Category Archives: society

A fig leaf

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There has been lots of talk lately about the need to embrace the gold standard for currency again because of America abusing the dollar. There are two issues that need to be separated, and the answers are not as simple as it might seem.

The reason why gold functioned as currency for the majority of history is that mankind had a solar powered economy. This means it was restricted by the amount of agricultural land that was used to convert solar energy into carbohydrates. Also, solar power was used for energy, in form of wood and coal. This made the total supply of energy available to mankind more-less constant. Also, technology was primitive and constant. This made the economy constrained, and its volume could be represented by another constrained resource, gold. Essentially, you could dig out just enough new gold to match the eventual growth of the economy. However, the problems started with the industrial revolution, where new inventions could multiply the size of the economy, and the monetary supply remained constricted. When petroleum use freed mankind from solar restrictions on energy by tapping into a huge energy buffer of oil reserves, invention of electricity broke all restrictions wide open, and Haber-Bosch method of synthesizing artificial fertilizers allowed for a huge increase in food supply, the economy and population started growing exponentially, and the monetary supply needed to be expanded far beyond the constraints of any single constrained resource. So, having in mind that the supply of gold couldn’t successfully cover the expanding economy even in the times of Tesla, Westinghouse and Rockefeller, and needed to be supplanted and eventually replaced by mechanisms based on mortgage loans and GDP calculations, suggesting an introduction of a currency backed by gold at this point reveals lack of understanding of the constrictive effect that would have on mankind. With gold, the totality of everybody’s wealth always equals the totality of gold in supply. With a gold standard, if you invent something that grows the economy by 30%, the supply of gold doesn’t grow by 30% to match, which causes a shortage of money in circulation and artificial appreciation of gold, favouring those who already hold the most gold, instead of giving power to the inventors and “new money”. Of course, if gold-backed paper money is used, the state will print more money in order to keep up with the economy, but then this money will lose convertibility into gold. This is the reason why gold standard was removed: it was a problem rather than a solution. When economy grew, for instance by the size of petroleum reserves, it was much better to use petroleum reserves as basis for currency than to try and dig out enough gold to represent the value of all the oil in the world, or to artificially inflate the value of gold to the comic proportions. Also, when someone came to the bank to request a loan, the bank could either say “sorry, but there’s not enough money in circulation to give you a loan, because we didn’t dig out enough gold this month”, or they could say “we can take the mortgage papers as backing for a low-interest loan we can get from the central bank, which will use this guarantee as backing and create new money which we will then sell you at increased interest”. Guess which turned out to be more acceptable for a growing economy.

However, when you allow someone to print papers saying “this paper represents a gold coin”, you will inevitably get more papers than gold coins, because the position where you can create money out of thin air is incredibly tempting. The first experiment with paper money in ancient China ended for exactly those reasons. But that is a separate matter: you can’t say that abuses of the fiat currency system justify returning to the gold standard, if the gold standard was not viable even in the 1930s, due to its restricting hold on economy. You can only make a currency that is required to be backed by actual physical resources, such as metals, petroleum, electric currency production, foreign currency reserves, and mortgages on physical assets. You can require solid backing for all newly printed money, but gold, there’s just not enough of it in existence to cover the value of our economy. It can’t even cover a minute fraction. And even if there were enough gold, it would work only if our economy remained constant. For a 5% growth in economy, you would need to have 5% of increase in total supply of gold, which is utterly unrealistic.

There is that other matter of dollar being an instrument of pressure and abuse, which warrants its removal from the position it presently holds. This would require the United States to relinquish a position where they can print new money out of thin air, and have the rest of the world pay for it; essentially, that’s what you get when everybody is forced to pay for petroleum in dollars. Instead of the normal inflatory effects you would get from increasing the supply of money in circulation, you get the situation where the rest of the world is artificially impoverished and American economy is artificially boosted. If you think America would relinquish this position without a very ugly world war, I have some real estate on the Moon to sell you.

However, there is a reason why America might actually find it preferable to have dollar crash and burn, despite all its obvious benefits. You see, all American debt is denominated in dollars. Also, American debt is so huge, it approaches the point of being unserviceable. There is a very easy and tempting solution for this: America can just print trillions of new dollars without any backing, and use them to cover their debts and thus reset their situation. Of course, that wouldn’t sit well with all the nations that hold American state bonds denominated in dollars, and would basically crash the world economy and monetary system in an instant, producing an avalanche of consequences, and that’s the reason why other great powers have been diversifying their assets, from US bonds to gold, rare earth minerals, etc.; because they see this coming. Either America will cause a world war to cover its naked butt, or remove any semblance of a fig leaf by simply resetting its debt to zero using the aforementioned method. Of course, having in mind that this would wipe out all retirement funds and personal savings of their citizens, this method would be hugely unpopular and would need to be covered up by some fabricated external factor. This is why I find a war to be much more likely. They will stir the pot so much, nobody will pay any attention to the little man behind a curtain pulling the levers and pressing the buttons. The plan seems to be to provoke Russia and China into a war, suffer a limited nuclear strike, introduce martial law, and then reset their debt and thus hide their plan behind some external villainous force, playing the poor victim of evil in the world. There is too much propaganda to that effect already in place for me to have any confidence in the possibility that I might be wrong.

What to do

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In the previous article I explained what the Western “democratic governments” have in store for their population in case of a major disaster. The worldview behind their planning can best be described as “pragmatic materialism”, which BTW is how Satanists would describe themselves if asked. However, I can easily anticipate readers’ questions: if shit does indeed hit the fan that hard, what, if anything, can we do?

Well, I’ve been studying disasters and the answer doesn’t conform to this “pragmatic materialist” paradigm, to put it mildly.

The “conventional wisdom”, if you listen to the American “prepper” community, is that one needs to stock up on food, water purifying equipment, guns and ammo, and in case of a disaster, defend one’s property against intruders. Essentially, they sort people into three major groups: the hapless unprepared victims, the predatory criminals and the prepared homeowners. When I listen to their theories, I try to envision the world they are describing, and my conclusion is that there are unlikely to be any survivors.

Let’s say the supply of food, water and electricity is disrupted. There is no rule of law. Follow the Maslow hierarchy of needs combined with the game theory in order to figure out what’s going to happen. The most prized assets will be the off-grid farms that have private water sources and can grow food. Also, those places will have food and medicine caches. The most desirable assets will be taken over by the most powerful forces, those most likely to resort to murder and robbery. They will take over the farms, kill the owners, and allow everything to go to ruin because they don’t know shit about farming. So, the theory that the ones best prepared for a post-civilization life will survive is very implausible; a much more likely scenario is that they will be the prime targets of undisciplined, panic-driven violence, which will further disrupt the supply of resources. Once the predators run out of food, they will resort to predatory cannibalism, because humans will be the most abundant remaining source of protein. After that, everybody dies. The scenario is very similar to that of the extinction of the dinosaurs: in the initial chaos, the carnivores and the vultures wipe out the remaining herbivores, and then they die off as this short-term food buffer is exhausted.

However, regardless of what the Americans might believe in their satanic worldview, my study of limited disasters shows a different pattern. You see, when shit hits the fan, the course of action that is most likely to result in survival is not self-centered predation, but cooperation. You don’t try to hog resources, because you understand that you are always going to lack something someone else has. Eventually, the resources are going to run out. The sociopaths do exist, but they are immediately treated as a foreign entity and killed off. The non-sociopathic armed gangs will trade protection for food, essentially becoming the paramilitary force that will guard the farms against attackers. The farmers will accept this as preferable to being killed, and will become the new serfs. The armed forces will become the new lords of the realm, and will form a hierarchy among themselves, resulting in new feudalism. How do I know this? Because that is what happens every time there is a major civilization-ending crisis. The armed thugs divide the food-production resources (farmland with serfs) among themselves. The serfs get to survive, the armed “knights” and “lords” survive. The sophisticated intellectual part of the civilization is wiped out. Nothing unrelated to food production and fighting has great chances for survival. In essence, civilization is reduced to a territory under control of a mafia gang: people get to mind their own business and have some semblance of normal life, but the price of this is paying for protection by the well armed militia. The territory is divided into areas controlled by different militias, which wage turf wars, until at some point they decide to merge, and then you get a state with “police forces”, and you even get “democracy” where you are periodically asked to choose which gang gets its turn in exploiting you for resources. As the baseline of violence is reduced and commerce is established between territories, there is need for high-level products and technology, which gives birth to sophisticated trades, and later to science and technology. The more connected the world, the more abstract structures it can support, until you get the global civilization that veers so far into the abstract it ends up destroying itself, and you get a reset into barbarism, feudalism etc., ad nauseam. That’s history of civilization for you.

Of course, we are talking about a civilization-ending event, not a species-ending one, but the irony is, in a species-ending event, the best you can do is try to preserve your spiritual integrity by cooperating with others from the position of kindness, trading for resources, offering services in exchange for resources, being helpful and protective, and simply continuing to do the best you can until everybody eventually dies. This would be very hard for the materialists, who believe this life to be all there is, but for the religious and spiritually inclined people it would be quite easy: in fact, it would be just another day in life, where you’re supposed to do the best you can in the available circumstances, and thus show God that you’re a worthy person who will remain faithful even in the darkest of times. You see, for the best people life isn’t about surviving, or having your family survive. It’s about being faithful to God by doing the best you can until the very end. And that is what you should do when shit hits the fan. Be the best version of yourself you can be, and you will leave this world as a winner. Choose to desperately fight for scraps, trying to survive at all cost, and you will lose everything, and still die.

Zombie apocalypse

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In the recent years it became popular for governments to train against the “zombie apocalypse” scenario, where hordes of the living dead threaten the living, who must quarantine and defend themselves at all cost. The zombies are, of course, completely dehumanized, depersonalized enemies; generic targets nobody feels any compunction in destroying. What you might not understand in this picture, is that they mean you.

In a major disaster scenario, regardless of the actual cause which might vary between disease, nuclear war or a volcanic super-eruption, people will be divided in two groups. There will be those who have underground bunkers with abundant storage of food, water, filtered air, medical supplies, and armed guards, and there will be you. You will live your normal daily lives, going to work, having a home with no more than a few cans of food storage, drinking tap water with no water reserves other than the tank for flushing your toilet, no energy reserves because you use gas and electricity from the grid, and no cash reserves because you live from pay check to pay check, and, in the majority of cases, you are in debt anyway.

In case of any serious disaster, you are the living dead. Your process of dying starts once the utilities of civilization, which you take for granted, stop. At this point, your death is a matter of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: is the air safe to breathe? Is the water available and safe to drink? Is there food? Is there warmth? Are there men with guns and clubs who want to take your stuff? Can you detect and avoid radiation? Do you have antibiotics with which to treat minor wounds? Do you need medication in order to function?

If you need medication, you will quickly run out. You will have to drink contaminated water and likely get diarrhoea. Food is not your most pressing concern, because you will most likely be injured during the disaster, and you will be in some state of shock, with open wounds that will get infected. You will be either irradiated, infected by disease, inhale volcanic ash, or simply lost and without any idea what to do, surrounded by other injured, shocked, lost people. In a state of shock, you will initially do all the wrong things – get out and watch the nuclear blast, drink some water of unknown state of contamination because you’re thirsty, act as if things are normal for far too long. However, that would only matter in a limited disaster scenario. In case of anything serious, it’s not a matter of what you need to avoid in order to survive, but a matter of conditions that need to be met in order for you to survive. You need to have an underground bunker with non-perishable supplies, huge tanks of pure water, air filtration, medical supplies, and safety. If you don’t have those, you are at this point the living dead. Your process of dying already started, and you are doomed; you just don’t know it yet. Not knowing that you’re doomed, you will attempt to survive. You will seek access of supplies and shelter. You will be ready to use force if you are denied, because you will desperately need things. Those who have things will have a choice: give you things and thus decrease their own already slim chances of riding through the disaster, or defend against you, the living dead. You doomed yourself by not being prepared, by believing in the fiction of perpetually available tap water and electricity if only you pay your bills, and now you are a factor of the chain reaction of doom: in order to live one more day, you need to eat somebody else’s food, drink somebody else’s water, and use up somebody else’s antibiotics, taking them down with you in your hopeless downward spiral.

The government, whom you usually look to for help, will perform triage: who lives, who can be helped, and who dies. In normal circumstances, if you are wounded or sick, you expect to be helped. In these circumstances, those who are sick or wounded are a fatal drain on the resources, and are cut off, sentenced to death. The most likely people to survive are the armed soldiers protecting the underground bunkers. If you are armed and in the position of power, this power will be further cemented; if you are vulnerable, you will not only lose everything, you will be a danger that needs to be guarded against. You, the living dead, will be shot on sight if you try to approach government installations looking for help. You watched disaster recovery videos and you expect there to be distribution centres where you can get food, water and medical assistance, but that expectation is only valid in a limited disaster, where one area is impacted and others are not. When everybody is impacted, aid is no longer provided to those in need, because the resources need to be stretched out for as long as possible, in order to give at least some, the ones most likely to survive, some chance. There is no longer a “government”, only people with guns and food in protected installations, and the hordes of the “living dead” who want to get in. And at this point, they have been training for years to see you as nothing but inhuman targets, in order to be able to kill you without any compassion whatsoever, guarding their bosses, their personal safety, and their stocks of supplies. Have you stopped to consider why “zombies” are depicted as dirty, bloody and wounded? Because that’s what you, the normal people, are expected to look like when shit hits the fan. Read the descriptions of Hiroshima and Nagasaki aftermath; the “living dead” were walking around bloody, dirty, wounded, in shock, dying. You expect your government to be making plans for helping you, if that happens, but you are wrong. They are training their soldiers and personnel to see you as an inhuman threat, to guard against you and to shoot you on sight. What they are planning to do is stay in the position of power, use up all the resources for themselves, and stay safe from you, who paid for all of their power with taxes, and believed in the human rights and democracy bullshit they’ve been selling you.

Incels and cat ladies

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I’ve seen women online scornfully refer to men who criticize them as “incel”, which is an abbreviation for “involuntary celibate”, essentially someone who wants to have sex but nobody wants him. And it always looks like this: “I’m a super hot feminist progressive slut in my 20s and I can have all the sex I want, and the guys who call me a slut are incels living in their mom’s basement”. The moment I read this my mental time lapse video fast-forwards ten years into the future, when the slut in question says something in the order of “I’m a woman in my 30s and I just can’t find a right man to settle. Where have all the good men gone? Also, I have a problem with my cats, they are peeing in my bed, does anyone know how to train them not to?”

Yeah. Apparently there was some survey indicating that women think 80% of men to be below average, which essentially means that 100% of women will compete for 20% of men. I would actually say it’s worse: 80% of women will compete for the top 1% of men, and those most attractive men will essentially go through women taking their pick, and changing them for a newer model every few months or years like they do cars, and it will be very easy for women to have sex, but almost impossible to form a long-term relationship with the men they target. Of course they won’t even think about marrying someone whom they consider “beneath them”, and so you have the stereotypical situation from the paragraph above, with girls in their 20s thinking they are on top of the world because everybody wants to fuck them and they think it gives them a sense of power, and in their 30s they start understanding that reality doesn’t really conform to their understanding thereof. They had their feminist educators fill their heads with nonsense and now they think they have the “progressive” version of everything, and it’s quite easy to stimulate the young people’s natural narcissism. If someone told them to never have sex outside a meaningful relationship, marry in their 20s, and make their husband their top priority in life, they’d call him an old backward conservative. However, when things go south, they’ll blame men, blame society, blame everything except their progressive feminism, because they think they got everything nailed just right, it’s just that this reality thing is a bitch and doesn’t conform to their ideology, so they need to go change the world a bit more, perfect and wonderful as they are.

If anything, cats find them quite useful.

Linux: what it intended, and what it did

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There’s been lots of talk about the recent development where the SJW cult apparently took over the Linux kernel development team, forcing Linus Torvalds to sign some LBGTASDFGHJKL manifesto, where meritocracy is decried as a great evil, equality of outcome is praised and white heterosexual men need to be removed in order for the world to be awesome.

To this, my answer is that communism, as usual, is eating its children, and this is nothing new. Linux was originally a communist project and a leftist cesspool, and since the SJW fraction already took over the modern communist movement elsewhere, it would not have been realistic to expect Linux to remain separate from this trend.

To this, I got a reply that Linux did some good things, and it’s not a failure: it powers the server-side, most of the mobile platform, and there are great companies making money with Linux and supporting its development. To this, I wrote an answer I’m quoting below:

Yes, there are companies that made a huge fortune using Linux – mostly those that just sell their services implemented on top of Linux, like Google with Android, but also some involved with Linux itself. If you look at it this way, Linux created both jobs and money. However, there’s an alternative perspective: Linux, by being good enough and free, destroyed the competition. SCO, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX went the way of the Dodo. All the people working on those were presumably fired, and because the competition is Linux, there were no alternative paying jobs waiting for them. Android destroyed the possibility of anyone developing a commercially sold OS for a mobile platform, other than Apple, whose position seems to be safe for now. If Android competed fairly and the cost of development was actually charged to the customer instead of being absorbed by Google and the open source community, with the goal of turning the devices into data-gathering and ad-delivery platform, competition could actually enter the marketplace and interesting things could happen, but this way, the only market pressure is on Apple, the only player who actually plays fairly, by charging money for things that cost money.
When Linux geekboys spout their hate fountains towards Microsoft and Bill Gates, and I’ve been watching that for actual decades, their complaint is that it costs money, and the users of Windows are stupid because Windows are easy to use. The argument against Apple today is the same recycled thing: the devices are expensive so the buyers are idiots and the company is greedy, and the devices are simple to use so the users must be idiots. This looks like all the bad shades of jealousy, hatred, spite and malice blended into a very nasty combination of mortal sins; essentially, they want to destroy companies that are financially successful by sacrificing their time and effort in order to provide a decent but completely free product in order to put the commercial products out of the market, because they hate that someone is rich, and something needs to be done about it.
Basically, Linux is a cancer that destroys the potentially profitable things by competing unfairly on the market, because it pays its developers in ego trip, hatred and envy instead of money, and its goal is essentially to make everything it touches inherently unprofitable. True, some managed to profit off of that, like Google who used the modified Linux to power its ad-delivery platform, as well as its server farms, but that was done by means of taking power away from the customer, because you’re not really the customer if you’re getting a heavily subsidised product, by turning the former customers into a product that is sold to the real customers: those that buy ads.
So, essentially, what Linux did was provide leverage that manages to pump wealth away from the software developers and into the pockets of ad sellers, making the customers less influential and less empowered in the process.
Also, what needs to be looked into is how much of the cloud computing boom is due to Linux, because it’s easy to have a supercluster if your OS is free; try paying Oracle per CPU for a Google or Facebook farm and you’ll get a head-spinning number that would probably make the entire thing financially unfeasible. This way, it’s another lever for centralising power over the Internet and over the end-users, essentially replacing the distributed nature of Internet itself with large corporations that, essentially, are the Internet for most people, and which, of course, are now starting to assert political and societal influence and controlling what people are allowed to think and say.
And in the meantime, the Linux crowd still hates Microsoft and dreams of a world where they’ll finally show it to Bill Gates who dared to charge money for Windows.