Consequences

I’m watching the news on the LA fire. The wind over night made everything worse. The fire is spreading and the firemen are having very little control over the situation, regardless of the fact that they brought in all kinds of ground and air assets. Simply put, they allowed the thing to grow too big and now it’s beyond control. They can try and clear the fuel from the fire path, but it’s questionable at this point. The aerial assets are the only ones doing anything, but it’s too little and too late. So, it’s time to consider the consequences.

The economy is going to react to this, but it’s unclear how, because the stock market in America is deeply into the red zone of complete insanity. The first-order analysis would be that the impacted businesses from the area will suffer, the real estate prices will drop like a rock since this will be the final incentive for the rich people to leave, since there’s nothing binding them to the place anymore. Sure, they saw it all go to hell for years but it’s a big thing to sell your house and leave everything you worked most of your life for and rebuild everything in Texas. Also, if your job is there you may not be able to leave at all. But still, one would expect most to leave, and few to rebuild. One would expect the shares of the construction companies to go up, and the insurance companies to go down, but since this is America, it might actually be the other way around. Normally, I would expect gold to go up, since rich people everywhere will understand the need for highly mobile capital; however, since gold is hard to get across the border, crypto assets might be preferred, at least until people realise those are worthless in a real disaster.

Jet Propulsion Laboratory is currently in the fire zone. It’s evacuated, but it is still unclear how affected it will be by the fires. This is a major strategic asset that controls all kinds of automated probes across the Solar System. All of this will be affected and control might be relocated to the Space Command bunker in the Cheyenne mountains or something.

All kinds of woke bullshit will be downgraded after this, and this will ripple out throughout both culture, politics and the economy.

However, this is all assuming that the fire is contained where it is now, and this is unlikely. Most likely, it will spread throughout the more populated LA areas, and the amount of chaos that would produce is hard to imagine – it would be almost on par with a nuclear strike. Around 18M people live in the wider area, and most of them are nowhere near as rich as those impacted so far. If they all have to relocate, and they will if the complex structures are disrupted enough, this will be a zombie apocalypse across America. I’m continuing to watch this closely, but I’m also being careful not to remove my eyes from other points of interest, because this fire increasingly looks like a man-made thing, and it might all be a distraction from something else. Possibly, a way to remove important assets from the X in time, in a more-less controlled manner. You see, I’ve been reading the cold war texts about the plans for the evacuation of the LA metropolitan area, and I know they decided it’s impossible and nothing there can be saved. Maybe someone decided to be proactive. So, the second-order analysis is that this might be a way to evacuate the most important people and assets from the area that is expected to be hit by nuclear weapons and impossible to evacuate at that point.

Fire in LA

I normally wouldn’t comment on something as arbitrary and random as a natural disaster, but this is different, because what’s happening there is a result of idiotic politics:

Basically, California is leading the rest of America in gender politics, virtue signalling and other leftist bullshit, and this was, similar to the recent fires in Australia, caused by the leftists prohibiting fire fighters from performing controlled burns of the underbrush in order to reduce the amount of flammable material for fires. Also, they are unable to organise transport of water into California, which is naturally a desert, from other places where water is plentiful, because of trivial political reasons such as saving some stupid fish species. However, this is worse than Australia, because in America they fired a huge number of people who resisted the covid vaccine mandates, and are hiring only the politically desirable combinations of black, brown, female and gay, regardless of any kind of merit. Also, their choice of equipment is much worse than what we have in Croatia, which is remarkable considering how much money there is in California. As a result, they have no water, no competent people, and they created the conditions for the perfect firestorm by intentionally failing to do any kind of preventative groundwork. When, inevitably, fire struck, as it normally does in an arid environment such as California, all the political idiots everywhere started babbling nonsense about climate change, which is probably the only factor that demonstrably had nothing to do with the situation.

To me, this kind of insanity and ignoring the physical realities is expected for a civilisation on its way down, but I don’t really pity them, since they are the most arrogant idiots that forcefully spread their idiocy to the rest of us, and the sooner it becomes obvious that they are simply wrong and their path is not to be followed, the better.

Syria as a liberal Utopia

I was thinking about what happened in Syria, and what lessons can be taken from this.

Basically, what’s happening is jihadists killing, looting and pillaging, the Western propagandists lying and whitewashing their crimes and producing fake material in order to blame the Assad regime, and the neighbouring states capturing territory unopposed. Essentially, it looks similar to the collapse of a bee hive or an ant colony, and the first lesson, I think, is about the purpose of the state. Unlike what the liberal idealists imagine, if you remove the state you don’t get a Utopia. You get post-collapse Syria and Libya, or, in other words, you get hell on Earth. You get criminals in power instead of in prison, you get rule of the strongest, you get murder as a possible answer to absolutely every question, you get a division of society into warlords and slaves, you get unlimited slave trade and you get neighbouring states taking over the territory. Nobody gives a damn about “human rights” or similar nonexistent bullshit. You get violence, misery and suffering, and the only thing that limits human depravity is religious fanaticism, which in case of Islam is hardly a limitation.

You get a zombie horde with automatic weapons, pickups and motorcycles, and you get victims. Soon thereafter, you get starvation, sickness and everything else that leads to a dramatic population drop. Then the dust settles and the survivors make rules that are meant to avoid the depravities that led to this outcome, and the cycle of civilisation slowly repeats. Alternatively, the aggressive neighbours who split the territory between themselves and introduce the rule of law limit the bad outcomes before it comes to that point. Unfortunately, history shows that this is actually not a likely outcome; the territory formerly known as Libya, for instance, was left to the warring fractions of fanatics there, and slave markets are a normal thing for years already. Early years of the Soviet reign after the fall of the Russian Empire saw widespread famine and cannibalism, murder, persecution and all kinds of depravity. After the fall of Rome, during plagues and wars of the early dark ages, Europe was a hell on Earth.

So, this is what the state is for. The purpose of the state is not to distribute wealth to the poor, indoctrinate people or legislate “carbon credits”. The purpose of the state is to keep the savages in prison and afraid. The purpose of the state is to keep the borders controlled so that the people inside can be protected in their culture, beliefs and customs. The purpose of the state is to keep the normal people safe, and enemies afraid. What happens when the state collapses is unlimited human freedom, which translates as unlimited human depravity, and lack of civilised options that would create the playing field for freedom to practice non-depraved things in safety. The only thing that stops unlimited depravity is the controlled savagery of religious zealotry.

Heaven isn’t good because people there are free. It’s good because people there are good. The concept of freedom defined as the ability to do whatever you want is inherently flawed, because if evil people can do whatever they want, you get the hell that is Libya and Syria, where their freedom negates all options for others; basically, you no longer have the option to do normal civilised things because you’ll be killed. On the other hand, in heaven everything is limited by not wanting to do anything depraved, and by the fact that those who would want to automatically teleport into hell. As a result, not having certain “freedoms” creates all kinds of beauty and possibility – you can create art without jihadists raping and murdering you, for instance, because they are not allowed to. You can have things without being robbed and murdered. You can study science without being recruited into some army’s cannon fodder. You can live a long time because nobody’s trying to murder you, which in itself opens up all kinds of options. It’s interesting how Satanists keep harping about freedom from authority. Please, do everyone a favour and go live in Syria. See how you like freedom from all authority. Yeah, it’s hell, in ways I cannot even begin to describe, because freedom from authority doesn’t mean that you are free to do whatever you want. It means that both you and the most savage criminal who rapes, pillages and murders for fun can do whatever you both feel like doing. So, you like to listen to music, and he likes to flay people alive and listen to them scream. In a place with freedom from all authority, that guy forms an armed gang, and you get to be a victim. You don’t get to live in an autistic Utopia where you get to do your thing unopposed. You get to be a slave and a victim, or you learn to be so savage and murderous that even the warlords fear you. Freedom from authority causes reduction of the pool of available options to almost nothing, and freedom thus cancels itself. If everything is allowed, almost nothing is possible. Where evil is not allowed, almost everything becomes possible.

Syria

I haven’t been commenting on the events in Syria because I don’t actually know what’s going on there. Initially, it appeared that a bunch of jihadists trained by the West broke into Syrian government controlled territory, and they looked like the typical IS characters on Toyota pickup trucks, armed with light weapons; they should have been easily stopped. However, that’s not what happened. Instead, the Syrian government forces retreated and crumbled away without actually opposing the invaders. Whether that is because of incompetence, cowardice, corruption or treason, I don’t know, but militarily speaking they were a non-entity. The terrorists took over the capital, Assad fled and Syria is no more. The Russians did some damage to the terrorists from the air, but since they had absolutely no ground forces to rely on, that did nothing, and they did the right thing by letting go of Syria altogether, because if its own people won’t defend it, why would they?

Israel is already taking advantage and entering border towns.

This entire thing smells of very good intelligence work from Israel and the West – bribe the key people in the Syrian military, spread discontent, use the fact that the Americans captured Syrian oil which made the Syrian government unable to finance the country etc., and then introduce the jihadis they trained in Idlib and other places to take the whole thing over in what, less than a week? That must be a record of some kind, even for the notoriously incompetent Arab armies. The Russians will now likely cut the losses, withdraw from the base they have there, and sigh in collective relief because they are no longer trying to push that rock uphill.

However, this doesn’t look over. Iran now lost a major ally in the region, and I don’t think they will just take it. Without Syria under control, Hezbollah would be exposed and their supply lines compromised, and the position of Israel greatly strengthened. Also, everybody blames Turkey for this, but they now betrayed Iran and Russia and thus lost the BRICS option that would allow them to gain independence from America and NATO. Basically, I don’t see Turkey as a winner here, despite the appearance. The only winners are Israel, America and presumably the UK; Turkey lost the option of strategic independence, Iran lost a strategically important ally, Russia lost its only foothold in the Middle East, but for Russia this was merely an unsustainable adventure with strained supply lines, that tried to fight fate and keep the incompetent Assad government and his rotten and cowardly army in place. This was a major win for America – they basically financed the destruction of Syria with profits from Syrian oil alone, they had no losses, they helped Israel, strategically harmed Iran, and made Russia look foolish.

Of all the aforementioned players, I think Iran is the least likely to just take the loss and shrug. Unlike the Russians, they have a very important stake in the region and they might decide that it’s worth it to go all-in and try to bring things back under control. In any case, this doesn’t look over. We now have multiple Arab countries without normal governments and unable to control their own territory, which makes them non-countries, I guess. Israel, as a major beneficiary of this, will feel encouraged, and will probably want to add Iran to this list.

Ukraine didn’t benefit from this at all, since the Russians refused to take the focus from what matters the most, and were not really distracted from destroying them. Their front line is crumbling and we’re approaching the point where the Russians decide how much of Ukraine they want to take, or, in other words, how much of Ukraine will they allow to become a hornet’s nest in their back yard, since the NATO countries are already talking about who will send how many occupying forces (aka. “peace keepers”) there. The Russians are not likely to allow this, but on the other hand they like the option of escalating the war even less, and they have to stop somewhere.