Author Archives: danijel

About money and sanctions

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Let me explain why monetary sanctions are a circular firing squad, ie. a form of suicide.

First we need to understand what fiat currency is and how it works, and in order to understand that, we first need to see what money is and how it works. Money is by definition a universally acceptable commodity. This means that, if ancient Egyptians wanted to trade with the ancient Babylonians, they had to agree on what is acceptable payment, and they had to agree on some form of measurement of value. Practicality dictated simplicity, so money couldn’t be some complicated basket of commodities. It had to be one metal, so that values of other commodities could be easily calculated, which was necessary for conducting trade. If you wanted to trade cows for wheat, you needed to know how much a cow is worth and how much a measure of wheat is worth. Measuring value of cows in wheat, only to later try to calculate value of cows in wood or copper, was impractical. When multiple metals were used as money (for instance gold, silver and copper) this already complicated things, but usually a fixed exchange rate was maintained for long periods of time, and things usually worked.

Conducting international trade doesn’t necessarily mean that actual gold ever changed hands. Gold was an instrument of debt clearing – a way of keeping score. You agreed to trade cows for wood planks, and usually this meant that goods of identical value were both imported and exported, which means you bartered cows for planks, and gold was used only for calculating how much wood you can get for a cow. Only if you had a trade deficit did gold actually change hands, but since countries didn’t like parting with their gold, and it was obvious that it can’t be kept up indefinitely, trade deficits were avoided. What gold was actually used for, was paying tribute to foreign powers; basically, it was a way of avoiding war.

The concept of “sanctions” by not allowing someone to trade with you is not something that makes much historical sense; basically, you didn’t trade with someone if you were at war. If you were at peace, trade was desirable, but not waging war while at the same time prohibiting commerce, that would be seen as inherently irrational. Also, the concept of not accepting someone’s money as payment, or prohibiting others from using your money as payment, that would be seen as silly, since any amount of foreign gold would just be melted and forged into your own coinage, whereby all “foreignness” would be erased from it.

Now let’s introduce paper money. Paper money started as a bank note promising to pay a certain sum of real money (gold or silver) to the bearer on demand. Since the bank notes were seen as completely reliable, people started to conduct mutual trade in those, not even bothering to exchange them for gold coins, which were cumbersome at bigger quantities. Then the states and central banks seized monopoly on issuing bank notes, which increased reliability of money in circulation against bankruptcy of the issuer; basically, if a bank that issued your banknotes went bankrupt, your paper money was suddenly worthless because its value was based on the ability to exchange it for gold. With state-issued currency, the things were simplified; the state issued paper currency guaranteed by the gold in its treasury. Also, since paper currency was merely a pointer to value, and not value in itself, second order pointers, such as orders to transfer money from one person to another became popular. A form of such an order is a cheque. Another form is a telegram between banks, through authorized channels, authorizing payment from one account to another. With popularity of such “wire transfers” of money (which is a term that is still used for SWIFT, SEPA and similar transfer orders), the banks no longer had to physically transfer money, either in form of gold or its first-order pointers, the banknotes. The banks no longer had to store physical money; they just had an account with the central bank, and account with other banks, so that they could perform inter-bank transfers for their clients. The concept of “correspondent bank” was formed; that’s a bank in which both bank A and bank B have accounts, and so when the bank A wants to transfer money to bank B, in which it doesn’t have an account, the money is transferred to the bank B’s account in bank C, where bank A also has an account. As a result, there isn’t actually any physical money in any of the accounts, just information stating how much money is owed to whom. In case where someone demands banknotes, they are created on demand by the central bank, and those banknotes replace some of the numbers in the computer. When the physical banknotes are used to repay a commercial bank’s debt to the central bank, the banknotes are withdrawn from circulation, because, let’s remember, they are a promise by the central bank to pay a certain amount. When they are back in possession of the central bank, it means they have been redeemed.

This entire system was based on two premises:

  • the central bank will redeem all issued banknotes in gold (or silver) on demand; always, without exceptions and preconditions;

  • all debts within the banking system will be honored; always, without exceptions and preconditions.

What does that mean, in practice? The countries constantly conduct commerce. If a country can say “I don’t like you, so I won’t honor my financial obligations to you”, it basically makes all international commerce impossible, because countries simply won’t trade with someone who might confiscate their assets or refuse to pay back the money they owe for some capricious reason. Also, a bank can’t say “I don’t like you, so I will just confiscate your money”, because nobody in their right mind would use such a bank to store his money.

That’s the theory. Now let’s see what we have in practice.

The US Dollar started as a unit of mass, defined in both gold and silver. Such metal Dollars were forged as coinage, and the paper banknotes were merely the first-order pointers, the promises to pay coinage to the bearer. Then it dawned to the American state that it can run a deficit by issuing many more banknotes than it had gold in reserves, because people trusted them and were very unlikely to redeem them. When people started understanding what’s going on, they started redeeming Dollar bills for physical gold coins. The state invented the term “gold hoarding” to describe the practice as something nefarious, started propagandizing against it and eventually introduced a law demanding that everybody exchanges their gold bullion for paper currency, and outlawed possession of gold bullion by the citizens. When the citizens handed over their gold, the Dollar was promptly devalued in terms of gold, which means that the state defrauded its citizens, and is normal and expected if one understands what state actually is, as opposed to what it claims to be. A state should be considered a self-interested player that acts according to game theory. This means that citizens should not consider the state a benevolent superstructure that acts for their benefit, but an opponent they must constantly play against and assume that it constantly plays against them, and will defraud, rob, abuse and murder them whenever it is found beneficial to its interests.

To continue our story, the Dollar was still pegged to gold in international trade, but the citizenry was denied access to gold, and thus had reduced sovereignty. When the second world war ravaged most of the world (except America), in Bretton Woods conference the nations agreed to use American Dollar as the “reserve currency”, which essentially means using the Dollar as the first-order pointer to gold instead of their own gold reserves for debt clearing, because moving gold around was seen as risky in 1944. Basically, the countries had an account with the American federal reserve bank (created when they sent their gold to America), and clearing was done by telegraphing a transfer order which moved Dollars between accounts. This meant that the money was “safe” in America. It also gave America an incredible opportunity to print as many Dollars as it liked, regardless of the actual gold reserves, which they of course used to finance the cold war and the space race. What happened next was the “gold hoarding” crisis of the 1930s, only on the international level; for instance, in August 1971 Charles de Gaulle called America’s bluff and sent a ship full of paper Dollars, to be exchanged for gold, because that was theoretically permitted, despite the fact that nobody actually did it because they trusted America. Immediately following that, Nixon “temporarily” suspended convertibility of Dollar to gold. This essentially made paper Dollar a null-pointer, and, since all other currencies were based on the Dollar according to the Bretton Woods agreement, it referenced the entire global economy to a null-pointer. Huge turmoil and insecurity ensued, and America reacted by creating the “petrodollar” system in 1974, by promising the Al Saud family military backing if they agree the sell the Arabian oil for US Dollars only. This was later extended to all OPEC countries, creating the system where US Dollar not only could be redeemed for petroleum, but was in fact necessary for obtaining petroleum on the market. This was actually an excellent move, because the difference between gold backing, silver backing or any other universally desirable commodity backing is unimportant. What actually matters for a currency is its acceptability, and people accept currency not because the government mandates it; people in fact routinely evade such government mandate in states with failed currency. People accept currency because they can buy things with it, and it retains stable value. If you need oil to power your entire economy, it makes oil-backing of currency in fact more reliable and sensible than gold-backing, because gold is nowhere near as necessary. The problem with the petrodollar is not that it makes petroleum the new gold; the problem is that it makes America able to print as many Dollars as it wishes, and other countries are forced to sell their precious assets for Dollars if they want to buy oil. What it means is that America found a way to export its inflation worldwide, which means it can run a huge budgetary deficit, it can run an infinite trade deficit, and use the proceedings to finance a huge military that will keep the rest of the world in a state of fear if they don’t accept the position of America’s satrapies and colonies. The only limit to such a condition, in game theory, is when America increases the pressure it applies to other actors to the point where open warfare with America starts to look like a lesser evil.

As America grew economically weaker and ideologically more insane, it increased pressure using “economic sanctions”, which are essentially recursive, meaning that anybody wishing to participate in the Dollar system (which in today’s world means being able to use money, since it’s the basis of all international trade and the banking system) needs to enforce American sanctions or be sanctioned themselves. In game theory, if a very powerful actor pressures a small actor, the small actor will either be ruined or resort to mostly unsuccessful and highly unprofitable attempts to evade sanctions internationally. If a very powerful actor applies the same kind of pressure to a peer actor, the peer actor will form international alliances that will fracture the current Dollar system, introducing alternatives. If America tries the concept of recursive pressure, other smaller players will have to choose between being blackmailed by America, being sanctioned by America, or being militarily attacked by America. This will mean that America won’t have any friends, but will have many slaves. If this were a shopping mall, and you were looking at the map, it would say “you are here”, marked with a red dot. Well, this is the red dot. America is at the point where it forced the world into two camps: slaves and enemies. The slaves are mercilessly exploited and controlled to their detriment, and the enemies are under threat of imminent nuclear war. This is an unstable equilibrium, meaning that it holds for a while, but the present condition makes most of the players so profoundly dissatisfied with their condition that they will perform iterative adaptations of their respective strategies in order to procure a better arrangement. An example of an unstable equilibrium is a totalitarian state, in which the citizens are oppressed and they understand it, but they don’t dare to openly defy the government because the price of open defiance is too great. However, since the price of total obedience is also too great, most actors choose to make public displays of obedience while maintaining a subversive attitude in private. This makes the totalitarian state underestimate the level of opposition to its power, and when something changes in the balance of power, basically when the citizens feel that the state is vulnerable and their odds of succeeding against the government have improved, there is a sudden “flash revolution” that topples the government in ways we have seen across Eastern Europe in the 1990s. Unstable equilibria have historically proven themselves to be a very dangerous way of organizing a state, which is why democracy was invented as a form of a “fig leaf” that creates pretense of citizen participation, consent and influence in the system of government. If citizens think the system is fair and good, they won’t waste energy opposing it. However, if the system changes in ways that make people feel oppressed, they will rebel against it, and the system will have to respond by increasing the amount of force it applies against any threat. This increases the perception of tyranny, and the things iteratively degrade until the eventual collapse. Basically, if you abuse the system, you are initially likely to succeed, because the inertia of the system guarantees that most players will have more to lose if they abandon the system than if they tolerate your abuse. However, this encourages further abuse, and this iteratively degrades the system to the point where players have more to lose by participating in the system, than in open revolt, and that’s the point where tyrants die. Since tyrannies are inherently conducive to abuse, and abuse is inherently conducive to revolution, this makes tyrannies unstable and, as such, undesirable as a form of government. Keeping the system honest and trustworthy is the only long-term stable outcome. However, the short-term benefits of breaking the trust in order to benefit from the abuse of power are so great, that self-interested players in the position of power hardly ever resist the temptation. The solution is to create a system where power is sufficiently distributed, avoiding concentrations of too much power at any one point in the system, regardless of the apparent utility. That’s why the old system, where each sovereign power had its own vault with gold, could last for millennia, and the Bretton Woods system, which kept all the gold in one superpower’s vault, was abused almost instantly. Also, that’s why the temptation to print more money than you have gold is always too great.

The problem with the financial sanctions is different – they initially work and seem to be a good substitute for kinetic warfare, especially if you are so powerful that the sanctioned party needs you much more than you need them. In that case, that party is weakened, and you are actually strengthened, because other actors compete for the sanction party’s spot on the market. However, the more you do it, the more you degrade faith in the system, by creating the environment where the players have to assume that they are next, and they have to make covert steps to insure their safety in case they are. Basically, the situation is similar to the unstable equilibrium of a tyranny.

So, why are the sanctions against Russia so fatal to the Dollar system? Well, the only reason why the Dollar system still works is because all the players assume that Dollar is good for conducting international trade. If they can’t assume that their Dollars are safe in the bank (meaning, that America won’t just confiscate them), and they can’t assume that they will be able to buy assets from other actors for them, the Dollar suddenly becomes devoid of utility, meaning literally “useless”. Also, the Dollar was always a liability if you wanted to wage war against America, but since few ever did, it was a moot question. However, it is also a liability if America wants to wage war with you, and this is increasingly the case, to the point where the world is now divided into America’s vassals, and countries America wages war against. You do have in mind that most Dollars (and Euros for that matter) don’t actually exist in paper form. It’s not like a Russian bank has foreign paper money in its vault. The “money” is actually a number on a central bank account somewhere in America or Europe, and if this account can be “frozen”, it means that the issuer doesn’t honor his obligation to make it “legal tender for all debts, public and private”. It’s suddenly nothing. Also, the idea that Russia will accept Euros to buy Rubles, it’s ridiculous. What Euros, and where? The Euros are a mere number in a computer, that denotes someone’s obligation to honor a debt. If the issuer can decide not to honor debts, what use is there of having a number in your computer, as opposed to having it somewhere in Bruxelles, London or Zurich? You can’t accept foreign money that is used as a financial weapon, period. You need to force them to buy commodities with other commodities, for instance using gold as payment for gas, because euros are worthless if you’re prohibited from using them. However, when you revert to trading in commodities, in a situation where you don’t have an established point of reference in one commodity (gold or silver), you have to use a very complicated mechanism of referencing one commodity against others, or using an international weapon of financial pressure as a yardstick, which is unacceptable. Essentially, what just happened is that the established system of international commerce was broken, and the new system hasn’t yet been proposed. This means that chaos and war will ensue, because the established system was abused so hard for so long, that there are many players who will suddenly see a chance to set themselves free, creating conditions for a “flash revolution”. On the international scale, this means that all conditions are ripe for total, all-encompassing conflict.

False flag

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Four days after the Russian military withdrew from the Ukrainian town of Bucha, in the suburbs of Kiev, the Ukrainians released a video of bodies strewn across streets, blaming the Russians. Judging by the evidence, the Ukrops executed the “Russian sympathisers”, arranged the scene for a movie production and the Western press is spreading it as widely as possible. This is the high-probability conclusion based on the timeline and the available facts; to cite a comment from SouthFront website:

“Russians withdraw March 28. Bucha announced liberated March 30. Celebrations March 31. Mayor announces safe and clear. Then April 1 OMG MASSACRE. It is a false flag you retarded cunt. Russian troops left Bucha 4 days before claims made or any photos taken of alleged massacre.”

Analysis: this looks like a CIA operation, and the purpose seems to be psychological preparation of the public in the West for total war with Russia. Basically, that’s what you do if you want to justify total destruction of the designated enemy in the eyes of the public. The interpretation where the Ukrops could have done this themselves, and outside a larger geopolitical strategy, is impossible, because of the kind of media coverage from the CIA-controlled press. The Russians are of course denying involvement, but even the normally sceptical and rational Westerners seem to be buying the anti-Russian propaganda for some reason; apparently, they understand that the press is lying about absolutely everything they can verify at home, but as soon as the press starts talking about Russia and China, they assume complete veracity.

Edit: This is a Ukrainian video where their units are pretending to be “clearing the area” several days after the Russians have left:

Notice the conspicuous absence of bodies on the streets.

From the comment section (translated):

“It is convenient and safe to carry out a “cleansing” when there has been no one there for 3 days”

“What is it? That the Armed Forces of Ukraine took the abandoned city on the 2nd without corpses on the streets? Then why did a mountain of corpses appear on the streets on the 3rd after their cleansing? It turns out that during the night they shot all those who disagreed without trial or investigation?”

“Ummm one question … Where are all the bodies that all our media are trumpeting about? The National Police was the first to enter Bucha, and then there was not a single body on the street (except for the first seconds) … And after entering, well, the police were already asking the media, and suddenly terrible shots appeared …”

“Handsome! Thank you for the video… now it’s clear after whom the corpses appeared on the streets… after this cleansing.”

“We drove into the city, talked to people, then they were killed and laid out along the road. Cool defenders”

“The same question as everyone else: where were those killed on the way at the time of the entry of the Armed Forces of Ukraine? The dead appeared later, under the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The state should protect citizens, not kill without trial and investigation!”

Apparently people are not as stupid as the Americans assume; at least those who watched this video, I guess, but this one might disappear soon so download it for offline storage.

Fear as a shield

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Why does a rattlesnake rattle?

It’s actually an interesting evolutionary mechanism, because being venomous doesn’t help you if a cow steps on you. Yes, you bite and kill the cow that stepped on you, but you’re still dead. However, if you warn the cow before it steps on you, then the cows can learn to avoid you altogether, thus saving both. A combination of warning and fear is, therefore, an evolutionary mechanism developed to avoid mutually assured destruction.

I keep thinking that one of the main contributing factor to our present geopolitical situation is the role of the “New Age” literature of the 1990s, which emphasised “positive thinking” and recommended things such as ignoring the things that frighten you until they leave. I guess this is useful strategy for making children unafraid of imaginary monsters under their bed, but it’s a terrible thing to tell a cow faced with a rattlesnake.

Also, such idiotic literature seems to have contributed to the anti-pragmatic mindset of, well, everybody, because instead of playing the normal and expected game where you weigh costs against benefits and then avoid actions with a poor cost/benefit ratio, people today adhere to “principles”, which are mostly pulled out of someone’s arse because they obviously have no deeper religious or spiritual background, ignore warning signs and react in petulant and spiteful manner where this is almost guaranteed to result in terrible consequences, they are taught “not to compromise”, to “follow their heart”, to just look at the ideals and ignore reality, because if you impose your wishes upon reality hard enough, “the entire Universe will change to accommodate you”. This all sounds like terrible nonsense, and indeed it is, but I assure you, I read it all in multiple places in the New Age literature, and saw it in all sorts of lectures by all kinds of self-help “gurus”.

When I read the news about all those European politicians who “won’t be blackmailed by Putin” after trying to blackmail Putin with sanctions, Ukrainians who are “not afraid of Russians” and refuse to accept a simple statement that they will be neutral and not a part of a war pact against Russia, and all kinds of lies on social media that attempt to portray a reality opposite to the one on the ground, as if that matters for winning wars, I keep wondering what kind of books have those people been reading? It’s like those Instagram “models” who pretend to have a perfect life, whose homes are minimalistically beautiful, whose meals all look like art pieces, who are always happy and up-beat and all of that, while of course the reality is that they are all on anti-depressants and suicidal. It’s as if they all think the most important thing is to show you’re not afraid, you’re not hurt, the enemy is weak and ridiculous and can’t hurt you in any way, and you’re so confident you laugh at him until he goes home confused with his tail between his legs.

He didn’t succumb to fear

I’ve seen Putin displaying obvious, absolutely clear rattlesnake warnings – back off, you crossed my red line, I am going to attack if you don’t – and they kept laughing, psychoanalysing him to figure out all the weaknesses and insecurities behind the threat posture, and then they act with shocked surprise when he actually did attack, as if it were out of the blue with no warning. When he didn’t attack with enough force to wipe out his opponents, he’s mocked for being weak. Guess what this tells him? Yeah, it tells him that you are unable to understand subtle signs and he needs a bigger stick.

Those “New Age” authors are all charlatans who have been lying to you. A rattlesnake is not trying to make you afraid in order to “control you”, or in order to make you “forget your own greatness” or to “make you forget your dreams”. It’s trying to keep both of you alive. To conquer fear means to win a Darwin award.

If all that allegory went over your head, let me put it this way: Putin first tried to reason with you. Then he tried to warn you. Then he increased the loudness of the warning and simplified it, so that even a not-so-bright person can understand. Then he did a limited strike to clear the immediately hostile area, but without actually doing much harm, the way some snakes do a “dry bite” as a warning. He’s trying to keep everybody alive. But hey, you know better than to be controlled by fear. You’ll just laugh at him to show you can’t be manipulated and you’ll keep following your dreams of total, uncontested power, and like a deaf cow that got bitten by the rattlesnake, you’ll ask “how did that happen all of the sudden?”

Ukraine sitrep

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According to the analysts, the actual number of Russian troops in Ukraine is around 50000-60000 men:

 One such U.S. military expert has created a brand new interactive map that shows unit dispositions all over the country. Of course it demands the usual caveats, being from an anti-Russian source, BUT it can give us a few useful pieces of information.

https://www.uawardata.com/

The most significant of these is that, I have counted every single brigade and BTG listed on the map and have come out with a startling find that correlates exactly with what I’ve been saying for a while, and have written in detail about in the last report. Namely: there appears to be only about 50-60 total Russian BTGs in Ukraine. Considering that a Russian BTG is listed as having an estimated 600-800 men, this would amount to 50,000 – 60,000 troops in total deployment. The author himself has stated these are all the confirmed groups in the country.

Also, I’ve seen reports that satellite pictures within Russia and Belarus show much more troops there than before the invasion.

My conclusion is that this adds weight to my initial assessment that this is all in fact a ruse, or, as we would say in former Yugoslavia, “navlakuša”. The majority of the military is in fact standing by in preparations for something bigger; the ones in Ukraine seem to be more preoccupied with locking the situation up than actually conquering, but something will have to be done with all the hornets’ nests they have stirred. The 50-60k numbers don’t actually surprise me because that’s perfectly in line with my expectations, if my initial assessment was correct, but since much larger numbers were mentioned online I thought, well, I must’ve been wrong and they are doing a much more serious job than I assumed. Apparently not.

It’s difficult to think through all this war noise, but let me try; for starters, what reactions did this invasion provoke, what’s the new status, and what’s likely to happen next?

Sanctions. America basically sentenced Europe to resource shortages, which will destroy their industry and forment social unrests. I expect more totalitarian clampdowns on freedoms, following the precedents set after the covid response. Normally, people would protest the self-inflicted shortages and the lowering of the standard of living, but now the military will control the streets and just shoot them. No protests will be allowed, and protesters will be publicly derided as selfish and ignorant, following the established covid patterns. So far, the effect of sanctions on Russia has been negligible; basically, they lost the Western fast food and fashion chains, and are left with better and cheaper local alternatives. They have cheap energy, cheap and good food, they are not dependent on credit, and what technology they don’t produce, they can get from China, which is a good and reliable ally. If the Russians didn’t know what happened, they could be excused if they came to the conclusion that some plague wiped out the collective West, and that is actually not far from reality. Russia lost some of its gold and foreign reserves, but honestly they could afford it; it’s mostly used for foreign trade anyway. Their economy is stable, and their currency has recovered to pre-invasion levels. American and EU economies, on the other hand, are flashing with warning signs. Things are not yet in free fall, but the forecasts are dire.

Petroruble. Putin is forcing the EU to either buy gas (and, likely, all other imports are to follow) in Rubles. This gives the Ruble the same kind of commodity-backing that the Dollar had since the 1970s. Nobody in the West expected this, and it’s a serious blow. America will try to stop this by all means at their disposal, but it’s questionable what they can do short of nuclear war. This situation is still in development and it’s unclear what direction things will take.

Ukraine. The Ukrops are rabid and murderous, and there is increasing support in Russia for wiping them all out with heavy weaponry – basically, if Putin stopped pussyfooting around them in attempts to protect the civilians, and simply levelled everything, there would be a loud cheer in Russia, especially after the videos of Ukrops torturing Russian POWs came out, along with increasing evidence of general Ukrainian population’s widespread hatred of the Russians. The helicopter incursion and bombardment of an oil depot in Russia didn’t help things one bit. The atmosphere in Russia changed regarding the Ukrainians, and the Ukrops will regret that very dearly in the following weeks. Other than being rabid and murderous, they are mostly incapacitated, fragmented, surrounded and unable to do anything of military significance. Basically, they wait for the Russians to decide what to do with them.

Technology. Russia was seriously slacking with regard to attaining technological independence from the West, and this is a real source of concern. This includes payment technology, which consists of licensed Western stuff implemented by their people who were educated in the West; basically, it’s all completely vulnerable to all kinds of pressures. Agriculture, industry, finance, even military industry – they are all vulnerable. Apparently, the reason for that is that they were following the path of least resistance and greatest short-term effectiveness; why waste limited resources on producing your own tractor when you need those resources to produce something you can’t readily buy for reasonable prices? Well, now they can’t buy either the tractors or the spare parts, and when things start failing, things will start degrading and eating up resources in order to get fixed. Also, they have problems with the production of seeds for agriculture – they import those from America, which is a mind-boggling oversight; also explainable by following the line of least resistance. I can understand that, because I’m also practicing this approach in daily matters, where I organize things to be economical in a business-as-usual environment, instead of a doomsday-SHTF environment, which might bite me later, but I would expect Russia to have figured out that America is neither a friend nor a partner, but a geostrategic enemy. You don’t buy seeds, tractors, software and payment protocol licenses from a geostrategic enemy. Things are very, very bad in this segment, and this is the only segment where I’m scratching my head in “what the hell were they thinking” ways. They have ten times more vulnerabilities than strengths here.

Phase 2. It’s generally assumed that by this the Russians mean cleaning up of the remaining Ukrainian military east of Dnepr river, and possibly Odessa. I’m not so sure about that, regardless of the fact that those Ukrops will absolutely end up pushing up daisies in the short term, because it would be strategically imprudent to either leave them there, or to allow them to evacuate. What I mean is that it might be more strategically prudent to just keep them surrounded until phase 3, and deal with America and NATO in phase 2, because something might be imminent from that direction. America just won’t allow things to go Russian way as much as things seem to be going now. They will intervene, Russia will respond, and all kinds of shit will hit the fan in very short order. This might mean that the Ukrops in Donbass will have to wait for their initiation into perfect unity with the earth.

 

Why Linux is not to be trusted

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From a recent Wired article:

THE DEVELOPER OF a popular open source package has been caught adding malicious code to it, leading to wiped files on computers located in Russia and Belarus. The move was part of a protest that has enraged many users and raised concerns about the safety of free and open source software.
The application, node.ipc, adds remote interprocess communication and neural networking capabilities to other open source code libraries. As a dependency, node.ipc is automatically downloaded and incorporated into other libraries, including ones like Vue.js CLI, which has more than 1 million weekly downloads.

Two weeks ago, the node.ipc author pushed a new version of the library that sabotaged computers in Russia and Belarus, the countries invading Ukraine and providing support for the invasion, respectively. The new release added a function that checked the IP address of developers who used the node.ipc in their own projects. When an IP address geolocated to either Russia or Belarus, the new version wiped files from the machine and replaced them with a heart emoji.

To conceal the malice, node.ipc author Brandon Nozaki Miller base-64-encoded the changes to make things harder for users who wanted to visually inspect them to check for problems.

Translated to common language, the open source community is motivated by ideology, not money. Since they are motivated by ideology, they constantly need to find “noble causes” and “change the world”. In this case, one such “noble individual” decided that the “noble cause” is to support Ukraine in its valiant struggle for fascism, theft, corruption and enrichment of criminals, and against Russia, and modified a popular open source project by adding malware that damages user data if the IP address is in antifascist countries. The code was base-64 encoded in order to prevent visual detection.

Now – if we have in mind that the supposedly “open source” projects are hardly ever peer-reviewed in normal times, because there are too many projects, and nobody really wants to bother with it because it’s assumed that, because the code is open to inspection, it actually is constantly inspected and reviewed – the fact remains that hundreds or thousands pieces of malware, carefully encoded to hide their real purpose, can be scattered across all sorts of open source projects, maintained by one or two actual developers who do all the work on the project while the “reviewers” will seldom give the source code even a passing glance, those project maintainers are starved for money and therefore easy target for bribery by governments or corporations, they are also possibly sensitive to other forms of pressure/blackmail, and then there are those who are ideologically motivated, in the sense that they, like all godless people, live empty and worthless lives and want to pretend that their lives matter and that they make a difference by contributing to the cause of the day. There’s absolutely no reason why I would assume that open source projects are trustworthy, which means I would have to either personally go through them – for which I lack both time and motivation – or trust someone who will provide oversight, in which case quo custodiet ipsos custodes?

I told the packet manager in the Linux distro I use to list all the installed packages and there were 2147 of them, and I inspected source code in exactly 0 of those. If n (where n,o,p > 0) % of all contributors were sensitive to ideological virtue-signalling, o% were sensitive to money issues and p% were sensitive to blackmail, how many hidden pieces of malware could they have hidden in there, carefully masked by either obfuscation, function by omission or function by interaction with other pieces of the puzzle, which is all very hard to detect?

Basically, if I want something that will work reliably in all kinds of scenarios, Linux and other open source solutions are arguably no better than the proprietary ones; they just have different sets of issues, which is why I try to average-out by using all the available platforms and maintain sufficient proficiency in all of them to be able to instantly platform-hop if one of them is disabled.