Open Thread 154

Prestigious.


  • Putin-Biden summit in Geneva. No surprises to the upside or the downside (if you credited the theory that Biden wants to curtail the breakdown of US-Russian relations to slow down its drifting alliance with China). $150M in weapons aid to Ukraine canceled, on top of the dropping of sanctions against German companies involved in NS2 construction. Putin says that Biden is not demented after all. Ted Cruz and Nikki Haley are very sad.

  • Paul Robinson’s take on it.

  • Biden: “How would it be if the United States were viewed by the rest of the world as interfering with the elections directly of other countries and everybody knew it? What would it be like if we engaged in activities that he engaged in? It diminishes the standing of a country.” What would it be like?

  • RUSSIAGATE IS ETERNAL.

https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1405256054745681924

 

Comments

  1. This is the current Open Thread, where anything goes – within reason.

    If you are new to my work, start here.

    Commenting rules. Please note that anonymous comments are not allowed.

  2. songbird says

    I suspect trannies will not get very far in Nigeria.

  3. Yellowface Anon says

    Now imagine UBI, pumping that cushion, indefinitely.

    We can probably see some of the effects of UBI in the stimulus checks that has been employed in response to lockdowns (not exactly the extra unemployment checks since it is for those who is forced out of the labor market due to lockdown insanity, but it still stands when it prices out jobs lower-paying than the UBI).

    It’s like IVing caffeine into a forcibly institutionalized and binded political dissident of sound mind. Or handing out cigarettes to inmates.

  4. ImmortalRationalist says

    Redpill me on the future of cryptocurrency. What cryptocurrencies are worth buying at this point, and how high can we expect the price of bitcoin to get in the next few years?

  5. Yellowface Anon says

    It won’t be publicly quoted when a global ban sought by the IMF and coalition of central banks is in effect.

  6. Yellowface Anon says

    some Russians paying 10-20k rubles for fake vaccination certificates

    Makes a lot of sense now that it is mostly gatekeeping anyway. This will come to the US

  7. I’ll probably write a post on it sometime.

    I wouldn’t buy now (we’re currently in a state of limbo) except if you’re DCA’ing in long-term. Generally speaking, the best time to buy in big is when nobody is talking about it. Long-term, I think the most prospective coins are Ethereum and quality DeFi coins ($DPI i.e. DeFi Pulse Omdex is good because it’s an index coin so you don’t have to worry about picking winners).

    I am skeptical about Bitcoin long-term. I view it as the “gold” asset of the crypto ecosystem, but you can’t actually do “interesting” things with it as it doesn’t have support for smart contracts. The total mc of all the gold in the world is $10T, which is just 10x BTC’s mc. (This is all assuming that BTC actually retains its Store of Value status, if it doesn’t – say, it’s replaced by Ethereum in that role – then its value will degrade to just its historical/cultural value as the first crypto asset). DeFi could, in the hyper-optimistic scenario, replace most of TradFi. It’s current mc is <$100B, which is equivalent to that of a single biggish bank. The mc of the financial sector in the US alone is $10T.

    There are Bitcoin absolutists are much more bullish on BTC than me, I definitely fall more on the "ETH maxi" side of the spectrum. Ask around for other opinions.

  8. It will sooner be Republican boomers who try to do that:

    https://twitter.com/AugustTakala/status/1401894513245818880

    Anyhow, obviously crypto is inherently riskier than “established” markets, if it wasn’t, it’d be worth 10-100x more and people wouldn’t be making insane returns on it (on average… individually, there will always be those who buy the top and sell the bottom). There’s no such thing as a free lunch after all.

  9. Blinky Bill says
  10. “Basically comports with my thesis that this is an anti-vaxxer problem, not a supply one” – That is the official Kremlin line to hide vaccine’s limited supply. Will see how it goes when local officials’ response to the new wave of infections is to institute mandatory vaccination on more risks groups. The 40% of export will have to be cut and hopefully promises made to other countries will be met with the output from new Sputnik breweries in India or China.

  11. Not Raul says

    You might find this interesting, AK.

    Richard McGregor often has interesting things to say about China.

    After Xi: Future Scenarios

    https://www.lowyinstitute.org/publications/after-xi

  12. Not Raul says

    Doesn’t ETH have serious security/hacking issues?

    https://www.coindesk.com/ethereum-learn-dao-attack

  13. No, not that I’m aware of.

    The upcoming transition from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake might be rocky. I suppose truly disastrous execution failure could send it to zero at that point, but that’s an edge case possibility.

  14. Blinky Bill says
  15. Not Raul says

    I said that McGregor has interesting things to say about China.

    https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n20/slavoj-zizek/can-you-give-my-son-a-job

    I never said that he has interesting things to say about Russia. Russia isn’t his bailiwick.

  16. Not Raul says

    The killer app for ETH is smart contacts. Unfortunately, smart contracts are a hacker’s paradise.

    https://makersden.io/blog/laser-cannon-hacking-smart-contracts

    Without smart contracts, ETH is just another coin.

  17. Passer by says

    Republicans are just Maddow but dumber.

    Agree.

    Will the Afghan government even last until the US completes its withdrawal?

    Yes. But no more than 1-2 years after that.

  18. Blinky Bill says
  19. Biden and Putin got along harmoniously at the summit, all things considered. But I am reminded of the old saying —- the day after the wedding, you wake up with a different person.

    Christopher Caldwell gave a Hillsdale College address a few years ago on how to think about Putin. One thing he said was that the Russian people don’t tolerate Putin; they adore him.

  20. I thought Scott Alexander’s take on Jewish immigration was a mixed bag. Disappointed he dismissed Cochran’s sphingolipid theory of Jewish intelligence out of hand without providing any evidence why the mechanism doesn’t work the way Cochran thought it did. No explanation whatsoever ventured for Jewish intellectual success. I like Scott, but he sure can be obtuse when he’s contemplating wrongthink.

  21. Blinky Bill says

    Some world reactions to the election of Ebrahim Raisi as president of Iran.

    Vladimir Putin, Russian President

    “Relations between our countries are traditionally friendly and good-neighbourly. I hope that your activities in this high post will contribute to the further development of constructive bilateral cooperation in various directions, as well as to the partnership in international affairs.

    “This fully meets the interests of the Russian and Iranian peoples, goes in line with the strengthening of regional security and stability”.

    Yair Lapid, Israeli Foreign Minister

    “Iran’s new president, known as the Butcher of Teheran, is an extremist responsible for the deaths of thousands of Iranians. He is committed to the regime’s nuclear ambitions and to its campaign of global terror”.

    Bashar Al-Assad, Syrian President

    Assad wished Raisi success “for the good and interest of the steadfast Iranian people in the face of all schemes and pressures that aim to break their will and undermine their independent decision”.

    Tayyip Erdogan, Turkish President

    “Stating my belief that cooperation between our two countries will strengthen during your presidency, I am ready to work together with you”.

  22. Blinky Bill says

    A taste for irony has kept more hearts from breaking than a sense of humor, for it takes irony to appreciate the joke which is on oneself.

    Another way of thinking about it:

    Wokeism as a White Supremacy that counter-signals itself to reinforce its own hegemony.

  23. Not going to engage in this debate again, but would invite interested readers to look over my arguments in https://www.unz.com/akarlin/dying-from-corona-in-russia/ as well as the claims by utu, my and melanf’s replies to them, and make your own decision on who likely has the better informed perspective on Russia’s vaccine situation.

  24. Every culture needs stability – a “still center”.

    Traditionally, it was manners, mores, and customs.

    Today, manners and mores are in extreme flux – but maybe, that’s because science provides the “still center”?

    I am struck by how important traditional cultures considered politeness – “proper manners”. So much so, that someone without proper manners was considered not human, a barbarian.

    The French used to make a huge deal about being the politest nation in Europe, the one with the best manners. The Chinese considered people without proper Confucian politeness to be barbarians, scarcely human.

    To us today, this seems impossible to understand. Today, politeness would seem utterly inconsequential and trivial! At best, a minor refinement, probably incompatible with success if excessive, and hardly almost synonymous with civilization – as it used to be regarded.

    But there must have been something very deep going on here. And significantly, the French and the Chinese, who used to pride themselves most on proper manners, have both acquired a reputation precisely for rudeness!

    As our trust in science is waning, our tolerance for difference in matters of culture and manners wanes.

  25. but it still stands when it prices out jobs lower-paying than the UBI

    Well the thing is we don’t care about jobs as such. We need consistent income streams coming in from payments on debt service so that they can be securitized at high credit rating. Whether the money for this comes from serving coffee or a government check is completely irrelevant to an investor.

    If the consumer earns less that UBI then he can carry less debt load and is therefore a poor financial asset. UBI will allow for a nice asset price increase.

  26. Boomthorkell says

    The crap Jewish immigrant fits in with the fact that I know America received a large number of immigrants from Galicia (the backwater of Austria-Hungary, and Europe at large), and try fact America in general received waves upon waves of crap European immigrants in general.

    The new economy is a real blessing in a sense, especially the freedom to work from home. UBI really will be the final cherry on top. An economic collapse may allow for even better refinement and ease of living (eventually.)

    Afghanistan’s government ought to collapse, though I suspect it will be more a slow motion replacement, with other invested countries encouraging and figuring out how to profit from the transition, while the Taliban carefully establish their control without rocking the boat too much.

  27. As of 20.06.21 10.42% (15 232 209 чел) got vaccinated in Russia. If all vaccines that were slated for Russia (18 mil) were utilized 12.3% would be vaccinated. This certainly would not have any impact on progression of the new wave of infection and availability of your gym and latte station. And you know it perfectly well, yet you pretend getting all upset and bad mouth Russian people for not getting vaccinated. Which you prefer to be called: Kremlin’s apologist and spreader of false information to benefit Kremlin or Kremlin’s useful idiot? There is no other choice. In either case you are no friend of Russian people.

  28. …the day after the wedding, you wake up with a different person.

    Biden threw Ukraine to its fate. Not unexpectedly, but still rather suddenly. The ceremonies are done and the physical reality of US not being able to win by force in the Ukraine-Black See region was made explicit. That leaves Ukraine to its own devices or to count on Russia’s restraint. Cat and mouse, and longer it takes more pain for the ordinary Ukrainians.

    Washington has tried everything, from NS2 to a revolution in Belarus, and at the end it was a bridge too far. Let just say that Obama didn’t know what he was doing.

  29. Not Raul says

    I don’t see your issue with his tweet.

    The more economically dynamic areas of China (like Shenzhen) are healthier demographically than the northeast.

  30. outSJW-ing the SJWs reminded me about the recent altercation between Polish feminist politician and one male journalist. She said that he had no invited a single women to his talks. He replies that as far as he knows, at least four of this guests identified as women. She ask which ones. He answers that he is astounded that she wanted to out four trans in such transphobic and backward country as Poland. There was no reply.

  31. JohnPlywood says

    And that’s how you put a white bitch feminist down. I swear, this woke shit is the saving grace of the white man.

  32. Bashibuzuk says

    The real reason of the Delta/Indian Covid variant spread in Moscow (pretty sure AK is well aware of it):

    [O]ne of the reasons for the current outbreak of Covid in Moscow – a flood of gastarbeiters from Central Asia. For the previous couple of months, Deputy Prime Minister Khusnullin made the fight for increased import of migrants the basis of his activities. And so they came to Moscow and, it turns out, they cannot get vaccinated, since non-Russian citizens (without compulsory medical insurance) live crowded on each other’s heads, while they are actively infected. And their main job is just in the service sector, from catering and taxis to supermarkets. This is where Covid is actively transmitted to Muscovites.

    From the excellent Telegram Blog by Pavel Pryannikov with slight modifications after Google Translate.

    Interestingly enough, the narrative for Khusnullin pushing forward the re-opening of Central Asian gastarbeiter influx was the need for low wages workforce in the building industry. According to Khusnullin, the industry cannot pay the higher wages that would be attractive to ethnic Russian workers. Of note, the building industry in the Moscow area is both extremely profitable and belongs in substantial part to Gorsky Jewish (Caucasus Mountain Jewish) interests. During the Covid pandemics, the building industry lobbied the RusFed government for different fiscal and financial measures of support. Mountain Jewish diaspora in Moscow is mainly from Azerbaijan and enjoys excellent relationships with many high ranked RusFed politicians.

    https://youtu.be/bDzzR5Bcn-E

    No suggestion to raise the wages, instead of bringing back unvaccinated gasters, has been ever made: “Откуда деньги у бедного Еврея ? Зачем Русским деньги? Русским денег не давать! ”

    TL:DR Mountain Jews in the building industry lobby asked for the return of hundreds of thousands of unvaccinated gastarbeiters, Kremlins obliged. The new Covid variant was introduced to Moscow, Sobyanin used it to reassert his leadership in the Covid infection control, Moscovite population will “enjoy” lock-downs, compulsory vaccination and vaccine passports.

    Meanwhile, Karlin blamed ethnic Russians for being idiotic antivaxxers who are responsible for the new wave of Covid in RusFed and suggested that if ethnic Russians died of Covid then they deserve it because “stupidity must be punished”.

    QED: a superb demonstration of Karlin’s supposed “Russian reactionary nationalism” (Sarc.)

    And one last thing: RusFed was not able to supply the msin part of Sputnik vaccines ordered by Algeria. So you’re probably right, their production capability is likely not sufficient to rapidly vaccinate the RusFed population.

  33. Pericles says

    I seem to recall Urbit recently apologizing for the exploding costs to get a new node in their network (uses ETH). In my mind, it points to a greater general problem of fuel costs to execute smart contracts. Or is there a mechanism to reduce the ETH cost for a contract as the $ cost of ETH rises?

  34. The Big Red Scary says

    In March, you had to wait a week or two for an appointment to get sputniked. Now you can get sputniked by walking into a shopping center in my provincial town. If there is a shortage, then you have to argue that the shopping center Sputnik V is placebo or worse.

  35. sher singh says

    https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/777363024196796426/856118621427335168/unknown.png

    “Remember our culture was illegal to practice up until 1978 when President Carter made it legal with AIRFA (American Indian Religious Freedoms Act)”

    https://www.reddit.com/r/onguardforthee/comments/o38elv/the_more_you_know/

    ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ

  36. I don’t even know where you got that data from, it’s 13.3% as of today according to the most cited resource on vaccinations progress: https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations

    The large amount of Sputnik V exports makes my point: There is/was a large cushion for domestic demand. In the event of a very large demand spike, Russia would have gone back to rationing by age, as it did early this year. The banal reality is that for a variety of factors, but primarily to do with anti-vax sentiment, few Russians were interested in getting it. The ultimate proof of that is that one could casually walk into any one of dozens of shopping malls and parks with just one’s passport and get a vaccine, the lack of queues testifying to the real causes of the low vaccination rate.

    The numbers will soon become much higher, but that will be on account of panic from the elevated deaths as well as Moscow having just made vaccination mandatory for people employed in state services – a radical “liberty-infringing” step that no other developed country in the world that I’m aware of has taken. Pushing it through now is unpopular enough, it would have been political suicide earlier this year, when the epidemic was at a low ebb.

    PS. Is Joshua Yaffa also no friend of the Russian people*?

    https://twitter.com/molenasreddin/status/1405098580046663688

    • Well, he might not not be, but not for this particular reason.
  37. Yeah, I call BS on that. Vishnugupta’s explanation seems far likelier: https://www.unz.com/akarlin/dying-from-corona-in-russia/#comment-4716181

    On top of that very recklessly Russia has not temporarily stopped tourists from India like most countries(in fact there is now some sort of a visa on arrival travel arrangement for tour groups) so there are presently a record number of Indian tourists in Russia now(Mostly Moscow and Spb) since it is pretty much the only option for a foreign vacation.

    Traffic between India and Russia is much more intense, than between India and Central Asia. If anything it will be Gastarbeiters in Russia who will bring it back to their countries.

    Don’t know why you care so much either, given that you’re a floomer and an anti-vaxxer IIRC. But I guess not when it comes to taking another dump on Russia.

    And one last thing: RusFed was not able to supply the msin part of Sputnik vaccines ordered by Algeria. So you’re probably right, their production capability is likely not sufficient to rapidly vaccinate the RusFed population.

    Confirmation that Russian domestic demand takes priority over foreign demand – just as I (and melanf) said. Russian demand rises, foreigners get less of it. Good to know.

  38. Yes: Layer 2 solutions – sidechains (MATIC; xDAI), zk rollups (Loopring), more generally, other chains with different solutions to the Blockchain Trilemma that sacrifice on decentralization in favor of speed. Incidentally, Urbit is working on its own L2: https://twitter.com/urbit/status/1393580435033055236

  39. songbird says

    Recently rewatched “Darby O’Gill and the Little People” (1959) after seeing it in my boyhood. First Walt-era film I’ve watched in quite a while.

    Remarkable contrast to modern Disney.

    In one scene, they were actually talking about how a twenty year old woman should get married and not wait until she is thirty. In another, an image of Jesus appeared on the wall of a house. Connery, who is Irish in the paternal line, was the only dark actor. They even made sure to give the landlord an Irish (Norman) name.

    Though I take issue with Walt for demonizing hunters in “Bambi” and, though he often bastardized folklore, I still think it is evident that he venerated all things European. For example, his idea with Disneyland was to recreate the aesthetics of a European village.

  40. Felix Keverich says

    I see no evidence of increased domestic demand. We also don’t know how many Sputnik doses were produced and administered globally, at least I’m not familiar with any data on that. It could be the damn thing is just too hard to manufacture and this why we don’t see many people getting inoculated with Sputnik domestically or internationally.

  41. Bashibuzuk says

    I am not an antivaxxer at all. I have always took the Influenza shot nearly every year and have made sure my children have received all the “traditional ” vaccines. The Covid vaccines using mRNA liposomes are a novel technology, therefore I am unsure of their safety, but they most probably are not more dangerous than the spike protein alone. The Sputnik vaccine is made using the more tried and proven recombinant adenovirus platform and it seems to have a good safety record. Therefore Sputnik should be used by all people who want to try avoiding getting infected by Covid and I have personally encouraged my relatives living in RusFed to get the shot. OTOH, I am absolutely unsure whether the current generation of vaccines can really protect against the novel variants and I am still worried about potential ADE effects after the virus infection anc vaccination. But as I wrote previously, this is a risk we will probably have to live with now that Covid has become endemic.

    If I understand correctly, a floomer is someone who thinks that Covid is “just a flu”. As I wrote above I usually got the yearly Influenza vaccines, therefore if Covid was “just a flu” I would get vaccinated. Covid is around 10X more deadly than an average “flu” and causes serious comorbidities, therefore it is certainly worth getting vaccinated for the age groups that are the most at risk. But Covid is not the “apocalyptic virus ” it first appeared to be following the early Chinese reports and the biodefense type reaction of Chinese authorities to the emerging Covid infection.

    Why the Chinese presented Covid as an “apocalyptic virus “, proceeded with an extreme response to its appearance is another interesting question altogether. A question you might possibly want to investigate one day.

    https://kornev.livejournal.com/557751.html

    An interesting take on the matter from the early 2020.

  42. I am not an antivaxxer at all.

    OK, fair enough, I might have confused you with someone else.

    Why the Chinese presented Covid as an “apocalyptic virus “, proceeded with an extreme response to its appearance is another interesting question altogether. A question you might possibly want to investigate one day.

    You have an unknown virus rampaging through one of your major cities with some people falling down dead on the streets and the very earliest estimates of IFR being as high as 10%. Why would it be so surprising that they’d go loco under such circumstances. Most responsible countries would.

  43. AgainstAilments says

    Paul Robinsons with his “Russia better not Novichok any more people.” I’m not sure how an ex-UK spook is some kind of a credible Russia analyst now.

  44. The Big Red Scary says

    Gospodin Keverich, is there a Sputnik V booth in your local shopping center? Do you think they are giving placebo or worse?

  45. The Big Red Scary says

    Moscow having just made vaccination mandatory for people employed in state services

    I myself have just received marching orders. There are ways around it for enthusiastic anti-vaxxers, but I was planning to get sputniked anyway, in case my immunity from an earlier live infection has started to wane.

  46. “where you got that data from” – GOGOV

    https://gogov.ru/articles/covid-v-stats

    На сегодня (20.06.21):
    19 675 725 чел. (13.46% от населения, 28.52% от плана**) – привито хотя бы одним компонентом вакцины
    15 248 371 чел. (10.43% от населения, 22.1% от плана**) – полностью привито

  47. sudden death says

    There are ways around it for enthusiastic anti-vaxxers,

    There might be quite shitty loop – anti-vaxxers will buy fake vax certificates, then get infected and sick, including mortal outcomes, thus overall infections will remain relatively high and Sputnik domestic protection stats will go down the drain too, therefore giving more mental weaponry for remaining anti-vaxxers.

  48. Street shitter says

    I saw Putin’s press conference after the summit, and something seemed off. He came across as nervous and not as self-confident as he usually is. Maybe Biden threatened something plausible, or maybe Putin wasn’t expecting the positive tone of the private meeting and had to improvise being gracious to Biden? I’m curious what the Russian take is.

    Generally, the thing with American attitudes to Putin/Russia is something like “we know you successfully interfered in our domestic politics, hacked all our systems, shut down a major pipeline on our own soil, but if you do this next thing (like let a Russian dissident die in prison) we’ll really get angry.”

    If Russia did half of what a lot of Americans think they did, where is the American response? What is America afraid of? Is it fear of miscalculation and a nuclear exchange? Of Russia siding with China in our new Cold War? Of something else that I am not aware of and isn’t discussed in Western media?

    If it is fear of Russia siding with China, do the sophisticated analysts that the American foreign policy establishment must have, really think that being slightly less bad to Putin/Russia is going to flip the country into the Western camp? Of course not. So what’s the deal? What’s going on?

  49. @Anatoly Karlin

    I don’t even know where you got that data from, it’s 13.3% as of today according to the most cited resource on vaccinations progress: https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations

    @utu

    https://gogov.ru/articles/covid-v-stats
    As of today (20.06.21) vaccinated
    19,675,725 people (13.46% of the population

    This is the same as what Karlin claims

  50. Street shitter says

    The closest geopolitical parallel to contemporary Russia in my mind is not Nazi Germany, as you most often hear in the USA (or even more so among Ukrainians I know), but de Gaulle’s France. It’s a former superpower that is punching above its weight from the initiative of one man. Once de Gualle was gone, France resumed its glide path to inconsequential power. Russia has a big territory, but it just doesn’t have the economic or demographic base to be a true rival to the USA or China (or later India). I personally think all the put downs of Russia as a weak country, declining power, Russia’s economy as smaller than Texas’s or Italy’s that you hear in America are just a kind of trash talk from the losing team, so to speak. But it is true that even at PPP, even assuming full development at some point in the future, 140 million people with low birth rates takes you to Japan, a true economic fading power that no one even considers anymore, not to the USA or China or EU.

  51. “This is the same as what Karlin claims” – If you thought so why you didn’t bring it up when Karlin wrote his comment and left his insinuation hanging that I did not know what I was talking about because my number was wrong? But it is not the same: “fully vaccinated” is not the same as “received at least one dose.” You do not have to side with Karlin on everything. Besides he can defend himself when he is correct and you won’t help him when he is wrong.

  52. Russia’s auto sales are somewhere between the UK, Italy, and Canada, so maybe the market exchange rate GDP figures are not far off, and then car prices are not really affected by PPP.

  53. “RusFed was not able to supply the msin part of Sputnik vaccines ” – This is what I am trying to convey that the vaccination rate is de facto supply limited. How many vaccines are being produced we do not know. But in late May it was suppose to be total of 33 million including 15 million for export, so 18 million for Russians. More recently I have read that the capacity to produce 30 million per month was about to be reached. Somewhere else I read that the technology to make Sputnik is such that many batches have to be rejected in the quality control stage. So the number of vats where the vaccine is brewing is not a guarantor of the final output.

    In May Mexico complained that they were not receiving the second dose.

    Mexico: Russia’s Sputnik V shortages mean limited 2nd doses
    https://apnews.com/article/world-news-mexico-russia-europe-coronavirus-vaccine-3f9b0455d1717c02e28fc710defee0ee

    Mexico has so far received only 1.9 million Sputnik V doses, out of a total of 24 million it has signed a contract for. It has been forced to rely more on the Pfizer vaccine, of which it has received 10.6 million doses, as well as about 10 million doses of two Chinese vaccines. It also received about 4.6 million doses from AstraZeneca.

    Too many promises have been made by Kremlin.

    Big promises, few doses: why Russia’s struggling to make Sputnik V doses
    https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/big-promises-few-doses-why-russias-struggling-make-sputnik-v-doses-2021-05-14/

    Hopefully production lines in other countries like India and China that are being talked about will be opened and the shortage of Sputnik V will be alleviated.

  54. Blinky Bill says

    That reminds me congratulations to Beckow, Slovakia produced more cars than either the UK or Czechs, for the first time in 2020.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_motor_vehicle_production

  55. Felix Keverich says

    Putin made the mistake of allowing US “journalists” into his presser, and their behavior was predictably outrageous. I imagine talks with American delegation weren’t pleasant either.

  56. Street shitter says

    Putin regularly has interviews with American/British media where the interviewer is very aggressive. This is not something he is unused to. But during his press conference after the summit, he came across as nervous and without the self-confidence that he usually has. I was just wondering why that was so.

  57. Demografie says

    Dude there are YouTube video of Russians roaming empty vaccination centers.

  58. Demografie says

    100x of nothing killed bull. There is demented American president who will never held normal interview or press conference. Yet Western journos act like if Putin left bunker after decade.

  59. Triteleia Laxa says

    This deserves to be copy and pasted:

    There are many social-media-savvy people who are choking on sanctimony and lacking in compassion, who can fluidly pontificate on Twitter about kindness but are unable to actually show kindness. People whose social media lives are case studies in emotional aridity. People for whom friendship, and its expectations of loyalty and compassion and support, no longer matter. People who claim to love literature – the messy stories of our humanity – but are also monomaniacally obsessed with whatever is the prevailing ideological orthodoxy. People who demand that you denounce your friends for flimsy reasons in order to remain a member of the chosen puritan class.

    Once you can see how those types of people are doing so much damage to others; but are doing even more damage to themselves, the whole SJW script becomes almost unbearable.

    If an ideology makes you act like a terrible person and leaves you miserable; there is something extremely wrong with that ideology.

    Shed it, move on, be whole.

  60. Bashibuzuk says

    Meanwhile in RusFed, the culture is “progressing ” a lot:

    How much is Buzova from Putin?

    The stars of degenerate shows become part of the beau-monde with the active assistance of the vertical of power and its overseers of culture

    The cultural program of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum angered the guardians of morality. Especially harshly the antics of the young transvestite Dani Milokhin were condemned by former liberals who quickly signed up as patriots. For example, a retired speechwriter Gorbachev and a former member of the editorial board of the American magazine Foreign Policy, published by the Carnegie Endowment (the Carnegie Moscow Center was later recognized as a foreign agent), chairman of the committee on information policy of the Federation Council, Alexei Pushkov. And the columnist of the Orthodox-monarchist channel “Tsargrad-TV” Andrei Perla, previously known for calls to imprison exclusively Russians for inciting ethnic hatred.

    Freshly baked guardians are right in this case – Dani’s degenerate circus has no place at SPIEF. Even if he is supported by the main publication of the government – “Rossiyskaya Gazeta” However, almost simultaneously, another similar organism – a girl of low social responsibility from the TV show “House-2” Olga Buzova – appeared in the Moscow Art Academic Theater named after Gorky in the role of a girlfriend of young Stalin. Not only the journalists of Rossiyskaya Gazeta were delighted, but also the “Tsargradtsy” who denounced Milokhin, headed by the head of the religious editorial office of the channel, Mikhail Tyurenkov. He even compared the administration of the Moscow Art Theater with Christ coming to sinners.

    Why is Danya worse than Olya? Yes, just behind his appearance at the SPIEF is the head of Sberbank, German Gref, whom spiritually strong patriots do not like. But the artistic director Eduard Boyakov and his deputy Zakhar Prilepin who invited Buzova to the Moscow Art Theater are now also Orthodox sovereigns and, therefore, they can. Moreover, Prilepin has just received a diploma for his work at the Moscow Art Theater from Vladimir Putin himself. This means that the appearance of a new star with a fee of almost half a million rubles has been sanctioned from the very top. Or even suggested. It was not for nothing that Buzova built Dom-2 together with Ksyusha Sobchak, the daughter of his former boss, the St. Petersburg mayor, who is close to the president.

    This is not the first time this has been observed in our country. For many years, the power vertical in every possible way supported and financed the already nauseating gallery owner Marat Gelman. The one who demonstrated the monkey with the orders of the Great Patriotic War and the model of the church with the domes of enemas. It was under Putin that Gelman became a member of the Public Chamber and, together with his accomplices, sucked the budget of the Perm region like a flock of leeches. They threw him out with great difficulty, but the treasury became impoverished by 2 billion. In exchange, the city received a giant P made of wood, an equally imposing statue of a dung beetle, and a squad of headless wooden men. The latter, clearly symbolized suckers, whom the gallery owner so successfully divorced from their moneys.

    Deciding to repeat the Permian drank in the Krasnodar Territory, Gelman met with the full support of its head – the Orthodox patriot, patron of the Cossacks and the head of the largest clan of local landowners, Alexander Tkachev. The assistance of the Moscow Patriarchate was promised by the head of the Synodal Department for Relations between Church and Society, Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin. However, the people again showed dissatisfaction, surrounded the place of the first exhibition and the father, less advanced than Chaplin, even spat in the face of Marat.

    The offended creator left Russia and now denounces the regime on which he parasitized, but a holy place is never empty. Now, instead of him, Buzova with Milokhin and not only. At the Moscow International Film Festival, under the roof of the chairman of the Union of Cinematographers of Russia and – of course – Orthodox patriot Nikita Mikhalkov, the British-Ukrainian-Estonian film “Firebird” about the same-sex love of a soldier and an officer of the Soviet army was successfully screened. The current regime will never abandon the course towards the degeneration of art, and here it is one with the liberal opposition. No wonder both came out of the same pockets of Yeltsin’s trousers and Sobchak’s jacket

    By Yuriy Neeson, the editor of Agency for the Political News. An old NazBol whom I hold in great respect for his incisive takes on the RusFed political realities

  61. songbird says

    I wonder if small dogs tend to live longer because lap dogs were companion animals more than they were work dogs (which would generally be larger dogs), so they were bred partly for longevity, perhaps accidentally, as owners wanted a puppy sired by their old dog.

    Also, how long could golden retrievers be made to live, if old sires were bred for 500 years? Oldest dog on record was 29 years 5 months, an Australian cattle dog

  62. Bashibuzuk says

    By Yuriy Neeson,

    Should read Yuriy Nesterov.

  63. They can’t. It’s not the ideology that causes it, it’s the participants that cause the ideology in the first place.

    Doubt there’s fixing ’em really. You get some stories about people who got out of it – but you can usually tell that they were duped to participate, or something similar, that they weren’t really in that deep.

    For the “true believers” even a month in the harshest wilderness where they would focus on their own survival and connect with nature wouldn’t fix it, at least that’s the impression I got.

  64. Daniel Chieh says

    Beautiful.

  65. Daniel Chieh says

    Smaller animals, I believe, just generally have less bodily stress; animals specifically bred to a purpose do tend to have to shortest life expectancies(dobermen, I’ve known seem to die at 9 years old as if on a clock).

  66. the best thing young people can do early in their careers is do #SexWork on the side because your early career prospects will be unstable, unpredictable, low pay, likely contract work and very much exploitative,”

    I don’t know about pay, but is this professor trying to propagate the idea that SexWork is stable, predicatable and not exploitive? What a bunch of BS.

  67. Спасибо Путину за подержку!

  68. Yellowface Anon says

    Indeed, this is the endpoint of financialization – of the individual. The “feudalism” in techno-feudalism.

  69. It’s what I was was saying a couple months ago during the war scare. Eventually the Ukrainians will figure out the same thing Bernard Lewis did. “America is harmless as an enemy, but treacherous as a friend”.

  70. Yellowface Anon says

    Only “classical” floomerism believes in the bug being no worse than annual flu outbreaks.

    The orthodox floomer position is that COVID is literally the flu and cold outbreaks, dressed up by very loose PCR tests reacting to common coronaviruses, as “cases” or even “asymptomatic cases” (i.e. not sick at all). Then most countries “react” based on the overblown data (and early on buggy models) to lockdown and segregate when opening up. This is why even masking up and standing a bit apart lead to floomer shrieks, and a lot go agorist rather than getting the shot – there is literally no disease ravaging the globe, no real isolation of the virus (fulfilling Koch’s postulates) and let alone a bioweapon, and everything is pandemic theater; whatever is in the vaccine, is pure evil.

    (Personally I’m more of a classical floomerist)

    Karlin’s position on makes good sense if it is not mandatory (as he has suggested in a tweet).

    Stop wondering why when Russian are used to getting things done in the underground economy, back in Soviet shortage times. Rather quit your jobs and go out less often than risk your conscience!

    The globalists need as much sheep as wolves out there so the resulting friction – this is why antivaxx stories circulate freely and even boosted by symbolic bans in legacy conventional and social media.

  71. What’s going on is that all of that:
    “we know you successfully interfered in our domestic politics, hacked all our systems, shut down a major pipeline on our own soil, but if you do this next thing (like let a Russian dissident die in prison) we’ll really get angry.”
    is generated for domestic political use.
    No serious person believes any of that happened. The US is backing off because it is unnecessarily worried that this rhetoric will drive the Russians closer to China, but that is, yet another, miscalculation. The Russians are working to use the relationship with China for their benefit, but have no intention of getting drawn in too close. China is the 600 pound gorilla just over the back fence, with 8-10 times Russia’s population and economy, and the Russians know they will have to struggle to keep from becoming a Canada to China’s USA.

  72. Felix Keverich says

    News coming out of Armenia indicate that Pashinyan wins reelection by a large margin. I certainly didn’t see it coming in November, as leaders presiding over lost wars tend to get booted very quick, but apparently Armenia’s opposition is even more pathetic than Pashinyan!

    With this Armenia cements its status as a failed state. Azeris will now have their way with it. Already taking over territory in Armenia’s proper.

  73. Yellowface Anon says

    Why can’t Armenia recover the demographic strength it had as a Soviet Republic (the only Christian one to have birth and pop. growth rates rivalling Islamic Azerbaijan and Central Asia)

    EDIT: turns out Armenia and Azerbaijan has very similar TFR but Azerbaijan has much larger cohorts of marrying age

    For that matter, why didn’t Georgia have a population boom post WWII? It had been closer demographically to Ukraine than Armenia.

  74. Felix Keverich says

    Georgia is a US state. The former Soviet Republic is called Gruzia.

  75. Ugly news from our Financial Wizards. The 30 year US Treasury is under 2% and dropping, and so is 10 year at 1.4%. Meanwhile, 3 month and 2 year are starting to climb.

    Now, to be clear, we are very far from yield curve inversion. I hope I’m wrong and that’s just market sending message to the Federal Reserve to not even think about raising rates or tapering. But if this is a beginning of a trend, we are looking at a recession by 2024-2025 which is a lot sooner than anticipated.

    Yield curve inversions are powerful things, they even see bat viruses coming a year in advance. (Curve inverted in March 2019). They rarely, if ever, miss.

    https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T10Y3M

  76. It’s striking how nonchalant Scott Alexander is when it comes to pointing out Jewish IQ supremacy while acknowledging the Black-White IQ gap seems to cause deep emotional distress for him:

    A while ago, I freaked out upon finding a study that seemed to show most expert scientists in the field agreed with Murray’s thesis in 1987 – about three times as many said the gap was due to a combination of genetics and environment as said it was just environment. Then I freaked out again when I found another study (here is the most recent version, from 2020) showing basically the same thing (about four times as many say it’s a combination of genetics and environment compared to just environment). I can’t find any expert surveys giving the expected result that they all agree this is dumb and definitely 100% environment and we can move on (I’d be very relieved if anybody could find those, or if they could explain why the ones I found were fake studies or fake experts or a biased sample, or explain how I’m misreading them or that they otherwise shouldn’t be trusted. If you have thoughts on this, please send me an email). I’ve vacillated back and forth on how to think about this question so many times, and right now my personal probability estimate is “I am still freaking out about this, go away go away go away”.

    On a personal level, I prefer anti-white Jews who honestly believe in tabula rasa, there’s some authenticity there which I can respect. On the other hand, I can’t help but despise those who are aware of racial IQ differences but ban the discussion of this extremely important question (except when it comes to Jewish IQ supremacy of course).

  77. Yellowface Anon says

    Aren’t we already in a depression that is possibly structural?

  78. Yellowface Anon says

    Demographic data in Turkey and Caucasian countries bugs me – all the 4 has TFR around 1.8-2, yet the Muslim pair (Turkey and Azerbaijan) still record demographic expansion while the Christian pair (Armenia & Sakartvelo) has their population drained into Russia.

    (Was trying to reply your later post pointing out “Gruzia”. I’m close to using “Hayastan” for Armenia but Armenia is unambiguous)

  79. LondonBob says

    Traced out a head and shoulders pattern, the plunge last night completes the right shoulder so they look ready to plunge over the next few weeks.

  80. Blinky Bill says

    https://i0.wp.com/www.russia-briefing.com/news/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/thumbnail_Russias-New-Caspian-Lagan-Port.jpg

    Russia is planning to build a port on the Caspian Sea near the city of Lagan to increase trade in the Caspian region and beyond. Plans to build the port have been included in Russian Federation Government plans for the region, issued last week.

    The redevelopment at Lagan Port will combine a container terminal with facilities for storing and loading a range of agricultural products, including a grain elevator with a storage capacity of 300,000 tonnes. Other terminals will handle vegetables, fruit and cooking oil.

    The grain and container terminals will each have a 5 million tonne capacity, and the liquid cargo terminal will have a capacity of 500,000 tonnes.

    Altogether, the port will have a transshipment capacity of 12.5 million tonnes; at present all Russian ports on the Caspian have a capacity of 7.5 million tonnes.

    https://i2.wp.com/www.silkroadbriefing.com/news/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Eurasia-Canal-1.jpg

    Dredging will also be carried out to deepen the existing port’s seaway to 13m. Much of the cargo carried on the Caspian is not containerized, so its adoption is seen as a way of increasing Russia’s trade with the Gulf countries and India, via Iran. In the reverse direction, the port will offer options for Chinese goods bound for Europe.

    The port will be built in the Russian Buddhist Republic of Kalmykia that has long lobbied for Russian investment in a seaport. Moscow is now more responsive, owing in part to the silting up of its main Caspian port at Astrakhan.

    The Kremlin is also considering the possibility of building a ship canal between the Caspian and the Sea of Azov, on the north of the Black Sea to provide a shorter route than the existing Volga–Don Canal.

    Products shipped too and from Lagan have four opportunities to join the Belt & Road Initiative routes. They can utilize Russian rail connectivity from Lagan north to the main Moscow line, which also connects to the Trans-Siberian rail heading East across Kazakhstan and onto China, they can cross the Caspian east to the Kazakh and Turkmen Ports of Aqtau and Turkmenbashi, they can head south-west and connect with Baku Port in Azerbaijan and access the BTK rail through to the Black Sea and ultimately to Turkey and Europe, or they can head due south to Iran’s Caspian Anzali Port (also a Free Trade Zone) or further east to the Amirabad Port and link up with the International North-South Transport Corridor which heads via highway south to the Iranian Port of Chabahar and then onto India.

    Onto The Russian Heartland Via The Volga, Lagan is close to the existing Port of Astrakhan, just a 2.5 hour drive away. While Astrakhan is subject to silting at the mouth of the Volga River, it will remain the main transshipment route up the river. This is strategically important, as the Volga is Europe’s longest River at over 3,500km and possesses eleven cities along the route with populations in excess of 1 million. Lagan will become a transit port handling ships too large to berth at Astrakhan but will instead break down cargo due to access the Russian heartland from Astrakhan.

    Vitaly Daginov, general director of Lagan Port stated in March that the expected cost of redeveloping the port, together with its road and rail links, was US$1.6 billion.

    Several Iranian companies have expressed interest in investing in Lagan Port as well as China’s Poly Group, and China Energy Engineering Group International.

  81. Bashibuzuk says

    What’s funny is that people really believe that the RusFed elites are conservative or even traditionalist.

  82. Bashibuzuk says

    Yield curve inversions are powerful things, they even see bat viruses coming a year in advance. (Curve inverted in March 2019). They rarely, if ever, miss.

    They are so powerful that they induce mutations in bat viruses and cause them to switch hosts somewhere on the other side of the planet, conveniently just a few blocks away from a BSL4 lab. That’s how powerful they are.

    https://youtu.be/uqZZ72UbOgA

  83. AltanBakshi says

    Even thus, they are a few generations behind western elites in the “progress.” Bashi now it’s important to play for time, before or later we will see the fruits of the progress, then those who are little behind have time to act, and snip the disease in the bud.

  84. Blinky Bill says
  85. Blinky Bill says
  86. (dobermen, I’ve known seem to die at 9 years old as if on a clock)

    Maybe if you serve no purpose in life it’s just not worth the effort.

    There’s an idea among working class people that individuals who have spent their lives working full time, and who did not develop leisure interests and do not do so upon retirement tend to die rather soon after retirement.

  87. Agathoklis says

    Turkey’s slightly higher TFR is from their internal enemies, the Kurds. Give it some time. The fireworks will start soon.

  88. Triteleia Laxa says

    I took this from some silly Chinese propaganda piece elsewhere on the site, but I feel that my inference from it must be shared.

    “[T]he lack of mutations since its discovery [… suggests that] it was already adapted to humans. [… Certain properties] have never been detected in nature”, he said.[62] Segreto and Deigin argue (Bio Essays, November 17, 2020) that the most striking difference between RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2 is “the furin cleavage site”, which makes the virus very contagious. It is previously not identified in other beta coronaviruses (incl. SARS, MERS and SADS),[63] and according to Nicholas Wade (Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, May 5, 2021), a beta coronavirus can, in nature, only re-combinate with other beta coronaviruses, while a beta coronavirus has never been found to have a “furin cleavage site”.

    1. Beta coronaviruses can re-combinate with other beta coronaviruses in nature.
    2. SARS, MERS etc. are much more lethal than Covid-19, but lack its contagiousness, because they’ve never developed a furin cleavage site.

    3. There is now a virus endemic to the world, from which they might gain this contagiousness.

    4. Total nightmare scenario.

    Please someone tell I am wrong? Otherwise, this needs to be planned for now. As many as 35% of MERS patients die.

    The effects of MERS gaining Covid-19 like contagiousness are beyond my contemplation, and in the realms of science fiction horror story.

  89. Bashibuzuk says

    Shrinking the Technosphere begins by contesting some deeply held, seldom-questioned beliefs about technology. It’s commonly assumed that modern machines allow us to work more efficiently than in the past, that more of them is always better, that new innovations are invariably superior to what they replace and that technology in general holds the key to solving any problem we may face. Yet, as Orlov shows, the evidence doesn’t support these assertions. The supposed efficiencies and beneficence of today’s advanced industrial technologies disappear when one takes negative externalities into account.

    https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-12-29/review-shrinking-the-technosphere-by-dmitry-orlov/

    In short, the corporate culture of externalizing costs and downsizing worked for the bottom line, but as a legitimating ISA it could only lead to the final problem with its own final solution: the ‘carbon footprint’ human beings are now the redundant workforce to be done away with. With automation and roboticization, no human being will be essential. All human life is inessential.

    https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/04/19/great-reset-morality-euthanization-of-inessentials/

    Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy’s resources

    https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/198384.Nick_Land

    I do not believe in an accidental lab leak. This virus is too useful a tool.

    Also look up comments by Levtraro about “segregated governance “.

    Blessed be all types of sentience…(Sarc.)

  90. Bashibuzuk says

    The effects of MERS gaining Covid-19 like contagiousness are beyond my contemplation, and in the realms of science fiction horror story.

    Please take the time to look through my reply to Blinky Bill. We live in the realm of science fiction horror story. We are close to win its jackpot.

    In one of the early stubs, it is Trump who won the 2016 election, and although no nuclear conflagration occurred then, a series of rolling catastrophes remembered by history as The Jackpot, ensued. The Jackpot resulted in massive depopulation, the destruction of democracy globally, and a system of interlocking fiefdoms run by a new governance structure openly acknowledged to be a kleptocracy.

    https://bombthrower.com/articles/welcome-to-the-jackpot/

    We are entering a bottleneck as a species. Few genetic lineages will emerge on the other end of the bottleneck…

  91. Malenfant says

    William Gibson has always been a little too prescient.

    The Jackpot was first described in 2014’s “The Peripheral.” You mentioned Nick Land — I remember discussing Gibson’s novel and The Jackpot on Nick Land’s blog, back then. Now it seems almost eerie.

    As it happens, 2014 was when shit really started rolling downhill and picking up speed…

  92. Bashibuzuk says

    Bashi now it’s important to play for time, before or later we will see the fruits of the progress, then those who are little behind have time to act, and snip the disease in the bud.

    It is too late to snip the disease in its bud. It should have been done 3500 years ago. The Zoroastrian eschatology and its influence on the emerging Abrahamic Creeds should have been prevented to avoid what we are witnessing today. We should have kept a Circular Chronological Outlook (CCO – I just coined the term right now).

    But perhaps as Daniel Chieh once astutely wrote : “It has always been too late”.

    May the Holder of the Wheel of Time have great compassion towards the immense suffering of the sentient beings’ multitudes. May the Listening to the Cries of these multitudes extend the myriad helping hands to prevent them from drowning deeper into the Cycle of causality.

    May we reach the Other Shore sooner rather than later.

  93. Agathoklis says

    It is true that when Europe shifted its world view from paganism (in other words Hellenism); particularly, Homer, Hesiod, Archilocus, the pre-Socratics and Epicureans, the die was cast. If we had avoided Abraham and his offshoots, then the transition to Darwinism would have been much less painless.

  94. Yellowface Anon says

    Yes I know, the western parts have Balkan-level TFRs – Thrace is literally in the Balkans.

  95. Yellowface Anon says

    I’ll say a war manufactured between China and the US will be another killer as the upcoming real plague. Even if we have 100% infection, the plague alone will probably only take away ~1/3 of of population (taking the fatality rate of MERS), the war can get rid of another ~1/5 or ~1/4, maybe throw in some artificial famines and we’ll have enough to fulfill the resource conservation goals sought by Davos. And when we emerge in the other end we’ll either be enserfed or running away from “advanced” technologies controlled by the elite. Malthusian Industrialism, but the industrialism is a shortage economy employed to control those in the system.

    The Tao will still be! Hear the Tao in the morning and we can pass away the same night.

  96. Malenfant says

    As Ezra Pound once alluded to, the great tragedy of Rome is that it spurned its native prophet — the Neopythagorean Apollonius of Tyana — in favor of an alien, Semitic prophet. This was the ultimate wasted opportunity. The nascent religion that was forming around the person of Apollonius had begun to combine the best of Christianity’s moral concepts with the best aesthetic and philosophical conceptions of Hellenic paganism, yet with none of the slave morality of the former, and none of the rank absurdities of the latter.

    The failure mode for most Roman religions is that they became insular mystery cults, or that they were simply too complex or ritualistic for mass comprehension. Christianity succeeded because it was just the opposite, and appealed particularly to the lowest and most numerous.

    It’s just a shame. Such a wasted opportunity.

  97. “Kartvelia” sounds cooler, though.

    On the other hand, Azerbaijan is literally Shia Turkey.

  98. songbird says

    I’ve heard this theory before. I think it is interesting because it seems to partly harmonize with Rushton’s theories about life history. For example, that a woman who develops large breasts early is putting energy into those breasts and will likely age faster.

    I don’t think it is wrong exactly, but I don’t think it is an intractable rule of nature. That is, I think it is “harder” for a puppy to rapidly grow, and that tends to cause more rapid aging, but not that large body size requires rapid aging (think elephants), if the growth process is done in a more correct way. For example, perhaps slower maturation.

    Then there might be additional factors. A doberman is an aggressive breed, that may cause more stress than if it had a golden retriever’s personality. A guard dog also needs to match humans in a fight, which is a difficult task that requires them to be in top form, and they were probably culled when they got arthritic. Historically, most could not afford to feed large dogs, so the gene pool of large dogs is probably a lot smaller and filled with mutational load.

    Interesting that a cattle dog was the oldest on record. In some capacity, they were ruthlessly bred for intelligence, and there may be knock on effects of less mutational load.

  99. Yes, but we are supposed to be exiting it an resuming subpar growth driven by government spending.

    I wrote about when I proclaimed the end of the American Consumer due to working age demographics tanking, and Joe Biden’s budget planners seconded that when they proposed $6-8 trillion budgets to generate sub-2% growth for the remainder of the decade. We were supposed to have slow growth, not another recession dip, this decade.

    Fed, for all their musing, is unlikely to hike, or even taper – they are not suicidal. US Treasury is spending the last of the Trump pandemic cash right now, so in just a few months they will need to sell massive new amount of US debt to keep operating. This is impossible without the Fed.

    So the only way to recession that I can see is pull back on government spending. Maybe if Republicans take over Congress and force an economic Depression. I guess we will see.

  100. Yellowface Anon says

    https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Media-Entertainment/Apple-Daily-to-shut-unless-Hong-Kong-police-release-frozen-funds

    Apple Daily will cease to operate on Friday unless authorities unfreeze assets linked to the arrest of its top editors and executives, according to a decision by the board of its parent company announced to employees.

    According to the internal memo seen by Nikkei Asia, parent company Next Digital has appealed to Hong Kong’s Security Bureau to release 18 million Hong Kong dollars ($2.32 million) of assets of three group companies that were frozen last week after the arrest of Apple’s editor-in-chief, Next’s chief executive and three other managers under the city’s national security law.

    Next’s board is to reconvene on Friday and has given the government a deadline to respond by 11:59 p.m. the same day. Failure to secure the funds would mean Saturday morning’s edition would be the paper’s last.

    Hong Kong national security police last Thursday raided Apple’s newsroom and Next’s offices as well as the homes of the five managers arrested on allegations of “collusion with foreign forces.” The allegations relate to some 30 articles that the authorities claimed called for the imposition of sanctions by foreign governments and organizations on Hong Kong or China.

    Everyone following HK closely will know what Jimmy Lai has been doing all the time. One of the nodes of US influence in HK goes out, but the ground is now toxic enough to sustain the color revolution.

    The last paragraph I’ve quoted might prove to be ironical. If the US acted hard HK might lose 70% of GDP overnight, and this could trigger a Syrian-style refugee crisis, instead of a Baltic-style brain drain. After all, HK’s housing bubble and money valving (which is the entire economy now that the borders with China are still closed and everyone is saving for emigration) is extremely dependent on its USD peg the and the lack of capital controls. You can see how unilateral sanctions is pure American evil that were never possible in any commodity standard or national fiat standards.

  101. AltanBakshi says

    It is too late to snip the disease in its bud. It should have been done 3500 years ago.

    You sound almost Evolian.

    https://i.pinimg.com/originals/12/37/ab/1237abc6fea295bc2279586f40a5626c.jpg

    Good guy!

  102. Agathoklis says

    I think it was very unlikely Apollonios was influenced by Christianity and Judaism if that is what you are suggesting. Almost everything we know of Apollonios is mediated through Philostratos who was one of the representatives of the Second Sophistic (a literary movement of Hellenic chauvinism) and the Roman circles he operated in. Personally, I think he was a much more minor figure than what we are made to believe; although, he is clearly superior to Jesus. I think the lost of opportunity was that the late Neoplatonists like Proklos, Simplikios, Damaskios, Olympiodoros did not garner the institutional support to survive as a discrete worldview. Clearly it was too late by then. They were probably too cerebral to ever have mass appeal and this is where St Paul showed his genius in creating the Absolute or the One in the figure of a mere Jewish preacher.

    Of course, many elements of Neoplatonism survived in Christianity, notably in the thought of Gregory of Nyssa, Maximos the Confessor and Dionysios Areopagitos, and later thinkers like Michaelis Psellos, Ioannis Italos and Gemistos Plethon and Bessarion, and some, Westerners. Also, Avicenna and Al-Faribi somewhat kept the torch alive but continuity was clearly broken much earlier.

  103. AltanBakshi says

    Bashi this is my reply to your Superyacht comment in previous thread.

    Ancient Aryans of the steppes believed that blood of the kings is holy, and curse will be upon those who have bled the royal blood, later Mongols and Turks too had such beliefs, which they probably had learned from Aryan shamans and holy men. Even Ottomans continued to have such beliefs, and for that reason Mongols and Turks very carefully killed those of Royal blood by various other means than by bleeding their blood, in this we can see how Aryan belief of sacredness of kingship had degenerated into superstition about magical powers of royal blood. Anyhow, Bolsheviks bled the holy blood of Romanovs and in the process cursed their land, for it is one thing to kill kings of other nations, but to kill one’s own rightful lord and master is indeed a transgression almost without comparison. In this matter Chinese and Mao were much wiser than Lenin, Trotsky and their kin. For Chinese did not kill their Emperor, but let him live his last days peacefully as a simple gardener. Regicide is indeed a horrible crime, one of the worst that nation can commit, there’s only one crime even worse…

  104. If we imagine the “life-situation” of the world as a line, the downhill part started way back in the 90’s. The ball could have been stopped right then and there, but with the violent dismantlement of Yugoslavia, the still potentially friendly Russia (and China) got the message and the intention quite clearly. The west is not agreement-capable, or even cooperation-capable. The steps to this insanity have been taken way back then.

    The slope started to steepen in 2003, then in 2008, then in 2012. By 2016 it was rather steep.

    2020 is when it just became a straight up cliff.

  105. Bashibuzuk says

    You sound almost Evolian

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolt_Against_the_Modern_World

    Evola did nothing wrong…

    https://youtu.be/ssEi4RjPqng

    https://youtu.be/GyYynOSyMCU

    Of course I sound Evolian, have been for some time now…

  106. Triteleia Laxa says

    If killing your King “curses” you for a few hundred years after doing so, maybe ambitious peoples need to kill their King in the English manner.

    300 years of global dominance, despite being a little island nation, is a counter-intuitive effect of a curse.

    Nevermind creating modernity and having much of your culture, language and customs become universal.

    If the juice from that act ran out last Century, it’d sorely tempt an English nationalist to do it again.

  107. Bashibuzuk says

    Some among the Bolshevik saw the murder of the Gentile Tsar and his family as a blood sacrifice to their G-d. The confirmation that all idols will be put down. This is what you get when you play by Abrahamic Creed rules: the prophecies of Isaiah become a reality.

    As one of the great Athonite monks has once said : “do not believe in superstition and it will not become a reality “. The Romanov dynasty believed in the superstition, both its “Christian” and “Progress” aspects. They had it coming because they did not want to make a choice between these two dialectical extremes of the same eschatology. The British royals made eagerly the choice of the “Progress” side of the Abrahamic coin. That is why they are now welcome at Davos and allowed to “Build Back Better “.

    One cannot serve two masters…

  108. It’s called a self-fulfilling prophecy.

    Rome and Byzantium had no qualms about killing their kings and emperors on the first sign of idiocy (befitting as they’re all basically glorified warlords) and they were fine, only collapsing a long long time later

  109. Mr. Hack says

    although, he is clearly superior to Jesus.

    He had something greater to offer humanity than Theosis? Tell me more, you’ve captured my imagination…

  110. Yellowface Anon says

    Isn’t it always too late? You should read the other comments by bashi.

  111. Yellowface Anon says

    You’re projecting a Japan onto the US. Japan didn’t undergo a post-Soviet-style economic transition in 1990!

  112. AltanBakshi says

    You are correct. I did not write my post down without thinking of famous French and English examples of regicide. French suffered very heavily for the whole 19th century, Napolenic wars, Bourbon restoration, White terror, revolution of 1830, revolt of 1832 depicted in Les Miserables, revolution of 1848, downfall of French Empire, Paris commune. But the story of English was totally different, unparalleled story of success, it could be said that they unleashed the forces of modernity by killing their king, but maybe they sold their soul in the process. No wonder that so many of us here call them by the name of Eternal Anglo… But then I don’t believe in the soul… Hah!

  113. Mr. Hack says

    I am absolutely unsure whether the current generation of vaccines can really protect against the novel variants and I am still worried about potential ADE effects after the virus infection anc vaccination.

    Please expand on this information, I’m very interested. Also, if you use any acronyms in your reply, be sure to explain what they mean. Thanks!

  114. there’s only one crime even worse…

    Go on, don’t stop now.

  115. Agathoklis says

    There is nothing to suggest that Jesus is responsible for the doctrine of Theosis but later Greek Fathers like Ireneos, Clement, Origen, Athanasios and explicitly, Gregory Nazanzios. They were all heavily under the influence of the Greek philosophical schools of their time; especially, Middle Platonism and Neoplatonism. We can probably attribute the origin of Theosis in Phaedrus or Timeaus by Plato where he outlines, that by contemplating of the Ideal Forms, one can ascent to a God-like state of being or assimilate with God. However, it is also possible that the doctrine has deeper roots in Pythagoras. Apollonios was considered a Neo-Pythagorean.

  116. AltanBakshi says

    What about the uncreated Light of Mount Tabor? A clear biblical precedent in my opinion.

  117. Yellowface Anon says

    ADE is antibody dependent enhancement, where vaccinations induce predominantly binding antibodies and “paradoxically” worsen viral infection outcomes. A lot of coronaviruses can induce this effect and it is one of the reason there haven’t been genuine successes of producing a coronavirus vaccine.

    This is one of the reasons hardcore antivaxxers will stay away from any COVID vaccines since it is seen to be nearly unsolvable and by their risk calculation existing vaccines will worsen their chance of surviving COVID, in case they catch it.

  118. Theosis, similarly to the concept of the Trinity were weaved together strictly from biblical precepts. written under the direct influence of the Holy Spirit. God allowed his creation to use its abilities to reason and realize that 2 + 2 = 4.

  119. sudden death says

    If killing your King “curses” you for a few hundred years after doing so, maybe ambitious peoples need to kill their King in the English manner.

    English manner being that they relatively quickly corrected that and reinstated the monarchy, differently from French and Russians? 😉

  120. Morton's toes says

    If it’s any consolation the top google hit for moscow gay pride is the following:

    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-19293465

    Gay parades banned in Moscow for 100 years; 17 August 2012

    According to slatestarcodex the gay pride parade in San Francisco is a bigger civic holiday than Christmas. He is a jewish psychiatrist who dates trannies, but still. According to Tyler Cowen and Eric Weinstein he is the biggest thing in cyberspace since ever as far as making good sense and public policy commentary.

    Perhaps the Russian media homo tranny episodes are more in the mode of let’s all have a big laugh at these sick jokes about these screwed up people? If you can’t laugh at Scott Alexander perhaps the psychiatric drug manufacturers have a pill for that.

    Your glass may be half empty but it still has something left in it is what I am trying to say.

  121. Daniel Chieh says

    A guard dog also needs to match humans in a fight, which is a difficult task that requires them to be in top form, and they were probably culled when they got arthritic

    Dobermen seem to die of heart issues:

    https://cvm.ncsu.edu/dobermans-with-genetic-heart-disorder-may-be-model-for-human-treatments/#:~:text=Dilated%20cardiomyopathy%20is%20a%20fatal,sudden%20death%20in%20adult%20dogs.

    It may be that they’re simply bred for performance that’s high risk for their bodies, similar to thoroughbred bone issues in horses.

  122. Nobody cares. Maybe you should write to that LGBT rights index website and request Russia’s position be raised from 10/100 to 12/100.

    That said, one genuine regression that did take place recently in response to normie outrage over the Kazan school shooting is a further tightening of Russia’s already highly restrictive gun laws.

    https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E4aDh1YWQAo-_l2.jpg

    There’s not much to be done about that, with Russian attitudes on gun rights being essentially the same as British ones (90% oppose). This is sad, though, since the Russian Empire was a free country in this respect: https://www.unz.com/akarlin/russias-gun-culture/

    The US is a genuinely quite unique country here by developed world standards.

  123. Well, that’s what they were indoctrinated into.

    The true basedeen will support mandatory arming of the populace, those who are disqualified from owning weapons being automatically treated like bottom class citizens

  124. Not Raul says

    Doesn’t L2 make it easier for government agencies to track transactions?

  125. AltanBakshi says

    there’s only one crime even worse…

    Genocide, religious persecution, so many good answers… Of course no one among the present day people is responsible for murdering of Romanovs, or should suffer because of it, but it’s an important symbol in, hmm, let’s say in Jungian sense, and we should not forget why such things happened. Better for us to remember, lest we repeat the tragedies of the past.

    Mr. Hack sometimes I write seriously and sometimes more metaphorically, it’s of course my mistake that this time I did not make it clear.

    Nikolai II himself was not very decisive nor imaginative man, or so I have understood, ruler and especially autocrat is always at least partially responsible for the fate of his nation… Still even though he had a heavy burden and mistakes were made, he was a good man and a true father of his nation, even rulers arise in dependence with other causes/phenomena, not in isolation.

  126. Philip Owen says

    There’s always been a Russian plot to invade India. Unlike the E-W silk road the N-S route connects dense enough populations and large enoguh cities to perhaps be viable. Pity Pakistan and China are in the way of wholly land based routes. I have looked at moving peanuts from India to Russia and loading/unloading charges are punitive. (No direct ships = cargoes are transferred in Dubai). Same for Russian sunflower oil to Afghanistan via sea.

  127. AltanBakshi says

    I don’t get your point, Orthodoxy is the least Abrahamic of all Abrahamic creeds, in reality almost non-Abrahamic, after all Orthodox Church believes that She is the true Israel of the Lord and the covenant of Jews is over, which was also the belief of Early Christians of Roman Empire. It’s interesting that the Orthodox Old Testament or Septuagint was originally written in Greek among Hellenic Jews of Ptolemaic kingdom, but Old Testament of Catholics was translated directly from Hebrew by St Jerome, I have understood that there are quite many small but critically important differences between Hebrew Torah and Orthodox Septuagint.

    Lets also not forget that Orthodox Church lacked the fanatical and purist attitude of western Christians with Pagans, Muslims and Buddhists, Paganism is still well alive among Mari people, who have lived at least five hundred years as subjects of Russia, same with the Tatars of Volga, who are Muslims, or with many other nations of former Russian empire. Therefore Orthodox church had no same drive in putting down “false idols” of other people as her Abrahamic siblings had, but yes there is one stain, the harsh persecution of Starovery, but in my understanding there was no violent persecution of them in the 18th century anymore. Relations with Catholics too were often tense, but that is a long and complicated story…

  128. Philip Owen says

    52 bioreactors still not delivered. Millions of sterile eggs needed. Russia has lab scale production facilities. High volume vaccine production is still many months away or some buyback of Indian production. Antivax has been convenient. The Russian Ministry of Health meeting to discuss production planning is buried in the newsfeed on my site somewhere about a month ago. (so about 500 stories back).

  129. 40 Lashes Less One says

    Anatoly, what is this bitcoin supercycle theory I keep hearing about?

  130. Cycles are getting longer. This is the basis (or copium) for the idea that we are currently only in a mini-bear market. Good video:

  131. Vladimir Pozner on WABC Talk Radio

    Re: https://wabcradio.com/episode/vladimir-pozner-6-17-21/

    Frank Morano is positively different than most US mass media hosts on Russia related matters. Tucker Carlson was noticeably silent on last week’s summit. Following up on the topics discussed in the below exchange:

    Vladimir Pozner’s comments about media looking to be negative is incomplete. In comparative terms, Anglo-American mass media isn’t so negative towards Kiev regime Ukraine foibles, as well as mass media’s hypocritical approach to Alexey Navalny versus Julian Assange and a number of other issues.

    Trump’s comments about Nord Stream 2 ignore that the construction of that project wasn’t hindered at all during his presidency.

    Great comments on the cyber-hacking issue, how many (not all) Americans are subconsciously duped on issues they don’t follow in great detail, as in relying exclusively on their mass media.

    Some disagreement with Pozner on Russians losing their jobs if they criticize Putin. Multiple sources tell me that Moscow University and some other venues employ open critics of Putin. Some appropriate whataboutism on this matter – can Americans be employed in US government foreign policy and most mass media positions for expressing views like mine?

    Interesting 2003 exchange between Chuck Schumer and Putin rehashed at the end.

  132. yakushimaru says

    Or you can look at it from a different perspective. That he goes with the tide. The tide has now changed direction.

  133. Philip Owen says

    But then Ireland and Scotland which hung on to the Stuart legacy. Thus Ireland is still conflicted and divided, Scotland may leave the Union. The Stuarts were Scottish. Indeed, there is a strong argument that Cromwell’s republican experiment led many North American colonies to question the legitimacy of the King and revolt for independence. There are reasons the Stuart period is not covered in a lot of depth in British schools. The Tudors are much safer.

  134. Russia is producing 30M doses a month.

  135. 40 Lashes Less One says

    I feel like a fool for not selling at the peak

  136. I met Pozner once at a conference and was struck by his visible unease. He is too nuanced and clever and ritualistically throws in a few Western cliches, like “lose your job if you criticize Putin“, unverifiable stereotypes that would be common around the world, including in Washington.

    There is no inappropriate whataboutism; Navalny, Assange, Basque separatists, Crimea, Kosovo – we live in a single mental space, to ban comparing it is ludicrous. Whataboutism is a defense in a discussion invented by the West when they started to lose. It is akin to a similar invention of conspiracy theory to avoid addressing inconvenient realities. (Every theory is also a “conspiracy”, it wouldn’t be a theory if we would know for sure.)

  137. I met Pozner once at a conference and was struck by his visible unease. He is too nuanced and clever. He ritualistically throws in Western cliches, like “lose your job if you criticize Putin“, unverifiable stereotypes that are common around the world, including in Washington.

    There is no inappropriate whataboutism; Navalny, Assange, Basque separatists, Crimea, Kosovo – we live in a single mental space, to ban comparing it is ludicrous. Whataboutism is a lame defense invented by the West when they started to lose arguments. It is akin to similar invention of a conspiracy theory to avoid addressing inconvenient realities. (Every theory is also a “conspiracy”, it wouldn’t be a theory if we would know for sure.)

  138. My top senses short-circuited this time as well. It was obvious, I suppose, but only in retrospect – very much unlike in 2018.

  139. Bashibuzuk says

    Another Gem from Pavel Pryannikov’s Telegram’s blog:

    The honorable Harun Sidorov posted a link to an article trying to clarify the love of Russian and Ukrainian Jewry for Israel.

    https://t.me/HVSchannel/4843

    There is a lot of historical detail but, in my opinion, the main thing is not said: post-Soviet Jews see in Israel their unfulfilled project in Northern Eurasia.

    Let’s be honest, at least half of the politicized class in these two countries has Jewish roots. At least a quarter (but which gives the right to repatriation), as, for example, the granddaughter of Rabbi Ksenia Sobchak. In Ukraine, the president is generally a Jew.

    I will not write about Ukraine, but in Russia this politicized class is not more numeroud than 1 million people, and up to 500 thousand in it are people with Jewish roots (and there are 1-1.3 million people in total with the right to repatriation in Russia).

    Israel for them is “the Russia that we have lost.” They are rooting for their dream, a phantom, which, as it seemed, they were holding in their hands in the 90s, and missed.

    And it is clear that the end would be for both countries of Ukraine and Russia, if the Judaized political class – the right neocons – had won. A president like a “strong man Netanyahu” (as at one time three top Jews from the Union of Right Forces – Kiriyenko, Nemtsov and Khakamada said: “The Union of Right Forces to the Duma, Putin to the presidency!”), But with a combination of strong parliamentary democracy, where every vote is important, like in the Knesset with their multi-party system.

    Personally, I see it as a great tragedy that Russian Jews went to the right, completely exposing the left. And that is why the leftist idea without Jews has become completely simplified in our country, archaic. The concentrate of this can be called the equivalent of Russian far-right Q-anon movement “Russkyi Lad” within the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, where, like their brothers, who stormed the American Capitol, the members also walk wearing skins. Those. it is almost the “Black Hundreds”, but as a part of a kind of socialist (!) movement.

    Two years ago, at a debate in the synagogue with the Shahar, I spoke about this regret, and then it turned out that up to half of the Jews who came there also expressed this regret, but they do not see whom they could join in the left movement, so that’s it. the left went along with the country into the New Dark Ages. Of the prominent left-wing Jews in Russia, I can only recall the respected Boris Yulievich Kagarlitsky, who is favorably distinguished by his intelligence and erudition against the background of a kind of left-wing social-conservatism.

    Pryannikov is himself Jewish so he knows what he is writing about.

  140. Bashibuzuk says

    Pozner is much more French/American than he is Russian. He has told it himself more than once, that he did not consider Russia as his homeland and often wished to go back to France where he spent his childhood.

  141. Shortsword says
  142. As far as I know he lives in Moscow and makes his living of Russia. He probably has multiple passports. The comprador world can be very complex, but at the bottom of it is the fact that there is no money for nothing…(on the other hand, chicks can be free).

  143. Philip Owen says

    That was not so a month ago when the crisis meetings were going on.

    Without action to im[prove capacity, the discussion was February 2023 to complete vaccinantions.

  144. 40 Lashes Less One says

    The Dogecoin mania should have been the sign.

  145. imma throw a couple hundred euros on ETH. Don’t need it right away, so it’s a good investment then

  146. songbird says

    In a way, everything is a product of its time, and Walt kicked the bucket before the big social changes occurred. That said, I think he was at least weakly a man of the Right, otherwise he probably would not be so smeared today.

    I doubt he would have approved of Disney now, but I’m not sure how much he would have been able to control it, as big as it is.

  147. Agathoklis says

    I have just pointed out to you that Theosis has antecedents in pre-Christian Greek thought. Similarly, the concept of the Trinity is not particularly original in a broad sense. Philo of Alexandria, who was deeply influenced by Plato; especially, Timeaus and the Pythagoreans, interpreted Jewish scripture through a Platonic lens and conceived of a sort of Trinity. Also, the Middle Platonist Numenius conceived of a ‘triad of gods, namely, Father, creator and creature; fore-father, offspring and descendant; and Father, maker and made’. The Neoplatonist Plotinus thought of triad of the ‘One, Intellect, and Soul, in which the latter two mysteriously emanate from the One’. Early Greek Fathers like Justin Martyr tried to get around the problem of Christian Trinitarian theology being rooted in Greek philosophy by claiming that Plato was inspired by Moses. Of course, this is ridiculous.

  148. Barbarossa says

    A agree with pretty much all your post, except for your positing that science can or has provided that “still center” necessary for civilization. I think that science is incapable of filling such a role because it provides no framework for reciprocity or ethics. It can tell us not to sneeze on people and such things, but that only operates on a crudely mechanistic level.

    As to the importance of etiquette and formalized interactions…
    In the past, disagreements and misunderstandings could easily end with someone disemboweled. Therefore it was of paramount importance not to misread intentions, hence a highly formalized system of conduct. Also people were in general much more reliant on each other in a given community. It wasn’t really possible to get ticked, write someone off, and move a state away like happens often enough today in our atomized society.

    It’s easy to burn bridges as a matter of course when we are encouraged to think we are all an island.

  149. I’m familiar with the addition of neo-Platonic thought within the evolvement of early Christian doctrine, and also some similarities found in the Zoroastrian faith system. And so many similar sayings uttered by both Gautama and Jesus. Men have been seeking deep spiritual answers to their inner questions since the earliest ages, and Christianity did not spring from a vacuum..

    But nowhere have I found the beauty and promises of a future life as found within the gospels as seen through the prism of Theosis:

    Psalm 82 vs 6: I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High.

    John 10 vs 34: Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods?

  150. Agathoklis says

    There is very little Theosis and Trinitarianism in the New Testament. These concepts developed later by reading them into the New Testament (exegesis) by mostly the Greek Fathers inspired by the Platonism, Pythagoreanism and Neoplatonism.

  151. Yellowface Anon says

    I forgot to add a caveat: the newest run of COVID vaccines, the inactivated ones from Sinopharm & Sinovac, claim to have solved ADE. Not sure about Sputnik V.
    (starting to use mobile, not sure if it affects anything and comment history might be separate)

  152. Yellowface Anon says

    Widespread gun ownership is an American phenomenon as far as the ideology is concerned (individual defence and force against potential state aggression). But physical fitness for personal defence is a common enough trait across cultures and societies, one that’s abrogated with the monopoly of violence in the modern state.

  153. Mr. Hack says

    These concepts developed later by reading them into the New Testament (exegesis) by mostly the Greek Fathers inspired by the Platonism, Pythagoreanism and Neoplatonism.

    Thank God for these synergistic developments. I would only add in the Old Testament too. BTW, the “very little” that you do acknowledge is sometimes referred to as a “pearl of great value”. There’s actually quite a bit within both the Old Testament and the New to build upon when developing the foundations of Theosis.

  154. Blinky Bill says

    There’s always been a Russian plot to invade India.

    The Russian East India Company, a threat to all Mankind!

    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/99/Ivan_the_Terrible_and_Horsey.jpg

  155. The Big Red Scary says

    Indeed, there is a strong argument that Cromwell’s republican experiment led many North American colonies to question the legitimacy of the King and revolt for independence.

    There’s a strong argument to be made that the American Revolution was just English Civil War II.

  156. The Big Red Scary says

    It’s clear form reading late 1st and early 2nd century Christian writings (St. Ignatius of Antioch and St. Irenaeus of Lyon, for example) that the later formalism of Trinitarian theology was not an innovation, but rather a “definition”, that is, a setting of precise boundaries to discourse concerning the ineffable.

    Anyhow, the idea that the scriptures can be interpreted outside the context of the tradition of the Church is an anachronism, since the very definition of what is scripture and what is not is determined by the tradition of the Church.

  157. The Big Red Scary says

    Yesterday, I got sputniked, and one of my colleagues, under 60 years old, died from covid.

  158. Agathoklis says

    Apologies, but I have spent little time on the Old Testament and neither do I plan to. It is simply not my history nor is it the history of an important people of the period like the Assyrians or Babylonians or Egyptians.

  159. Yellowface Anon says

    Even “gentile” Phoenician history is more consequential.

  160. Blinky Bill says
  161. Mr. Hack says

    Anyhow, the idea that the scriptures can be interpreted outside the context of the tradition of the Church is an anachronism, since the very definition of what is scripture and what is not is determined by the tradition of the Church.

    I believe that your statement is true. However, even Jesus pointed to things outside of the Old Testament when he spoke in parables to try and make certain points. If certain philosophical texts (or even religious ones) help(ed) to buttress the ideas within the gospels, pointing to perhaps some universal truths, then what’s the harm in using them? Even Orthodox monks are writing books about the echoes of the Christ to come heralded within Chinese culture. Hieromonk Damascene makes an excellent case for viewing Christ as the Tao prophesied by Lao Tzu in his very popular book “Christ the Eternal Tao”

    https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51MysLCx5CL._SY291_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_FMwebp_.jpg

  162. Agathoklis says

    Precisely. The Phoenicians built an enormous trading network and their offshoot almost toppled Rome while the other lot were stuck in a small desert for 40 years. There is nothing spiritual about failure and endless whining.

  163. The problem with lookism is that it doesn’t account for physiognomy.

  164. I have seen somewhere (June 3 or 4) Denis Manturov making statement about producing 30 million doses per months or by the end of June w/o specifying whether there were single or double doses. And also that Russia is exporting unfinished product which I presume might mean not in individual bottles.

    As we know many too optimistic pronouncements about vaccine production and deliveries were made in the past, so I would be careful about how to understand the tense “Russia is producing” that Karlin has used.

    Recently I learned that in December 2020 Russia imported vaccine from S. Korea:

    Russia Trumpets Vaccine Exports, While Quietly Importing Doses ( March 28, 2021)
    https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/28/world/europe/sputnik-vaccine-russia.html
    Russia Trumpets Vaccine Exports, While Quietly Importing Doses (March 28, 2021)

    Russia imported the South Korean-produced Sputnik V in December as it expanded the categories of people eligible for vaccination. The doses arrived in two Asiana Airlines cargo planes, according to an announcement by the airline, which was touting its cold shipment service.

    Russia received two cargo planes loaded with Sputnik V from the South Korean manufacturer, GL Rapha, in December and the company expects to send another shipment in coming days.

    and here is an interesting Kremlin spin on Putin with an admission of past shortage:

    The Kremlin this past week for the first time acknowledged that scarcity of the vaccine played a role in Mr. Putin’s decision to delay his own inoculation to avoid stimulating demand for shots before they became widely available outside the capital.

    In January, when Mr. Putin became eligible for a shot under Russian rules based on his age, “production was not yet sufficient to fully meet demand in the regions,” said his spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov.

  165. Scott is doing everything he can to avoid getting redpilled by the reality that he observes around him. Unfortunately, he’s not honest enough with himself to realize that that’s what he’s doing, so he says asinine things whenever he skirts into wrongthink territory.

  166. Philip Owen says

    On my commercial site which i run on another computer, I have the news story about the vaccine supply crisis meetin. Sputnik V has twice the problem of AZ because it uses two carriers. The prevention science was good but it reduces manufacturabilty. If just one carrier vat fails, the other is lost too because they don’t keep long so it is a double hit compared to AZ production failures. (Which happened about 12 months ago. The UK had a wobble).

  167. Barbarossa says

    My Dad owns that book and has read it, but I sadly have not and so cannot comment directly on it.

    I will say that having read the Tao Teh Ching, there is really nothing opposed to Christianity in it. With slightly different syntax most of it could fit right into Proverbs or Jesus’ teachings.

    There is only one Truth which is beyond our limited human intellect to fully grasp. While I believe Jesus’ teachings to be the pinnacle of earthly revelation, I do not think that truth was kept from the all the peoples of the Earth throughout time. There is certainly much truth and value to be gained from study of other worthy belief systems, while their deficiencies can be duly noted.

  168. * Where will Bitcoin go? My guess is that we’ll have a double peak this year (as in this video). But it’s impossible to be sure, of course. I think a multi-year bear market is highly unlikely.

    How come you understand what n=1 is and at the same time share this video without any hint of shame or cringe is beyond my understanding.

  169. Yellowface Anon says

    https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/philippines-duterte-threatens-those-who-refuse-covid-19-vaccine-with-jail-2021-06-21/

    Like the clown he is. (Ivermectin is a decent cure for COVID that is sidelined in favor of vaccinations, but most of those jailed won’t have COVID anyway)

    I heard from Martin Armstrong’s blog that the World Bank has a global program where all personal debts will be forgiven in exchange of UBI and forfeiture of all personal assets. The caveat (it goes) is that you also need to accede to getting COVID shots; otherwise (even if you only oppose the financial aspects) you will be called out as an antivaxxer and sent to concentration camps.

    This keeps me up at night (and even more potent than my mom’s assertion that all HK youths will be sent to reeducation camps Xinjing-style) since it’s liberal fascism; this sounds outrageous, but judging from Duterte’s Freudian slip, it might be implemented after all.

  170. sher singh says

    Someone needs to make the Bell Curve Meme:

    Low IQ: Needles are Powerful because they hurt

    Mid-wit: Ivermectin broo, Vaccine are Dangerous

    High IQ: Needles Powerful because Science

  171. Yellowface Anon says

    What exactly do you disagree in this post, Blinky Bill?

  172. Hungarian lack of social mobility same as everywhere else (high status families from 18th century maintained status during Communism and after):

    http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/110873/1/Working_Paper_67.pdf

  173. Shortsword says
  174. AltanBakshi says

    https://c8.alamy.com/comp/BCG3CT/buddhist-monks-buddhist-ceremony-of-fire-agni-puja-pokhara-nepal-BCG3CT.jpg

    https://ik.arhano.ru/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/%D0%A1%D0%BA%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%BD%D1%88%D0%BE%D1%82-15-05-2019-075449.jpg

    We Buddhists still maintain Vedic Aryan fire rituals, I have seen our monks to do these rituals even in St. Petersburg. Doesn’t get more Aryan than that, tending sacred ancestral fires, building Vedic fire altars! Aryan ways are not dead, Aryan gods, Surya, Indra, Agni and Mithra are still honored!

    https://les.media/img/users/2076/wide_jxB2dgFCyUbXLPHHF1Ue.jpg

    https://cdn.photosight.ru/img/6/f52/5510246_xlarge.jpg

    First photo was taken in Nepal, but others in Buryatia and Mongolia. There is something slightly Slavic in Mongolic faces, if compared with Han and Japanese?

  175. AltanBakshi says
  176. And Turkic faces too:

    http://www.onyschuk.com/wordpresstugg/?p=495

    Ahatanhel Krymsky (1871-1942), polyglot, orientalist scholar, and specialist in the Turkic peoples, and in 1918, co-founder of the Pan-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences.

    Ever get a chance to study Ahatenahel’s life? I peeked your interest in him at one time.

    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/54/Stamp_of_Ukraine_s104.jpg/220px-Stamp_of_Ukraine_s104.jpg

  177. Anatoly please remove my “e-mail address” from my comment above. Don’t know why it started to appear? I don’t want my adoring fans here to start sending me-mails. 🙂

  178. sudden death says

    Herpes-like survival abilities of Sars-cov2 inside some people:

    But while most people, including those who suffer “long Covid”, eliminate the live virus from their bodies within a couple of weeks, Smith experienced a very different sort of long-term problem: a persistent infection lasting more than 290 days, or almost 10 months. This has been the longest recorded active Covid-19 infection to date.

    https://uk.news.yahoo.com/longest-covids-man-infected-10-050048889.html

  179. sudden death says

    The real white antifragility?

    COVID-19 pandemic caused US life expectancy to decrease by nearly TWO YEARS to 76.8 – the biggest drop since World War II
    Researchers looked at official life tables from the CDC to calculate life expectancy estimates through 2018 and used provisional data to estimate 2020
    They found that life expectancy in the U.S. fell by nearly two years from 78.8 years in 2018 to 76.8 years in 2020
    This represents the biggest drop since World War II when life expectancy fell by 2.9 years from 66.2 in 1942 to 63.3 in 1943
    Life expectancy decreased by 3.25 years for black Americans and 3.88 years for Hispanic Americans compared to 1.36 years for whites

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-9718649/COVID-19-pandemic-caused-life-expectancy-decrease-nearly-TWO-YEARS-76-8.html

  180. Yellowface Anon says

    It’s more of a deaths of despair and loss of medical care problem similar to the 1990s spike in Russian death rates.
    Non-white workers in more physical and menial jobs are thrown out of their normal lives in larger numbers and cope worse.

  181. Yellowface Anon says

    He is genuinely Turkic (as in the thoroughly-Indo-Europead-admixed western type). From his wiki bio:

    Krymsky was born in Volodymyr-Volynskyi to a Tatar father with Belarusian descent and an ethnic Polish mother.[1] In 1915 in interview to newspaper “Tergiman” Krymsky identified himself as Crimean Tatar.

  182. Yellowface Anon says

    What I mean as “Thoroughly-Indo-European-admixed western type” is (genetically):
    78% Hellenized Anatolians & Armenians + 22% Turkic = Anatolian Turks
    67% Caucasian & Iranians + 33% Turkic = Azeris
    84% Slavic & Finno-Ugric + 16% Turkic = Volga Tatars
    (I am taking East Asian admixture as the “Turkic” percentage)
    As nomads moved west they accepted more locals into their ranks and even assimilated the sedentary majority (as in Anatolia). Shouldn’t we all know there are never pure races but ethnos?

  183. sher singh says

    https://youtu.be/2et-jka1jXU

    https://youtu.be/rrHzPmKcJ0Q

    Fire also during Lohri a festival in winter

    Fire considered form of Shakti & feeder of poor

    ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ

  184. No doubt about it, his clan had Tartar origins, and he probably admitted this in the newspaper interview, but he also definitely considered himsel to be a Ukrainian national too. He was after all a very important figure within the Ukrainian national movement in the early 20th century, in many ways on a par with Michael Hrushevsky, with whom he often quarreled about scholarly things. Here’s a quote from a Pakistani forum about Krymsky:

    Ahatanhel Yukhymovych Krymsky was born one hundred and fifty years ago on the 15th of January 1871 and died on 25th January 1942. He was a prolific Ukrainian scholar and observer with a remarkable spectrum of history and linguistics. He made valuable contributions to the foundation of modern Ukrainian culture. He was brought up in a mixed family of Crimean Tatar as reflected in his last name Krymsky. He dedicated his life to open a new horizon for his compatriots. He spoke 56 to 60 languages.. Importantly, Krymsky’s appetite for other cultures didn’t compromise his Ukrainian identity. On the contrary, his multicultural experiences shaped and enriched his perspective of Ukrainian culture and he made his contributions to it.

    https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/m3EAAOSwU6VgBmzQ/s-l1600.jpg

    Ukraine has honored Krymsky by issuing a commemorative coin bearing his image on the frontside, and this quotation of his on the backside this year:

    I understood that I had to become a Ukrainaphile. I understood this consciously/СВІДОМО

    So, Krymsky chose to become a Ukrainian Svidomite. That’s good enough for me! 🙂

  185. sher singh says