Author Archives: danijel

RT: Moscow dismisses talk of gold reserves trapped abroad

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Russia says all of its reserves are held in the country’s central bank vaults

The Russian central bank on Friday dismissed media speculation that gold reserves have been taken out of the country and are being held abroad. Western media began reporting the rumor after the US and EU authorities hinted of possible sanctions targeting Russian gold.

“All the gold from our gold and foreign exchange reserves is in the vaults of the Bank of Russia on the territory of our country,” the regulator stated on its website.

source: RT

Status in Ukraine

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The Saker published a “pretty decent map” of the military status in Ukraine, which I’m reposting here:

Basically, things moved very quickly at first, but are now at the point where the Russians are trying to find a balance between trying to destroy the Ukrops, and trying not to kill the civilians, behind whom the Ukrops are hiding. They are also routinely destroying ammunition, weapons and fuel stockpiles deeply in the Western Ukraine. They are also very carefully avoiding the agricultural areas, because that could cause severe famine. Basically, this is the gentlest and most considerate form of warfare I ever saw.

Unprincipled alliances and behaviour of America

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Basically, America will ally themselves with absolutely any kind of scum if it’s helpful in achieving their goals – Al Qaeda is fine, the Nazis are fine, it’s all good as long as it hurts the Russians or the Syrians or the Chinese or whoever is the enemy of the day. They would ally themselves with the devil if it were useful to them, and all the talk about international law enters the scene only when it’s useful – but when they invade countries, there’s no mention of international law. It all looks insane if you wrongly assume that Americans are principled and virtuous, but if you drop those assumptions and see them as an inherently amoral and unprincipled self-serving actor, then suddenly everything makes sense and their behaviour is perfectly consistent and logical.

 

Enslavement through convenience

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Apple recently created the new generation of laptops that are, performance-wise, the ideal machine to replace my aging 15” mid-2015 Macbook Pro, in the role of a desktop replacement heavy lifting photo editing machine. They also recently released the Mac Studio desktop which is almost exactly what I would want as a desktop machine. Did I just go out and buy them immediately, the way I did some other things they made before? Heck no. Instead, I started moving away from Apple gradually by buying a Lenovo Legion 5 pro gaming laptop; earlier I already upgraded my desktop machine to Ryzen 5900X, so that beast is very unlikely to need any kind of replacement or an upgrade in the next four years, meaning it’s likely to outlast both myself and human civilization.

What made me “fall out of love” with Apple is the fact that they are at the bleeding edge of the political censorship movement based in America, and are basically the most likely company to disable your computer by a remote command if you find yourself in a “political dissident” camp; basically, if you’re not a complete sheep toeing the official American main stream media line prescribed by the CIA. Having in mind my political stance, I’m an obvious target, and I don’t really feel like making it easier for the CIA to shut me out; sure, I have lots of Apple gear, and I have “cloud” accounts with other American vendors. However, I have a sufficient number of backups; I can trivially get a Huawei phone which is already de-nazified, and I already have several older SSD drives with Linux pre-installed, so that I wouldn’t have to go online in order to be able to go online; I would just have to plug an USB stick into the machine and boot a live Linux distro, or, if I wanted to get serious, plug the SSD into the machine and have an instantly-working pre-configured OS where I just install the certificates and encryption keys and I’m up and running within five minutes. Let’s say a paranoid old bastard like myself is not the easiest conceivable target. They would have to really try, it’s not like they can lock my Apple account and I’m out. I’m certainly not going out of my way to make things easier for them by having an all-Apple ecosystem. Sure, it’s very convenient in peacetime environment where you agree with everything the CIA wants you to agree with, but let’s put it this way. By having a non-Apple system, I miss out on things like the iMessage or the iCloud integration. Big deal, I have to get the Macbook if I want to write lots of text messages. If I switch to Linux, it’s more of a hassle, because a certain percentage of things won’t work properly, I will have to use a different, somewhat inferior password manager, and I won’t have Lightroom so managing my photo library would become a real pain in the arse. Other than that, everything will work, because the way I have my Windows and Mac system configured is basically to work like Linux with Adobe apps running on it. Whenever it’s possible, I use the most direct possible way of controlling things, such as copying files over the network using ssh instead of the high-level services, so the moment I get the ssh terminal and the web browser running, I have everything I need. Would I run Linux preferentially over Mac OS or Windows during peacetime? Heck no; too many things are wrong with it. Would I run it if the commercial options start waging technological warfare for America? Heck yes. Also, I did it for five years in a row at one point so it’s quite easy for me to find my way around, especially since I have a current Ubuntu distro running in WSL on all my Windows machines, I run Linux on both my servers, on a home staging server, and I use the Mac the way I would use a Linux distro where the window manager isn’t actually crap.

Besides, I’m quite shocked by the amount of user-unfriendliness of the current Macs, to the point where you can’t even replace the monitor cable on the new Studio display, and you can’t add/replace SSD drives or add RAM on a Mac Studio which is a machine targeted at professionals. I understand that you can’t do it on a Macbook Air, but on a desktop machine? On a thick Macbook Pro, targeted at professionals? And the entire thing is deliberately designed so that America can pull a plug with a single command and you’re out. Russia recently found out what it’s like to implicitly rely on “international” services which are essentially all American-controlled, and you find out that you have tractors and harvesters from John Deere that are designed to be maintained only by the manufacturer, so that when you’re sanctioned by America, your agriculture stops working. Fuck that shit. I want to have a car that doesn’t “phone home” to tell its American masters where I am and what I’m doing so that they can brick it in case they don’t “support” my way of thinking and want to “cancel” me. I don’t want a phone or a computer that requires someone’s approval in order to keep working. Sure, it’s very difficult to get out once you get comfortable in the American ecosystem, but I’m at least keeping a foot out. That’s why I bought a laptop where I can add or replace drives, add or replace RAM modules, it’s designed so that I can open it and make upgrades, and I can just replace the OS with something that doesn’t require political compliance in order to work.

Oh BTW, when Americans figure out that half of the world hates them, they think it’s because of their “freedom”. Well fuck you and fuck your “freedom”. Everything you make is a slave-control device. That’s not what you do if you’re interested in freedom, that’s what you do if you want to keep everyone else as your slave. Anyone who wants freedom today would need to make a list of everything they own and use that is controlled by America, put it on a heap and burn it.