Category Archives: politics

Coronavirus with HIV traits

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There are some interesting developments regarding the SARS-like coronavirus epidemic in China.

On the Saker’s website, the majority in the comment section believes the virus is an American bioweapon.

This sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory, but it’s not that crazy once you look into it. First of all, the virus genome was analysed and it turns out it looks like someone combined SARS virus and HIV. I don’t know if that stuff can happen in nature, but it looks very much like something you would cook up in a lab if you wanted to make something deadly. Also, it supposedly preferentially attacks Asian males, which is what you would want a bioweapon to do, and Americans very notoriously collected samples of Russian genome, which is what you would want to do if you wanted to create a virus that would preferentially attack Russians, and then pretend it’s not a weapon of war and instead somethin’s wrong with the Russians if the virus is attacking them. If it’s actually a bioweapon, which can be proved or disproved by DNA analysis, it was very carefully designed and released to mimic a natural thing, and in the flu season when such things are expected.

The goal of such a thing would be to weaken China’s economy and to facilitate international isolation. Also, it would seriously harm China’s military. However, if this actually is a bioweapon, of which it’s hard to be certain because I’ve seen nothing conclusive so far, this is the form of genocide attack that’s answerable with nuclear weapons.

Gold and silver getting scarce

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Essentially, things are moving more slowly than I expected them to, but they are following the predicted pattern. The spot prices are completely fixed due to the fact that most “metal” being traded exists on paper only, but physical metal is getting scarce, especially since the central banks mopped up majority of it. Having in mind that only a small fraction of the population actually has physical metal, and the majority didn’t wake up and smell the coffee yet, you can imagine what will happen when the majority tries to convert their paper savings into gold and silver, only to find out that there isn’t any on the market.

In Germany, a small “gold rush” in the order of magnitude of 200 people daily per retail store was sufficient to completely exhaust the amount of metal available for sale.

About exceptions

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There are several things I saw people do in online conversations that annoy me, because they think they are using arguments, and they are in fact committing logical fallacies.

The first one is citing exceptions to disprove a rule. They will cite a smart black man and a retarded Asian in an attempt to disprove statistical findings about race and intelligence. They will find a woman who managed to give birth in late 30s, or one who is happily unmarried in her 60s, they will find a quiet Italian and a loudmouth German, or a Lesbian that actually doesn’t hate men, and say “gotcha”. To that, my answer is that sociology isn’t mathematics. In mathematics, if you state there are no even primes, and I cite number 2, your theory is disproved and that’s the end of it. However, even in mathematics, there’s statistics and probability. In statistics, citing a sample of 1 in order to invalidate a rule is worthless. Let me use an example.

This is a dark image. It was intentionally shot as such, and histogram shows a statistical distribution of pixel luminance values. On the left side are the pixels with values closer to 0, which means black, and on the right side are the pixels with values closer to 255, which means white.

What the political left wants us all to believe, under threat of violence, is that you can’t say that an image is dark just because the luminance values are grouped in the left side of the histogram, as long as there are any white pixels on the picture. You can’t say that a cat is black if they can find one white hair on it, basically. But on the other hand, if you disagree with them about absolutely anything, essentially if your agreement with their ideology is less than the perfect 100%, you are a Nazi. That’s fundamentally intellectually dishonest; essentially, they are using logical fallacies and counting on the fact that most people are only vaguely familiar with logic, and they heard somewhere that you can disprove rules by citing exceptions, only they don’t understand that this doesn’t necessarily apply even in mathematics, because statistical analysis was developed exactly for the purpose of dealing with exceptions to rules. That’s why sociology uses statistics to formulate statements about human groups. Similarly to that picture, if some human group has a median value of 6 in 0..255 range, you can say it’s very “dark”. It’s basically how the biblical God saw Sodom. It’s the case where white pixels don’t disprove the rule, they prove it, because if you can basically count them all by hand, it says something.

The second thing that irritates me is citing your personal experience to disprove some general rule. It’s statistically worthless because it’s a sample of 1. Also, every substance addict I talked to used the same argument: I’m drinking alcohol or using drugs all the time and I’m feeling great. First of all, your subjective experience is most likely just your personal delusion – the consequences might just not have caught up with you. Second, even if it were not, you might be a severely abnormal specimen – for instance, some people are resistant to AIDS and never contract the disease because they have a genetic mutation that renders them immune. Third, it still isn’t necessarily a good idea. For instance, someone can say he was drunk and jumped from the hotel room on the second floor, landed in a pool and was fine. That doesn’t prove it’s a good idea. Rather, it proves that some people have more luck than one should reasonably expect. So, essentially, I shit on your personal experience.

The third thing is that some people think feeling is an argument. They feel something therefore it must be true, or I must at least accept that they are validated in their feeling-based opinion. That’s actually true in some cases, for instance if someone isn’t sexually attracted to you, that’s all the reason they need in order not to have sex with you. Asking them to provide evidence is actually a fallacy, because you assume evidence is needed. It is not. If someone doesn’t like you, they don’t need reasons to not like you. But this is an exception to the general rule. You can’t use this argument for medications, and say that a certain substance comes in an ugly box that you don’t like, and you’ll therefore not take it. You can’t say your school professor rubs you the wrong way and you therefore won’t accept his grades. You can’t say you don’t like police uniforms and you will therefore not obey the law. In most cases, your emotions are irrelevant and nobody should care about them. Your idiosyncrasies are your problem, and have no place in a discussion. If you think something is true, you need to be able to provide arguments in favor of your opinion. Feeling a certain way is not an argument. So, essentially, I shit on your feelings. If you have strong feelings in favor of a demonstrably false concept, it’s not evidence in favor of it, it’s evidence that you’re a fucked up person.

Manipulated markets and war

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How can you tell a certain commodity market is being manipulated? It’s when supply is restricted, demand is enormous, and the prices are not rising. It means someone, usually the huge buyers, is influencing the markets by complicated and marginally legal means in order to keep the prices affordable for themselves. In my opinion, that’s what we have been seeing in the precious metals market in the last few months. The central banks and other big players have been buying unprecedented quantities, including the future production, and the prices have been dropping. I have a pretty good idea how some of it is being done, and even I am quite shocked at the amount of fuckery involved.

Also, we are approaching the upper limit of my prediction, because 3 months ago I said I expect the thing to blow up in the time interval of 15 days to 3 months. This was based on the expectation that the American stock market is in a hugely unstable bubble, that the central banks and other buyers will quickly exhaust the physical metal supply and this will in turn collapse the unbacked paper market, which worked thus far only because the bluff hadn’t been called. In the mean time, the fed has been printing money like crazy, and it’s been going into the American stock market, basically trying to prop it up in order to stabilize the house of cards. Also, overnight borrowing by the banks is huge, which indicates serious liquidity issues. In essence, the visible metal prices seem to invalidate my prognosis, but I think it’s just a matter of time before this house of card collapses, and I’m actually not in a great hurry to revise my time estimates, I think we’re still on the same schedule. I’ve seen very similar patterns in 2007. Marketplace was behaving contrary to the underlying realities seemingly disproving them, until it went poof.

I’m still buying silver with all the money I can spare each month, and I still recommend it to others. If the banks are buying metal instead of paper, contrary to their long-standing custom, it means paper is going to shit. Already, bets are being made on gold exceeding $4000 by summer of 2021. Some people say someone is betting high and will probably lose money. I say somebody is betting on a certain thing in a marketplace of asshats. A major constraint on my prognosis is that this time the financial collapse will be so big, it might cause the major players to pre-empt it with a nuclear war, seeing it as a preferable option. In fact, that’s what I’ve been warning about for years already; American intentional aggravation of the geopolitical situation makes no sense in any other context. Also, America is in the overture phase of a very nasty civil war for the last 3 years, with Obama-appointed people in the intelligence agencies acting as some sort of an insurgency that is trying to negate the results of the presidential elections, sabotage the executive branch of government, and, most importantly, control the media in order to propagandize their own populace. They actually revoked a law that used to prohibit that, so that everything would be legal.

When a significant part of a nation is refusing to accept the election results, using all kinds of excuses, that’s when you know the democratic system collapsed and the country descended into banana-republic stage. The level of political discourse in America is something I am used to seeing in African shitholes, but not in serious countries. It’s basically all at the point where the sides are so far apart in fundamental issues, they can no longer be said to belong to the same civilization, let alone nation. When this war gets hot, it’s going to be worse than Bosnia and Rwanda.

Fog of war

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Some generals consider only unilateral action, whereas war consists of a continuous interaction of opposites … no strategy ever survives the first engagement with the enemy.

— Carl von Clausewitz

I like Von Clausewitz and his elegant formulations of complex realities, for instance, how a well made plan isn’t likely to fail just because the “fog of war” happens to obscure your vision and you see only chaos, gossip and misinformation. You have to trust that you made a good soufflé, put it in the oven and wait for it to rise. Changing the recipe, checking before time and second-guessing yourself are of no use.

That’s how I see the current situation. I trust that I had read the situation well, that I made all the right moves that were possible for me in the given circumstances, and there’s really no point in bouncing off walls like a ping-pong ball. The situation where you wait for the outcome, and the reality apparently contradicts your assessment and actions is not only not new to me, but I saw it in a movie “The Big Short”, about the 2008 collapse of the real-estate mortgage market and the guy who saw it coming, bet everything on the collapse, and the market kept rising, at which point he thought, “what if the entire market is so inherently broken and controlled, that they can do this indefinitely, or at least long enough for me to run out of money?”

The answer is, of course, that there is only so much you can do. The soufflé is in the oven, and it’s either going to rise, or it’s not. There’s not a damn thing you can do about it at that point, as Benjamin Sisko’s father would say.