at huge interest. This forces most countries to be stunted in their development, because they can’t finance growth easily, and have to actually earn money in order to invest it, which takes time. However, since they have almost no debt, they are completely resistent to credit rating manipulations and pressures, which the Americans use to control their vassals – if you’re a bad boy, your credit rating gets degraded and your country can no longer refinance its debt to go into more debt, which collapses your debt-addicted economy. Be a good boy, and your credit rating stays “investment grade”, and you can continue to keep your Ponzi scheme economy afloat. The fact that Russia had to finance its economic growth by selling commodities, such as oil, gas, metal and food, made it essentially the only commodity-based economy in the world. Translated, an economy running a gold standard for its currency is commodity-based, because gold is a commodity. A petrodollar is theoretically a commodity-based currency because you need the dollar to buy oil, but in reality it’s backed by military force and blackmail – start selling oil for something that’s not dollar, end up like Saddam or Gaddafi. Continue selling oil only for dollars and American military will continue “protecting” your country. After all, it would be a shame if something happened to it.

So, basically, what this means is that there are only two commodity-backed currencies in the world, namely the US Dollar and the Russian Ruble, and only two commodity-backed economies in the world, namely Russia and China. The weakness of the Russian economy is its reliance on foreign exchange with fiat currencies, which used to make Ruble weak due to forex manipulations by America, and the weakness of Chinese economy is its reliance on export. The sanctions imposed against Russia essentially removed its main weaknesses, the forex market and foreign credit, leaving it completely commodity-based and with no vulnerabilities, which is why it has recently been the best performing currency in the world.

Of course, you won’t hear this interpretation in the Western press, because you live in a cult, and this interpretation would make you question “facts”. One of those “facts” is that Russia is economically weak, and the slightest whiff of sanctions will make it collapse, and the West is economically strong and can sanction and bully other nations. It’s actually the other way around, because the entirety of all Western economies is based on the credit-rating dependent Ponzi scheme, which created enormous financial bubbles that show good GDP numbers, but when you calculate the actual purchasing power, and when you factor in what would happen if a country couldn’t refinance its Ponzi economy, you would get a very disturbing reality, which is starting to become visible now: the West is actually completely dependent on buying commodities cheaply, at suppressed prices compared to the prices of “intellectual property” and other bullshitful constructions that form the inflated prices of their retail products, and they are addicted to selling those bullshitful products at inflated prices back to the exporters of commodities, and that’s how they keep financing their Ponzi economies that are geared to constantly work in a bubble. What the sanctions did was compromise access to cheap commodities, and prohibit their own export of inflated bullshit, thus compromising their own ability to refinance their internal Ponzi scheme, bringing their entire socioeconomic system to the brink of collapse, with very poor short-term prognosis.

When you ignore the Western fake numbers, you are left with the following realities:

• Everybody needs energy, and Russia is a major exporter of energy, meaning it has super cheap energy to power its own economy, with enough to spare to power its currency. This includes electricity, nuclear fuel and fossil fuels.
• Everybody needs food, and food production is dependent on two things: the Haber-Bosch method of producing fertilizers, and diesel fuel for agricultural machinery. Russia is a major producer of both natural gas used for producing fertilizers, petroleum products for powering heavy machinery, and agricultural products.
• In order to have a modern society you need to have industry capable of producing technological artifacts, such as aircrafts, automobiles, ships, tanks and so on. Russia produces basically everything, from tractors to human spaceflight, and what it doesn’t produce currently, such as semiconductor foundries, it is in the process of building. As far as the industrial and technological basis, Russia is probably the closest to total autarky, of all the countries in the world.
• Russia has almost no debt. Attempts to collapse its economy by making debt refinancing expensive or inaccessible would necessarily fail because Russia has been under American financial pressure for so long, it had to find ways to finance itself that are alternative to the debt bubble used to finance Western economies. However, all the Western economies are extremely vulnerable to this type of a threat, which is how America keeps them all in check.
• The major weakness of Russia prior to the sanctions was its love affair with the West. The West made sure to make Russians realize how much the West hates and despises tem, turning the pro-Western Russians into patriots.
• As a result of sanctioning Russia, the Western countries now have expensive and insufficient energy, shortages on the domestic market, price hikes on the domestic markets, reduction of purchasing power on the domestic market, and they already inflated their currency in response to the 2008 economic crisis. Also, they now have reduced access to foreign markets for their exports. Economic prognosis for the West is dire in the short term.
• Euro, Yen and other currencies are falling compared to the US Dollar. The US Dollar is falling compared to the Russian Ruble.
• Russian weapons aren’t 10x cheaper than the US equivalents because they are worse. They are actually better. The reason why they are cheaper is because the Russian weapons industry is orders of magnitude more efficient, because the American model is based on state corruption. The Russians make weapons in order to defend their country, the Americans make their weapons in order to line the pockets of the weapons industry oligarchs. The Russian model requires weapons to be as good as possible and as cheap for the state as possible. The American model requires weapons to be as expensive as possible in order to transfer money from the tax payers to the oligarchs, and quality doesn’t matter.

As for Russia, yeah, you let them know how much you hate them and think they are subhuman. You pissed them off and now they are urging Putin to nuke you, and he’s actually holding them all back. The only thing the sanctions did is clear their domestic market of imported overpriced garbage which used to finance your economic bubbles, so they are now forced to buy cheap, superior domestically produced goods. I heard a guy who lives in America, but visits Russia occasionally, say that he bought shoes in Russia and they were the best shoes he ever had. That tells you something about the terrible fate the Russians are destined to without your Gucci and Prada bullshit. They will buy better shoes for less money, eat better food for less money, fill their cars up for less money, and they will colonize Moon and Mars together with China while you learn how to eat trash out of dumpsters, thinking you’re sticking it to Putin.

What’s the actual, objective magnitude of Russian economy? This is very hard to assess, because it’s relative to circumstances and pressures. For instance, a sudden currency/credit collapse would produce a world where Russia would be the absolute No1 superpower, with China dependent on symbiosis with Russia to survive, and America and EU reduced to post-apocalyptic dumpster-fire shitholes. This is because so far Russia has been sailing against the wind, against the current and with enemies boring holes in the ship, and the West has been producing hot air to power its baloon economy. The Russian economy is closest to the physical reality, in the sense that it’s based on power plants, steel foundries, hydrocarbons, nuclear plants, and large-scale agriculture, and the West is increasingly based on the “service economy” and “intellectual property”, which are very fragile and ungrounded entities very sensitive to needles poking holes in baloons.

So, it doesn’t matter how big your baloon economy currently seems to be, and how small comparatively someone’s real economy is, if it only takes one needle to reduce your baloon to something that drops you from great height onto very hard rocks.