Fake people

I can’t decide whether this AOC crazy person is funny or depressing, but take a look at this:

Fake person having fake emotions over a fake scene in order to create fake news in a fake world.

Because empathy is very useful as a tool for manipulating fools into tyranny. Fake pain results in fake outrage that results in actual laws being passed that will make you even more of a slave, and all “because children”.

What about Iran?

If my analysis from the previous article is correct, the question isn’t whether America will destroy Iran or not. The question is really when and how, because they can’t afford to let it be.

Imagine for a moment that America had its breakdown, and it’s reduced to the state of the Russia of the 1990s. It can’t influence the events in the world in any way. It can’t feed its own military, or its own people. It’s the world’s greatest consumer of humanitarian aid, provided by China, Russia and Europe.

It can’t provide any kind of aid to Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Israel is at that point hugely threatened and has no great probability of survival unless it literally nukes everybody around them, and still they would have no long-term chance of survival, which is why I think the creation of Israel was a very dangerous project, from the position of the Jewish people. It basically puts them all in a single place, surrounded by enemies who want to kill them, and makes them dependent on their influence in America. The Jews were in a better strategic position as a dispersed minority in other nations. As things stand now, they regressed to the point of endangerment that existed directly prior to their Babylonian captivity. They had a state, but it was indefensible. So, Israel wants to act preventively and destroy Iran before it finds itself in a situation where it can no longer count on American military to implement its political goals. Notice how I didn’t mention Saudi Arabia or other Arab states as a threat to Israel; that’s because they are not. Without America and Russia fighting for influence there, the Arabs would be a non-entity. Saudi Arabia wouldn’t survive without America for two weeks; it would be absorbed by the resurgent Turkish caliphate, which would absorb all the Sunni states. From Israeli perspective, Turkey is not dangerous because it has other business, like the Kurds, to preoccupy itself with. Iran, however, would most likely absorb large parts of Iraq, large parts of Syria, and Israel would be swatted like a fly along the way. The Middle East would be divided among the Sunni Caliphate under Turkey and the Shiite Republic under Iran. The Kurds and the Jews would most likely be exterminated.

This outcome is strongly opposed by two major forces in America. The first and obvious is the Jewish lobby. The second are the strategic planners in Pentagon, CIA and similar places. They will try to set the board in such a way that all other players are preoccupied with survival, infighting and wars that weaken them, on a low technological level that makes them a non-entity to an advanced technological civilization or a state. Essentially, reduce everybody to the level where they can’t produce advanced weaponry, where they are economically bankrupt, societally fractured and ideologically and genetically weakened, and make sure no powerful and technologically modern power can emerge and spread across the world during America’s absence. Essentially, they are intentionally harming and weakening the rest of the world and reducing it to chaos, and all in order to buy themselves the time to “reboot”. They saw the collapse of the Soviet Union and the resurgence of Russia under Putin and they know how long the process takes. If, for instance, Iran grabs the Middle East during those 15-20 years, that part of the world will become inaccessible to America. If China absorbs East Asia, that part will be inaccessible to America. If Russia absorbs Europe, that part will be inaccessible to America. And all those regions will accumulate so much power in the meantime, America might actually never re-emerge as a great power, just like Britain didn’t after the WW2. Those are smart people and they know their history, and they know their geopolitical strategy.

Those people are in the positions of actual power since who knows how long. Definitely through the Bush era, when they started implementing the process of reducing the Middle East to chaos. None of that happened by accident. I’ve seen Russians comment it as if this chaos was the result of American incompetence and carelessness, but I see no validity in this line of thinking; I see it all as intentional. A country that is reduced to chaos, and ruled by gangs of thugs, is no threat to a modern technological state, or at least that’s how they see it. I see it differently, because the greatest threat to civilization isn’t another civilization, it’s chaos. Chaos is to a civilization what cancer is to an organism. Chaos is the force of entropy, something that continually attacks and degrades the sophisticated mechanisms that make a civilization work, until it nothing remains but chaos. That’s why chaos is such a dangerous thing to play with, because it has a nasty habit of not remaining safely contained, especially if your own civilization has already been weakened by the mental virus of tolerance and diversity, whereby it was rendered incapable of self-defence against inferior elements. The analysts in the American think-tanks think that if they reduce the Middle East to the level of Libya and Syria, it becomes a non-entity, but that’s not how it actually works. You get chaos, terrorists, fanatics, despair and suffering that breeds more suffering. In fact, a state full of content people is more of a non-entity than a territory filled with desperate fanatics. Chaos tends to produce unpredictable side-effects and it’s impossible to plan for.

To conclude, America doesn’t want to conquer Iran. It just wants to degrade it to the point where it can no longer support a nuclear, space and information technology, and is busy rebuilding its basic utilities (water, electricity, sewage treatment, medical facilities). This is the point from which they expect Iran to require more time to rebuild than America, and that will satisfy them. I can’t see any situation other than Russia preventively nuking America, that would save Iran. If America isn’t stopped, it will keep checking its geostrategic boxes until they get everything to the state where America after 15-20 years of recovery is still in able to resume its position of a world leader. This means Europe needs to be reduced to a shithole, Iran needs to be degraded to the point of having to rebuild power plants and provide water to its population, and, unfortunately, Russia and China need to be reduced to a glass parking lot.

Why Huawei was banned

The American version of the story is that Huawei can’t be allowed to install 5G infrastructure because it’s connected to the Chinese government and will build in back doors and spyware.

However, the American version is also that Iran is aggressive against America by bringing their country too close to the American aircraft carriers which threatens freedom and democracy.

I have a version that is much more likely. So far, America had complete technological supremacy, both on the layer of infrastructure and the layer of consumer electronics. Non-American products used key parts that were either produced or designed by America, and America had the ability to completely control the entire technological layer, either for spying or for denying access.

For the first time, America lost the technological supremacy on the infrastructural layer, which would mean, if free market rules applied, that the Chinese who were the first to market with 5G, would install their own technology across the world. This would mean two things. First, the Chinese could now put their own back doors and spyware in the infrastructure, and this is at least formally the reason for all the noise. Second, and most important, the Americans couldn’t put their own back doors and spyware in the infrastructure. This, I think, is far more important. In all the places where Huawei installed their own 5G routers, America would not be able to collect, store and analyse user data without control or supervision, the way it is used to. They would be forced to actually respect other people’s privacy, if not by choice, then by limitations of technology.

Let’s put 5G concerns aside for the moment and forget that the 5G band contains frequencies that were patented by America as weapons; this is important, but it is not the reason America has their panties in a bunch. They would be perfectly fine with installing weaponized microwave technology on each building in each city, as long as they control the technology. The problem is, they don’t. Which brings us to the next point.

When someone is a technological leader or has the strongest economy, he advocates open borders and free market. When he loses that position, he introduces tariffs and sanctions in order to protect himself. Notice how the roles have reversed between USA and China?

So, it’s not about Huawei, and it’s not even about China, or about spying. It’s about America losing technological and economic supremacy. If America was a normal country with a normal economy, that wouldn’t be so bad. It could fall behind, then get stronger and leapfrog the competition, the way it happens in sport all the time. The problem is, America isn’t a normal country. It’s a country that managed to abuse its dominant position after WW2 in so many ways, from currency to economy, technology and culture, and by abusing I mean thoroughly depending on the fact that it can force other countries to finance their debt, and infiltrate their intelligence assets into vassal countries’ press, politics and education, to the point of total control. America got so dependent on printing trillions of dollars out of thin air and passing the bill to the rest of the world, and using aircraft carriers if anyone had a problem with that, it became a cornerstone of their economy. Their entire economy is based on printing money, using VC funds to pump it into startups, overhyping and overinflating their value at the IPO, and using the GDP data obtained from the stock market to print more money, because American economy is so huge. Most of that economy is nothing but air. That’s why all those comforting stories Americans keep repeating, about Russia having economy the size of Italy, are profoundly misleading, because something must be very wrong about those numbers, because they don’t explain the reality on the ground. The reality on the ground is that America is hugely in debt, and the expectation is that countries that are truly technologically and economically powerful have a huge economic sufficit. That’s how America used to be, how Japan used to be until recently, and how China is now. Economically powerful countries create new and abundant financial assets and use them to go around the world and buy. They don’t create debt, they lend money to others and put them in debt. The fact that America is tens of trillions of dollars in debt, and that’s only the actually declared part, makes it obvious that its economy is not real, because real economies create wealth. This means America can’t afford to let go of the dominant position it’s been abusing since the end of the WW2. Their entire country would collapse. It’s not just that they wouldn’t be able to finance their military. The entire structure is built upon foundations of debt and illusion. If their economy collapsed to realistic proportions, based only on what they could actually make and consume without magic tricks of printing tons of aircraft-carrier based money, it’s their economy that might prove to be quite modestly sized. And that’s the reason why they are fighting this process, tooth and nail. They literally can’t afford to lose the dominant global position, because they won’t just be leapfrogged by China or Russia, then do better and leapfrog them back, as a healthy country would be able to do. No; if they lose the no1 position, they will crumble into post-apocalyptic rubble, and take the whole civilization with them. That’s why it’s so difficult for me to explain what I see to other people: because they don’t understand those facts. That’s why my analysis can sound crazy and yet be supported by the events. The way the world actually works and the way people think it works are two vastly different things.

So, when you understand that America can’t afford to lose the dominant position, and yet it is in a position where they can’t maintain it because they already bought themselves some time by removing all rational restraints on money printing in 2008, they got their economy addicted to injections of free money just to keep it going, they impoverished the rest of the world by exporting their inflation overseas (because other countries have to buy dollars with real assets in order to buy oil), and they understood in 2008 that this game is over, and all they could do is buy themselves some time in order to have the collapse on their own terms. All those sanctions and restrictions are merely stop-gap measures. What they are actually doing is destroying the potential competition that could arise in the years of their absence from the dominant position on the world scene. They are preparing the ground in such a way that everybody else is in a worse mess than they will be, so that when they recover, they can just assume the mantle of a world leading power. They destabilized the Arab countries in order to force them to spend all the oil money they accumulated, so that they can’t use it for increasing their control of the world in America’s absence. They destabilized Europe by importing all kinds of worthless human garbage there, so that it turns into an African hellhole mired in endless civil wars and poverty, and forced it to degrade relations with Russia because Russia was a huge market for Europe, and that threatened America, because an alliance between Europe and Russia would have naturally formed in America’s absence and would have taken over the mantle of leadership of the Western civilization. And, unfortunately, the plan for dealing with China and Russia is a nuclear war. They will turn China and Russia into a nuclear wasteland, and put an end to competition that way. That, at least, is what they seem to be planning. However, it is my opinion that they miscalculated. There will be no recovery.

It’s not really yours

Regarding my recent bout of paranoia regarding Intel kill switch in the CPU, which can basically allow America to brick your Intel-running computer if you are placed on some “black list”, because you’re “politically incorrect”, “enemy of America” or whatever bullshit they are throwing at Julian Assange. Essentially, any American-made CPU, chipset, BIOS etc. is not yours. You’re just allowed to use it while you comply with the guidelines imposed by America, which say that you must at all times be an obedient slave. If not, “American technology” will be taken away from you.

Let me quote some things from Wikipedia:

The Intel Management Engine (ME), also known as the Manageability Engine, is an autonomous subsystem that has been incorporated in virtually all of Intel’s processor chipsets since 2008. It is located in the Platform Controller Hub of modern Intel motherboards. It is a part of Intel Active Management Technology, which allows system administrators to perform tasks on the machine remotely. System administrators can use it to turn the computer on and off, and they can login remotely into the computer regardless of whether or not an operating system is installed.
The Intel Management Engine always runs as long as the motherboard is receiving power, even when the computer is turned off.
The IME is an attractive target for hackers, since it has top level access to all devices and completely bypasses the operating system. Intel has not released much information on the Intel Management Engine, prompting speculation that it may include a backdoor. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has voiced concern about IME.
AMD processors have a similar feature, called AMD Secure Technology.
The subsystem primarily consists of proprietary firmware running on a separate microprocessor that performs tasks during boot-up, while the computer is running, and while it is asleep. As long as the chipset or SoC is connected to current (via battery or power supply), it continues to run even when the system is turned off. Intel claims the ME is required to provide full performance. Its exact workings are largely undocumented and its code is obfuscated using confidential huffman tables stored directly in hardware, so the firmware does not contain the information necessary to decode its contents. Intel’s main competitor AMD has incorporated the equivalent AMD Secure Technology (formally called Platform Security Processor) in virtually all of its post-2013 CPUs.
Several weaknesses have been found in the ME. On May 1, 2017, Intel confirmed a Remote Elevation of Privilege bug (SA-00075) in its Management Technology. Every Intel platform with provisioned Intel Standard Manageability, Active Management Technology, or Small Business Technology, from Nehalem in 2008 to Kaby Lake in 2017 has a remotely exploitable security hole in the ME. Several ways to disable the ME without authorization that could allow ME’s functions to be sabotaged have been found. Additional major security flaws in the ME affecting a very large number of computers incorporating ME, Trusted Execution Engine (TXE), and Server Platform Services (SPS) firmware, from Skylake in 2015 to Coffee Lake in 2017, were confirmed by Intel on 20 November 2017 (SA-00086). Unlike SA-00075, this bug is even present if AMT is absent, not provisioned or if the ME was “disabled” by any of the known unofficial methods. In July 2018 another set of vulnerabilitites were disclosed (SA-00112). In September 2018, yet another vulnerability was published (SA-00125).
Critics like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and security expert Damien Zammit accused the ME of being a backdoor and a privacy concern. Zammit stresses that the ME has full access to memory (without the parent CPU having any knowledge); has full access to the TCP/IP stack and can send and receive network packets independently of the operating system, thus bypassing its firewall.
Intel responded by saying that “Intel does not put back doors in its products nor do our products give Intel control or access to computing systems without the explicit permission of the end user.” and “Intel does not and will not design backdoors for access into its products. Recent reports claiming otherwise are misinformed and blatantly false. Intel does not participate in any efforts to decrease security of its technology.”
In the context of criticism of the Intel ME and AMD Secure Technology it has been pointed out that the NSA budget request for 2013 contained a Sigint Enabling Project with the goal to “Insert vulnerabilities into commercial encryption systems, IT systems, …” and it has been conjectured that Intel ME and AMD Secure Technology might be part of that programme.
As of 2017, Google was attempting to eliminate proprietary firmware from its servers and found that the ME was a hurdle to that.

The AMD Platform Security Processor (PSP), officially known as AMD Secure Technology, is a trusted execution environment subsystem incorporated since about 2013 into AMD microprocessors. According to an AMD developer’s guide, the subsystem is “responsible for creating, monitoring and maintaining the security environment” and “its functions include managing the boot process, initializing various security related mechanisms, and monitoring the system for any suspicious activity or events and implementing an appropriate response.” Critics worry it can be used as a backdoor and is a security concern. AMD has denied requests to open source the code that runs on the PSP.
The PSP is similar to the Intel Management Engine for Intel processors.
The PSP itself is an ARM core inserted on the main CPU.
In September 2017, Google security researcher Cfir Cohen reported a vulnerability to AMD of a PSP subsystem that could allow an attacker access to passwords, certificates, and other sensitive information; a patch was rumored to become available to vendors in December 2017.
In March 2018, a handful of alleged serious flaws were announced in AMD’s Zen architecture CPUs (EPYC, Ryzen, Ryzen Pro, and Ryzen Mobile) by an Israeli IT security company related to the PSP that could allow malware to run and gain access to sensitive information. AMD has announced firmware updates to handle these flaws. While there were claims that the flaws were published for the purpose of stock manipulation, their validity from a technical standpoint was upheld by independent security experts who reviewed the disclosures, although the high risks claimed by CTS Labs where often dismissed by said independent experts.

The fact that both American x86 CPU manufacturers have the same type of a low-level back door makes it highly likely that someone from NSA visited them and politely asked to put it inside and give them unlimited access, or else. Based on what is known, I would hypothesize on what is possible and likely, and state that it is likely that everything except Elbrus CPU produced in Russia, and ARM CPU produced in China from peer-reviewed schematics, is an instrument of American control, which will go dark if America orders it to. This includes Internet/mobile routers and other infrastructure. Notice how I implicitly count everything produced in Europe as essentially American-controlled.

My recommendations? There aren’t really any. If America does indeed utilize this, it will either be against select persons who occupy top positions on their shit lists, like Snowden and Assange, against foreign governments on their shit list, such as Iran, DPRK, Cuba, Venezuela, Russia and China, and they will pretend they hacked their computers using a virus or a Trojan. If they use it against you, it means you’re already fucked in so many ways and on so many layers before that point, that computer vulnerability will be the least of your concerns. But be aware of it and know that buying American means voluntary submission to their control.

Would Russia or China be any better if they happened to be in that kind of a position of power? Of course not.

 

Americans and nukes

I was recently asked (in person) why I think the Americans are considering starting a nuclear war if nuclear weapons are obviously world ending. I answered that the Americans don’t see it that way, and this article shows I was right:

“Using nuclear weapons could create conditions for decisive results and the restoration of strategic stability” said new DoD doctrine before it was taken offline (Steven Aftergood)

What was the reasoning behind my argument? I said that the danger posed by the nuclear weapons was incredibly overstated by the anti-war activists during the 1980s, for instance the entire “nuclear winter” argument is incredibly overstated and there is no reason whatsoever to assume a full nuclear exchange between three superpowers would produce global cooling effects that would be worse than the Mt. Pinatubo eruption, and mankind has seen much worse, for instance “the year without a summer” caused by Mt. Tambora eruption. The people who actually do the thinking for Pentagon have much better information than normal people do, and even better than I do, and I consider myself quite well informed in that regard.

The Pentagon analysts know the data obtained by long-term studies of the participants of Operation Crossroads:

The increase in all-cause mortality was 4.6 percent (relative risk [RR] = 1.046, 95% confidence interval, 1.020–1.074) and was statistically significant (p < 0.001). For malignancies, the elevation of mortality was lower—RR = 1.014 (0.96–1.068)—and was not statistically significant (p = 0.26). Similarly, leukemia mortality RR was elevated to 1.020 (0.75–1.39), but not significantly (p = 0.90) and by less than all-cause mortality. The increase in all-cause mortality did not appear to concentrate in any of the disease groups we considered.

TL;DR version for people with American-levels of attention span is that the Americans did a series of nuclear weapon tests in Bikini 1946, to see how nukes would influence surface ships. Everybody was exposed to radiation and all kinds of fallout including un-fissioned Plutonium, and when you read articles about it you expect everybody to have died from cancer within five years from the experiment. However, it turns out that, to quote Wikipedia, “one study showed that the life expectancy of participants was reduced by an average of three months”. In the time-span of half a century.

The data from other nuclear mishaps including Chernobyl shows similar, quite surprising outcomes. Stress from relocation is the main cause of death. People who didn’t evacuate from the exclusion zone had better health outcomes than those who were evacuated. The data from the Soviet K-19 submarine, nicknamed “Hiroshima”, where the officers decided to re-route radioactive coolant of the reactor through an external pump, spraying everybody on the ship with super-radioactive coolant, stuff got into the ventilation system and everybody was exposed to high levels of radiation. Of the crew of 125, “twenty-two crew members died during the following two years” (Wikipedia). Having in mind that they were sprayed with and/or inhaled radioactive substance while sealed in a metal container, one would expect everybody to have died of cancer; however, I’ve seen survivors living to very old age.

Essentially, you can even survive the levels of radiation exposure causing acute radiation sickness and live to die of old age in your 80s. Radiation is quite deadly in extreme doses, but those extreme doses are actually extreme, the kind Pripyat firemen received during their unfortunate attempt of putting down a reactor fire in Chernobyl. However, there are strong indications that both wildlife and humans can be exposed to quite high levels of radiation in the Chernobyl exclusion zone and live quite normally.

Also, the amount of radioactive fallout released during the Castle Bravo fuckup was so large, it’s what one would expect from a limited nuclear war with dozens of atmospheric MIRV warhead explosions, and guess what, we’re still here. So, having in mind what I know, there are very good reasons to believe that the Pentagon people know more. Knowing more, they fear nuclear war less. However, the potential for miscalculations is great. They may plan for a limited nuclear exchange within a tolerable range of outcomes, and things may escalate wildly and end up as something altogether different.