The question that’s currently asked everywhere is whether Russia will now escalate to use of tactical nuclear weapons after Biden’s regime deliberately crossed their red line of using long-range missiles to strike Russia proper.

It’s a complicated matter, because the Americans are applying their way of thinking to the Russians, and the Russians run a different algorithm. Basically, they are playing poker, and the Russians are playing chess. In poker, there is a concept of bluffing, and at some discrete point the cards are revealed, and the Schroedinger’s cat box is opened; basically, probabilistic uncertainty collapses into certainty and you have a binary outcome. The Russians are developing a multi-dimensional self-serving strategy; essentially, they want to ensure a long-term positive outcome for themselves, and they don’t believe in a zero-sum game thing, where others have to lose in order for them to win. From a Russian perspective, others have to lose only if they decide to play such a game that positive outcome for Russia isn’t possible while they exist. This means that Russia has no problem with multiple powerful actors on a world stage that each play their own game and try to be successful in their own way, as long as that allows Russia to mind its own business and prosper – basically, trade freely with others, cooperate with others in science, technology, sports, art etc., and not have implacable foes accumulate weapons and armies at their borders.

Russian self-serving strategy means they would very much like to avoid any outcome where Russia enters a mutual-destruction pact with America. Russia would prefer it if America blew off steam and made their arrogant posturing, while Russia creates the alternative UN with BRICS, basically excluding America and their vassals but keeping everything else that’s useful in the international relations, so that they can all trade and cooperate freely while America sanctions itself out of existence and their economy implodes. Basically, the Russians are buying time, because they understand economics well enough to know that America is hollowed out, unsustainable and in too much debt to be able to continue as it is now; why have a nuclear war where everybody dies, when they can just wait for America to go bankrupt and thus solve the problem peacefully, and they end up winning by default?

The problem is, the guys who are running America knew this much before the Russians figured it out, and I don’t think they will allow this. If I could plot out this scenario, it’s quite obvious that the American analysts plotted it out as well. The problem with every strategy is that the opponent will actively resist outcomes that are highly unfavorable to them.

Also, this makes Russia very averse to any kind of radical moves, which makes them susceptible to “salami tactics” – basically, if the opponents slices up aggressive strategy into small chunks, each of which is too small to warrant extreme reaction, you end up with an entire salami up your ass before you know it. It’s a game theory thing – and the Americans invented game theory. Basically, they count on the fact that a self-serving actor will respond to a small provocation with conciliatory moves rather than resort to mutually destructive action, and even if some moves will then have to be reversed, it will be just the last salami slice, not the whole damn thing; essentially, you will be in a position to revoke the last centimeter of a kilometer-long encroachment, and even appear to be a reasonable peacemaker when your victim eventually turns aggressive.

The additional problem is that Putin sees himself as a savior of Russia, and you can’t be a savior of Russia if you react in such ways as to start a nuclear war. Also, he likes to see himself as a Christian, so he would rather try turning the other cheek, and giving you his shirt after you’ve stolen his coat. He is very much inclined to try all kinds of peaceful and diplomatic solutions before resorting to war, and in war he will try to use the minimum force necessary to accomplish goals.

As a result, there is now a widespread understanding in Russia that the concept of deterrence is broken, and the enemies of Russia feel that they can do whatever they want with impunity, because nuclear war is off the table as long as they don’t use nukes first. They feel this to be unacceptable and harmful to their long term goals, because if their enemies are not deterred from messing with them, all kinds of mischief will continue in perpetuity, and they are pretty much tired of it now. This means that various powerful and influential actors within Russia are mounting pressure on Putin to put nuclear weapons back on the table, and this has been going on for quite a while, and the most recent concession Putin had to make is the change of the official doctrine for use of nuclear weapons.

The problem with this doctrine is that in itself it does nothing to establish deterrence – there are too many scalars and not enough Booleans. It’s all “if an attack is estimated to be large enough, we might…”, and no “if any violation of this principle is observed, use of nuclear weapons in response is obligatory”. Also, the reason why American deterrence works is not the fact that America has nuclear weapons, it’s the fact that they used nuclear weapons on two cities, so everybody knows they are crazy enough to actually do it. Russia never used nukes against an enemy, so there is doubt if they are actually willing to use them at all, and Putin did absolutely nothing to eliminate this uncertainty; in fact, he contributed to the problem. In order for deterrence to work, your adversaries must think you’re reasonable enough to deal with normally, but crazy enough to kill everybody if you’re fucked with enough.

That’s why there were calls in Russia to perform a nuclear test and show that nukes are on the table, but that obviously won’t work, because it doesn’t show you’re willing to use them against your opponent if encroached upon; it shows you’re willing to detonate them in some wasteland.

In order for Russia to be taken seriously, they will have to use a thermonuclear weapon against a densely populated military installation of their opponent upon encroachment. This makes the present situation very serious, because if Russia doesn’t make the Bryansk attack a point where they respond with nuclear weapons against American military installations in the first ring of support around Ukraine, further encroachments will follow and there will be no deterrence whatsoever to inhibit them, eventually causing a full nuclear exchange. On the other hand, the Americans are just waiting for use of nuclear weapons from Russia to justify their own nuclear attack, which will lead to a full nuclear exchange. So it’s a tree of options where every branch eventually leads to the same outcome, which is why Putin would prefer to avoid the whole thing and just wait for America to go bankrupt and have a civil war across the damn ocean and leave the rest of the world alone finally; however, he won’t be allowed that option. This has to be dawning to the Russian analysts as well, which is why the pressure is mounting on Putin to create a psychological wall of credible deterrence that was lost after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

The entire situation is an explosive mixture, and I’m taking it quite seriously.

“In the year 1945, the bloodthirsty Soviet hordes performed an unprovoked invasion of the 3rd Reich, causing terrible destruction and toppling its democratically elected government.”

🙂

France has recently arrested Pavel Durov, creator of the Telegram application that serves as a free speech platform, as part of the intensifying crackdown on free speech in the increasingly totalitarian West.

They accused him of, basically, enabling all kinds of real or imaginary crimes that someone did or could do using his platform because he didn’t censor enough and didn’t allow the governments to spy on people enough.

The thing is, if they actually have evidence for any of those things, it means they caught the people who committed crimes, proved it in court, and those people are now behind bars, so the problem doesn’t exist. If they couldn’t prove those accusations in a court of law, then they are mere slander and people making them should be punished.

Which is it?

Also, if drug dealers or pedophiles used Telegram to enable their activities, they also likely used the local grocery store to buy food, also to enable their activities. They also used electricity, water and other communal infrastructure to enable their activities. The argument that someone used something to enable some illegal activity is perfectly worthless, because until someone is actually sentenced for a crime in a court of law, everybody should treat them as if they were innocent and not pass any judgment, unless, for instance, they actually witnessed a crime, in which case they need to report it and testify to that effect in a court of law.

Everything in the West has been turned upside down and is currently the exact opposite of what used to be a free society. For instance, the financial system is legally obliged to constantly pressure everybody to provide evidence of their innocence of either money laundering or financing terrorism or whatever is currently fashionable. This is sheer insanity. Rather, the state should offer evidence of crimes being committed, the state attorney should request seizure of documentation, suspension of service and so on, based on the actual facts that infer guilt, instead of asking everybody to continue proving their innocence in order to keep having access to services, which is what a totalitarian state would do, and in fact does. People are being prohibited from using services right now, not because they did anything wrong, but because their nationality or place of residence was put on some “entities list” by America, which seems to spread totalitarianism and everything else that is in stark contrast to the wording and intent of their own constitution, around the world. Also, the fact that America and its allies seem to be extremely threatened by any restriction on their ability to perform complete, unconditional and unrestricted control over every single person in the world, in their actions, words and thoughts, is the most sinister and totalitarian thing in history.

Yesterday, a billion computers running Windows 10 bluescreened because Microsoft pushed an untested update by a company called CrowdStrike. Air travel, banks, payment systems, hospitals and who knows what else was affected. Interestingly, everybody affected belonged to a single user group: large entities with enterprise-level security systems installed.

The guy who tried to assassinate Trump once appeared in a 2022 Blackrock ad. I tried to test several possible conspiracy theories, and nothing really makes sense. The guy seems to be a stupid kid, but without any social network accounts, which is weird, because if that stuff was wiped in advance, that would be evidence of an actual conspiracy on very high levels that include intelligence agencies. Also, the guy was on a roof in what was supposed to be a protected area, and the experts say the only explanations are total incompetence or conspiracy.

So, we have two major events very close to each other, where almost inexplicable levels of incompetence are the only alternative explanation to conspiracy. So, let’s first go with the more parsimonic explanation: incompetence. This is actually very easy to believe, because America is literally rotting from top to bottom, and incompetence is absolutely widespread, and often dressed up in corporate and political newspeak to look good. Boeing literally can’t make airplanes anymore because they fired all their engineers. Microsoft no longer has a department that tests software, they basically fired it all and are now crowdsourcing product testing. Big startups that turn out to be based on outright fraud – basically just hype without a product – are no longer even news, it’s the way things are done there. The Secret Service head is a woke woman that has a goal of “diversity”, and Trump’s security detail included several obviously incompetent women who were running around aimlessly like headless chicken. The president of America is completely senile. Meritocracy is a bad word there, because it goes contrary to all the DEI neo-Marxist nonsense that’s the ruling policy of the country. No, incompetence cannot be ruled out as an explanation for anything there, because the entire West is a black hole of incompetence, idiocy and all sorts of fools who would save the world and CrowdStrike is an excellent metaphor: a security firm that created the greatest security threat and outage in history.

However, as tempting it is to say that Americans are obviously idiots and no level of incompetence can be put past them, I would still like to explore conspiracy as an explanation, just to be thorough. The problem here is that there’s no actual evidence, but if I was told that incompetence has to be ruled out as an explanation and that I have to promote the secondary explanation, no matter how poorly backed by evidence, to the no1 spot, I’d say that the circumstantial non-evidence points in the direction of someone trying to create chaos, or at least test the mechanisms they have in place for creating chaos, panic and erosion of normalcy. It would have to be someone in a high enough place to be able to control both Secret Service, Microsoft and whoever in the Wall St. billionaire crowd it is that owns big enough chunk of CrowdStrike, which seems to be a 80 billion company that sells security-themed nonsense to enterprise customers, who all wet their panties at the mention of security and control. If it’s AI controlling security, they are already working very hard to suppress a loud orgasm in public. CrowdStrike seems to sell just the right combination of buzzwords, but in reality, I have no reason to believe it’s not the new Theranos. I also have no reason to believe that it is. However, knowing how American business works, … In any case, the most likely explanation would be a conspiracy from those WEF people, or whoever sells them ideology and panders to their narcissism in order to control them. It’s actually possible that they take instructions from an AI, which for instance tells them that they need increased social anxiety in order to increase probability of success for whatever grand plan they are implementing, and they pulled the strings for several chaos-sowing events.

I don’t know. However plausible this sounds, the evidence is incredibly thin and I can’t give it a Bayesian match higher than 20%; incompetence is just so much more elegant explanation, but for some reason I’m not happy with it, because the other explanation fits into a wider situation very nicely, and once the news about the Trump assassination attempt started to circulate, the thing that crossed my mind was “whoever put this in motion must have a plan B”. Also, yes, Biden is completely senile, but someone is pulling the strings of that obvious puppet, and it’s in someone’s interest to have a figurehead “President” who gives them free rein. That someone might not want there to be an election. Furthermore, the two explanations are not mutually exclusive, as a society riddled with profound and systemic incompetence is very easily influenced or outright taken over by malicious actors. I would therefore advise caution, and expect major disruptive events. Declaration of a state of emergency in America, resulting in closing the borders (for departures at least), lockdown and severe crackdown on what little there remains of freedom is likely in the short-term. I don’t know what excuse they will use this time, but something’s definitely in the air.