- In his latest newsletter, Adam Tooze points out that the Chinese government is asserting greater state control over the economy, including the power of Chinese business magnates to “cash out” of their holdings.
In retrospect, this is perhaps the most logical explanation for the crypto crackdown.
- Diana Fleischman has a good article in Quillette on how the Leftist moral panic against eugenics has given ammunition anti-abortion activists, with apparently six states now banning women against abortion on the basis of congenital disability. Interesting example of how an SJW – rightoid horseshoe, even in matters so small, helps usher us along towards Idiot’s Limbo with some combination of more disabled people, more restrictions on prenatal testing and genetic screening, a reduction in reproductive rights. Noah Carl notes most of the pointing and sputtering it generated came from left-wing progressives.
- Mark Galeotti – Kremlin Looks to Establish a ‘Techno-Authoritarian’ Power Vertical 2.0. Seems like a move in the Chinese direction of digitalized, indices-based control over regional governance (along the lines of Mishustin’s reforms of the tax sector).
- Steve Sailer on new FBI stats showing a 29% rise in murders in 2020. Incidentally, the gap between the US and Russia is now possibly larger than at any time since the Revolution.
- The Guardian lumps Steve in with Jeffrey Epstein. #AJAB
- Paul Robinson covers a report which calculates that the incidence of Russian military interventions abroad under Putin has actually declined relative to the Yeltsin era.
* Silventoinen, K. et al.(2020). Genetic and environmental variation in educational attainment: an individual-based analysis of 28 twin cohorts. Scientific Reports, 10(1), 12681. (h/t Steve Sailer). Contra Herrnstein/Murray, the heritability of educational attainment may have actually declined during the second half of 20C. Was the idyllic (to some?) picture of old time America in which people who marry across cognitive barriers a mirage?
- Robert Stark: Why the new “Populist” GOP is the worst of both worlds
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.
YouTube banned RT Germany yesterday.
This is a great opportunity to ban YouTube if not all Google products from the Russian market..
A wonderful, touching dog photo. Thank you. Hug your dog, my friends.
This is what Russia is sort of threatening. I agree. As I often pointed out, it is very strange that Russia should allow a company HQ’ed in a pretty hostile foreign state that bans its patriots/nationalists (e.g. Tsargrad TV before this), while actively pushing their own agents (Navalny) on us, his viewership numbers were clearly massively and artificially inflated.
The main problem is that Yandex.Efir and RuTube are probably not yet in a sufficiently advanced position to take over YouTube’s functions. This could provoke a truly mass shift to VPNs. Part of it has to do with the Kremlin’s own mistakes, they were tech illiterate boomers a decade ago, who purposefully wrecked RuTube in its first incarnation.
I’m hoping for a France-Russia nationalist axis to counter european atlanticism, especially now that Germany’s government is at the mercy of the pro-US FDP and Greens. The rise of Éric Zemmour presents a huge opportunity for Russia – he is not your standard rightoid and is much more solid, intellectually and potentially politically – than Marine Le Pen (who BTW has grown more friendly to americanism lately, at the same time that she has moved to the center and is now closer to Macron than to what her family used to represent). Eventually, Italy will also enter this alliance, as it is the least atlanticist western Euro country and is ripe for a nationalist takeover.
(Zemmour has not even announced his candidacy and is already on the verge of overtaking all other competitive opposition candidates – in my view, it is a matter of time before Le Pen completely crumbles and a mass exodus to Zemmour occurs – https://mobile.twitter.com/EuropeElects/status/1442891519359209473)
The mood in France is actually very anti-atlanticist. Macron was only elected because the alternative anti-US political factions are a mess and hate each other – with the left’s de-facto leader Mélénchon being a pro-islamic and rabidly replaceist clown. Identitarianism, both leftist “indigenism” and anti-replacement euro nationalism, has been on the rise in France – but Marine Le Pen and her party are both toxic to older voters (who won’t change their minds no matter how much she cucks out) and too uninspiring and establishment-like to energize disillusioned abstainers. Zemmour solves both of these problems, which is why I think he has a real shot at the presidency. Macronia is clearly worried, and that is why a gas and energy price freeze was just announced, a move very much at odds with macronist thinking.
Does being very short hurt Zemmour? Women generally hate short men, I think that’s true everywhere.
Is there any website/platform dedicated to showing Russian movies/TV series with English subtitles?
Iranians have a website IMVBox which has a huge collection of Persian movies and TV serials with English subtitles.Is there any Russian equivalent to this?
I saw one good Russian crime series ‘Cold Shores’ on YouTube and would like to see more.
Most Russian TV series on YouTube are melodramas with Bollywood tier plots which I find unappealing.
Zack Snyder’s 300 presaged the howling fascism of the alt-right
https://www.avclub.com/zack-snyder-s-300-presaged-the-howling-fascism-of-the-a-1798265082
@Anatoly Karlin
In the linked piece, you write that although the US homicide rate is higher, ‘ “demographically normed”, Russia’s homicide rates remain well above American ones. ‘
What “demographic morning” are you referring to?
The 13/50 issue.
erm, norming. Damnable autocorrect.
#AJAB =
All Journalists Are Bastards ?
All Jeffries Are Bastards ?
All J _ _ _ Are Bastards ?
Guinea fowl are also very odious animals. Worse than chickens? I don’t want to be inconsistent, but I think the answer is yes.
BTW Anatoly, your “Russia’s Nationalist Turn” post appears with a gold star on its page. Does that mean that you consider it one of your seminal posts? Or does Ron bestow a gold star to the posts he considers most important? Or is it something else?
AK: afaik a gold star appears next to all posts that have been featured on the front page.
Well if you show too much about Putin’s house, then anything is possible. But from the view of ordinary people (as opposed to embarrassed politicians) YouTube has become too useful to ban. “Too big to fail”. I mean not just for bigclive videos or sneaker unboxings – how will contemporary kids learn Kotlin or Scala.
Teenagers whose parents do not hire extra after school teachers, are more likely to learn from YouTube than going to the bookshop and buying the wildly expensive textbooks. This kind of way is how nerdy children can be substituting for bad schoolteachers nowadays https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSdmht0kbvfnItRMNcr4qZA/
Didn’t want to sully the last effort post but thumbs up. Always great to learn things I would never be exposed to if not for the effort.
Thanks. Then I guess Chechens and Tajiks still fall short of American blacks either in fraction of the population or in homicidal tendency.
So much for “Догоним и перегоним Америку!”
China’s EVs are perhaps really going to be successful.
You can see increasingly good reviews for many of them in YouTube.
As nonchinese EVs are still very uncompetitively priced, it seems like the transition to EVs some kind of once in an epoch opportunity for Chinese brands to become important in world automobile exports.
Sci Hub is the real place to learn. ; )
When you see even EU propaganda like Euronews telling you that chinese EV will be your most probable EV, you get the drill.
They always thought that they will make a deal with the West to leave them alone, but that hope crushed and burned miserably. ; )
Good.
Some of the “mother’s culture” of the Middle Eastern (Moroccan Jewish) singers in Israel.
Sentimental pop songs and music videos about your love for your baby.
In the main lyrics of the song she is singing “there is no love in the world like mother’s love” (“ayn beolam ahavah shel kmo ahavah shel ima”).
Hasn’t been updated in a while. You can find some fairly up-to-date stuff on Youtube, though. At least in some subjects.
Another underappreciated strength of it is that it has a lot of old movies on it, so that undercuts the profit mechanism of Hollywood. Don’t believe Youtube itself is profitable yet, so you are undermining Google by using it, especially with adblocker.
Anyway, I think a better strategy would be to at least wait until better decompression chips are more widely adopted.
I am sorry, Dmitry, no disrespect intended, you’re a nice guy and all, but there are forces beyond this world that compulse me to…
https://static.themoscowtimes.com/image/1360/cb/PSX_20201112_135439.jpg
Does anyone here know the mechanics of the indefinite flight Russian cruise missile? Did Russia discover perpetual energy? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/9M730_Burevestnik
Obligatory ZHONGGUO AKBAR!
I recently read one of David Icke’s books. I was struck by how good of a writer he is and how everything he says makes sense and everything he writes has logic and evidence behind it, how faulty the logic may be or reliable the evidence is another question. David Icke’s theories seem to me to have two levels, the surface level which taken at face value is kind of nuts; and the deeper level which if interpreted as parody of reality and power structures make 100% there are ancient families manipulating world events and those involved are obsessed with power which by default includes cruelty and wealth and to solidify network ties perform terrible acts in secret to prove that they are worthy members of the inner circle. However I don’t believe the Icke conspiracy extends into China, North Korea and small countries.
Were any Germans here forced to read this book in school?
Jim Knopf und Lukas der Lokomotivführer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Button_and_Luke_the_Engine_Driver#Jim_Button_and_Luke_the_Engine_Driver
You should quit Twitter when it’s banned, if you want to be consistent.
The actual issue with liquidating YT would be the huge backlog of videos saved up over more than a decade. They will go poof
I’m actually wondering how the Chinese pays for VPNs now that international capital flows are well-scrutinized by the state. Just in case the Internet Firewall covers HK and blocks unz.com too.
There’s one for Russian/Soviet animation specifically – https://www.animatsiya.net
It also has a “DIY” page that allows one to quickly pair subtitles and videos from elsewhere online.
I’m not really much of a “video” person so I’m afraid I can’t help you there. RuTracker is the most popular Russian-oriented torrents website.
Mosfilm has a huge Soviet films archive on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MosfilmRuOfficial/ / https://cinema.mosfilm.ru/
Regarding TV serials, this is something that’s definitely beyond my ken, but regarding “historical”/good ones that had a significant cultural impact, I can suggest Sword and Shield (Щит и Меч) – apparently, that’s what inspired Putin to join the KGB – and Ermak (Ермак) about the conquest of Siberia. Both should be available on Mosfilm.
That said, I’m not the best person to ask about this, probably Dmitry or even AP would be a lot more familiar with this.
Why would I want to be consistent?
People who really need to access those videos will use VPNs.
However, the ability for a foreign-controlled company to arbitrarily delete Russian content if the State Department tells them to is a liability.
I’m actually referring to the scenario of a new Trumpist administration expropriating assets and services of the Big Tech, in particular Google (including YouTube), Facebook and Twitter. In this case operations might be moved to Trudeau’s Canada or EU’s Ireland to avoid losses.
If that’s done the archives of these companies might be donated to Internet Archive after screening for “woke” content.
And libgen.
A beautiful place.
Hollywood also telegraphed a lot of this tranny stuff around 30-40 years ago, maybe earlier.
How to explain it? Are they making policy? Or is Hollywood just some strange microcosm of Western politics, where larger trends pre-manifest?
Youtube is the source for my seeing Putin demand his pen back from the humiliated corporate muckymuck and seeing Putin plunge himself into icewater with snow on the ground.
There are a dozen or more subtitled historical Russian dramas on Amazon, some Sci Fi too. Watching them does work to improve language skills. The “history” is more than a little nationalist and the view on women is very traditional, the Sci Fi excepted where it is more Shoku, to use the Japanese.
I would also be interested in alternatives with a preference for modern material. I used to watch broadcast Russian TV directly. However, it is no longer broadcast on Astra and Hotbird has moved but mydish hasn’t. A computer is not the same.
My all-time favorite Putin moment is when he cucked sportsball king Robert Kraft, by pocketing his Superbowl ring and walking away (2005). I am surprised there are no memes about it, contrasting him with BLM kneelers.
Of course, followed closely by the Steven Seagal moments, which are really bizarre.
Unfortunately amazon prime India is not the same as amazon prime UK/US..same with Netflix etc.
The selection of quality international programs is laughably basic..though it costs only about $20 a year.
The only way to see international content is via VPN on my phone but I like watching these things on my TV.
I normally download stuff via torrent which isn’t a problem with most European content but I never find good subtitles on most Russian content.There must be Russian movies & tv serials where KGB/SVR/FSB guys are the heroes..basically the Russian equivalent of The Bureau(The French TV realistic fiction series about the DGSE)..but unfortunately I’m yet to discover them.
I fail to understand why that it. 5% of the Russian population speaks excellent English so subtitling at home should be straight forward and the demand for quality Russian content outside Russian speaking expats will be 10x that of Persian content outside farsi speaking expats for which good subtitled films and serials are readily available..
The ability to assimilate into white.
Check out IPTV express?
Mr. Karlin, I am a kind and compassionate person. Therefore, I feel obliged to warn the world that Bitcoiners hurt cute kittens.
In one of your previous threads, I was rather surprised at the reactions to some common misperceptions about Bitcoin:
(N.b. that at least one of those anti-Bitcoin “Agrees” is from an anarchist (!), who proclaims, “There is no such thing as good gov’t” (!!). Another is from a known Moon Landing Denier, which is not so surprising.)
With financial deplatforming (archive.is, onion archive) now such a major issue, why do so many people on a “free speech” site hate the only extant mitigation of government control and mass-surveillance over everybody’s money? I even have a conspiracy theory which may explain at least some of this.
——————————
As an advocate of eugenics, I can’t help but notice that your headline dog looks like the proud result of refined breeding. If I ever
piratecourteously borrow your dog’s photo, perhaps for an article on why Siberian Huskies are infinitely superior to mutts bred in a New York alleyway, how should I accredit it? ®Someone recently posted elsewhere that the supposedly beautiful US fashion model would be no match for the average Russian hat-check woman. I agree about the aesthetic comparison of US celebrity vs. appealingly attractive everyday people – – but are there really hat-check gals in Russia? I can envision its being a sensible feature in a restaurant or nightclub, given the high prevalence (my stereotype) of large, furry warm hats.
Is Jay Leno’s chin the chin of a Yamnaya?
It has stuff from 2021.
Didn’t realize that. Guess they updated sometime in early September, but were frozen before then, since around December? It’s hard to follow what is happening to them with all the court cases and country ban orders.
NYC spends $447k to jail one person per year!
Here is a case where it would be handy to have some prison islands, to exile people. I suspect that Montserrat could be bought for a pretty reasonable price. TFR is pretty low there, so wait a while and it might get cheaper, as long as they don’t reopen the exclusion zone.
PBUYT
He isn’t talking about Trumpist failure, but the Trumpist approach being a superficially rhetorical one born of of the institutional structure. That would be true if we only look at 2016-2019, but not 2020 and afterwards. He can’t see the shift in direction as the result of the Great Awakening, that is the movement gaining the counterposition to a political establishment (“elites”) beholden to accelerationist pressures.
MAGA didn’t fail, but it also didn’t succeed. It will get a better rerun, but in the meantime the world is in the middle of uber-liberalism on steroids. (I saw a few minutes of “Troy” series with a black Achilles, it is sinking fast, even the past is being changed…).
The incremental removal of a few politicians and a slow takeover of the Rep. party will take decades. I don’t think the financial system will last that long. It is a race between internal reform and an externally imposed catastrophe. Trump did too little and never confronted his enemies in the media, tech, courts, etc…in many ways his pro-business policies made those institutions stronger.
The fact is that other places around the world look like they will do better in the next few decades, China, Russia, few others, and my perennial favourite Central-Eastern Europe (still European!). It is inevitable, with the West going financially wobbly (debts!), militarily impotent, culturally insane, it won’t be much of a contest.
There will be a George Floyd national holiday, Twitter will ban DeSantis, and all non-liberal thought will be cancelled (possibly even retroactively). With tech-run elections being a joke, 2/3 of people loving being conformist, and fatness spreading over the land, even the two Haitian Harvard doctors that won’t be much help…(that was a good one, it’s always customary to laugh during a funeral feast).
Dmitry, we had discussed dog eating in Korea on another Open Thread. By fate one of my favorite commenters, a Korean-American, wrote about it:
https://www.unz.com/isteve/fbi-murders-up-4901-black-share-of-known-murder-offenders-reaches-record-56-5/#comment-4931328
They shouldn’t be mistreated, but they have been bred to be eaten.
Dog eating in Korea was a pretty fringe practice even in the past. The practice became more commonplace during and after the Korean War when there was mass starvation and misery. As South Korea became richer and more palatable meats became abundant, the practice was dying out. Then Western celebrities and activists took up the cause and created a huge nationalist backlash: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2002/01/what-s-wrong-with-eating-dogs.html
“French actress-turned-activist Brigitte Bardot, backed by thousands of rabid European and American letter writers, has enlisted FIFA, the world soccer federation, to pressure South Korea to shut down the industry. South Korean lawmakers, angered by this pressure, are pushing to legalize the industry next month. The industry, armed with supportive research by a scholar known as “Dr. Dogmeat,” plans to set up dog-meat stands near World Cup stadiums and advertise recipes on English-language Web sites.”
During this time, there were even editorials suggesting that dog meat consumption was patriotic – along the lines of “Show these foreigners they can’t tell us how to live!”
That article is from 20 years ago, at the height of the Brigitte Bardot-inspired hysteria. Once the foreign meddling stopped – surprise, surprise – dog consumption collapsed again and the President of South Korea is now proposing a total ban. Nor is he alone in this – about 70% of South Koreans are opposed to dog meat consumption.
Some don’t understand the technology and its implications, and have better things to do/are too lazy to try to understand it. [strike out as appropriate]
Some do understand it, but think it’s a bubble now. There is a lot of reason in that view, though I suspect it’s wrong, and that Q4 and/or early next year will mark the last big wave of this bullrun. But I am only 70% confident about that. And strictly speaking, they are right that crypto is overvalued right now. Then again, so are most global asset classes.
Some are nocoiners and feel resentful about having missed out. Not the worst mental habit in all fairness, it’s a defense against FOMO’ing in (which usually marks the top).
The dog is a husky I met in Teriberka, Murmansk oblast. They are a popular dog in that region.
Joining these two things, there is also a $HUSKY token. As the first and foremost dog coin on the Avalanche chain, it could theoretically explode if $AVAX continues going from strength to strength.
Did you see that youtube of the guy who had some bad ammo blow up in his high power large caliber rifle and it punctured his carotid artery, busted bones in his face, collapsed his lung, and after he had a helicopter trip to Vanderbilt U medical center from the local hospital? He had some other injuries too like broken bones in his arms but I did not see the complete list or the bill.
Sober video. He was shooting through a fire hydrant target which I have never thought of trying. Right before the accident he is happy as can be that he had a bullet go through one side of the fire hydrant and get stuck on the opposite side after piercing it but not getting all the way through.
I think they already did. Let’s see:
– extreme constraints on who is allowed to run ($, media, etc…)
– voting now includes “mail-in” votes – in no known universe can that be done without cheating
– if (by some miracle) a candidate is elected who wants to really change things, the institutional stranglehold will undo him.
DeSantis may win. It may make no difference. There are a few hundred million Haitian-like people who will try to get to US. There are also around 50-100 million Americans who benefit from the cheap-labor-create-chaos-high-rents-low-incomes dynamic. Many are elderly who crave cheap service labor, many are morons, end-of-liners with no progeny and no real interest in the future. What am I missing? How is this going to work?
(Trump used to import cheap labor for his golf courses and construction…is there ever an oligarch who doesn’t want cheap labor?)
Yes this has been one of the main international news stories this week – South Korea planning to ban dog meat eating ( https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-58705602 ).
South Korea has become perhaps one of the most Americanized place in Asia (Maybe Okinawa can rival them?). So this is surely inevitable, as eating dogs (America’s most holy animal) is one of the worst culture clashes for South Korea with the American culture they have been importing for the last half century.
But all of us are young enough (excepting probably AnoninTN), that we will likely see the same thing to happen in Western countries with cows and pigs, perhaps before we are even pensioners – if (!) cultured meat is technologically and economically viable, and scalable. It will happen very soon if there will be the predicted “Fourth Agricultural Revolution”, that the moral fashion for some of the younger people in Generation Z, and probably Generation Alpha, will likely pressure to ban the consumption of non-cultured meat.
Sorry, Trump is too much of a cuck to do that.
Which is why I don’t see it likely, or Big Tech will just relocate.
Exile to Montreal, that’s what I read it was first anyway
In other news:
https://twitter.com/Sonnenmensh/status/1444079682303844355?s=20
&
Man in Ninja Outfit beats up 26 US SOF Soldiers
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/640459736919048202/893683222725148672/image0.jpg
Though part of an old debate, his case includes a new argument. Past denials of accommodation requests have typically cited practical safety concerns, like beards interfering with gas masks. That approach faltered in recent years after a federal judge noted with disapproval that the Army was denying shaving waivers requested on religious grounds while granting more than 100,000 of them on medical grounds.
In Lieutenant Toor’s case, though, the Marine Corps is arguing that the mere sight of a deviation from uniformity inherently hinders mission accomplishment, said Amandeep S. Sidhu, a lawyer at the firm of Winston & Strawn who has represented a number of Sikhs in cases against the Army. He said he doubted the courts would agree.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/26/us/sikh-marine-turban.html
Based.
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
https://twitter.com/Parikramah/status/1443064450173571072?s=20
https://twitter.com/porbotialora/status/1441456978459389958
https://twitter.com/maidros78/status/1441616348434472966?s=20
https://twitter.com/sialmirzagoraya/status/1441427446444609542?s=20
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
https://twitter.com/Kal_Chiron/status/1441442418792886285
With all their buildings, computer equipment, and other physical plant in the usa seized and the executives imprisoned for life or executed, that would be harder. Time to change the laws to make these things happen legally.
What kind of laws or pretense would be used? Treason (how do you define the enemy here, globalism?)?
They can just move their operations to Canada or overseas.
Seems that after the underage gaming restriction laws, China is learning the ways to construct a upright cultural and moral identity from Russia, thru stringent ideological regulation. After the Beijing International Gaming Conference 5 points of understanding are made to correct and possibly controllably deflate the gaming industry:
1) Value system: much more stringent regulation on gachas & pay to win business models in order to discourage consumerist overspending on gaming; discouragement of depictions of post-apocalyptic scenarios and illegal acts; discouragement of Japanese anime-style games to hinder cultural imperialism
2) Anti-social & anti-human depictions: “Anti-social” means depictions of evil and morally reprehensible acts; “Anti-human” means pozzing
3) Cultural & historical depictions: no negative or parodic depictions of culture and implicitly anti-socialist & seditious depictions, e.g. separatist flags, Japanese-influenced designs or militarism
4) Religion: no religious imagery even if it can be passed as cultural (this seems closer to atheist ideological orientation of the CCP than what should be allowed in any healthy cultural production)
5) Technical standards: bugs, incomplete games, wholesale plagiarism of game mechanics, etc.
The result would be the practical elimination of 90% of titles & game developers and China, possibly with the mass exodus of gaming industry personnel into Japan or elsewhere, which tells a lot on where the sources of influence lay. The gamer community might become beholden to VPN gaming & piracy, but they are a lot who has been trapped by Pacificist cultural imperialism. CCP could have used the same argument as Trumpists and Russians towards American Big Tech, mainly ideological and socio-political hostility, to completely ban video gaming and arrest all gaming industry personnel. This is also what Trumpists and the European cultural right (Russia included) might learn and adapt, like the old temperance movement.
(but if the West does nothing, much of the gaming industry will collapse because of cashflow problems during the forthcoming hyperinflation and/or currency resets)
The 13/50 issue.
Currently 13/56, it seems . . .
https://www.unz.com/isteve/fbi-blacks-up-to-55-9-of-known-murder-offenders-in-2019/
/* TODO: After more commentary that starts with cats and ends with dogs, code a meme graphic involving nocoiners, grapes, and the sourness thereof. */
One may expect that I should understand that. I am, at least, amused by speculation on those who write so much about money, without making much of it. For I also “missed out”.
I was not as late as Saylor, whose name I sometimes conflate with “Sailer” when I have insufficient coffee—how very telling. But I am too much of a perfectionist. Bitcoin has some flaws, especially as to privacy. I wanted to wait for the technology to improve and mature. It is how I came to understand the theory of Satoshi’s BFT consensus, the minutia of the UTXO model, etc., etc., before I learned in practice how to use a wallet; meanwhile, everyone else got rich.
(I tip my hand just a bit, because I suspect that the scientifically-minded Russian Bitcoiner will be one of the only ones here who will understand what I just said. Очень хорошо.)
However, I do not sympathize with the sour-grapes attitude. Not in principle—and not in practice here.
Bitcoin has never been for me about financial speculation. It is about freedom, most importantly its support for the freedom of speech.
From a writer’s perspective, the necessity of free-speech money should be obvious. I will soon be posting some cryptocurrency addresses on my Unz Review blog. From the content of my blog thus far, I think it is clear that even if I wanted to dox myself to Paypal and Paypal users, which I assuredly don’t and won’t, my chance of keeping a Paypal account associated with my work would be effectually nil.
The sign-up process for a Bitcoin address: A call to /dev/urandom, an elliptic curve point multiplication, some hashing, and encoding in Bech32. No one can deplatform that! And in practice, transactions are infeasible to censor.
From a reader’s perspective, the need for crypto should also be obvious. For my part, I have sometimes sent precious bits to authors of politically incorrect writings. Such writings are perfectly legal in the United States, but association with them may bring social and economic retaliation there; and in some countries, such writings are considered “criminal”. I would not want for my bank or my credit card company to have any record of that—let alone Paypal. What I read is none of their business. Although Bitcoin itself is not private and not anonymous, I know how to make it so well enough; and other cryptocurrencies are competitive on this point.
How many people here think it’s a good idea for financial companies to have a fully “KYC”-identified list of those who not only read The Unz Review, but care enough about it to support it? Similar considerations apply as for Karlin supporters.
Financial censorship is one of the most powerful means of controlling people’s thoughts, and suppressing the communication of ideas. Financial mass-surveillance is its evil twin. The problem is so awful, and so patently manifest in real-world scenarios today, that I am frankly shocked that people do not recognize its solution.
Well, perhaps I should not be shocked. After all, we somehow find ourselves in a world where many people refuse to understand that you cannot get a fine Husky by cross-breeding poodles with chihuahuas.
Joining these two things, I think that the more famous doggy-coin would have been better off if it
had developershad gone with a more wolf-like money-guard, instead of trying to be so cutesy. If they wanted a Japanese dog, an $AKITA would be a neat counterpart to your $HUSKY. Strongbitebuy? Naturally, the Germans will want a $SHEPHERD. ®I dont’ think your hypotheses are correct, any of them.
Yellowface Anon seems to have a good understanding of this:
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/china-isnt-going-to-make-it/#comment-4922362
Just one question: how does Yellowface Anon tell whether an elite has a “Randian mindset” or not? If he thinks Xi and the CCP do not have one, then is it fair to say he would rather live in China?
He mentioned however that consumption of dog meat was rare and fringe to begin with. It became temporarily popular due to starvation in times of the Korean War and due to a nationalist backlash. It was never popular for its own sake.
Based on point 4 we should start preparing for a Protestant China||
I’m actually half-libertarian, if someone or some group comes up with his/her/their own way of life that works well in their own worldview, don’t disturb them and maybe facilitate them. But libertarian anti-government thought is giving up the rule to private oligarchs or anyone strong enough to grab the land, and you can read the quote.
To some extent, since the works of Ayn Rand are sold in China: https://www.amazon.com/Atlas-Shrugged-Chinese-2-volumes/dp/7229058546, probably many of the Chinese readers, and CCP cadres among them, have Randian mindsets.
I’ve never said Xi is thinking one thing or another, just that it’s difficult to tell from his official and formulaic pronouncements.
What I’ve said about China, you know, is 1/3 staying out of trouble. And you have guessed it…
Puritan China
These are the ones that Dmitry dreams about:
https://youtu.be/43gP2rhPpQY
Just $720 a pair!
Need to get our Polish contingent back:
https://youtu.be/JDB9BzY0b6o
“Hey just do it like a Russian”. 🙂
We define the enemy however we want and take whatever lawful measures we deem necessary and best for our children’s safety, liberty, culture, and prosperity.
PBUYT
Generally agreed. But the pretense was “muh need to reduce COVID transmission”
At least you Trumpers have a clear vision of what’s to be done. And if the “Trumpist” presidental candidate is DeSantis, he’ll have a much easier time if globalists stumble thru their acts, and especially being the Governor of one of the few Open States.
Many of the better recent Russian TV shows (Sophia, Godunov, etc) are available for free on Tubi.
Did it hurt Sarkozy? Does it hurt Putin?
I think men who spend too much time reading MGTOW literature and are slightly spergy actually care more about that kinda stuff then women do.
I saw that but with risk of “liar’s paradox” by posting here – it’s a comment posted on this website, so (as with everything posted here) I give 90% chance that it is wrong.
With posts on Sailor’s forum – I would give 99% chance it will be wrong.
Wikipedia (which might be only 50% wrong) has developed an article about the topic though https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_meat#Modern_practices , and probably there are some books and academic articles which would discuss this topic.
Mare about the gas war.
https://www.intellinews.com/ukraine-claims-gazprom-gas-deal-with-hungary-is-use-of-gas-as-a-weapon-demands-sanctions-222441/?source=ukraine
Ukraine is hyping about its transition to bitcoin – maybe they will receive some of the fashionable El Salvador media hype.
Someone needs to explain to Zelensky that electronic Pachinko tokens that can achieve 30% daily swings in valuation, are not probably going to simplify life for Ukrainian grandmothers trying to pay for vegetables in the supermarket.
https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/ukraine-is-building-a-digital-future-with-bitcoin-2021-09-29
That particular poster is highly credible though (I don’t read the comments on Sailer’s blog but I’ve bookmarked that guy’s history and sometimes read what he’s been writing)
I guess if we are too lazy to search something scientific looking in a book (which I am of course) – then in Quora there are some numbers of real local Korean people to answer these kinds of questions?
Quora answerers are not going to be a representative sample though (as English-speaking, educated students that are usually answering any questions you can ask there).
https://www.quora.com/Do-Koreans-eat-dogs
https://www.quora.com/I-know-eating-dog-meat-is-limited-to-a-certain-region-of-China-but-are-most-Chinese-supportive-of-eating-dog-meat-in-the-first-place
https://www.quora.com/How-common-is-the-eating-of-dog-meat-in-China
https://www.quora.com/Why-shouldnt-people-in-China-eat-dogs
They support what that poster said:
It is NOT as prevalent as most westerners would like to believe.
I’ve lived in South Korea for two years (one year in the rural countryside and one year in a metropolitan city), I have never once saw a restaurant that specialized in dog meat.
I know that they exist but if you’re not looking for them, you’d never know.
The Korean dog meat industry is a dying business as most younger Koreans are moving onto the mindset that dogs are companion animals rather than livestock animals.
I would say that in twenty years or less, the consumption of dog meat will be completely phased out in South Korea as the elder generations pass away. In June 2018, it even became illegal to kill dogs for meat in South Korea.
I think Russia will religiously fulfill its contractual obligation to send 24.6 billion cubic meters of gas per year via Ukraine. That’s was the deal between Merkel and Putin.
What Hungary will do? Just ask Orban.
PBUYT
https://www.salon.com/2014/07/08/lets_nationalize_amazon_and_google_publicly_funded_technology_built_big_tech/
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/30/nationalise-google-facebook-amazon-data-monopoly-platform-public-interest
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/12/facebook-big-tech-antitrust-social-network-data
The idea of nationalizing Big Tech companies have been put on the table by the wokes themselves and brought up from time to time. Just cut a deal with them and the executives, maybe even paying them off, and start “inefficiently” manage the services until most people are done with them and find alternatives. You can call it controlled demolition or managed decline, and it looks good to the wokes.
I contend that murder rates are not a good metric for cross-country comparisons.
1) Russian murder rate is 50-100% larger in reality than reported. The reasons is the difference in classification. Murder is intentional murder, then there is death caused by intentional injuries is another big category that isn’t added to the murder stats. Than there is deaths from injuries with unspecified intent. Sadly, it now contributes almost 50% of all external causes of death, which means that statistical reporting on external causes of death is nearly useless. It look like most of those “unspecified” deaths are suicides and accidents of lonely elderly people, but some of them could be murders.
https://ourcountryindata.ru/vneshnie-prichiny-smerti-po-vozrastu-muzhchin-i-zhenshhin/
https://ourcountryindata.ru/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Vneshnie-prichiny-smerti-po-vozrastu-1024×577.png
2) US homicide rate includes all causes of homicide, including police shootings. It seems like if you compare apples to apples, US homicides are still ~30% lower than Russia’s, though the gap will close in 5-10 years.
3) I don’t about other countries, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the nations will ultra-low homicide rates aren’t as safe as they say just because of the local reporting differences.
4) Homicide rate depends heavily on your healthcare system. US healthcare is the most technologically advanced in the world + since many murders are done out in the streets or with people present, there is a bigger chance of first responders coming if you get stabbed or shot. The result is that only 1% of aggravated assault victims die. >70% of Russian murders are drunk 40-60 year old men killing other drunk men in kitchen fights, the result of which is no first responders and larger probability of death. Even if by some weird chance (very rare) you get stabbed or shot outdoors, when you make it to the hospital the doctors will be in a worse position to save you since they don’t deal with such injuries as often as US doctors. All else equal, US counterfactual murder rate is probably significantly higher than Russia’s.
Not necessarily. Legit issue with the two wrongs don’t make a right saying, which comes across as incomplete.
Prefer: two wrongs don’t make a right and hypocrisy isn’t virtuous.
Why did you refuse to publish my comment where I pointed out that I use “God” as a synonym for”I don’t know” and pointed out that you are psychologically incapable of believing in one because you’re psychologically incapable of saying the other?
You must surely find it interesting that you can’t do the latter?
I think Russia will try to do anything in its power to keep Ukrainian pipeline operational, and Ukrainians will do the opposite and may even end up blowing up their own pipeline to get out of the transit business.
General idea is to slowly reduce transit volumes until the Ukrainian transit fees no longer cover the maintenance costs and the pipeline turns from a profit center into a financial black hole.
Imagine Ukrainian transit income is $3 billion and pipeline maintenance and operating costs are $500 million. You are booking a very solid $2.5 billion profit and everything is awesome.
Now imagine Ukrainian transit income is $100 million and maintenance and operating costs are still $500 million. Instead of making profits, that same pipeline is now losing you money to the tune of $400 million per year. Everything is not awesome, everything is problematic. But you can’t just shut it down because by law and contracts you’ve committed to keep the transit open.
At some point it will be cheaper for Ukraine to just blow it up, deal with EU lawsuits, and go out of business. Russians will be giggling and chewing on popcorn on the sidelines of course.
If you were concerned for safety, it can be more important where you live in the country, rather than the national level.
In Russia, there is the vast regional variation in the estimation of murder rate. Where the can be such across high income cities, it clearly indicates some influence of the activity of professional criminals.
Moscow has been estimated to have a very low murder rate now (it’s still almost twice higher than London’s murder rate, but it’s half of New York City)
https://habr.com/ru/company/eusp/blog/508366/
https://i.imgur.com/fYrXBSs.jpg
There’s also professional killing, part of which will be excluded. A portion of “missing people” will have been killed – especially in relation to professional criminals, who might are able to make bodies “disappear”. Similarly unidentified bodies. (Sometimes these murders are discovered 5 or 10 years later).
There were some claims (2011) about the issue of “missing people” had remained more constant than murder rate.
https://i.imgur.com/hZWk8jU.jpg
If you can comment about how the “UN Office on Drugs and Crime’s International Homicide Statistics ” is calculating?
Perhaps it is optimistic, but I expect UN goes with reliable professionals and trying to compare apples to apples.
Here the UN has painted an optimistic line, where there could be convergence occurring to the US level if the trends continued.
https://i.imgur.com/c1xpam2.jpg
Agreed.
Sure, I can think some other ones. I believe the US has a disproportionate number of deaths from poisonings and stair falls, some speculate that a significant proportion of these could be murders. As for the number missing – I remember that people bring the same issue up with Russia, that there are tens of thousands missing people and the number doesn’t change. As far as I remember the explanation was the typical confusion between “stocks” and “flows”. Missing people were a “stock”, also many missing are then found alive and well. To compare missing people properly you need to compute the difference between new missing people in a year and the number of previously missing who were found alive. Not sure if this is what’s happening in the US case.
Being a researcher myself I wouldn’t count on professionalism of other researchers. UN data must have sources and methodology, but my impression has always been that they just use officially reported figures that national governments submit. This is why you sea unrealistically low suicide rates in Sub-Saharan Africa, high fertility in China and very low suicide rates in Russia. UN’s murder number are definitely wrong, because they don’t add “deaths from intentional injuries” that are basically murders with a small caveat. I have a relative of a friend “killed from intentional injuries”, the perpetrator’s prison sentence was the same that it would be if this crime was classified as a murder, the difference is purely semantic, but it is not added to the UN reporting, because the UN researchers in New York have no idea about these intricacies.
Don’t you two realize that it’s not actually a human eat dog world, but a “dog eat dog” world amongst humans? 🙂
https://lowres.cartooncollections.com/dog_eat_dog_world-dogs-puppies-pet_dogs-dog_lovers-animals-CC52575_low.jpg
I’m soft-hearted, so I like the idea of sending exiles to tropical islands. Been to Montreal before, but never in winter. Can’t say whether any of the rivers around it freeze and become walkable, but that might be a problem.
As to Germany and Germanics, it is hard to separate their natural susceptibility to wokeness with their intense, decades long indoctrination, which was only made possible by military occupation. Sure, East Germany is bit more Slavic and a bit less woke, but it was also occupied by a different power, arguably with a less anti-German regime. All the big movies in East Germany were made in East Germany, unlike the West.
Really a pity that East Germany didn’t remain ideologically separate. By now, the direction of the flow of Germans would have quite reversed, IMO. Would have been a pretty big political blow to multiculturalism.
Are you sure Westies will trade pozzing for rigidly planned consumption, ideological conformity and surveilled lifestyle?
Nevermind.
(BTW deportation is never justified unless they do it themselves, which is then called “migration” or “population exchanged” for states aiming at a more homogenous area)
Like their anthem:
Good one on the AUKUS Alliance
https://twitter.com/thejuicemedia/status/1444523835554893825
So it seems Belorussia has banned a Russian media organisation…
A Romanov descendant, Georgyi Mikhailovich, got married in St. Petersburg. I know very little about the former imperial family but after reading about the marriage and looking at some of the photos I’m left wondering…
He was born in Spain and lived most of his life in Spain and France. He married not a noblewoman, not a Russian, not a Slav, not an Orthodox (she converted for the marriage), not a Germanic princess (as I believe was the Romanov custom), but an Italian commoner. The two have not lived in Russia for long. Do Russians even know who he is? Do Russians perceive any sort of connection to him? Does he represent “Russianness” in any way?
He looks more or less mediterranean; his mother, overweight, looks almost Mexican; the bride looked unimpressively mediterranean (though, to be fair, she’s past her best years). All three seem to have dark hair and dark eyes. How much Romanov blood does his branch of the family have?
His part of the family (his mother and now him) seem to be claiming succession to the former imperial crown. How legitimate are their claims? How can he be eligible to the “throne” when he married a commoner and not a princess?
Does Georgyi Mikhailovich and/or his family have any connection whatsoever to the Russian state? Or, dare I ask, to some other state? I note that media reports claim that he worked (in what capacity?) for the European Parliament, quite a loony and often anti-Russia organisation. Do non-ruling royal families (say in Spain, England, or Holland) usually have a relationship with their respective state’s security apparatus? Are they afforded any kind of security clearances?
Malofeev was apparently invited to the ceremony. What does he think of it all?
Not sure if you’re speaking in code or losing your mind, lol.
Among some Russians in Russia and abroad with a sympathy to the Russian monarchy, he isn’t viewed as a legit heir.
Uh oh. I was too tired. Here is the correction: I don’t want to see people being deported at all. Every movement has to be voluntary, or very close to it (e.g. Whites forming a coherent idea of expelling Blacks from White-majority areas, similar to the Rwandan Genocide but non-lethal or having the emigrants well-propagandized enough not to have the idea of staying behind).
The main question (as always with royalty): does he carry a male-baby-predisposition gene? In other words, would he have enough sons? He looks pudgy and his commoner mamacita a bit old, so we may have a dead-ender, but I would give them a chance.
The governing elites welcome people connected to a security apparatus, no matter where. Today it is almost a sine qua non, from Bushes, Putin, Obama, the pope, Macron, Merkel, they have all been wetted. It is in a weird way a plus, a known entity, the elites hate instability and surprises (see Trump for a recent example).
Romanovs on a male line are from the Y-DNA Haplogroup N, suggesting an original Ugro-Finnish northern-Euroasian descent. They heavily mixed with Vikings, Slavs, Tatars, Germans, Balts, Poles, and as all Euro royalty cannot easily claim ethnicity. The most common descent among the major Euro royal houses is actually Italian – early Middle Ages were very Italian in outlook. Many descended from the Germanic invaders to Italy like Lombards and Goths, but many were simply a continuation of the Roman aristocracy. So the fat guy with his Mexican chola mother is not far of…
The main issue with “mail-in” (or internet) voting is that it is remote and by definition cannot be private and individual. That makes some sort of voting-harvest much easier and the harvesters are as creative as the sane-reforms that you listed. The solution is to win so big that the mail-in and other forms of cheating cease being realistic. That’s hard.
Trump had both GOP Senate and Congress in 2017-18. He had executive power, e.g. H1B could be put on hold the day he was sworn in. Or he could simply do very-slow paperwork, that’s what you do if you really care about something. I don’t think he did.
I never surrender (it would be boring), but this will be messy and volatile, eventually things will change. I don’t think it can happen from the free-enterprise patriotic right that Trump in effect represented. The contradictions are too big and at the end an oligarch will be an oligarch. Things will change because the reality will force it: the numbers are out of whack. Any changes will require a massive social (socialist if you wish) policies – people want stuff and any winning patriotic movement will have to give it to them. The liberartarian moment is over and Trump (even DeSantis) are still too much into libertarian “dog-eats-dog” thinking. That doesn’t sell. Look at Germany and its electoral shift to the left, the way to beat the out-of-control liberals is by out-flanking them on social policies and staying traditional and conservative. Even Putin doesn’t seem to get it, but it is so obvious…
Well, the colonization of Europe was never predicated on 100% mutual consent, so that formula probably won’t suffice for reversing it.
Even in theory, I’m not sure a state with 100% mutual consent is possible. Best you can do is seastead a new country and screen new citizens heavily. Get them to sign a release form that gives them the right of exit, but not of staying, if they behave badly. (But you are really just post-dating their consent.) Not to mention, it might be problematic if they have children. Of course, you could make citizenship conditional and probably make a much more functional state, that way, but I think it would only work with prescreening. I don’t think it translates well to existing countries.
That said, it is obvious that things can (and I think should be) incentivized/disincentivized. That that was part of the process of colonization and should he part of the process of decolonization. And it is quite easy to think of dozens or even hundreds of such rules. And it is not really important that each one work independently, just that they function as a whole.
Also, it need not be a process that happens overnight, just a positive trend, with strong messaging, cost optimized.
I kind of like the idea of forcing them to sign a consent form with is headed “self-deportation.”
100 years ago, Germanics were still generally highly ‘progressive’ but also still had their natural ethnic chauvinism, claiming to bring the light of civilisation to ‘uplift’ the fuzzies and (genuinely religious) Christianity to save the souls of the naked savages, and also mixing in other elements (Darwinism/Eugenics) which were utilised by progressives as mapping out the road to a better progressive mankind; but back then the progressives put themselves at the top of a racial, heredity pile; it was also common to see boasting about how they were the purist race and naturally inclined against race mixing (in contrast with Southern Europeans). So I think all these guys writing ‘Germanics are genetically woke hyper-individualist race mixing pussies because of marriage patterns 10,000 years ago’ would be writing the exact opposite if they had been born 100 years ago.
The preachy, puritan progressivism still remains, but after WWII (and postcolonialism and USA civil rights) POC (& recently LGBT, etc) took over the role of holy people while whites (and their culture) were recast as the bringers of evil into this world who must be vanquished to bring in the new progressive millenium. Nationalism, Chauvanism, Darwinism (as it applies to humankind), and all the rest, were now off limits as the stuff of the devil himself (aka ‘Adi’) so there are no avenues to channel that energy into a positive view of their own ethnicities.
Generally I think of myself as extremely ‘genetically determinst’ but understanding culture is surely as important in the ways and channels that nature gets expressed, the difference in Germans before and after WWII (and then again after being divided into West/East) is one of the clearest demonstrations of that IMO.
“The rollout of AUKUS was a bungle.”
ALL rollouts are bungled.
But, regarding AUKUS, I read that these last three days, the Chinese have flown more flights into Taiwan airspace than ever before. Was this a response to AUKUS? The US response to China’s flights has been to caution them that they have increased the chance of “miscalculation.”After Afghanistan, it is hysterical the US would caution some other military about miscalculation.
I grasp what power is and your myopic obsession with 18th century ideas keeps you from seeing it. Trump had a lot more power than he used. 5-10 GOP senators were against him anyway, if not more. They didn’t fear him because he held his fire, saving it for the day that never came. Not knowing who hates you is a major shortcoming in a politician.
Your argument is circular and will lead to the same do-nothing result every time. It requires daring to exercise power, Trump seems to lack that. Implementing popular policies (like border, crime suppression, H1B restrictions, etc…) would had dramatically increased his power and the weasels would be too scared to attack him. In any case, they attacked him anyway, his court appointments are ridiculous – country club types who immediately voted against him. He could had done a lot more against tech monopolies – his free-market libertarian ideology kept him from doing what was obvious and easy.
I listed a few specific things that Trump could had done and chose not to do. That was a missed opportunity and there may not be another one. And 5-8 years is a long time.
Don’t misunderstand me, I wished him well and I wish someone would stand up to the globalist liberal totality. He didn’t, or not enough, there is a lesson there. If you ignore it, it will go the same way next time. You can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs.
This is false and outdated, and based on haplogroup testing of modern people claiming to be Romanov descendants. Actual forensic testing of Rurikid skeletons that was more recently conducted reveals they all belonged to haplogroups R1a and I1.
https://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads/38917-Actual-Medieval-Rurikid-DNA-not-from-modern-people-who-claim-descent-from-Rurik
The laughable idea that Finno-Ugrian peasants became European nobility is pure fantasy.
Trump is hardcore deep state and so is Bannon (School of Foreign Service graduate), Trump was friends with John Kluge’s family for decades.
John Kluge is the guy who created American Empire as we know it. He ran interrogations under Operation Paperclip and got Wernher von Braun his job in US government.. He also launched the private sector career of Christo Grosev of Bellingcat.
Anyway, people expected too much from Trump, and conversely, yelled at him too much when he failed to deliver.
It’s like “oh look Trump is with Jeffrey Epstein!”. Well sure, deep state elite are gonna deep state elite and party together, what’s so unusual about it?
Vast majority of law in the US is not prescribed by the Constitution and a good chunk of it is actually actively hostile. (You right wingers have a good point about Title IX and so on).
But Constitution had nothing to do with why Trump (or any other US President for that matter) ruled the way he did. Simply put, Americans are not suicidal people, Constitution or not, and thats why you see what you see. Regardless of which puppet is nominally in power.
Surprisingly, Beckow was accurate here. Maybe because the topic doesn’t involve Communism or modern Ukraine.
You should have scrolled downwards on your link, it would have been explained. It is well-known that the Chernihiv branch of the Rurikids experienced an unexpected paternal event and are R1A.
The Rurkid N comes from Sweden, a region called Roslagen. Modern Swedes from this region have the same profile as Rurikid descendants (other than Chernihiv branch). I don’t know why you think they would necessarily be peasants.
More details here:
http://freepages.rootsweb.com/~mozhayski/genealogy/teksty/ydna.html
https://imgur.com/a/vjBqIAX
This is a particularly good forum to note the fact that R1a-M417 is Europe’s true noble lineage. The Centaurs from the East! Everywhere they went, they conquered, and set themselves up as the ruling warrior caste.
R1a1a is always and everywhere indicative of noble descent. In this respect it is unique. Haplogroup N is just the opposite.
No goofball, re-read the thread. It was N1c that was introduced through false paternity (assuming these modern people really are Rurikids). R1a was the original Rurikid haplogroup, as shown by the skeletal evidence.
Agreed. Haplogroup N is a “Mini-Me” haplogroup. All non-R1a people are always trying to steal R1a glory and make themselves the progenitors of R1a accomplishments and genetics. This is true even for mtDNAs.
“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery“.
I can´t understand the fuzz about this Spaniard man marrying an Italian woman. They can label themselves Romanov, but this means… nothing.
Mr Hack posted on the China thread an interesting article about changes towards work in China and the US, and my response is too long and off topic so I figured I’d post it here.
It’s a good article, but the writer of course does not understand the shift that is taking place, and tries to use traditional social “shaming” language against the “narcissistic and entitled” people who no longer wish to work hard.
It won’t work. The shift that is taking place is much deeper than that.
There is a little known historical episode at the very beginning of the modern period that anthropologists have called “the reformation of manners”. Basically, across the West there was a massive social movement to change people’s habits towards hard work, sobriety, deferred gratification, and the like – basically, the values needed for “progress”.
The episode is somewhat mysterious as it has no clear cause and seemed spontaneous and uncoordinated, yet appeared simultaneously in many countries across Europe and in all sectors of society.
It was almost as if the “world spirit” was changing course 🙂
This is all now winding down.
The “modern period” rested on a promise – defer gratification and shift your priorities to hard work, and we will create Heaven through intellectual development and control of the physical world.
Ultimate satisfaction lay in the distant future – “a far off divine event” – and society was fundamentally future oriented.
Everyone was unhappy and miserable.- the distinguishing mark of the “modern period” in Europe is dissatisfaction and unhappiness – but this would have a huge “payoff” in the future.
This was of course a secularization and materialization of the Christian message 🙂
The problem now is that the promised future arrived 🙂 Mankind has developed technologically beyond it’s wildest dreams, and yet Heaven isn’t here!
In fact, Heaven has always been “inside you” – but modernity was based on ignoring/rejecting this basic truth.
So the promise – the contract – that ushered in the modern period has been dissolved.
Of course, there are still some diehard holdouts who think with yet more technological development, Heaven will then come 🙂 These are the transhumanists and suchlike.
They are like the people who chase after wealth, and after having made millions and find they are still unhappy, think they just haven’t made enough yet.
But for the mass of humanity, the old contract underlying modernity has been dissolved, and we are entering a new period where Heaven will once again be searched for “within you” – not in external projects of controlling the world.
And one sees this across America – we are no longer quite the grim, serious Puritans of old who defer gratification and live sober, drab lives in pursuit of some “far off divine event” which requires sacrifice in the present. Delicious craft beers and wines, cheeses and meats and other good things proliferate across the land in an explosion of interest in the “good things” of life, and Americans have discovered a renewed interest in nature and the delights of nomadism, and no long see “work” as the central, defining feature of their lives.
I predict new forms of spirituality similar to Taoism and Mahayana Buddhism and mystic Christianity will gradually develop as the focus on developing the physical world recedes and Heaven is once again looked for within us – and we realize, like the Zen masters say, that we have always had it and have been searching for a precious jewel that was embedded in our forehead all along 🙂
Over the past few weeks, I have seen a slee of articles in the New York Times – the flagship of elite opinion – about how Americans should no longer see work as the focal point of life.
All the social upheavels and dislocations we are going through are part of the transition process, where the “old values” are hollow and no longer hold the power they once did, but the new values have not fully emerged yet, and the “old guard” is in many ways trying desperately to cling to the old, dying religion of physical control – the whole COVID fiasco is a good example of the dying old religion of control having a last gasp.
But overall, I think we are entering a seismic global shift in attitudes and priorities, and “good things” lie ahead for us 🙂 Humanity may be returning to a period of happiness and contentment, once the myth of “progress” is transcended. Of course, there will be much upheaveal and strange phenomena – and even sufferingband confusion – that will accompany this transition.
I was going to say, let the Chinese shoulder the burden of misery in adopting the myth of “progress” and hard work, but it seems our worthy Chinese brothers are coming to be on the same page, and thus will likely be a truly global shift.
Of course, China has to emerge from its dull authoritarian period first – but after it does, China can be one of the cultural leaders in developing the new world value system, drawing on it’s tradition of Taoism.
People tend to forget that boring, dull authoritarianism is only one side of the Chinese character, and anarchic creativity and life-loving freedom always emerges among them before long 🙂
So we should all take heart!
The thread was about the remains of a prince from the Chernihiv branch which is known to have been subject to a paternity event.
No, because various Rurikids of different branches have N1C; it is the most common among the various Rurikids. But the Chernihiv branch has R1A.
Your source claims that I2a not R1A was the original Rurikid Haplogroup. It claims Yaroslav the Wise’s Swedish wife Ingegerd cheated with King Olaf of Norway who was visiting Rus. Vsevolod was the product of this cheating. And thus, Vsevolod’s son Volodymyr Monomakh’s N1C was the result of this unexpected paternity event and that he and his descendants weren’t actually Rurikids but instead the descendants of King Olaf of Norway.
Meanwhile the Chernihiv branch weren’t actual Rurikids either, as proven by the R1A haplogroup.
The theory provided by Polish poster on the forum you linked to doesn’t have widespread acceptance. Moreover the specific N1C1 seen in the Rurikids is not linked to Norway but to a region in Sweden called Roslagen.
http://freepages.rootsweb.com/~mozhayski/genealogy/teksty/ydna.html
“…thanks to this, i.e. Rurikid project, we can now say that Rurik was a historical person who was born on the Roslagen seashore (slightly north of Stockholm, Sweden). However, he was of Finno-Ugrian descent (haplogroup N1c1 (earlier described as N3a)). Although all of well matching N1c1 Rurikid princes are descended from Yaroslav Mudry (978 – 1054), it seems that his ancestors including Rurik (b. ab. 820 – 876) himself, also belonged to this haplogroup. A group of Swedes, whose ancestors lived in or close to Uppsala, and whose genetic haplotypes are very close to these of the Rurikids, seems to be confirming the theory that Rurik, in fact, originated from Sweden.”
(you are a well known troll, I am posting here for other readers)
He was born in Spain but is not of Spanish descent. His father was a Prussian prince from the Hohenzollern ruling family and his mother Grand Duchess Maria Vladimirovna was a Romanov. Her father married a Georgian princess (which is why he looks dark).
Since his wife is a commoner presumably his kids will not inherit his claim to the Russian throne.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rorik_of_Dorestad
PBUYT
Mikhail is right. But we are descending into a dark era in American (or Western) history where grave injustices (both from the establishment/elites and the populists, and every player on the geopolitical scene) are dealt out for political expediency and probably overarching agendas. The era of civility is over.
As long as people have the wherewithal or have devised other ways to pay their monthly bills, they can afford to explore more adventurous ways of organizing their lives. The article, talks to the fact that at least in the US, many are still living off of their generous covid unemployment benefits. It’ll be interesting to see what happens next?
https://www.theepochtimes.com/i-refuse-to-work-chinas-lying-flat-culture-comes-to-america_4024854.html
When was this era of civility? I remember the 1990s.
Yes, but until recently American culture would try and make you feel “guilty” for such self-indulgence if you didn’t pour your life into your work 🙂
The feminist movement, which has always been about making sure societies most prestigious “prizes” are available to women, made a huge deal of getting women into the workplace, as if this was a great blessing rather than a curse.
Feminist demands are a great barometer of what society considers most prestigious.
Whereas the Bible describes work as a curse, and the Greeks and Romans prized cultivated leisure above all.
The attitude of modernity to work would have been incomprehensible to the ancient world – worship of hard work makes sense only in a culture with a religion of “progress”. No society before modernity had this destructive idea as central to their world view.
I think the author makes far too much of the Covid checks. That’s only part of a much larger picture.
For instance, many workers are renegotiating with their bosses to have more free time even if this means accepting less pay. That is what I did, and this is a big trend. And there are articles appearing in the NYT calling for shorter workweeks and less hours, and redefining career and job as less central to identity and life satisfaction, which indicates a major philosophic shift.
Secondly, what I am noticing is many people simply being happy and content with living on less. Digital entertainment and the ubiquity of cheap goods has made people realize they simply don’t need much money, and in all fairness, much of the pressure to “succeed” was based not on quality of life considerations but on status and prestige.
And what is happening, is society is “normalizing” not working hard, so the prestige motive is significantly reduced.
Perhaps, as “progress” is receding as the central principle of society, the old notion of “dignified poverty” is being reintroduced 🙂 Well, poverty not in material terms, as all ones needs are amply met, but in other words, status is being slowly decoupled from wealth and hard work, or at least, an alternative value-world is being accepted as legitimate (as many people will always worship wealth).
Finally, wages have been rising across the country and the “gig economy” permits people to choose their hours and opt for more leisure and less pay if they so wish – and many increasingly do.
As to what happens next?
Well, I think we are moving ineluctably towards Universal Basic Income 🙂
As Anatoly notes on the China essay, the world economy is increasingly “dematerializing” – this is an important topic that deserves it’s own thread. But what this basically means, is that mankind has essentially “automated” the production of not just the essentials of life, but many of it’s luxuries, and this trend will only increase.
Therefore, there is no “real” work to do, and the economy becomes a sort of giant “game” that everyone has to pretend is serious 🙂
When the wealthiest companies are things like Facebook, Twitter, etc – then you realize that Lord Keynes vision a hundred years ago has been realized, and work has ceased to be a harsh necessity holding mankind in bondage.
In short, 10,000 years of human development have returned us to the leisure of our hunter-gathering start 🙂 As T.S Eliot said, the result of all our wandering will be to return to where we began and see it for the first time.
And who knows, maybe having made this grand adventure, it was all for the purpose of truly understanding that we always had what we needed 🙂 In any event, it was a fun adventure!
Of course, there will always be people who still work on technological development like Elon Musk etc – and if that floats their boat, more power to them! But this will always employ a tiny number of people, and be a boutique and niche occupation.
And the world is big – I celebrate a diversity of endeavors and personality type, so long as no one type tries to force itself on the world.
Oh, and one more method of making money that has exploded recently is YouTube. And this isn’t limited to exceptionally talented or creative people.
There is no gatekeeping here, so anyone can find an audience of like minded people. I follow a few hiking/travelling people who are full time YouTubers and who don’t post exceptional content, just rather straightforward accounts of their travels, but make an acceptable income. Some YouTubers I follow are quite wealthy – you’d be surprised.
But this is another example of the “dematerialization” of the economy and the shift to a “game” economy.
With a basic income provided to all, based on the automation of basic industrial tasks, the economy will be a “game” where rich people compete to “gather” money from the population, and with nothing really serious at stake.
I agree with you here. The extent to which the service economy has evolved over the last 20 years is truly amazing. Beside YouTubers turning the technology to their financial benefit, E-Bay has been offering such a mercantile platform for decades now. The explosion of ethnic restaurants and grocery stores is mind boggling. There are places now where you can not only leave your pets to be kenneled, but they can get a haircut and shampoo and a pedigree too. Speaking of pedicures, I saw a handwritten sign today advertising a complete pedicures for only $20. Computer repair shops on almost every corner. The times, they sure are a changing…And if gaming is your thing, we now have legalized gaming in AZ. TV adds galore try to lure gamblers to use their services. “West World” was a 1973 film starring Yu Brynner that explored a Disneyworld for adults, where every type of fantasy and desire was fulfilled: “where nothing could possibly ever go wrong”:
https://youtu.be/EjyOfTEeNHA
A newer version of this film was put out a few years ago, starring Anthony Hopkins. I haven’t viewed this new rendition yet. Anybody out there seen it?
Zemmour seems a pretty obvious spoiler candidate.
Whilst the financial markets have started selling off there is an impressive level of denial as to the devastating impact the energy crisis is and will be having. Still at least it is just in time for the corrupt fat buffoon to host COP26.
sigh
So much stupidity and mistaken assumptions.
No, thw thread was about a paper that tested three skeletons from ancient Rurikid skeletons. Here, an independent observer sums them up for our audience:
https://indo-european.eu/2019/07/vikings-vikings-vikings-influx-of-eastern-ancestry-in-the-whole-baltic-iron-age/
So, the DNA of actual medieval Rurikid princes has been determined. None of them belong to haplogroup N1c. That completely dispels the notion that Rurikids were N1c. If they were N1c, we would have found N1c in at least one of the medieval forensic samples.
That is not true and R1a was not found in a medieval Chernihiv.
Give me a break, kid. There is no “widespread acceptance” on this subject; it’s an obscure +1000 year old dead European dynasty. There’s nobody but a handful of aninymous online comnenters and geneaologists paying any attention to this.
But the recent skeletal evidence, the first of its kind, completely demolished the inferred genealogical theory that Rurik was N1c. In fact, all N1c people claiming descent from Rurik are “false Rurikids”. That was an inferred theory based on the assumption that those people were Rurikids. Hard evidence proves they are not.
In all probability, Rurik was R1a, as shown by the Galician-Volhynian (NOT Chernihivian) remains. However he could have been from haplogroup E1. The point is that he is definitely not from that accursed haplogroup N1c.
And finally:
If I am a well known troll, why do you need to point it out?
[Img]https://i.giphy.com/media/Q7ozWVYCR0nyW2rvPW/giphy.webp[/img]
I think he is serious, his books are good. It seems like he is a level above the usual right wing commentators, as Ville wrote.
Hey Anatoly can you please fix my spelling and my code for me? I didn’t get a preview of this post as usual. Thanks man.
I frequently wrestle with smart punchy short to the point tabloid lines versus holding back a bit.
Some examples of the former include these article titles:
“Covering Russia: What Sucks About The New York Times”
“BBC Limits and Related Censorship on Russia Coverage”
“CNN’s Blatant Disinformation About Russia-Ukraine Activity”
Your actions have consequences reference is a good one. At the same time, it’s not inappropriate to highlight hypocrisy, especially against those self righteously saying that their given target is being hypocritical.
The more powerful US replacement, makes Australia a greater strategic concern for China, while understandably pissing off a US ally (France), which had an agreement that got nixed. (The French shouldn’t complain too much, seeing how they reneged its Mistral agreement with Russia.)
As that sarcastic link I posted notes, the Aussies will be more dependent on the US in a way that might increase Aussie armed expenditures.
Apologies for the typos. Didn’t have time to properly edit the post.
What do Tony Blair and Vladimir Putin have in common?
The answer is to be found in the Pandora Papers :
https://www.newindianexpress.com/world/2021/oct/04/pandora-papers-tony-blairputin-to-jordans-king-abdullah-ii-hidden-riches-of-world-leaders-expo-2367360.html
Remember: the West and RusFed are so different ! (Sarc)
And yet your link states:
“ N1a-VL29 lineages spread again later eastwards with Varangians, from Sweden into north-eastern Europe, most likely including the ancestors of the Rurikid dynasty”
Unlike you, the author of the peer reviewed article you referenced does not draw a conclusion about the origin of the Rurikids based on three skeletons (only one of which was R1A).
It’s even accepted by the source you provided.
Many readers are casual ones.
It is probably impossible today to know which exactly was the Y haplogroup of Rurik. That is if Rurik was a real historical character and not some mythical founder imagined to streamline the creation of the ancient Rus ruling elite and provide it with frame of reference to decide the matters of succession and inheritance.
This Y haplogroup “mix up” also happened to another dynasty: the Hashemite who are supposed to all descend from the Prophet Mohammed through Imam Ali, who was his paternal cousin. Surprisingly (well not that surprising) the male Hashemite and Alid Cherifs are of haplogroups J1, J2, E3b and even R1a (was some Rurikid hiding under the Caliph’s bed ?). And that’s in the Islamic Ummah where adultery was punished by death. Imagine what happened in the bedrooms of the Rus princesses who were quite independent and strong women, at least in the early centuries of the Rus state.
The wise Jewish Rabbis were right: better follow the lineages through the maternal ancestry. Because as everybody knows : “mommy’s baby – daddy’s maybe).
Yes, everything you say is true. Times are indeed changing in ways that are but dimly felt as of yet.
I’ve seen the first season of the newer HBO version. I really enjoyed it and thought it was quite good, but I can’t compare it to the original.
The newer version also has a significant AI dimension to the plot, which I suspect wasn’t in the original.
Imagine saying this about your own mother.
Congrats, I’m now an Article 282 supporter||
“The source” I provided was just a blog by a universally hated blogger without any credentials (Carlos Quiles). I only provide it as an independent summary of the data in the paper, which you wrongly summarized as concerning a Chernihiv skeleton. I could care less if Carlos shares your worthless opinion.
And not a single one was haplogroup N. Care to explain that?
The fact that haplogroup N has not heen found in a single Rurikid royal skeleton is powerful proof that N was not an important early Rurikid haplogroup. That you would continue to deny this and hold on to your precious haplogroup N theory just goes to show biased and pathetic you are, in the face of the forensic evidence.
But go ahead, keep claiming that it’s “widely accepted” that Ruriks were N based on inferred assumptions without a shred of forensic evidence. I will still be dangling these Rurikid prince’s skeletons over your head (0/3 haplogroup N).
But what AP here is basically saying is that anyone who wasn’t haplogroup N in the Rurikids was a result of non-paternity.
He is therefore assuming that three different Rurikid princes were all bastard descendants of haplogroup R1a/E1/I2a men who cucked the “original” haplogroup N1 Rurikids, all from 1000 years ago.
We are then supposed to believe that there are masses of N1 men walking around today, who are descendants of the “original” Rurikids, even though ALL of the original Rurikid princes were non-N1c men, cucked by E1, R1, and I2 stallions.
How did that happen? How did the N1 “original” Rurikid men stop getting cucked so hard in antiquity, reinsert thenselves in to the Rurik royal family, and come back and repopulate Northeastern Europe? Why is there no historical account of this happening?
And would it even matter if N1 was the original Rurikid haplogroup, when they were getting cucked left and right by E1, R1, and I2 men so early on? What kind of dynasty is that? The cuck dynasty?
These morons need to accept that Rurikids were never haplogroup N and that the people claiming to be Rurikids nowadays are mistaken. The hard forensic evidence trumps their assumptions. N1 were the serfs of the Rurikids.
Well, the Rurikid N haplogroup is easily explained by the romantic love triangle of Yaroslav the Wise, his wife Ingegerd of Sweden and the konung Olaf of Norway.
It is known that Ingegerd was first promised to Olaf Haraldson of Norway. Ingegerd was in love with Olaf and was disappointed when her parents married her to the Rus prince. Yaroslav was wounded when young and limped when walking, he was a wise man, an exceptional ruler and a great leader of men. But perhaps Ingegerd had a hard time accepting a Rus prince who was way older than she was, was limp, was already married before he took her as a spouse and of course wasn’t a poet as her teenage passion Olaf was.
When she arrived to meet Yaroslav, Ingegerd was cold and kept herself distant. Yaroslav on the other hand fell in love with his young wife from the very first sight. Facing the cold treatment by his beloved spouse, Yaroslav naturally felt stressed and unhappy. Given his wisdom he managed to talk it through with the knyaginya and learned that her heart was distracted by Olaf.
Yaroslav then invited Olaf to Rus, befriended him and allowed Ingegerd and Olaf to send some time together alone. Then Yaroslav and Olaf pledged a pledge of brotherhood and Olaf married Ingegerd’s sister Astrid.
Ingegerd was amazed by her husband’s generosity and wisdom and become a perfect wife spending many happy years together with Yaroslav and giving birth to their numerous children all of whom Yaroslav loved and cherished.
All is good that ends well…
Ah, also Ingegerd was of Wendish Obodrite ancestry on her mother’s side (can’t escape the Wendish angle).
Part of it is bioculture, IMO. Insert a few million Turks, Arabs, and Africans, and you’ll get progressives signaling about things that they were never evolved to signal about. And most of them don’t have the self-awareness to realize it.
I really feel that Euros are in need of an updated cultural toolkit, for dealing with social disruptions caused by technology. That no country, not even Sweden, is beyond the help of an updated cultural toolkit.
Ethnic identity used to largely be based on a ballad and storytelling culture, and on language and accent. Most of these things have been circumvented by technology. Scale production has replaced local production and local identity, short-circuiting feelings of kinship.
Not sure why anyone expects Schwarzenegger to he an icon of the Right. He made his initial celebrity bodybuilding, where he was cheered by crowds of gays. And he played up to them.
Also, left the Old Country to migrate to Hollywood.
Tend to be kind of a pessimist on Japan, but some people are more optimistic. Here’s one blackpilling theory I have, based on statistical differences:
Japan is less rabidly pro-gay because its AIDS rate is and has always been lower, so less of an extreme of sympathy for dying gays.
Similar idea with blacks. How many were shot in the US so far this year? Heard a stat that in the whole of Japan, the police only fired a total of six bullets in 2015.
Swedish artist Lars Vilks, under police protection for a decade now due to islamic murderousness, was yesterday killed in a traffic accident while being transported by two cops in an armored car. The car swerved, broke through a wire barrier and collided with a truck in the other lane. Some claim the car was travelling at high speed (160 km/h) at the time.
Police have stated it appears to be a normal accident, no crime suspected. But really, how often do people get killed in car accidents while under police protection? I can’t remember hearing of it at all before this. Competent leadership would in fact work with the opposite assumption in this case: that this was an attack of some sort.
This is probably true. My own paternal family who according the family legend are of Varangian descent have an R1a haplogroup identified as “Wendish”, with most hits in the Pskov and Novgorod regions and large clusters scattered around Scandinavia, with a small one in Kiev region (where they supposedly move to, from the North, during the times of Rus). However the Varangians and Rus seem to have been more Norse than anything else (unless the Wends had assimilated with their Norse companions).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rus%27%E2%80%93Byzantine_Treaty_(945)
The text of the treaty, as preserved in the Primary Chronicle, contains a list of the Rus’ plenipotentiaries (no fewer than fifty are named). The overwhelming majority have Norse names.[1]
One part of the Rus’ envoys swear to their pagan gods, while another part invoke the name of the Christian God, indicating that a portion of the Rus’ elite was Christianized.
The total number of names is 76 among whom 12 belong to the ruling family, 11 to emissaries, 27 to other agents, and 26 to merchants. In the princely family, there are three Slavic names Svjatoslav, son of prince Igor’ (Ingvar) and Volodislav and Predslava (of unknown relation). The other members of the family have Norse names, i.e. Olga (Helga), Akun (Hákon), Sfanda (Svanhildr), Uleb (Óleifr), Turd (Þórðr), Arfast (Arnfastr), and Sfir’ka (Sverkir). The emissaries also have Old Norse names except for three who have Finnish names. Olga has a representative by the Finnish name Iskusevi, whereas Volodislav is represented by the Norse Uleb (Óleifr). Among the 27 agents there are some who have Finnish names, but none with Slavic, while among the 26 merchants there are three with Finnish names and two with Slavic.[2]
Yes they probably all worked together in various proportions depending on the missions and trading destinations. And there are Norse people with Y haplogroup R1a too. Plenty of them in Norway for example. Also the Norse ruling elites extensively intermarried with the Wendish elites, many such royal couples are recorded in the chronicles.
Thing is, the Wends were economically quite affluent, they were rather fierce as fighters often raiding both their Norse and German neighbors and were in Pagan times the keepers of several important sanctuaries and temples that were respected by Norse pagans and possibly by Germanic pagans as well.
But nowadays the Vikings are a good selling point, while Wends are nearly forgotten. So everyone sees the Vikings as something exceptional, while in fact Saxons and Wends were also in the same category of Northern barbarians with high martial skills and great business acumen.
The thing that the Wends sorely missed (as is usual with the Balto-Slav) was ethnic cohesion and ability to move beyond petty tribalism. The Norse and especially the Germanic people were more adaptive in that regard and ended conquering and assimilating the Wends.
He summarised that N1a is the Rurikid haplogroup.
I don’t take N=3 very seriously when drawing a broad conclusion. About 68% of Rurikids from multiple princely families have the N1a haplogroup, a specific one that just so happens to match a region in Sweden called Roslagan, which just happens to match the origin story in the Chronicles.
BTW the skeleton of Glen Sviatislavich while not N1a most closely matched some guy in Sweden:
https://lundiak.wordpress.com/2020/10/10/vk542-and-me/
It is interesting that you with all the excuses, formalism and “requires this or that…” would call others defeatist. You seem paralyzed in a mental cage of restrictions – basically nothing can be done, right? I pointed out that Trump could had done more. I gave specifics, and yes, they came with risk. But why do what Trump did – run for office and mobilize people – if you are not willing to take risks? You didn’t answer my suggestions that he could had used better staff (!), more executive action, and less brown-nosing to people who hated him anyway. He could had at least fight the tech monopolies – he definitely had that power, all executives do.
At the core this is a question about how much people want. Some are gradualist and want just a bit – that works during normal times, but today that gets you nowhere, just slower. Some want more, why not? Why are we even alive if we wouldn’t want more, if we don’t want everything? It is liberating and scary, but at least consider it. Living a constrained life is ok, but you may as well be a bird in a very large cage. The cage is slowly shrinking.
I basically agree, but two things to consider is that in a very large territory (as Russias were then and are today) the few thousand people from what is today Scandinavia would get lost in the population very quickly. The estimates are that early Russia had a few million people. How many Vikings came? Even logistically only a few thousand are theoretically possible.
The historical “names” (people known in documents) lived highly mobile and volatile lives. Some survived and left a disproportionate number of descendants (Ruriks?), but most didn’t. It was the opposite for most travelling people and raiders: they died more than the common population and left fewer descendants. That is simply the nature of the lives they lived – then and now. If you look at most “names” from the past, they very often left no descendants and we see documentation of them ending the line. The massive peasant population did better and eventually they overwhelmed the elites of that time. The mixing was the story: we all have R1a, I2a, N1, even R1b in our past, people mate with everyone around.
I am glad that you discovered your ancestor, Turd from Uppsala, it explains a lot. (On the other hand, being R1a1 makes two of us distant cousins – I need a f…ing drink….)
Eventually however the gentry were having more children than did peasants; they could afford to feed more kids, medical care was better, etc.
Further back, raiders living adventurous lives had a high chance of getting killed, but the commoners were getting pillaged and massacred also, when they weren’t pressed to serve as cannon fodder.
Lol, I’m not a Rurikid. Turd was one of the people from the princely family and that was not mine.
I do have a funny family name (in English) of one of my ancestral lines though. In the 14th century a Belarusian warrior, Vanko, did very well in a war against the Muscovites. So the Lithuanian prince ennobled him. The descendants were the family Vankovich, they ruled Minsk for awhile, some of them moved to Galicia in the early 18th century and mixed with local Ruthenians. The ones who stayed in Belarus became Polonized:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walenty_Wa%C5%84kowicz
PBUYT
If you are talking about specific religious affiliation and practice, obviously so. “Religion is the opiate of the masses”. https://depts.washington.edu/chid/intersections_Spring_2009/Ada_Albuquerque_da_Silva_Redemptive_Narratives_in_Marx_and_Nietzsche.pdf
But you can’t conceive of the ideas of Das Kapital without investigating and conceptualizing bourgeois capitalism with the particular underpinnings of Judeo-Christian ethics.
The burden of proof is on you.
This Ludniak guy is I2 and has found himself closely related to not only Knyaz Gleb Sviatoslavich, but also the the Vistula Wends.
The Wends again…
Moreover, the Viking were admixed:
https://www.somersetcountygazette.co.uk/news/national/18725519.analysis-viking-skeletons-suggests-not-scandinavian/
They intermixed with anyone they lived close too leading to interesting lineages, some of which Y haplogroup R1a:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somerled
Obviously, diversity was their strength !
Perhaps if we sample some Native Americans in Labrador we would find Viking ancestry too ?
Just kidding…
Gentry was very much biologically part of the peasantry, if you look at documents (starting in the 16.-17.th century), lower gentry was an outgrowth of the peasantry often rewarded for military or other service. They also systematically intermarried.
By 2nd half of the 19th century (at least in the Habsburg Empire) the gentry class went into an economic and biological tailspin, they lost “privileges” and were not always willing to work as hard as richer peasants or craftsmen. The solution often was to marry into peasantry-crafts. Some interestingly emigrated (to big cities, even America) where they were suddenly more willing to work – maybe something to do with self-perception and pride.
Yes, in some places. But the world is a very big place and getting to remote areas at that time was almost impossible. And most areas were remote areas. When you look at regional histories it is shocking how many places were literally left untouched – unvisited by raiders – for centuries. Their main risk was famine and plagues, raiders were very infrequent and easily escaped. Raiding has always concentrated on the prime real estate – then and now. Statistically it was quite insignificant.
Since your family has the history of anti-Russian (Muscovy?) fighting, you may have that peculiar Central-Eastern European disease of regional pride and brown-nosing to invaders (of course, only to the ones from the West). It started with Vanko, and people with names like “Turd”, maybe you can have a go at it again – Kiev needs it.
But seriously, we have been discussing this for a few years and things have turned out somewhere in the middle with a stalemate and endlessly growing tension in that region. No real winners, but everyone has lost something. We are looking at freezing winter (maybe), a loss of gas transit revenue (yes, us too), Hungarians and Germans are laughing, and the mood in the air is basically “somebody is going to get hurt“. What do you think? Who this time? And is the constant compradoring really that good for the region?
The wages of sin is death.
Just desserts for video peasants.
PBUYT
If you wish every obstacle had been swept away, there should have been:
1) An entirely sympathetic political establishment that provided staff that totally complied (which is contrary to reality)
2) Dictatorial rule (which requires wholesale Roman-style reworking of institutions)
The 1st one means oligarchical support & the 2nd one means autocracy. American republicanism could have the first, but definitely not the 2nd.
You should accept the rule of thumb of institutional decay and many good institutions become dysfunctional towards the end of a political regime. In the end total political realignment is inevitable, a process that has been intensifying since 2016 and definitely since 2020.
https://www.wired.com/story/what-if-regulating-facebook-fails/
Just dug this out after searching. Wokes want to reform social media, rightoid want the hammer. I want to sleep and forget.
CIA has always funded “Islamic” terrorists. Does this make CIA Muslim?
Has Soros sworn the Shahada, or said anything that expresses his personal belief in all of the fundamental Islamic doctrines?
Japanese NEETs should be drafted to become colonial administrators; that would give them a sense of purpose and a certain status, as well as a usefulness in promoting stability in the Third World, which would help ease the repatriation process.
How Typical of DW:
https://www.dw.com/en/oleksander-usyk-ukraines-controversial-heavyweight-boxing-champion/a-59398411
I agree, something seems amiss to me, from my perspective here in the U.S. And it’s not just a matter of being a police-driven armored car. My anecdotal knowledge is that careful, defensive, sober drivers do not get into accidents, and do not even receive any moving violations, over an entire lifetime. The only safe-driving conundrum I face is when I am about to stop for a light that just turned red, and the driver in back of me might well be disposed to accelerate to run the red light; I judge that from the type of hippity-hoppity vehicle he is driving. Signing-off from California.
This is not a binary situation: I am saying he could had done more, not everything. E.g. tech monopolies could had been hurt by executive action. It was a fight – he should behave as in a fight. Sessions and others, like Bolton, could had been fired sooner – again, there was an attempt to please the people who obviously hated him, not those who elected him.
Change is hard, reform often almost impossible. But an alternative is what America has now – a full-blown uber-liberal circus. Trump was never going to be impeached – the votes were simply not there. Plus, the establishment knew that was a very dangerous game and could had backfired. They want stability above all.
There is nothing about what I wrote that is “never Trump”, kind of the opposite. But a discussion requires a broad spectrum of ideas and critical thinking. It is exactly the shutting down of other ideas that we all (I hope) find so repulsive about the modern liberals. If you want to do better, don’t close your side off to different perspectives.
https://twitter.com/akarlin88/status/1445109287454449666
https://twitter.com/akarlin88/status/1445120356293955587
The HBO series was very slow-moving, I thought. This is where I lament the decline of films and the migration of prestige storytelling to TV. Perhaps the new WestWorld tells a much deeper and more nuanced story than the old one. But if it takes 100 hours to do so and the original wrapped itself up in under 90 minutes, then it would seem the new one is clearly better only in a world where time is an infinite resource.
The thing about watching 50-100 hour series is that I don’t see how it happens, as a married/family man, unless you’re watching it with, at minimum, your wife. But it’s quite possible to watch a movie by myself, even if I sometimes end up having to watch it in 30-60 minute segments.
Yes, this was the origin of some of them. Another group were lesser branches of greater families. A third group were free soldiers who I suppose could have had some sort of peasant origins. In Ukrainian territory these would be the people like the Varangians, or the Transylvanian Saxons who got land grands in exchange for fighting the Mongols ( a few hundred Galician gentry families with the coat of arms Sas have this origin). They all mixed.
After the 17th century, this became very rare. It wasn’t as strict a caste system as in India (where research shows that in the same village, people from different castes who have lived near each other for centuries are as genetically divided as the people of Italy and Sweden). It usually involved a very poor member of the gentry and a wealthier commoner.
But as you wrote, despite not intermarrying these guys tended to get along well with peasants.
This was true of the poorest of the village gentry. But many others served as low-ranking military officers or worked as priests. Because Greek Catholic priests could marry and have heirs, many of the lesser gentry of Rus origin took on this job. One of my ancestors owned a small village while also being its priest. So they owned land, and were paid a priest salary by the Hapsburg government.
At the turn of the 20th century they became lawyers, professors, and the first intelligentsia.
These places also had local gentry, with huge families.
They were loyal to their state, Lithuania and later PLC. The invaders were the Muscovites. When PLC collapsed they were loyal to the new one.
PBUYT <- this makes me a Muslim by your logic
In your imagination (except for the very-true ethnic self-hate).
Look, this is unprovable.
You need not to mind the refugees’ religion to support them entering Europe. And if anything, the Pentagon is “more Islamic” for crushing or undermining several Middle Eastern states all of them becoming hubs for refugee movement.
Which is also the hatred of traditional Islamic beliefs.
What does Antifa, which is exclusively a phenomenon in America and some heavily Americanized states have to do with Islam?
Are you a closet Jew?
It varied region by region and country by country. Even at their peak gentry (“blue bloods“) in the Habsburg Empire were only 2-3 % of the population, in big centers around 5%. Their choices were limited, unless the usual cousin pair-up was arranged. Many in the gentry were poor, all they had was a right to serve as officers (really a duty), they could vote at county assemblies, and many schools until the late 18th century required noble origin for admission (then Joseph II did away with it). Commoners were everywhere and many were wealthy, mostly because unlike gentry they actually worked, it created surpluses over time. You are right about the priest careers.
It is the loyalty to new masters that distinguishes these people. When you have privileges and property, it starts out well, and then you end up being owned by the property. You no longer own them, they own you. A weird mental place to be that makes people do things that a normal human wouldn’t (or shouldn’t). That explains a lot about the current Kiev oligarchy (and others too)…
I definitely see what you mean.
Quality storytelling seems to have abandoned the big screen – for the past few years I stopped even checking what films are being released. I have no idea what’s playing now – although I think most films are being released on Netflix and similar platforms during Covid anyways.
As a busy married man, that can be tough.
Your point raises the interesting question though, that clearly most people seem to prefer these long series these days, or the shift wouldn’t have been successful? Perhaps more people have free time?
Or maybe, people spend more of their leisure time on immersive digital entertainment, and yearn to surrender to imaginary worlds for an extended period of time – as the real world can be so unsatisfactory.
Perhaps this need is more pressing today, or maybe – and I apologize for shamelessly introducing my earlier thesis here 🙂 – as “progress” recedes as a goal, people are less interested in engaging with the physical realm, and seek “inner space” more. So maybe a prelude and preparation for a reorientation towards the spiritual?
Anyways, just wild speculation on my part – as is my wont. But it is an interesting shift.
For my part, I have lots of free time, but watch way more TV when I’m in the city than when in nature.
Another thing occured to me – in the 19th century, huge sprawling novels were hugely popular. TV and movies, for the past 100 years or so, were competing with novels – but maybe this means the screen has finally completely supplanted the novel, and now provides an experience similar to a gigantic, immersive Dickens novel where a new chapter is released every week, and you might “inhabit” this world for a few months or even a year.
Among Poles, the percentage of people who were gentry was around 8%, among Ruthenians/Ukrainians 2%-3%.
In Austrian Galicia this meant about 300,000 Polish gentry and 80,000 Rusyn/Ukrainian gentry by 1910. This is enough for genetic diversity – the Quebec French founder population was only 8,500 people after all. First cousin marriages were forbidden, and pairings with first and second cousins cousins and lead to birth defects. But it appears that in terms of healthy offspring, 3rd and 4th cousin pairings may be ideal:
https://www.nature.com/articles/news.2008.562
And priests, historically. During modernization in the 19th century they started to become lawyers, professors, etc.
Contrary to modern propaganda, gentry were a service class and not some sort of lazy do-nothings. Yes, the poorest ones living as farmers did not toil as hard as did some of their peasant neighbors, but the ones working as administrators, military officers, teachers, priests, etc. were very busy. A priest, for example, would not only tend to his flock’s sacraments but would organize a school and choir for the villagers, organize causes for their betterment (such as agitate against drunkenness) as well as run his own farm. This attitude went all the way to the top. Old Franz Josef was working 80 hour weeks long into his old age.
They were stakeholders and not servants, so the reference to “masters” is not accurate.
And those who do not own are just as likely to be owned by envy of those who do own. That is, they are owned by property they do not even possess. And they did horrible things based on that, worse things than the owners did. And were punished in the end for that.
Daniel Chieh offered up some very well thought out opinions about just this sort of cultural supplantation of novels with television and even video games happening right now. We were discussing Chinese films and I remember that you were involved in this discussion too. He’s slowed down his commenting output substantially as of late – barely 2-3 comments within Karlin’s recent Chinese thread, where I would have expected much more from him. Here’s a good review of “The Last Emperor” by Trevor Lynch, one of the films that we discussed: https://www.unz.com/tlynch/review-the-last-emperor/
https://variety.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/the-last-emperor.jpg
Daniel Chieh, what’s up? 🙂
Antifa has long been a European phenomenon, by the way. I was somewhat surprised that they turned up in the US, poignantly enough with the Seattle anti-globalization riots. But now the US offshoot has outgrown the original.
Explain when the dowry is offered by the bride’s family to the groom|| France has corrupted u.
So that is the preliminary result of all that Lukashenko initiated huffing and puffing (plane downing&”refugee” sending to the western neighbourhood) since spring – despite doing self congratulory 8 hour summer media orgy in front of mainly convienently selected army of various propagandons, still decides to do quite drilling one on one hard talk with the enemy and finished about the need of friendship?:
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/10/02/europe/belarus-lukashenko-interview-transcript/index.html
btw, “refugee” crisis in Lithuania largely abruptly ended in August, when official decision to not let anymore go in or simply physically send back to Belarus was implemented:
https://ls-osp-sdg.maps.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/9b0a008b1fff41a88c5efcc61a876be2
Since then Lukashenko redirected those “refugee” streams to Latvia and Poland, but they also implemented the same official policy quite soon, so at the moment he is stuck with homeless camps of various third worlders with ended tourist Belarus visas on his side of the border, lol 🙂
I didn’t realize the original Antifa started as one of the militant wings of German Communists that anticipated the incipient Nazi regime (1932). That was at least as legitimate as the Brownshirts.
But like much of left-wing ideology it has been debased by wokism these 30 years, then co-opted by the political establishment along with the Democrat’s radical wing.
Comparing the TV series of Westworld, especially the first one, to the film, is like comparing War & Peace to a single Spiderman comic book.
Lisa Joy, who made it with her husband Jonathan Nolan, recently released the film Reminiscence. It has a great storyline, a great setting, lovely echoes of the Maltese Falcon and is very interesting. The reviews were poor, but the reviewers are too superficial to understand how interesting the film actually is.
Just as it was in history, art can be too complex for reviewers to even realise what they are failing to understand.
There you go again, trying to subdue Spidey. When will you ever learn, it can’t be done. 🙂
https://66.media.tumblr.com/bd5a98bd9b8e9324d793d15cd8e1ae41/tumblr_nbwwf3qY6l1qbgo38o1_1280.jpg
Yes
I suspect that the trend for serials partly reflects that we live in an increasingly feminist culture, perhaps, as well as the increasing number of sun peoples who seem to have a penchant for telenovelas.
Though it is hard to come up with a unified theory. My vague impression is that it is the same in Japan and Korea. (In Japan this is probably related to manga culture). Not to mention many popular novels of the 19th century were released in serial format, and pretty drawn out as writers were frequently paid for by the word. Probably there are incentives to try to amortize the costs of production by producing serials.
I’d be very curious to learn where they were more dominant, in the US or the Soviet Union. One interesting distinction between the two is that actors and actresses, whether in plays or movies were frequently older in the Soviet Union.
Yes, I too enjoyed Reminiscence quite a bit in spite of the reviews. I do usually agree broadly with the critical consensus, but this was one of the exceptions. For example, Bright was a movie where people insisted the critics were wrong, but the critics were actually right — that film had some fun ideas but the script was fatally broken.
It might be that I’ve been a sucker for hardboiled detective tropes my entire life, and we don’t see them much these days. I’m also a sucker for a film that dares to do something different. Reminiscence did several things different, and I thought they all paid off in the end (though the pacing started to drag at a few spots in the middle). Some of the twists and turns genuinely surprised me as well, even if some other points were pretty predictable.
PBUYT
Wokes (“BLM”) support the Palestinean cause since they associate perceived repression (BLM) with actual ones (what Israel does in West Bank & Gaza), not because they share anything on a religious level.
He is anti-Israel and funds a bit of Palestinean initiatives, sure. But he isn’t interested in Muslims, but in letting his ideology permeate every country and annihilate anything against his “Open Society” vision. Islamism is one of his targets.
In Russia, a teenage girl was cut in half (as Anna Karenina) by the tram, by riding on the stick part between two different carriages.
Traditionally the hobby since Soviet “boomer” days, is safely riding on the back or front of the tram by sitting on the stick part (not between two carriages).
https://i.imgur.com/MKf0aS7.jpg
Grandmother rides behind trolleybus advert apparently for a Jewish computer school
https://i.imgur.com/G3Tkh8W.jpg
It’s one of the “Normal day in Russia” memes
https://i.imgur.com/zpJkbcF.jpg
Sadly in recent years kids seem to be losing “institutional knowledge” of the traditional safety methods
Correct me if I’m wrong since I don’t follow these politics at all, but while stopping rapeugees is a terrible civilization ending crime, allowing Mini-Putler to have his way with your country is also looked down upon.
On the other hand, how much difficultly will Lukashenko have in physically removing these “ended tourist Belarus visas” masses now huddled at his politically Western borders? I suppose that requires some place that will accept them (back), or camps. Would the establishment of the latter make things worse for him and Belarus vis-à-vis the EU, U.K. (do they matter in this??), USA etc.? What about Turkey, which is far away but pretty important overall?? Or are they Mostly Harmless where they are and will migrate to in Belarus? What sort of numbers are we talking about?
I think there has been a loss of discipline, from the late ’50s onward, of which Heinlein is a pretty good example, as he spanned the trend. Had a lot to do with editors, IMO. Might have had something to do with drugs. And an end to paper shortages, in some places. Maybe, the cost of print came down?
Some 19th century novels were pretty long, unabridged. For ex: “The Count of Monte Cristo” is like 1000+ pages. Maybe, this had to do with the absence of major wars? And that explains the current lengthening?
This lengthening is an interesting phenomenon, but I’m not sure books explain it, so much as show the same trend. AFAIK, a lot of prime time serials were never based on books, “Dallas”, “Dynasty”, “Lost.”
Probably serials became more viable with streaming. Maybe, before that with DVD box sets? And before that with cable TV which had multiple channels for syndication?
It is interesting how what are often among the lowest cost TV shows to produce, police procedurals, seem to be more episodic and looked down upon. (I dislike them myself, but I also dislike serials in general. The best Star Trek was episodic, IMO.)
When Kurosawa was a school boy, he had a brief impulse to let go of the back of a trolley. But he was in-between two college students who were also clinging to the back of the trolley, and they caught him by his book bag and held him up. (But that was just overcrowded Tokyo and not fare-dodging.) Years later, his glummer brother committed suicide, but in a different way.
And don’t I know it from reading the whole thing in English translation (it’s great, or so I thought in junior high). The general answer to your question is that they were first serialized, per Wikipedia Monte Cristo in 18 parts in what was then the most read newspaper in France.
First published in book form also in 18 volumes. War and Peace is another traditionally held to be very long novel, per Wikipedia 1,225 pages, and it too was first serialized, but in something that sounds rather modern to me, Tolstoy heavily revised it, and when published in book form “Russians who had read the serialized version were eager to buy the complete novel, and it sold out almost immediately.”
So long novels, no longer serialized in part due to a lack of outlets in the US, being serialized in video versions where you can’t so easily put a book aside make a lot of sense today. Although I agree about the lack of discipline that developed, Heinlein is one of the best examples I’m personally very familiar with. With the notable exception of The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, fairly long at 382 pages and I see now also serialized in 1965-6, Starship Troopers was his last great novel, and it was written with his Leftist Scribner’s editor in mind, someone who he’d constantly fought with, for example censoring some of his pro-gun material in Red Planet.
She rejected it, ending an eleven year long very productive for both relationship. Heinlein did not respond well to rejection, although this was for political reasons. He wrote Troopers in a white hot heat after President Eisenhower betrayed the country with a nuclear test ban agreement with the USSR, and I’m pretty sure it was a bit longer than his previous juveniles. But not in any way padded, or so I felt when I read it in junior high along with the rest of them.
But he’d for example started working on the published in 1961 Stranger in a Strange Land for some years before, in part waiting until the mores had changed so it could be published. Which I’m sure includes that change in editorial policies you note, although when an author gets as prominent as he got by the time of Troopers they can be impossible to control, can as he did easily find another publisher. And of course now with the big five publishers becoming all but useless for all but the biggest blockbuster authors….
Specifically in Lithuania overall number is not really big, just over 4 thousand “refugees”, most of them were received in two first months of initial confusion this summer, untill the official order to not let them in was issued. However, LT is really tiny (2,7 million pop) country and this 4k number is equal to 0,15% of all current population, which on USA level would be 500k illegals coming in during quite short span.
Guess Lukashenko’s initial plan was to emulate Erdogan, but unlike Turkey, current Belarus is way smaller and also absolute political pariah after 2020 Belarus presidential election, even in modern liberal minded Western establishment eyes, so his propaganda cries about “humanitarian refugee catastrophe” and “Nazi Lithuania” behaviour did not have any significant reaching impact as he hoped.
There were several small scale escapes&riots in those make shift refugee camps and very vocal complaining just about everything, but so far they were not committing very serious crimes in LT like murders or rapes of local population, so it could have been worse.
This meme picture was confusing too much – I mean, not the grandmother riding outside the trolleybus, but why is there an advert for a Jewish student club “Hillel” for a computer school “IT kids”?
But the answer – this is Ukraine, and apparently Hillel has private computer schools there, and put its adverts on the trolleybuses.
Apparently Hillel has diversified its business to become an educator of the peoples’ private afterschool IT training.
http://www.ort.org.ua/en/schools-and-centers/kiev/educational-center-ort-hillel-kiev/
Now I’m starting to understand why on Ukrainian startup groups, the young people have been often posting about their Israel heritage trips. Although World ORT trains both people with or without Jewish roots (World ORT allow anyone in their schools), IT people in Ukraine can be going a bit like the diamond industry of Antwerp.
Had to read “The Count of Monte Cristo” over summer vacation once. Put it off until about the last week. Most people read the abridged version, but by the time I found a copy, the only one I could find at a library in a different town was the unabridged version.
It was a brutal slog. Eventually, I realized I would never finish unless I read every other page, or even less, which I did. Not missing much on the test, except the secret passage by which a conversation was overheard, which, however, I think I would have still caught, had I been better able to maintain my focus.
Interesting story, but life (and youth) is too short for the long version.
Mostly, I hated assigned reading. By my time, lot of it was already woke. And almost none of it was related to my interests.
This kind of theme trying to enjoy a city for free, has been a story of Kurosawa’s early films.
If you saw his 1947 film “One Wonderful Sunday” – it’s about a young couple who are trying to enjoy Sunday in Tokyo with no money. But having to spend all their money for a cup of coffee in a cafe, or being unable to watch a Schubert concert because of ticket scammers.
Kurosawa also tried to kill himself in the 1970s. Scary to imagine if he had killed himself then, as he made some of history’s best films after.
Mosfilm hired him for making “Dersu Uzala”. Then he filmed (with Hollywood financing) “Kagemusha” and (with French financing) “Ran”. Some of the best films of history.
A bit of US TV history, and perhaps seen in other nations like Japan: For after prime time “syndication,” where local stations would buy the rights to show a TV series generally five days a week for at least a year (and that has implications for how long networks would try to draw out a series), it was generally deemed too complicated to show episodes in order—this was back when film or professional video tapes had to be physically moved from A to B—so a whole bunch of series were done without episode to episode continuity.
I mention Japan because of a show I watched subtitled in the US on an obscure local station in the 1990s, Abarenbou Shougun or The Unfettered Shogun, “Set in the eighteenth century, it showed fictitious events in the life of Yoshimune, the eighth Tokugawa shougun.” Very formula, but very well done including fake sword fighting much better that in the first Lone Wolf and Cub movie and highly recommended, and it occurs to me an original year’s episodes could be shown out of order, except for the last one which they put a lot of effort into, wasn’t formula, and the 1-2 of those I saw implied there could be continuity.
Good point with HBO. I think a lot of it might be explained by cable.
Those channels used to pay a fortune for the first-runs of blockbuster movies. Since, they made these big commitments that ran like $100+ million sometimes, they were probably looking for a better return on their money by spending it in-house, on rights that they would own in perpetuity, until copyright expired. Serials could amortize the cost and be a better return than movies.
Probably a class dimension in the trend. Premium cable had the resources and desire to differentiate themselves from network TV. To some extent, they promoted serials more than network TV and that is why they became prestige.
I’ve actually only seen a handful of Kurosawa films so far (Ran being the only one you listed), though I intend to see more, but I still thought his autobiography was very interesting.
Come to think of it, he did spend a lot of his pocket money on books. Maybe, he was fare-dodging?
One fellow who knew his brother who committed suicide thought Akira was the polar opposite of him, with a very cheerful face and attitude.
Many great novels were first published in serialized format in newspapers.
Charles Dickens’s “The Pickwick Papers” or Alexandre Dumas “The Count of Monte Cristo” which appeared in 139 installments. Authors were getting feedback from readers and their concerns about novel’s characters which in some cases affected the plot as some novels were written daily or weekly. No different than in soap operas where some characters are resurrected if killed too prematurely after viewers’ objections.
Even Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov were serialized. Some authors like Dostoevsky needed money badly and had no time to wait for proceeds from published book.
That such real-time writing and publishing process w/o help of editors and final polishing of text and structure could produce great literature is something really amazing.
Russians got their movie stars to the International Space Station on a two orbit, 3.5 hour flight. Awesome, and rather adventurous for non professionals.
Soyuz does have a private bathroom though, so should they have missed and got stuck for a few days, the lady actress wouldn’t have to pee on the heads of her fellow passengers 🙂
I will soon be posting some cryptocurrency addresses on my Unz Review blog.
There are people who will pay to read what you write!?
I vaguely recall rumors that they were trying to appeal more to women. Maybe, it was serials that got them started on this idea?
I watched SG1, back in day. I think it was good, if you needed a sci-fi fix, and when you consider what else was on. But the show often felt lazy. Big pauses between lines of dialogue, sometimes. One episode, they were just sitting around drinking beer and having a barbecue. After a while, you started to wonder why the bad guys never hit them or had better security on their gates.
Probably another factor with cable encouraging serials was the lack of censorship (seen in first episode of SG1). Easier to interest men. Didn’t have to worry about markets pulling an episode for censorship purposes and thus breaking the narrative. Or, the game going into overtime, or the local newscast starting early.
Ridiculous and loathsome:
https://www.rt.com/usa/536665-sarah-silverman-jewface-hollywood/
Yes, I remember that now 🙂
Daniel Chieh is quite a bright individual capable of interesting insights, so perhaps I was channeling him 🙂
As for his disappearance, I imagine as a High Priest of the Machine God his time is taken up with his religious duties, and perhaps he’s undergoing an existential crisis at the realization that the Machine God is not going to be the High God of the coming century, but a minor deity in the emerging pantheon 🙂 And in his rightful place as a minor deity, deserving of our respect and appreciation – but no more.
May Chieh return and share his intelligent insights with is again 🙂
Thanks for the link to Trevor’s review – it’s quite good. I saw the movie a long time ago and remember liking.
I like Trevor’s discussion of the aesthetic deficiencies of Communism, its dull drabness, as opposed to the sumptuous color and pageantry of traditional culture. This critique might be extended to the drabness of modernity as a whole.
This is basically the criticism Edmund Burke leveled at the French Revolution – it’s destruction of the great pageantry and chivalry of the traditional culture of Europe, to be replaced by the colorless drabness of Reason, with it’s abstraction and lack of emotion. It is also what Henry James described as so lacking in America, and what he found so compelling about Old Europe.
This ushered in what might be called the Age of Ugliness, still with is today – but not for much longer, I devoutly believe!
However, Trever describes a concern with aesthetics as essentially right wing – there is some truth to this, but it’s vastly overstated. It’s true there has always been a right wing faction that approaches life from a distinctly aesthetic perspective, and artists like Evelyn Waugh converted to Roman Catholicism partly out of a fascination with it’s aesthetics.
And that is as good a reason as any, as far as I’m concerned 🙂
But the right-wing in America, for instance, the Puritans, the Reagan lovers, etc, are distinctly drab and unaesthetic and utilitarian, and “liberal” cities integrate an aesthetic dimension into life far more successfully today.
Trevor ends by saying that valuing the aesthetics of traditional culture – which I infinitely prefer to modernity – is reactionary, but to me, this ignores the very real problems a mere return to traditional culture entails.
For instance, a year or two ago I tried to become Jewish again. Charmed by the rituals, traditions, community, sense of corporate identity, etc – by the aesthetics of a traditional culture – I sought entrance into this other world.
But after a short, charmed spell, the dark side emerged – traditional cultures demand extreme conformity, and immense social pressure is brought to bear on anyone who stands out – and I am a very eccentric individual 🙂 I began to finally understand why the French Revolution, with it’s desire to simply sweep aside the entirety of the “ancien regime”, and not gradually reform it, was such an attractive option at the time to many. And similarly for the Russian Revolution.
Kings and Lords, Knights and Monks, Emperors and eunuchs, hierarchies and complex manners, all the costumes, color, and pageantry, are truly wonderful things – as long as they are not taken too seriously.
Once they become in deadly earnest, and people forget life isn’t really serious, and the hierarchies are not really absolute, and all humans are really, finally, equal – then stifling oppression sets in.
For instance, I find the institution of the “bow” completely charming – having been to Japan and seem it in action, I love it. And gracious and refined manners – but the bow can, under adverse conditions, come to signify abject abasement, and not a charming ritual of mutual symbolic respect, and no longer a poetic gesture, but an attempt to cement harsh oppression.
Ultimately, we need beautiful social forms and ritual – but when they cease being poetic gestures, not entirely real, symbolic and charming, and become solidified and real, them they become a terrible, pitiless oppression.
Heh, although the ZeroHedge article author is unsure if the unloading of those five bulk carriers of Australian thermal coal is a real change in policy. We’ll know more now that the supposed secure thermal resources “at all costs” order has been made by no looking so great right now helmsman Xi.
A probably more interesting article to the readers of this blog that dropped today is “Just How Reliant Is Europe On Russian Gas“. BTW, TTF would appear to be the Dutch Title Transfer Facility, a place where I assume LNG cargoes could be received.
While I don’t trust anything I read on ZeroHedge, several facts that are probably falsifiable dropped out of it which I found interesting. The biggest is that whatever happens with Nord Stream 2 (NS2), there is “limited visible pipeline spare capacity” to move gas from its end in Germany further west.
This makes sense, it’s expensive to build or expand pipeline capacity, I wonder if the Greens make it extra hard especially in Germany, and with the uncertainty of Nord Stream 2 ever supplying gas I can’t see pipeline operators building up capacity in a major way absent a government contract prior to functioning. The Goldman analysis pencils in not very much from it this winter, 10 mcm/d; that’s like 5% of the “expected net pipline imports from Russia into NW Europe this winter.” And it says:
I don’t quite see how that works in the long term, absent lots of LNG from the US etc. Something the Greens in general and the Democrats in the US Officially don’t want happening in general.
It has a complicated analysis that Gasprom might not be able to physically meet its contractual obligations this winter. Part of that is saying their storage facilities in western Europe are essentially empty, and part of the analysis is an educated guess gas is being produced, but being stored further east. And here’s another possible motive for what’s happening right now:
One of the other ZeroHedge articles today cited a figure of $1.2 billion as I recall for how much the Ukraine is poised to lose in transit fees once Nord Stream 2 is fully armed and operational.
Possibly it can be an inspiration, especially to have feedback from the readers between chapters.
We know in music that the live performances are often more popular than those recorded in studios, despite more common problems with the sound quality. (e.g. many music fans are addicted to nervous energy in live Toscanini recordings https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6U-ntPFgNuQ. )
He was public with some nightmare visions in “Dreams”.
Unortunately, it wasn’t until I submitted by comment that I remembered that both you and Chieh were reveling in some long diatribe that seemed (to me anyway) to long outlive its usefulness after about 4 comments, instead of the Dostoyevskian 67 that it consumed. My bringing up Comrade Chieh had nothing at all to do with wanting to rekindle this historic confrontation.
As far as Reagan and drabness goes:
https://static.hollywoodreporter.com/sites/default/files/2013/09/ronald_reagan_bill_clinton_century_city_a_l.jpg
He loved living the good life, and always had a good joke to share at his disposal 🙂
You are quite correct, my bizarre and pointless feud with Chieh should not be resurrected. I wish him all the best and look forward to his future insights here 🙂
I apologize if what I said seemed to point back to that dark episode – I was trying to be humorous.
As for Reagan, the man himself was quite delightful, and it’s not as if I disagree with all of his policies. He had a very good “presence”, too. Clinton was a step down in that regard, imo. My father was a great fan of Reagan.
Only, right wingers in the US have not generally represented the “aesthetic” side, but rather, a sort of sober, Puritan, utilitarian side – many American right wing arguments relate to what is socially “effective”. This is not the right-wingism of Burke or Waugh. This is important – but man does not live by bread alone, and in the US, right wingers, however correct, have for the past few decades represented the sobriety of “bread”. And that is one reason they have lost to the admitted “lunacy” of the Left.
This is important, and should be taken into account – if one can.
Yeah, it’s a good thing that Germans aren’t subjected to mass surveillance and now, a pandemic police state. Whew, that’s a relief.
Looks like the Australian regime has enough weapons to brutalize and beat their people and force them to get injection after injection and not leave the house without “permission.” That’s all they seem to care about. Let China take them.
Sure he was, a tottering moron who took 2-hour crap (royal sources), an afternoon nap, walks and endless meals. Yeah, he also sat at a desk shuffling some papers and telling his servants (because that’s who they were regardless of title) again and again that “nothing must change, all is well“. Look, you are welcome to your silly Habsburg worship, it is harmless, but don’t feed us these brown-nosing stories, it is embarrassing in 2021. (As it already was in 1918.)
I think not. The balance of pain in that region, at that time, was squarely on the side of the suffering “property” types. Some of it was even justified. What you call envy was simply the life punishing all those lazy unearned assh..es, it happens now and then. You don’t know the local history – instead you internalised family lore and Hollywood fairy-tales. Oh, and the “merican” version of history…precious.
Only kings and fools are born, which one are you?
https://www.instagram.com/p/CQGzqdbtjOj
The WEF are just accelerationists who exploit tendencies that have always existed since liberalism’s inception, just like those Mongol soldier throwing pestilent corpses into Caffa.
Our ancestors have survived the Mongols, the Black Death, and the wars and unrest in the 17th century, and even the Spanish Flu and 2 World Wars. Only those who want indefinite demographic expansion will be woeful.
https://twitter.com/qin_duke/status/1445417785077780484?s=20
Thanks for your response; sorry, i’m not sure who “our” ancestors are in your comment, or who “WEF” are.
I don’t want an ever-increasing world population, if that’s what you mean by indefinite demographic expansion … but I’m not sure what that has to do with Australia having become a brutal police state with surveillance and control more like China.
I mean the peoples of the pre-modern Old World and the WEF is the World Economic Forum, with their Great Reset agenda. One of the components of their agenda is alleged to be depopulation (to whatever extent), which is simply pre-modern demographic patterns reasserting itself after 2-3 centuries of unchecked expansion, regardless of what the WEF actually does. And if you have read what I posted, it’s simply the late Liberal predilection for more intensive control that drives all the brutality and surveillance, or Classical Liberalism turning into its dialectical opposite. So many people don’t know what they’re actually facing and cling to some mythical worldview about the good ol’ liberal times.
O, na old liberal times & new ones are both gay, because:
https://twitter.com/akarlin88/status/1144009116614086658
With that out of the way, it’s natural to desire an increase in soldiers.
Lots of sons & lots of guns as the Pathans say||
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
So just as an addendum to this point:
https://twitter.com/zerohedge/status/1445475203044110340
Also Soros: “When I see a bubble forming I rush in to buy, adding fuel to the fire.”
Regardless of one’s opinion on Soros, if you’re counter-trading him, you’re probably NGMI.
I did an image search for that title. A black boy? I don’t suppose he’s a personification of the lokomotive’s coal, right? ;^)
How binding are those “points of understanding”? I read a short report that indicated that they were the product and purview of a group of industry self-regulation reviewers, not a government injunction.
There are some reasonable points of focus there, like the pay-to-win model, gambling (“gacha”), the homo and “effeminate” stuff, Chinese history revision, Chinese separatism, and the technical topics you mentioned. But there seems to be quite a bit of overzealousness too, IMO. Like the stuff about evil, anti-social, or anti-human storyline choices or settings (these categorisations are extremely wide, amorphous, what do they specifically have in mind?), or anime-style games, which IIRC, according to Daniel Chieh, have been making serious inroads into global and even Japanese markets (it seems utterly foolish to indiscriminately curtail such developments just because they are stylistically native to Japan; suffuse it instead with Chinese culture and slowly evolve it into culturally-Chinese directions), or the stuff about violence, which is similar to the nonsense we typically hear from anti-gun advocates in the west.
In general, there is significant amount of vagueness, which could be used as a carte blanche to disqualify lots, but which also provides a very large wiggle room for discretionarily allowing a great deal. I have observed more than once that industries that self-regulate (commonly to avoid government regulation) by casting such wide nets, do so with the implicit understanding that most fish will slip through. I wonder if this is one such case. Although, in China’s case, wary of the past, I can’t avoid worrying a bit about the potential for “spiraling”.
Cui bono, poignant as ever. The media in the west and Japan is typically aghast when reporting about these topics, while their industrial lobbyists may actually be fanning some of it.
Those might be what the event conclude which might or might not have regulatory weight. And I agree with your assessment with the foci and execution.
The Japanese will go from localizing their own games in Mainland China to pulling talent and ideas out of China, assuming that nothing serious happening to threaten the business environment in Japan (something I have hinted at in the original post).
Of course, there will be much upheaveal and strange phenomena – and even sufferingband confusion – that will accompany this transition.
Dammit! I knew that it was a mistake to throw away my jar of moonbeams.
Climate change not so great for Russia after all?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-change-permafrost-oil-gas-economy-russia-11633443474#:~:text=The%20melting%20of%20the%20thick,scientists%20and%20Russia%20government%20research.&text=Since%201976%2C%20Russia's%20average%20temperature,global%20pace%2C%20government%20data%20shows.
Climate Change Is Melting Russia’s Permafrost—and Challenging Its Oil Economy
Across Russia, the thawing of earth thought to be forever frozen cracks buildings, infrastructure; ‘It’s all on the line.’
By Ann M. Simmons and Georgi Kantchev | Photographs and video by Arthur Bondar for The Wall Street Journal
Oct. 5, 2021 10:24 am ET
YAKUTSK, Russia—Thawing earth once thought to be permanently frozen is springing to life and threatening a crucial chunk of Russia’s economy.
The melting of the thick layer of the earth known as permafrost is a result of climate change, according to scientists and Russia government research. Two-thirds of the country sits on such soil, including much of its oil and gas infrastructure. Since 1976, Russia’s average temperature has risen 0.92 degree Fahrenheit per decade, or 2½ times the global pace, government data shows.
Mines and plants are experiencing increasing corrosion leaks and cracks, stemming in large part from defrosting ground. In the pipeline industry, braces and other mechanisms, previously anchored into permafrost, often corrode, twist and bend when the earth below changes, according to ecologists and other researchers. Companies are pouring millions of dollars into reinforcing buildings, monitoring soil temperatures and installing high-tech cooling systems.
The phenomenon was a contributor to the largest ever spill in the polar Arctic in spring 2020, when damage to a diesel fuel storage tank in remote Siberia caused 20,000 tons of fuel to leak.
After the spill, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared a national state of emergency and the country’s Prosecutor General ordered regional prosecutors to inspect all hazardous facilities built on permafrost. Russia’s Investigative Committee, the nation’s main investigations agency, later blamed the incident on negligence and poor maintenance. Officials at the Norilsk Nickel mining company that operates the installation—along with some government scientists and elected officials—said thawing permafrost caused the failure of posts supporting the basement where the storage tank laid.
“In the near past, everybody believed that permafrost would have an impact on infrastructure by the end of the century. Now we know we don’t have much time,” said Vladimir Romanovsky, professor of geophysics at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. “Oil, gas, villages—it’s all on the line.”
Russian economic officials and scientists estimate that thawing permafrost could affect more than a fifth of Russian infrastructure. The economy stands to lose more than $68 billion by 2050, a government minister said in May. The government says that 40% of buildings and infrastructure facilities in permafrost-covered areas have already been damaged.
Aging Russian buildings and equipment, much dating to the Cold War, don’t help matters. “We must be prepared for this,” said Mr. Putin during a nationwide address in June. Last month, he ordered the creation of a national permafrost monitoring system to analyze data from 140 stations.
In Yakutsk, capital of the Northeast region of Yakutia, residents describe water pipes that regularly burst, creating fissures and holes in buildings. Roads buckle as moisture seeps in from below, leading to cracks in the asphalt. Trains run at slower speeds because of deformed tracks, local engineers said. Flooding was behind the resettlement of at least one waterlogged village from the basin of the remote Kolyma River.
Across the countryside, the effect of permafrost is plain to see. Thawing ice has transformed farmland into swamps and rivers swell in springtime with up to 30% more runoff compared with the 1980s, local scientists said. In villages, locals who previously stored meat and other perishables in cellars dug deep into the ground now must use ordinary deep freezers because of waterlogged subsoil.
For funerals, residents for centuries had to dig to approximately 5 feet underground, and then burn wood to heat the soil to suitable softness required to bury the dead. These days, there is no need for the second step, said local ecologist Valentina Dmitriyeva.
But now the US offshoot has outgrown the original.
It’s in our DANA; it’ who we are.
What I find funny is that he was very loosely inspired by an Amerind, but I guess that was not enough color-signaling and radical miscegenation for German schoolkids in the early 1960s.
What do you think would be the greater cost/benefit for Russia:
or:
It’s not even close, LOL.
From The Siberian Curse:
$68 billion? Current Russian economy is $1.5 trillion nominal and $4 trillion real GDP. Even today $68 billion represents only a few months’ worth of budget or trade surplus for Russia.
By 2050, assuming about 4% growth rate, Russian economy will be on the order of $5 trillion nominal and $10 trillion real GDP. That $68 billion stretched over 30 years will be affordable by any medium sized Russian city. And a lot of that spending will need to happen regardless of any climate change as infrastructure simply can’t last 30 years without any maintenance.
Norilsk Nickel will most certainly be able to afford it because in the future world of electric vehicles they will become a $trillion company. All those Teslas require nickel for batteries and Norilsk Nickel is one of the largest producers in the world.
Recently watched the TV movie,”The Day After” (1983), since I got the impression that it is the most influential atomophobia film ever made. Guessing they changed the plot a little when they aired it in the USSR.
Overall, a terrible movie. I don’t recommend it. But there are a few laughs, like when they show cows and a wedding party being x-rayed by a nuclear blast. Anyone who likes dissecting in-your-face propaganda might enjoy it. There is a very, very minor anti-racism theme, which I found curious against the background of intense antinuclear propaganda, that centers around escalations revolving around the matter of West Berlin.
Anyway, oddly, it really gave me an appetite to learn about nuclear tactics and strategy, which I am sure was not the intent of the film. I wonder if anyone could recommend a easy to get primer for the layman?
One thing I was wondering about is, at what altitude would a warhead from an ICBM be set to blast (non-EMP)? (If you aim too low, wouldn’t small hills help tamp the effect?) And how would EMPs dovetail into regular blasts? Do you do them first, or would that endanger the city-hitting nukes? Or are they shielded? What ratio are dedicated for EMPs?
Yours and mal’s are excellent points, particularly for long-term prospects.
“The modern state of Russia could not possibly drain its soil. Russia will become a big swamp.”
Tell us another one, Greta!
Lol, I expected that part to trigger you. So in reality 60 hour work weeks into his old age? I have a friend from university who is now an executive at a large company, responsible for hundreds of employees and projects worth tens of millions if not more. He works from 8 to 8 or 10, and gets about 5-6 hours of sleep nightly. Even on “vacation” in Switzerland or the Andes he spends a few hours daily on a laptop solving some problem. I wouldn’t want such a life, it’s not for everyone. A naive victim of propaganda would believe that people like that are lazy because they sit at a desk shuffling papers or pressing buttons on a keyboard or chatting at meetings or flying around the country all the time.
It’s cute that you assume that the Socialist stories, or the peasant-nationalist stories, are somehow more accurate or truthful.
The two facts are not mutually exclusive. The elites may have suffered more but the envious masses suffered too, and ended up being worse off. Millions and millions of the masses died in the former Russian Empire, they didn’t benefit from the mass murder of their elites. Things were milder for both elites and masses in central Europe, the masses just got poor. And naturally the elite survivors and descendants of the culling ended up on top again eventually anyways.
Supposed laziness of military officers, administrators, priests, professors versus virtuous hardworking totally non drunkard peasants is a myth.
It’s not even close, LOL.
Yeah, and when parts of that famed black earth turns into a dust bowl, we’ll see who wants to be a Little Russian again.
This is interesting proto-conflict to follow. I may give an opportunity window to Armenia.
https://www.rt.com/news/536745-iran-azerbaijan-conflict-moscow/
The gas price continues skyrocketing ($1900/1000m3).
I liked that movie as a kid. But I haven’t watched it in 25 or so years and I can imagine time hasn’t been kind to it.
I recall reading some RAND Corp. declassified nuclear strategic documents maybe a decade or two ago. No idea how seriously they were taken though. A quick search found this one from 1959 but I thought I remembered some from later in the Cold War:
https://www.rand.org/pubs/commercial_books/CB137-1.html
IIRC the grand strategy of WW3, as they imagined the most likely scenario, was that the US and Warsaw Pact would both be nuked — if not to oblivion then at least to a state of economic collapse — but neither side would want to nuke Western Europe and thus WW3 would come down to a conventional war for control of it.
I only have a cursory understanding of ICBM tactics, but my understanding is that EMP/HEMP was really only a consideration in the late Cold War and Russia at least has come a long way since then in its capabilities, to being a central element of any proposed first strike (EMP is probably much less useful in a second strike — the primary goal would to use it to disable command and control before the nukes are able to leave the ground).
His name is clearly Alexander and not Oleksandr (Vitaly Klitshchko who was there at the fight in London, even making it clear he was warmly congratulating ALEXANDER)…… so why are these German pillagers using “oleksander”? Sounds like nothing but it isn’t – its as aggressive as somebody still refusing to stop calling Muhammed Ali, Cassius Clay. Name can only be as the person involved, or as their parents intended – not murdered by retarded khokholism.
I agree, moronic article. He has fought in Russia since 2014 and been very well supported, he has not acted like a khokhol – plus it reinforces that anybody with any talent in ukropia is not from the Banderastan part of it.
It looks like alot of russians in London were there to support Usyk for the fight
On PRC regulation of gaming, and “discouragement of Japanese anime-style games to hinder cultural imperialism”:
Not a gamer, but I’ve tangentially heard about a couple of “anime style” ones from the PRC that have had a big impact in Japan, Azur Lane which was fairly recently subject to censorship in the PRC of some of its characters, and the hugely successful Genshin Impact has been legitimately and illegitimately controversial in a number of ways. The Azur Lane problem might be related to one of its Japanese voice actresses visiting a shrine:
And I see Arknights is yet another “anime style” game from Japan, from the controversial “gatcha” genre you mention which per Wikipedia “induce players to spend in-game currency to receive a random virtual item.” Although the Wikipedia Reception section cites some very unreliable US game publication sources as it being a good if not the best example of such games and worth playing.
While what you advise in terms of a transition could in theory happen, if initial actions result in the canceling of games like the above I can imagine PRC developers becoming ultra cautious, no one wants to spend a long time developing a game only to have it canceled by the authorities after release, perhaps based on further changing regulation, especially if more personal penalties start happening.
Although anyone who makes mobile games without being a big name is already subject to such dangers from the capriciousness of Apple and the Goolag’s approval processes; of the above mentioned games, only four years in development Genshin Impact also runs on other platforms, but it sounds like the mobile versions appear to have produced the most revenue.
Well, Russia can sell Europe 10 times more gas for 10 times cheaper, or Russia can sell Europe 10 times less gas but for 10 times more money. It all works out in the end.
I picked up a much more substantial understanding of such strategy and tactics, ask me anything now or in the future in a Unz.com topic I’m commenting in, and beyond The Strategy of Technology by Stefan Possony, Jerry Pournelle and Francis X. Kane I don’t have anything else specific to point to. Pournelle wrote at length on these topics, was head of think tank for a while that was tasked with such, and managed the feat of doing that without getting a clearance so he could talk about it afterwords. They were asked at one point to consider the “flood the heartland and use it to hide midget SSBNs” concept, which I’ve heard of independently and which has to be one of the most insane ever proposed, they asked their task masters in D.C. if their leg was being pulled. It wasn’t.
Although I suppose, especially thinking about our ruling trash today, this could have been serious just to trash the dirt people who our ruling class has hated with an unquenchable passion since the end of WWII or thereabouts. Read enough Pournelle, maybe this is in the above book, and you’ll learn about techniques like pindown that can potentially negate ICBMs that don’t launch on warning and thus the anti-nukes considered to be impossible. Also check out anything Lowell Wood has written, although he’s covered “by every clearance the US government has.”
As for EMP, there’s every chance due to Eisenhower’s 1950s treason I mention above that the Soviets and now Russians understand it very well. From memory, they did a bunch of nuclear tests, got Eisenhower to buy into an atmospheric test ban while they ground the data from them and built what was needed for another set of serious tests, did those tests and in response we did a slap dash whatever we could in a short period of time set of tests before the final atmospheric test ban was agreed upon.
From the latter one in space warhead from the mid-1962 Starfish Prime test revealed the outsized EMP effect, that wasn’t expected and we didn’t instrument properly for it, for example it pegged too many sensors. So RUSSIA!!! may know exactly what’s needed to turn out the lights in the US and kill most of the population with a relatively small number of warheads, and that could for example explain the late 1960s Soviet policy of setting up a bunch of SS-9s on soft pads, what was taken by Pournelle and others at the time to be a sign of a planned first strike. Although based on recent info this would be consistent with an internal Soviet political error which sunk too much blood and treasure as Pournelle liked to put it into their Strategic Rocket Forces, part of what helped bankrupt the USSR, especially when SDI threatened to negate the entire effort.
Getting into strategy and tactics, if even a partly effective strategic defense takes out a random assortment of missiles and warheads a first strike which disables a counter strike becomes impossible. Study the “triad” of bombers, ICBMs and SLBMs (sub launched ballistic missiles) for how they interlock and make such a first strike extremely difficult. For example, on first warning the bombers can be ordered to take off without final PAL data and orders to attack, and of course nuclear subs are hard to find. The Ohio class subs are so big because Rickover wanted to see if he could create a reactor that could output a fair amount of power without pumps, just convection cooled, making those particularly quiet.
Before they understood how much this justifiably upsets the Arabs, the German National Socialists were responsible for giving the Zionists in Palestine the foundations of modern infrastructure, upon which they established “Israel”. Does this make Hitler a Jew?
https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-jews-and-nazis/#the-nazi-zionist-economic-partnership-of-the-1930s
Of course, I now memorialize Adolf Hitler זי״ע as the Aryan Judge and tzaddik who almost saved the free world from the Nation of Hate.
https://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/SwastikaZionism.jpg
I found this discussion via A123’s comment history. I knew that he was a Zionist; and it was unsurprising to see him turn up in my thread about why Germans are hated, to dish out his anti-German propaganda which was promptly supported by another fantasist-apologist for Israel. I needed some links to show who he is, and what his agenda is when he blames the German people for Merkel importing Muslims to Europe. His Christian theory that Soros is a Muslim is—exemplary.
As a former Zionist myself, I am well familiar with all these types of wacky conspiracy theories. Whereas I was never a Christian Zionist; dear me, no! I was drawn into it by a racist right-wing Israeli, who overtly appealed to my racism. Zionism was an outlet for my repressed nationalist tendencies; and as a bonus, my erstwhile Jewish friends were not offended by my firebrand speeches against Christianity, a religion that I first rejected when I was a child. In private, we all sneered at the Christian Zionists, who are useful tools but very annoying; their typical doctrine that the Jews must accept Jesus as Moshiach is outright “antisemitic”, so they are considered definitely unfriendly, albeit useful.
By the way, A123: Do you believe that the Jews need to accept Jesus as the Christ, to save their souls and to fulfill what, according to the interpretation of many Christian Zionist evangelical denominations, are the Christian eschatological prophecies?
For an honest answer to that question, I will bribe you by pointing out that the Septuagint, a translation by the Jews themselves, fixed the Jewish meaning of “עלמה” in Isaiah 7.14 as the very unambiguous παρθένος—in a context in which “virgin” would be a stereotypically grand prophecy, but “young woman” would be so boring that the author of Isaiah would not have said such a thing. Whereas it would be just as unsurprising to see a Jewish prophet forecast a virgin birth, as it is to see the Christians copy the myth of Zoroaster’s virgin birth into their hokey Judaized copy of Zoroastrianism, and make their fictional savior’s virgin birth be attended by matrilineal-hereditary Zoroastrian priests (Magi).
See also Professor Oliver’s argument about this completely unimportant and ridiculous question, from Liberty Bell, April 1987, pp. 3–8, 4f.:
Whereupon the old professor of classical philology just cannot resist a few remarks on the Septuagint.
—Whoops. I have no talent for bribery. Anyway, yes, Isaiah 7.14 must prophecize a virgin birth, and the Jews are liars as usual, and arguing about whether or not Yahweh really foretold the virgin birth of Jesus is like arguing about whether or not Darth Vader really secretly wanted Luke Skywalker to defeat him: Senseless and pitiable. ®
In the end it also should kill the myth of Gazprom as a reliable supplier for the the core EU whatever the real reasons are (domestic prioritization/lack of production/deliberate contraction or mix of altogether) for the inability to increase the export flows more. When the last time it happened during European gas flow was restricted during 2009 RF/Ukraine murky gas row, 3rd packet of EU energy law was born, so some kind of new countermeasures against such situations will definitely be taken.
Will it be expansion of reserve requirements for the gas holders, appearance of supranational EU gas tanker fleet, expansion of gas seaport gas import terminals or something entirely else remains to be seen, but certainly not for very long waiting time.
All those won’t survive Sino-Japanese rancor.
There is nothing wrong with anime aesthetic. But it and mobile gaming will vanish at once when things get going.
The WEF wants to depopulate by 90%, and COVID only goes that far. EMP is the way it will be done, by knocking out 90%+ of infrastructure and immediately create primitive conditions for the survivors.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/eu-leaders-discuss-strategic-gas-reserve-summit-commission-2021-10-05/
Yeah, but who cares about the EU or even Gazprom for that matter?
I mean, what are they going to do? Shut down gas flows from Russia? Asia pays more anyway, good luck with that. LNG? Russian Novatek is dominant in that area, so instead of Gazprom Europeans will buy Novatek stuff.
And if they go all electric, it will be Norilsk Nickel that will rake in $billions in profits.
Russian domestic chemical industry is growing rapidly, so the odds are domestic consumption will be more important than exports going forward.
In the end, Russia with $600+ billion in forex reserves needs European money a lot less than Europeans need cheap energy. I wouldn’t be surprised if 10 years from now Russia would start banning oil and gas exports similar to what they did with unprocessed wood. Europeans can do as they please.
Now with NS2 completed, Germany becomes a de facto superpower and, I think, Russia will let Germans to order their backyard. Gazprom is feed up with dealing with Eurocrats and Atlanticists and have already started the Drang nach Osten (Power of Siberia is working full capacity). Contrary to the hysteria coming from Western propaganda NS2 is not that super-strategic weapon. The real game changer is the construction of the trans-Mongolian pipelines. With the Chinese market connected to the Arctic fields (Yamal and so on), Europe becomes a secondary market. Gazprom will be ready to sell to them but the real market is in the East. May be Pepe Escobar is right and a Kublai Khan’s empire of pipes will signal the final dead of the Atlantic economic pole.
Preventing/decoupling of EU from RF raw material dependence and end of shroederization is nothing but Atlanticist main strategic goal and imperative since the time immemorial, so such option only could be applaused furiously, especially when that “cheap” gas from there is actually not so cheap anymore 😉
I mean “Germany becomes a de facto gas superpower”.
But decoupling of EU from RF is, in the end, an Euro choice.
Nothing here to argue with, only wish that such Euro choice would happen sooner 😉
Warning: Topic
driftwild jump.FTFY. Fancy seeing you here.
My article with a photo of an American collecting a Japanese skull at the top, with my encomia to the East-West WWII alliance of Germans, Japanese, Chinese, and Indians, grew out of an offhand remark in a yet-unfinished blog post that started as a reply to one of your comments of September 18, 2021 (which I found a few days later).
Since I want to complete that article, I should repeat to Mr. Karlin’s commentariat a question that I asked in my thread (now with boldface added):
From what I understand, His Imperial Majesty never altered in any way his claim of divine ancestry. From what I gather, he issued a Rescript in archaic Japanese which effectually repudiated the gaijin concept of “claiming to be God”, and then let MacArthur say about that whatever he wanted. Is that correct? I want a more precise characterization of what the Rescript truly says.
What with this being the Internet, when I speak much about goddesses, I should emphasize that I clearly repudiate “the feminists, the left-wing ‘neopagan’ hippies, and that pseudoscholarly fantasist Robert Graves and his disciples.” (For a terse takedown of Graves, which is probably more scholarly attention than he deserves, see America’s Decline.) I have a theory, which perhaps I may elaborate in the future, that genuinely masculine religions perforce need a sexually dimorphic, well-balanced pantheon; after all, healthy men actually like women. And I am wholly unsurprised that (1) the Japanese, who had a hypermasculine warrior-culture, centered their religion around a national goddess, and (2) their masculine culture is attacked by feminism, Christianity, and democracy, three ideologies so closely related that in historical terms, their names should almost be considered synonymous. All of this is consistent with my theories. Cf. the Athenians’ worship of their eponymous divine patroness.
By the by, Mr. Telling, I apologize for having dropped out of that anti-vaxxer thread. I have been trying to keep up with my new blog, to work out a good way of handling comments, to learn WordPress (which, unlike Unix shell tools, is not easy to use), etc. As I recently remarked in a comment on my article about the probability distribution of Bitcoin block times, I want to bring more SCIENCE!!! to The Unz Review. I originally had that idea when I was immersed in the anti-vaxxer threads: More general science and technology blogging (outside of HBD issues) would bring more science and technology readership, and thus a scientifically-minded commentariat. Good chases out bad. The feedback loops go both ways.
I do intend to run articles on Covid and the vaccines. Now, whenever I want, I can run the non-stupid vaccine skeptic article that I first offered Mr. Unz almost two months ago! Whenever I finally get around to that (which is not my primary interest), I will be cooking up wily schemes to lure you into the comments. Ever since I figured out that I can award gold boxes, I have been thinking of this comment. ®
I think the future will be Chinese and Russians will be building nuclear reactors (Chinese are buying both conventional Russian nuclear reactors as well as portable barge compact types, and Russians have BN-800 breeder types as well), and using that energy to make solar panels for Europeans.
This should keep Greta happy, reduce emissions and pollution, and even keep Atlanticists pacified. This will keep EU dependent on Chinese solar panels, but that will be for EU to sort out. Russia will have moved on by then. Europeans will still be buying Russian hydrogen and helium anyway. Russia is going to make mint in post carbon world.
Nonsense. There are millions of stories like that around the world that get earnestly circulated by fools (you are the one who made the choice, not me :). Almost none of those stories when examined turns out to be true – your friend, and other friends, mythologize and lie. People lie about how they spend their time, they always have and always will – in that my peasants are the same as your priests and officials, they all pretend to do more than what they do.
You were obviously raised in a heavily propagandized US-version of history, with Hollywood always showing only caring and thoughtful royals and their unfortunate problems, always stereotyping others, always avoiding actual life and its trade-offs. So it is hopeless to try to show you that both the past and our present are actually in reality quite different. Only life itself will eventually show you.
That’s a truly mad statement, it may very well be the most stupid thing I have read on Unz in years. Yeah, we can all see the “poor masses” in Central Europe, are you insane? Masses after 1918 in Central Europe lived a lot better – actually, immensely better – than at the beginning of the 20th century with the hapless Habsburgs and their equally retarded noble servants. Let me remind you that under Habsburgs tens of millions emmigrated, there was hunger, extreme poverty, no medical care or education for 2/3 of the people….simply a rolling disaster. Today we have some of the highest standard of living in the world and social security that is an envy of most Americans who visit. But you seem to be born a fool who prefers to live in a fantasy land because of some comic-book level devotion to mostly-invented “noble” family past. I can’t help you, you will have to wait for life to teach you.
I’ve mentioned this in a previous Unz.com topic, but that Polish nuclear project is probably initially of very small scale. It’s based on a modular reactor design from NuScale as mentioned in the quote, and each module only generates 60 megawatts of power. For a “mining giant” that could be an extremely useful amount of power in a not well or at all connected location, per Wikipedia is now operates in the Poland, Canada, Chile (with a PRC connection of some sort) and the US.
NuScale, now mostly owned by Fluor Corporation, a $20 billion a year revenue “American multinational engineering and construction firm,” sounds like they’re doing all the right sort of things but they’ve yet to get their first reactor operating. So at now this is a smart choice for this Polish company, but not at all guaranteed.
I’d say the general declining nuclear competency in the more traditional West is making it less and less likely, this is widespread, see how France recently destroyed their ability to economically build reactors. But small and modular are terrific architectural advantages which also require less staff, and it sounds like the US nuclear regulators are helping, not hindering them. Well, no matter what “Biden” for example orders, if they shut down US nuclear power generation they’ll be out of a job. I highly recommend the seminal 1989 Permanently Failing Organizations for this sort of analysis, just look around and wait until you can get a reasonably priced copy, I paid $15.87 for my well used one through Amazon.com a year ago.
I want to bring more SCIENCE!!! to The Unz Review.
But we are Unz readers. We don’t trust the science, much less the scientists, and we especially distrust the shills.
That’s because the majority of you with that attitude are conspiratorial nutcases who know no STEM, where a whispered word to Bohr’s ear from Heisenberg completely invalidates the basis of the Manhattan Project.
I’ve stopped contributing to that vaccine thread Raches mentions because as of this month there is no longer any intelligent life to be found in it except for one recent comment by a “Stephane.” I suspect that’ll continue if another thread is created aside from Raches’, at this point it really boils down to, do we vaxxed die on schedule or don’t, and at the same time are our betters using the vaxxes to mind control us….
That’s ultimately the end of anti-vaxxing today, throwing all the spaghetti at the wall no matter inherently contradictory, every COVID vaccine “is both a floor wax and a dessert topping!” And as always, calling someone a shill is no response to the points he makes. But if you can’t do STEM, I suppose it’s what you’re reduced to, plus endless links to the latest video that reveals The Truth.
(This is your cue to retire from the field and let the adults do the serious analysis, ones like me will never see even see your screeds more than once before being marked Troll and Ignored. Unless you’re not memorable and have to be recycled because that Ignore list is highly finite.)
I think, it will be a German choice. The rest of the EU countries will have the right to accept the decision.
Europe will buy gas and hydrogen by these “evil Russian pipes” anyway. But the Asian market will dwarf the the EU one. The anti-nuclear hysteria and propaganda from Greta and her minions started to show their true consequences.
calling someone a shill is no response
Is he a scientist?
Gazprom will send more gas via Ukraine.
https://www.rt.com/russia/536775-putin-gas-transit-ukraine-gazprom/
This reminds me a bit of the bigoted divide and conquer approach the Nazis used as a means of encouraging division among the peoples of the Soviet Union – in the form of motivating an anti-Russian race war. Something that was behind the Cold War era Captive Nations Committee in the US.
On the other hand, German mass media is more prone to prop PC Russians who agree with the Baltic and Kiev regime governments. Usyk is by no means a lone Ukrainian, who doesn’t march to the tune of the nationalist anti-Russian elements.
These three articles serve as a fact based healthy alternative to that DW piece:
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/08/10/olympic-afterthoughts/
https://www.academia.edu/37358188/Michael_Averko_Consistency_and_Reality_Lacking_on_Crimea
https://www.eurasiareview.com/19072021-getting-putins-intentions-wrong-again-on-russia-ukraine-oped/
haha, guess quite a coincidence here, straight a day after EU started to talk more openly at the highest level and raised possibility of strategic gas reserves 😉
Nah, I’ve seen it with my own eyes, both when visiting his family and when our families vacationed together. When he was an entry level engineer he thought like you did about the upper management, he was complaining “we do all the work” many years ago, but now he works far more than ever before. The higher one goes, the more responsibility, the more work.
You fail to see that your cynicism here marks you as being very naive and myopic.
US propaganda of course opposes the ideas of nobility and peddles fairytales against it while glorifying the regular guy. Have you ever heard of the American Revolution?
They were pretty poor by the time Communism ended, and are still behind the rest of Europe financially. Under Hapsburgs they had been almost as rich as the Austrians. They became even poorer than the Portuguese.
Geometric growth in incomes began under the Hapsburgs. In Austria, Hungary, and the Czech and Slovak lands GDP PPP nearly doubled between 1870 and 1913. The first rulers, all of whom were developed under the Hapsburg and had histories of serving in the Austrian administration, did okay, they kept the pace, but it all ended in Communist squalor. The fact that poor people in 1990 could have a television while rich people in 1910 did not, does not change that.
In addition to rapid economic growth, there was population surplus rather than population decline.
By 1910 even Galicia had full school attendance. Numbers are hard for you, I know. Thank you for demonstrating that Slovak Sovoks have similar fairytales about Hapsburg rule as Russian Sovoks have about Romanov rule. And meanwhile the best that your nations produced, were made under the benevolent Hapsburgs or other monarchs. Does it hurt?
LOL. Unlike you I am a realist. The reality is that envy drove people to overthrow their legitimate rulers, the ones who were cruelest in doing so suffered the most from it. But after all the useless upheavals the same families continue to have advantages. Of the course, the overthrow meant that now everything is more international. While your great-grandparents may have served some Magyarized Slovak or a Hungarian, your boss is likely to be some Brahmin, Englishman, etc. Congratulations.
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/110873/1/Working_Paper_67.pdf
This paper measures social mobility rates in Hungary 1949-2017, for upper class and underclass families, using surnames to measure social status. In these years there were two very different social regimes. The first was the Hungarian People’s Republic, 1949-1989, a Communist regime with an avowed aim of favouring the working class. Then the modern liberal democracy, 1989 2020, a free-market economy. We find five surprising things. First, social mobility rates were low for both upper- and lower-class families 1949- 2017, with an underlying intergenerational status correlation of 0.6-0.8. Second, social mobility rates under communism were the same as in the subsequent capitalist regime. Third, the Romani minority throughout both periods showed even lower social mobility rates. Fourth, the descendants of the noble class in Hungary in the eighteenth century were still significantly privileged in 1949 and later. And fifth, while social mobility rates did not change measurably during the transition, the composition of the political elite changed fast and sharply.
Remember how I mentioned that Russia will do anything to maintain gas transit through Ukraine and Ukraine will end up wishing it blew up?
And here it is, from the wise man himself.
https://twitter.com/27khv/status/1445806388979118080?s=20
Indeed, Gazprom must maintain its contractual obligations and not switch to Nord Stream 2 fully.
I fully and totally agree.
This is a thoroughly dishonest ransom note selective quote. With more context:
And “strategic gas reserves” do not address the fundamental problem that as you quoted above, the EU imports 90% of its natural gas. Although with LNG it is to a degree fungible, but such a reserve would not, for example, allow enough time to create new LNG production facilities, they’re massive and expensive affairs. Probably not enough time to make new LNG tankers; don’t know about reception facilities, but if they’ve got to buffer a lot of LNG that would also take some time. And you can’t get any of this infrastructure very wrong or BOOM!
Psstt.. I got a little secret for you. Do you know what’s the other name for a strategic gas reserve? A long term pipeline contract with Gazprom. Those things have been around since 1970’s and are yet to be violated. Ukrainians stealing gas don’t count.
Because the silly thing to do would be to build out storage infrastructure for a ton of money, and spend a ton on LNG, and then end up hiring Gazprom to manage your storage for you because you have no gas to put in your new fancy storage.
If you think American frackers are going to manage this for you, you are delusional. I mean, where are they now lol? And we need that fracked gas in US anyway.
So your options are:
Delusional and expensive scheme of “strategic” local storage that is guaranteed to fail.
Just relax and pay whatever happy German contract gas consumers pay under Nord Stream 1 deal, which isn’t much, $200-300 as I recall. Beats current spot prices anyway.
TV serials, and nearly all contemporary movies, are written at what Roger Ebert used to call The Readers Digest level. If that’s what those viewers want, so be it. Too bad, because they are probably oblivious to appreciating the subtleties and ironies and richness of everyday life. But so be it. I leave them alone, and I just want them to leave me alone to watch movies that were made before they were born. They should not recommend modern serials to me and then follow up and ask how I enjoyed these and make me feel guilty or like some kind of dinosaur. Similarly I read the traditional literary canon as it existed before Harvard “refreshed” it. Leave me alone and stop making me feel like a dinosaur especially by sending me books. But there is hope – – a Chinese-American woman I know told me she loves Yeats.
Ever feel tantalised by life?
What felt like it would be nourishing always just somehow ended up out of reach?
Tantalus was a Greek who decided to test the gods’ omniscience by serving them the flesh of his own killed and cut up son at a banquet. Perhaps they wouldn’t realise, but they did.
The gods then threw Tantalus into the underworld, where he spends eternity standing in a pool of water beneath a fruit tree with low branches. Whenever he reaches for the fruit, the branches raise his intended meal from his grasp. Whenever he bends down to drink, the water recedes before he can reach it.
But what type of person would do such a thing?
Someone who found the Gods’ omniscience so threatening that he hoped to disprove it even at the cost of his own son’s life.
But why would he find is so threatening?
He could not admit to his own lack of omniscience because he would then feel inadequate, as knowledge is where he had decided his value came from and this fragile individual could only see himself as all valuable or totally worthless in this regards.
Our Tantalus was formerly a precocious child, who had some spent some time trying to adult, but, when old and bitter, regressed into his childhood identity, because he had never been validated by society for his intelligence and knowledge in the way that his one-dimensional personality needed.
A “gas giant” is a bloviating “failed star”. It never developed the substance to make it and is primarily full of hot air, specifically hydrogen and helium.
This failed precocious child gas bag then hides in his shadow, that of the know-it-all. If his life never allowed him the validation he needed, he will at least never admit his lack of knowledge. This defence will stop his failures from being exposed to his own awareness.
The tragedy is that he would gladly sacrifice his own children as part of this defence, but it is even worse than that. The Deus Ex Machina is that, by never admitting to not knowing something, he could never truly understand anything, and so the nourishment he needed therefore always receded out of his reach just as he thought he was about to get it.
Now this Tantalus, as with so many in our age, turned to politics to serve in place of the spirituality of old. It became the arena where he could confront himself, the parts he didn’t know, without having to admit it.
The three key players in this tragedy, other than our egotistical empty vessel, the three parts of himself that he denied, were the humble passive know nothings, the active deceiving manipulators and the fully fledged magicians of greatness and light. In order, he called these: the Christian Aryans, the Jews and Revilo P Oliver.
In this way, he fashioned the child and the mature magician archetype and their respective shadows, into a theatre of repressed morality and called it his ideology and view on politics; little realising that every part played was actually himself.
Feeling deceived and rejected by his attempt at adulthood and his mature self (the Jews) he decided that they were the curse of the world (his ego) and that only his crush, the man he is not sure he wants to be or perhaps wants to be with, can save it.
He reduces the Christian Aryans to the role of poor passive know nothing children, who might one day be redeemed, not realising that he lives his life almost entirely passively and his possessed by this.
This tragedy of the ever tantalised Tantalus could have been avoided and could still be rewritten. The protagonist might simply realise that omniscience is for the gods, that his knowledge is extremely limited, and from this sure foundation he could finally start to learn.
The soul-quenching water of knowledge can’t be reached by someone who is pretending to themselves that they already possess it. They will think they are stretching to the source, but they will be doing so in willfull blindness.
You will never reach far enough. You will always be tantalised.
The perennial question is therefore: does he have the courage to recognise his reality? Will he be able to overcome his existence of frustration, ignorant sacrifice and defensiveness, to reconnect with his sense of meaning, life and spirit?
Can Tantalus learn to admit to himself that “I don’t know?” Or will he remain in his self-created underworld punishment of needing water from a pool at his feet, but always having to pretend to himself that it is in his hands?
Perhaps his “political proems” and his ideological mythology are true? It is possible that the actual world, with its billions of people and infinitely complex geopolitical set-up, just so happens to perfectly match his psychological contradictions and self-mutilitaions, but that would be a very extreme coincidence. Perhaps instead he just sees in the outside world, what he fails to see in himself?
In memoriam, for his innocence and his humility, cruelly murdered by his own monstrous Goebbelsian ego, but whose death he blames on external deceivers, which is really just his arrested maturity.
Probably not, GDP per capita in Czechoslovakia & Hungary was 40% lower than Austria in 1913. Czechoslovakia was only 9% poorer than Austria in 1937 & Hungary was 31% poorer in 1939. Slovenia which was just south of Austria was 38% poorer as late as 1952.
Much of the wealth went to Vienna. What Central Europe actually missed was the post-war catch-up done by Southern Europe.
You can throw some personality analysis to me, but the basic agenda is there even if it is just a set of (late liberal) ideas for every self-serving elite or populist to appropriate.
What probably scares you: If people want to send me money, nobody will be able to stop them. ®
“I come from a scientific background and I prefer to believe in reality.” — Ron Unz.
You do realize that Mr. Unz is a scientist, yes? Oh, no—no, you don’t.
I think that Mr. Unz qualifies as the epitome of an “Unz reader”. ®
——————————
P.S., dear Science, please make sure to send my science-shill payola in bitcoins to my non-deplatformable wallet. Just to annoy “iffen” even more. Thanks.
Just for a measure of the mind that you are addressing: “iffen” alleges that Moon Landing Denier Revusky is Mr. Unz’s sockpuppet (!). ®
According to Maddison:
In 1870 Hungary had a GDP per capita PPP in 2011 dollars of $2656 vs. Austria’s $3229. Hungary was 82% of Austria.
In 1913 Hungary had a GDP per capita PPP in 2011 dollars of $5105 vs. Austria’s $6109. Hungary was 85% of Austria’s GDP per capita.
In 1870 Czechoslovakia had a GDP per capita PPP in 2011 dollars of $2182 vs. Austria’s $3229. Czechoslovakia was 68% of Austria.
In 1913 Czechoslovakia had a GDP per capita PPP in 2011 dollars of $3929 vs. Austria’s $6109. Czechoslovakia was 65% of Austria’s.
All these regions seem to have improved at the same pace.
Austria’s economy collapsed after the 1929 crash, so by the late 1930s it was poorer barely higher than Czechoslovakia and poorer than Hungary (in 1937, Austria $5471, Czechoslovakia $5403 and Hungary $6188). The Hapsburg trained interwar elites did a good job. It wouldn’t last: Communism came, and with that the central Europeans fell far behind. By 1973, Czechoslovakia had 68% of Austria’s GDP PPP and Hungary had 70% of Austria’s GDP PPP. It just kept getting worse.
Knowing STEM & allowing Stem-tards social prestige or power (politically) are 2 different matters||
Nukes are kept in lockers, as are the nerds who make them||
As many times before after losing an argument you retreated to your autistic world of made-up numbers, over-simplifications, and basically a total lack of understanding of Central Europe. That often happens to ‘mericans‘ going abroad: their poor and propagandised education combined with extreme gullibility leads to some comic situations. Your context is way off (“American Revolution driving Hollywood culture?” please, that is simply retarded.)
I assure you that in Czechoslovakia absolutely nobody buys your offensive Habsburg myths. It was a failed and oppressive “empire” run by some very mediocre people. We have done much, much better since 1918 – you retarded playing with numbers and trying to prove the nonsense you seem to believe is untrue on its face – our families, our friends’ families, simple travel around, all of that tells the story. Your desperate cherry-picking says more about you than anything else.
You confuse activity with purpose thus missing what actually happens. In that way you rather nicely represent the collapsing modern Galician-Canadian-Washington experiment that we are observing in Kiev: emotional wrecks paired up with greedy oligarchs to fool a lot of people. As their time is running out, they create fanciful stories and illogical demands. Nobody is taking them seriously. When the end comes – as it did for the Habsburgs – nobody will publicly admit that they believed the nonsense.
Is there a good book or a reference on the history and people of Austro-Hungarian Empire and successors from around 1900 until 1939?
Something happened in that region during that time that continues to shape our world but I’m not sure what that is.
Conventional answer is “Jews” and sure there’s a good deal of that but i don’t think it’s the whole answer or even the main answer. I mean, Tesla was a Serb but he was an Austrian Imperial. And so was Hitler for that matter. Both rather important, colorful personalities, not Jews. For Jews, American Arthur Burns, Chairman of Federal Reserve in the 1970’s, was a Ukrainian Jew, but more importantly, Austrian Imperial. And of course Soros from the same neck of the woods. But Habsburgs are not Jews? And neither is Kalergi.
Anyway, where were the “Jews” when Austrian Empire got wrecked by German Empire? Prior to 1900 Austrian Empire was a decaying, wrecked backwater, Jews or not.
So how did the dead backwater of a place, decaying, managed to produce such a powerful burst of genius as it got destroyed? And it’s not all Jews. But it shaped our world more than most other events. Weird.
@Anatoly Karlin
May I please request guidance on your moderation policy:
I made a meme graphic with some extremely rude Russian language. The way that I did it, every Russian will assuredly burst out laughing (although some may not admit it). If anyone were to try this on my blog without first asking permission, then most likely, I would temporarily ban the commentator for at least 7 days; after all, courtesy is very important to me. Therefore, I am asking you before posting this.
Russians like to make everything big—e.g. the Czar Bell, Czar Bomba… As an amateur philologist, I am fascinated by how the Russian language has slang that is like gathering all “dirty words” in English into a radioactive core, then compressing it until it goes supercritical. (I know that some other Slavic/Eastern European languages are similar, in this aspect.) I don’t know much Russian; and I generally will not allow Russian-language comments on my blog—partly to keep it readable to its intended audience, partly to keep it readable (and moderation-friendly) to me. But I do know this slang, which is like a Czar Bomba of extreme cursing. (Long story—don’t ask.)
Here, I do this for comedic effect—and to humiliate American prestige, in a way that only Russians will be able to read. (Google Translate does not work on this, even if someone manages to type in the Cyrillic characters; I tried it.) For my own part, the sentiment is more from grievances at American policy than purposely being pro-Russian. I am sometimes critical of Russia—with all due respect, and with my wish that Russia and her neighbors could reach a harmonious rapprochement, beneficial to all in that region and free of American influence. Nevertheless, this comes off as very pro-Russian. Russians will probably pass this around on social media. And I like Russian people. So, maybe I will make some Russian friends this way. Consider it a practical homage to the Russian sense of humor.
To be clear, from a moderation perspective, the only thing even “questionable” in the graphic is words. In Russian. In big, bold letters.
Please advise. Thanks. ®
AK: OK, sure, go for it. Would be curious to see what you came up with!
Yeah but their vision for Confederate Union prevailed, no? We call it European Union now. So, like, how? Again, I’m not an expert on the area or disputes in question, just trying to understand the mechanism.
Happy birthday
https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-N1HlxXOtNfs/W407tFd3h8I/AAAAAAAAGDo/suUbj-8oFTQAdNHBVZTgLec2-Y0_d0PjQCLcBGAs/s1600/nYfGGDbmqUgd1tVU2WH68ntcFqaTERLA.jpg
This is Anatoly’s blog – throwing below the belt pot shots at americans is not only allowed, but encouraged, and that it’s russian doesn’t detract from it at all, so do as you wish
Btw, Sweden today halted use of Moderna due to a (small) risk of myocarditis and pericarditis for young people (born 1991 or later), particularly men. The same goes for Norway, apparently.
https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/modernas-vaccin-stoppas-for-unga
(In Swedish)
I seem to recall something similar being discussed earlier in the unacceptable and discredited fever swamps of the extremist, etc etc.
Can’t see how that added context does contradict or negate anything what was said previously – for whatever reasons up to this point RF was constricting gas supply volume to EU compared with previous years at the same time frame (summer-autumn), which in fact trashed any notions of “Gazprom’s reputation as an “absolutely reliable partner”, but suddenly Putin remembered that it “should not be tarnished” just a day after EU explicit mention of RF inability to increase the supply and possibility of future countermeasures.
Also the problem seems not to be that there’s immediate lack of 90% flow (IIRC, RF has roughly about 40% EU gas market, the rest is Norway (formally non EU), Algeria, Qatar, USA, etc), so to form the initial strategic reserve for the future, 10-15% overall flow quantity for some extended period, like 2-3 months, would be enough for the start.
You do realize that Mr. Unz is a scientist, yes? Oh, no—no, you don’t.
Like I said.
The idea of having any strategic reserve not on your own territory and not at your own immediate disposal whenever you want, is quite strange, to put it mildly. Imagine China having its whole strategic reserve of some kind on USA soil or vice versa, lol
Everything else is just technical studies, details,problems and terms, which will be dealt with, when the official decision to form such strategic reserve will be announced. Probably Gazprom was just as sure about 3rd energy law packet not being implemented some ten years ago as you are sure now about the fail of strategic storage 😉
What else do you expect?
Back and forth between Jacob Heilbrunn and Vladimir Soloviev:
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/what-vladimir-soloviev-really-thinks-about-russia-and-america%C2%A0-194966
Regarding the faux whistleblower:
https://theduran.com/facebook-whistleblower-calls-for-social-media-regulation-exactly-what-facebook-wanted/
A blatant lie still up on a Facebook from someone in the Dem Party establishment:
https://www.facebook.com/pg/evelynforny/posts/
Strategic reserve is an advisable tool for smoothing wild prices variations but it will not solve the core problem. The EU shot itself in the foot by trying the force the march to green sources. In addition, the Asian market will continue outpacing the European one. So, with a strategic reserve they may “filter” prices noise but the core dynamic of gas consumption growth will not be changed. American and/or Argentine frackers will not be able to fill the gap given by the growing Asian consumption. Those Marcellus and Vaca Muerta fields may have lots of gas but require huge investments and the logistics of moving LNG from north and south America is and will be expensive.
The only smart option is let the Iranians live and produce at full potential. But the Zios will be furious about that idea.
A great book about the late A-H is Pieter Judson’s The Habsburg Empire a new history.
Not really. Per capita GDP in constant dollars nearly doubled between 1870 and 1913. The country was industrializing. It didn’t keep the pace with Germany but it certainly wasn’t decaying. That’s modern propaganda. There are parallels to myths about the late stage Russian Empire.
It was neither decaying nor a backwater, so there was no contradiction. As I mentioned to Beckow, the greatest cultural figures his and neighboring peoples produced were made freely under the benevolent Hapsburg rulers.
Interesting fact: on the eve of World War I, Trotsky, Stalin, Hitler, and Tito were all in Vienna. As were von Mises, Freud, Mahler, etc.
Looks like Zelensky has managed to join his predecessors by becoming just another tax dodger:
Just another crook beholden to Kolomoisky, Shefir?
https://www.occrp.org/assets/the-pandora-papers/Shefir-and-Zelensky.jpg
A lot of modern “culture” seems to be about social fads. It is about watching what other people are watching, or what is promoted in such a way as to make people believe it is what others are watching, so you can talk about it, if someone asks you about it, or else feel a faux community spirit, if nobody does.
I think this is a big part of why serials appeal to women.
“A stopped clock is right twice a day.” People who are not intelligent enough, anywhere from at base to “terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought,” or are just plain liars and griefers are still not worth listening to, especially when those who aren’t plagued by the current anti-vaxx mindset intelligently discuss this sort of thing.
For there’s always been legitimate debate about vaccinating people under, say, 30 years of age on the basis of how much protection do they need, and assuming we have a good handle on morbidity with kids then COVID vaccinations for them become equivalent in principle to the ones for we already accept for rubella AKA German Measles for male children, in that case to protect pregnant women and their fetuses.
That one, or one class of vaccines has an only discoverable in Phase IV “post-marketing” rare side effect that is not good for young men is suppose to reveal … what? Especially when we have other vaccines that might be fine for them.
Thanks for the rec. Added it to history reading list.
Those are probably either full believers in half-truths and hearsay mixed with probable power plays and visible signs of repression; having an instinctual fear to the loss of their relatively secure lifestyles, or those who really believe in their worldview they have constructed from their often accurate observations. Don’t confuse them with really serious anti-vaxxers who have studied the evidence and realized vaxxing isn’t worth it for them or that will sacrifice their own principles. Or those who aren’t against vaxxing, but all those political and economic measures (e.g. vaccine passports) being done in name of COVID.
I suppose the current antivaxx mindset will win out at the end, because 1) There are always visible signs, e.g. riot police being used against antivaxx protesters, to validate their worldviews, 2) They are backed by conservative political actors who want to take down those associating themselves with the COVID agenda 3) They have ideological zeal and determination to “resist”, to the lengths of self-sufficiency, 4) They are tolerated by the globalist establishment for their effect of off-loading institutional resource consumption, and 5) They are riding on the Zeitgeist of withdrawal from modern society.
The current bunch of anti-vaxxers are half-right and half-wrong. We should have had many better scenarios of dealing with COVID than one that maximize social dissolution, but things are the way they have become and those are advantageous to an elite that are moving beyond modern politics. The sad thing is, rational pro-vaxx and anti-vaxx people will lose it big.
Based and offshorepilled.
Thanks. Guess it is hard to live up to Stan Winston’s marvelous blast sequence in T2, which I believe I probably saw multiple times before any other kid in my elementary school. Or Dr. Strangelove’s satire. And part of it is ideological – I feel like they were concerned with the wrong thing, that anti racism is more dangerous than nuclear weapons.
BTW, I wonder if they try to maximize fallout. And whether you’d be better off living in a climate with a lot of rain, or whether the coasts, being more densely populated, would just get hit by more nukes, obviating the advantage.
I once read a standard-issue US army booklet from the early ’60s, and it seemed to say fallout is no big deal . You just wait a few days, and it drops dramatically.
This is interesting, thank you.
It’s almost like Germany et al. shouldn’t have mandated the phase-out of fossil fuels at an unrealistic pace without increasing their nuclear-power capacity first.
Having said that, of course it makes sense to have a national strategic reserve of resources that are critical to healthy, safe, modern life. We here in the USA should be building reserve facilities of the type mentioned by the EU and much more: reserves holding massive quantities of potable water, oil, natural gas, and industrially/medically/militarily useful minerals and metals.
A nation would also be wise to have a network of publicly owned factories & labs that manufacture the most commonly used prescription medications (used to control or treat hypertension, diabetes, gout, and simply pain).
There should be water, fuel, and medication reserve facilities in every congressional district, really in most counties across the country. Merely the money our rulers waste on profitable aggressive wars and occupations could pay for all of this.
Or the government could do nothing and leave us at the mercy of profiteering corporations, long and easily disrupted international supply chains, and indifferent-to-hostile foreign countries. Yeah, that seems better 😉
Translation: when Beckow says something wrong I demonstrate facts that contradict his false claims. He then says numbers are “made up.”
Reality is that per capita GDP nearly doubled in Austria-Hungary from 1870-1913. Contrary the your false claim that is not 33% of the population was literate, by 1913 full school attendance was achieved. Adult literacy in Austria was lowest in Galicia and Dalmatia – about 60%.
And of course what really bothers you is that your cultures achieved their highest level of development under the benevolent Hapsburg rulers.
We have witnessed here, how inferior and propagandised your education is. You live among the very monuments that were built by and under the sponsorship of your natural lords, and sincerely believe that they somehow held you back. You somehow think America propagandised in favor of the Hapsburgs. Have you even heard of the American hero Woodrow Wilson, father of your country?
Lol, do you think the world would have stood still otherwise? Geometric growth began under Hapsburgs. It would have continued under them. Central Europe did well in the immediate decades after collapse, when ethnic insiders who had been nurtured and developed by the Austrian system were still in charge (contrast this with the debacle when the Soviet insiders took over after the USSR’s dissolution and you will see the difference between a great and an awful system). But then it went downhill for you. You became very poor relative to the Austrians, and very poor relative to what you should have been. By 1990 your cities became poor dumps, cheap places for Germans and English to get drunk in while admiring architecture built under the kings and Emperors whom you foolishly defied. And you still haven’t come close to catching up. But it’s gotten better for you since you joined the EU, a poor imitation of the Hapsburgs.
The one whose economy is the best it’s been in 10 years and whose wages are the best they have ever been.
Did Putler tell you so? 🙂
Going by the content of that article, saying that Russia will send “more gas” is misleading. The article only indicates that Gazprom will (probably) honour its current contracts regarding Ukrainian gas transit, rather than drop them, pay the resulting fines, and switch sooner to the more profitable NS2.
It’s an “interesting” choice. Honouring contracts is important (as France would surely agree) but Russia knows well that part of that money will be used against it.
But what is the choice, really? Russia has no control over the process of EU certification for NS2. Until NS2 is certified and inaugurated the only available choice is: stick to the existing contract and split profits with a hysterically inimical government ruling over a brotherly nation, or drop it and calmly watch European energy prices continue skyrocketing (which can be interpreted as a pressuring tactic towards the EU, perhaps for them to speed up the certification, or perhaps something else).
There is also the seemingly crucial issue that, AFAIU, a EU court ruled that NS2 AG cannot make exclusive use of its own pipeline because of some (originally intra-EU) anti-monopoly regulation.
So, really, the only thing that article is saying is “Russia is not arm-wrestling the EU”. It is not saying that Gazprom will contract more capacity with Ukraine, which is what the Atlanticist lobby in US/EU/Germany want (“fund the government that will buy weapons from us to threaten you”).
Related: A few days ago, thanks to their idiotic self-inflicted gretinism, some Chinese cities/industries experienced electricity shortages, and amid the scramble for securing coal and gas supplies they also requested Russia to increase its export of electricity. What was Russia’s response? Gas prices have been increasing in Europe and also in China. What’s the state of Russia-China energy trade? Is Russia prioritising the friend to the south, the frenemy to the west, none/itself? (Are you out there, Blinky Bill?)
YES. Thank you. A wise nation should try to have reserve facilities on its own territory of anything needed to live (clean water) or needed for safe, healthy, civilized life and a modern economy (oil, nat gas, widely used medications, and any metals/minerals with industrial, medical, or military uses).
It’s the height of recklessness and stupidity to put one’s people at the mercy of foreign countries for such necessities.
Of course, most governments, demonstrably including “ours” in the USA, lie constantly. Why believe the booklet released by those murderers? They’re not entitled to the benefit of the doubt.
No substantial number of people is going to survive for long, let alone live any half-decent life after a major nuclear exchange, on the coast or inland. Radiation spreads throughout the world by air and by water. A sad and terrifying prospect.
If the US gov claims to think that fallout is no big deal, let them detonate mini-nukes in Washington DC, NY City, and Los Angeles to prove it — without the more elite members of the ruling class being allowed to bug out to their ready homes in New Zealand, Israel, or wherever.
I know my comment will promptly draw out those of the current antivaxx mindset which is mainly shaped by 2 pre-existing ideologies: 1) Trumpism (A123) & 2) (proto-)libertarianism (RadicalCenter). 1) uses the Democrats’ complicity to totally ostracize their political power in the way Nazism is ostracized in post-WWII Germany. 2) wants to use the visible signs of statism (authoritarianism) to rapidly launch a program of radical social and political realignment to conform many antivaxxers to their individualist ideal. Which is why both of them grasps at incomplete “truths”, even tho many observations by libertarians towards the COVID agenda have some merit.
THEY ARE BOTH THE PROGENY OF AYN RAND.
Sure, live the outcast live like what you want. But both your ideologies will eat the world as the masses are alienated from what existed, exists and is coming for them. The worst thing to happen isn’t the Great Reset, but the damage from the struggles between Great Reset and Great “Awakening” to the collective psyche of humanity.
Strategic gas reserve is no all mighty silver bullet, but it certainly was needed yesterday already in case of EU. Regarding additional gas sources, Turkmenistan may be another option, either through potential underwater Caspian pipeline or just floating gas tankers headed to Azerbaijan, then to TANAP pipeline or its future extensions.
In practical terms there may be caveat, regarding recent Hungary-Gazprom new contract as it was anounced that Ukraine would not be transit country for this gas as it was previously. So for Gazprom to reatain the same overall Ukrainian transit amount, perhaps he may add some amount for other EU countries, while Hungary will be getting it through the other route.
Hm. That Japanese shrine of war-fallen and war-criminals comes up quite frequently in Sino-Japanese diplomatic disputes. I didn’t know it also played a role in this vidya issue.
Quite a notorious shrine that one. Probably one of Japan’s strongest symbols of nationalism. It is likely that many Japanese (and some foreigner) figures visiting it do so as a deliberately political act, one which is immediately and stridently heard in China and Korea, unavoidably triggering reactions (and individuals). Unimaginable the West accepting something remotely similar in, say, Germany. But it is expedient for them in Japan, and it’s not like the crimes in question affected the holy causes of choice, so it’s all good ;‑).
As long as their principles include not stepping off their property without properly wearing an N95 mask if there’s any chance they’ll then go into a shared enclosed space. Otherwise as previously discussed their “principles” are “I have a right to infect anyone else with a deadly pathogen,” which works particularly poorly for healthcare workers, the only class of people at this time for which I fully support a get vaxxed or get fired policy. Which is not new for a whole bunch of infection control measures, including always iffy because of guessing flu shots.
Anyone who chooses not to get vaxxed solely on that basis is insane. For example nothing says you can’t get vaxxed and then lie as much as you can about it to the authorities or friends and acquaintances who would cast you out of their tribe, refuse to play the vaccine passport game, protest, put a decal on your AR-15 etc.
I suppose you mean among those who refuse and will continue to refuse to get vaxxed? Because I keep looking at the CDC’s data tracker, they can be trusted to collect and present raw data, and we’re now up to 77.9% of the US population 18 and older who’ve gotten at least one dose, and this keeps climbing. I’m sure coercion is now a large factor in that, but I also suspect a lot of it is people changing their minds as they see or experience more and more data.
And I should note with Delta now the dominant strain and second boost/third dose/booster data of quality not yet available and for Pfizer/BioNTech’s Phase III study you can’t have gotten infected prior to the state, people like my youngest brother and his entire family who got infected well enough before they could get vaxxed are at last count not bothering, and that’s OK based on what I think we know today.
Interesting note, I’ve read Janssen is presenting the FDA with all their data on their always planned second dose, first boost dose, see their ENSEMBLE2 full scale 30K people Phase III trial of doses two months apart for what’s going to be the biggest block of that. But they have some data on all the way out to six months apart, and are not recommending any interval to the FDA advisory committee.
For single virus vector vaccines that’s about the least certain thing in all this, among other things you’re balancing how much of a real boost dose people get sooner vs. how much gets chewed up by an activated immune response to the vector itself that tapers. Be there or be square, first day on the 14th they discuss a third Moderna dose, it might be like when Pfizer/BioNTech had their hand forced by “Biden,” (no longer following that one closely since I don’t know anyone who got it). Second day is on Janssen.
Note that if you look at the agenda etc. when it gets published, the FDA tries for no later than two business days before but the agenda in particular can get modified, there will likely be presentations of all sorts on COVID vaccine topics. Which of course is useful context for all their COVID vaccine decisions. And if you hate video, transcripts are published in due course. Note if you see a literal elephant in the video, it’s probably from the public comment section and by an anti-vaxxer. The advisor committee may have to in theory listen, but are not required to heed what cranks say, nor does this have the FDA seal of approval as the usual lying anti-vaxxers claim.
Getting back to US vaxxing statistics, the above is not what I’m personally experiencing in my part of Red state flyover country where “vaccine hesitancy” is extremely high, although our Delta wave is now receding like as far as I know (utu?) all others. But still with delayed age stratified death statistics that make a very strong case for getting vaxxed. Specifically, from the running tally I’m keeping in my head, at least as many below 60-65 years of age dying as above. And still almost entirely the unvaxxed are getting hospitalized, with our local hospital systems being too specific in their statistics to be lying. We are, you might say, running a full scale experiment here.
Well, USA at the very least seems to have national strategic petroulem reserves, IIRC.
You can double your explosive yield from fusion devices by using U-238 as the tamper for the fusion part, significantly increasing it over lead or whatever is standard. Or use cobalt, but that would make survivors particularly dedicated to killing you personally.
Well, the trick is to not get a fatal dose in that first few days. It does drop off radically, but you then have to avoid for some time things like sleeping on ground which received the fallout. Start here and get the green large format paperback for properly scaled copies of the Kearny Fallout Meter, an electroscope you can build with a soup can, aluminum foil for the leaves, etc.
Ignore no nothing nihilists like RadicalCenter, for example we’re already run this experiment twice in Japan…. Note also how the USSR for their civilian nuclear war survival manuals, one of which I have, simply copied the necessary raw date from Glasstone’s The Effects of… books, which they wouldn’t have done if it was all lies. We know that because they also copied the typo mistakes….
A much harder factor was brought up in the Goldman Sachs analysis, there’s no “visible” massive increase in pipeline capacity running to the West of where Nord Stream 2 terminates in Germany. Which given that these pipeline companies are also subject to the politics of EU certification and Greeness makes complete sense, they’d be idiots to do anything except maybe make more pipeline capacity that could be switched to go the other way for LNG imports. Which would be an interesting trick in the compressor stations, but I suppose steel pipes, valves and extra space aren’t super expensive.
It’s exceeding stupid to claim they’re still experimental at this stage in the game, almost year after they froze their initial data collection and worked up their applications for emergency authorizations (Janssen was a few months later) and after hundreds of millions have gotten them.
There’s a big problem here: how do you know what level of immunity an infection created? After the initial antibody fleet naturally wanes, you’ve got to do more expensive tests, not even sure if they’re a standard thing that your doctor or you can order, on stuff like memory B cell fleets, cellular immunity etc. Stuff which in terms of raw SCIENCE!!! and epidemiology is still in the research phase, although that’s looking good for populations as a whole. Here you’re asking us to run an experiment when you insist vaccines are still experimental. And when you spout insanity like this:
You show us you’re stark raving mad. Really? Populations that have been propagandized by Marxists and the Left in general for close to two centuries luv Big Pharma and its “revenue events?”
It wasn’t their vision. Habsburg vision was a softer version of the German Nazi vision for Europe: in other words, Germans uber alles with an assh..e monarch in charge.
Unlike what the demented AP is spouting here, Habsburgs murdered their enemies in large numbers, prisons were full of both undesirable-ethnic and leftist politicians, they committed an outright genocide in the Balkans, put Orthodox believers in labor camps (for supposed potential sympathy to Russia), etc…E.g. in 1916-17 when Habsburgs realized that it may end badly they belatedly released 2,000 top ethnic politicians from jail, many awaiting death penalty, as a gesture to restart a “dialogue”. It didn’t work, by then it was too late.
EU for all its issues is very different – it has so far preserved individual sovereign states, its oppression is mostly annoying and verbal (from LGBTX to defining “bananas”). But most important it is based on ethnic states: Germans run Germany and Austria, Czechs run Czechia, etc…
I think the Habsburgs analogy is wrong and over-simplified. You may as well use Napoleon Europe or Nazi Europe as an analogy – they are equally off. Actually most historical analogies are off.
Again I have to teach you the history of central Europe. Nazis shut down schools and persecuted Slavic culture. Slavic languages were developed and Slavic peoples achieved mass literacy in their native languages under the Hapsburgs. It was quite the opposite. Nazis were German nationalists. Hapsburgs were prenationalists, conservative internationalists. It’s why Nazis, nationalists, and Socialists (all the ones who wrecked Europe in the 20th century) hated them.
Your greatest writers and composers were nurtured and created under the Hapsburgs. Did Nazis nurture Czech writers?
Your ignorance is amazing. It must be feigned.
Many of them were literally spies.
I don’t think development level of these regions, was very comparable.
For example, in literacy, much of Austria was already around 70-80% literacy rates in 1880. (In the Russian Empire, only 28% in 1900 – although in some nationalities like the Estonians there were more comparable levels).
https://i.imgur.com/vcyLBS7.jpg
May be, but Turkmenistan gas is (so far) also going East. That’s simply because pipelines tendo to go to faster growing markets.
It seems that Gazprom will add some token contracts in the spot market via Ukraine and not much more. This was enough to send down the gas price, showing that the market went really crazy.
Goodwill cubic meter Russia is ready to bring down the rush demand for gas in Europe
Russian President Vladimir Putin admitted the possibility of a “neat” increase in Russian gas supplies to Europe through sales on Gazprom’s electronic trading platform. This mechanism allows Gazprom to sell gas for export in a controlled manner, without competing with long-term contracts. But the volumes that the company can now offer on the ETP are unlikely to significantly help Europe in overcoming the energy crisis.
Electronic gas trading in favor of Europe may balance economics and politics
Gazprom could increase gas sales to Europe through its electronic trading platform (ETP), Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak said during a meeting chaired by President Vladimir Putin. According to the Deputy Prime Minister, such a step could bring down the sharp rise in gas prices in Europe, which is partly speculative in nature. “It would be possible and expedient to supply additional exchange volumes of gas on the electronic trading exchange in St. Petersburg, at least small volumes that could really bring down the speculative effect. But here it is imperative to take into account the fact that today we continue to pump gas into UGS facilities (in Russia. – “Kommersant”) ”, – he remarked. “If it knocks down the rush demand, then we can do it. Only not to the detriment of yourself, of course, “- Vladimir Putin replied, adding that” this must be done carefully “and after discussion with Gazprom.
Austria was probably the modern world’s most culturally fertile country relative to population, until the Second World War.
Much of the modern world’s greatest art, music, architecture, science, philosophy, literature, had been from Austria.
–
Even in the 20th century, if you think about cinema such as “Film Noir” as being an area of visual culture where America has been very fertile – many of the best American film directors (Billy Wilder, Michael Curtiz) can be seen as partly an importation of Austria’s visual culture (Fritz Lang even went to Hollywood in the 1930s), and the stories of “Film Noir” were partly influenced by a early 20th century of Austrian pulp fiction.
The following is inspired by a meme that I found floating around on the Internet. The version that I presented thereby was cropped by me, to remove (in English) some relatively mild rude language. Whoops!
On a serious note, putting women into a modern army¹ is so often (albeit not always) a Communist thing. The Red Army also did it, with tragic results;² but those were serious fighters (to the best of their ability, such as it was), not putting on makeup and dabbling in a “soldier” fantasy.
Question for native Russian speakers: In the context of “soldiers”
breaking a nail and getting their lipstick smearedgetting skewered and roasted on the battlefield, does the word that I set in red make as good an extra double entendre as I think it does? ®https://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/american-dyevushke-remember.jpg
——————————
Notes:
From the perspective of their battlefield enemy, Léon Degrelle wrote in Campaign in Russia, p. 154:
The woman was ferocious, as women generally are; but this did not help her on the battlefield.
Yes, the other regions caught up by 1914. In 1880 began a massive expansion of schools in eastern Galicia, for example. By 1910 about all kids were in school.
Habsburg? Really? Are we going to make point, that we would be better of with Habsburg? Austria do not want Habsburg come back, but Czech and Serb should lead the charge. Habsburg had their time in history. It is over and it is good thing. Arguing otherwise beyong stupid.
Unfortunately AP, for all his gifts, does seem beyond stupid. He lives in an emigre ‘mercan‘ dream of his Galician ancestry that worships Habsburgs. Galicia was at the time Habsburgs occupied it a sh..thole beyond belief. It used to be a part of Poland-Litva, a border land constantly raided by Ottomans and Crimean Tatars (for slaves), underdeveloped and incredibly poor. Habsburgs built some infrastructure there and refrained from outright slavery, so AP is forever grateful. For some bizarre reason he transfers this devotion to other, more developed parts of the Habsburg Empire.
What he displays with the Habsburg worship is not about history, it is pure psychiatry – people like him look for approval and meaning to their past. Absolutely nobody after 1918 ever seriously proposed that Habsburgs come back – and that includes Austria, their homeland. He is out on the limb on this one, in a fantasy land. He should come back.
Nazis didn’t “shut down schools“, schooling went on much as before during WWII in local languages. You are just making up stuff. Nazis – Germans and Austrians really, let’s call spade a spade – limited universities and added German as a second language, they didn’t shut them down.
Our greatest writers by most accounts were in the 60’s to 80’s of the last century, mostly raised in WWII and in socialist Czechoslovakia, e.g. Milan Kundera was an enthusiastic young commie in the 50’s. Our culture blossomed, movies, music, science – what the f..k are you talking about under Habsburgs? Why do you make up stuff?
I gave you an example of 2,000 national politicians who were in jail under Habsburgs, a few dozen sentenced to death – is that your idea of “benevolence”? You display your ignorance. How about the tens of thousands murdered by Habsburgs in the Balkans, whole villages wiped out? Or you will pretend that didn’t happen? They were not as bad as Nazis, but they were pretty bad – and the German-uber-alles was their ideology, others were tolerated as secondary nations, not really that much different from the way Nazis saw the local Slavic nations, but softer.
If you believe that tens of thousands of Orthodox believers who were put in labor camps by Habsburgs where thousands of them died were “spies” you are a dangerous fanatic. Get a hold of yourself.
On “hard work”: how many hours do you think James Bond works? 2, 10, 80 or even 168 hours a week? How would you determine it? Same goes for the endless officials. A famous Habsburg dramatist Grillparzer who was also a Habsburg civil servant described it: “Into the office at noon, found nothing to do, read a book.” That was the way it was. You with your gullible ‘mercan‘ underdeveloped personality can believe otherwise if it makes you feel better, but you just sound very naive and stupid.
Here’s a modern Russian comedy series with more than 100 episodes. Has English subs.
I wonder how representative it is of current on the street Russian culture.
Look, my worldview is closer to what you see as antivaxx, but not a rigid one.
N95 is the type which can really filter out aerosol transmission. That said any mask mandate is of dubious value if not plainly symbolic, as anti-mask people claim.
How deadly is it, around the level of rather serious flu outbreaks? Have flu shots been mandated? Do some of the flu shots use poorly tested experimental gene technology which will benefit from several more years of testing? (It is not to denigrate the opinion of pro-vaxxers who have taken the risk inherent to any new medical therapy)
Which implies other types of vaccine mandates are at least hasty and not fully justified.
They are thinking soundly on their principles since they view it mainly from a political viewpoint of struggle.
I have reservations about the swift and broad application of immature mRNA technology without the possibility of opting out, other than the destructive antivaxx option I quoted from you. But other types of vaccines for COVID exists built on conventional or well-tested technologies, and I’m willing to take the relatively minimal risks they might have.
Captive market, which is one of the things strictly antivaxx will abhor.
The experiment isn’t public health but economic since there is at least a vaccine passport component to it. Have you read my 2nd post on antivaxx ideology?
Fait accompli much? Usually long-term testing lasts for 5-10 years, which is exchanged for actual application because of the supposed emergency. A line of genetic therapy is discredit because of this.
This is what I said, a captive market. Whether it is legitimate is up to your worldview.
You should really remember that for most people, the COVID agenda started with lockdowns. It has always been a political and economic problem, and that means class war and struggle. And you should consider why I think Trumpism & Libertarianism will eat the world.
Freeman Dyson seemed to think nuclear war is no big deal, if you are in an adequate shelter. A few feet of dirt, provided it is not a direct hit. But he said that’s just not what people want to hear.
Very interesting interview to Vladimir Soloviev
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/what-vladimir-soloviev-really-thinks-about-russia-and-america%C2%A0-194966
Vladimir Shapiro
Here, fixed it for you.
https://s00.yaplakal.com/pics/pics_original/2/7/4/12117472.jpg
A true Ghussky patriot!
A man of firm principles!
Good luck getting Sikhs & Muslims to shave, along the rando Jew or Orthodox||
In other places the rate of Vax hospitalization is actually higher..
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/777363116454313984/792913708908675112/unknown.png
Khalso Hovey Khud Khuda||
Jim Khoobee Khoob Khudaaiy||
Aan Na Maaney Aan Ki||
Ik Binn Sachey Patshahey||
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
In the first page, he is completely speaking correctly, but explaining to the netizens on this forum that (e.g. “not [“Stalin has killed 30 million people”]”) is like Sisyphus rolling a stone up a hill.
In the later pages he claims that oligarchs don’t have an influence in politics. Well, how likely this is, can depend if you believe it is co-incidence, realities like Solovyov and Surkov being best friends of Fridman – since all three of them lived in the same dorm together in their university days.
This year, Surkov provided a similar kind of interview in the Financial Times of London, but Surkov’s interview was really open and honest.
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/interview-an-overdose-of-freedom-is-lethal-to-a-state-says-former-key-putin-adviser-1.4598641
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/781981619073318943/895873178226790420/unknown.png
https://twitter.com/akarlin_/status/1446189176353853444?s=20
:/
Do Akarlin47 then||
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
3x post, mb. Attacks in both Kashmir & UP||
https://twitter.com/amaanbali/status/1446025764621537292?s=20
https://twitter.com/amaanbali/status/1446023584158130183?s=20
https://twitter.com/HVSBanwait/status/1445816872469876739?s=20
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/781981619073318943/895876458143178792/unknown.png
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
Thanks for demonstrating your ignorance again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Poland_during_World_War_II
“On the territories incorporated into the Reich, education in Polish was banned and punished with death. Throughout Polish territory, the Germans abolished all university education for non-Germans. All institutions of higher education were closed. Their equipment and most of the laboratories were taken to Germany and divided among the German universities while the buildings were turned into offices and military barracks”
In contrast, Hapsburgs presided over massive expansion of non-German language schools and universities. Your people and the other peoples became literate in their native languages thanks to them.
You like to make fun of Americans, whose president gave you a country. Is ingratitude a national or a personal flaw?
Kundera lol. I admit I liked him when I was 15. He was fashionable in the West for awhile, they even made a movie. But – you ever heard of Kafka, Capek or Hasek?
People who repaid benevolence with treason should of course be imprisoned. For example the imprisoned Alois Rasin, a humble farmer’s son. His father became mayor and later member of the Imperial Council. Alois became a lawyer. He repaid the system that helped him, by wanting to destroy it. Such ingratitude.
And yet under their rule Czech became the dominant language in Bohemia and its schools and German speaking Prague was Czechified. Compare to the effects of actual past persecutory governments – what languages are spoken in Kiev and Dublin?
When is war not ugly? Who hasn’t slaughtered civilians in war? It’s not good, but from this perspective they were no worse than Americans, Russians, etc. Or Bulgarians, who killed quite a large number of Serbian civilians also. The war began with Serb terrorism btw.
Naturally the system was imperfect, like any other. There were some innocents there. But most were spies or traitors, during a war. I had Russophile relatives in Talerhof, they really were working with the Russians. But even here the Austrians were mild compared to everyone else. 30,000 sent to camps, 3,000 deaths. Compare to what Brits did with Boers, Polish nationalists with Ukrainians in 1920, and of course Nazis and Soviets.
What does James Bond have to do with it? Are you okay?
Someone who doesn’t know his own history and who regurgitates nationalist and Communist fairytales shouldn’t accuse others of being gullible.
It was the poorest of the Austrian lands but richer than Russia, Portugal and everywhere in the Balkans. It was as rich as Slovakia. Were all of those places shitholes beyond belief?
…ugly…imperfect...how about “mistakes were made“? in a way, your acceptance that Habsburg did commit these atrocities is all we can hope for.
That was the Habsburg Empire for you, quite ugly and nobody misses it. Get over it.
Why are you changing the definition? Who cares about a few annexed territories, that was not what we discussed: in Czechia, Slovakia, Poland…and Hungary, Latvia etc… the schooling in the local languages continued. I had relatives who studied during WWII perfectly fine in their native language. You made up the “Nazis shut down schools” and then you backtracked when caught.
So? Kafka was an extremely overrated German Jew whose writing is quite unreadable, an infantile mediocrity who tried to be original, and wasn’t. Capek was a hack and nobody remembers anything he wrote – nice person, though. Hasek was – a drum roll!!!! – a bona fide bolshevik, a commie with a drinking problem, he even acted as a commissar somewhere in the Urals for a while. Hasek actually knew how to write, but I find you in particular an odd person to mention him. And you are right about Kundera, he is passe – by the way also an enthusiastic commie who wrote the infamous poem:
“and from the waves, we heard the thunderous ‘Stalin, Stalin, Stalin“…
I meant the actual broad cultural scene in Prague in the 60’s to 80’s, movies (Forman), poetry (Seifert), music, comedy…it is generally considered the golden era of Czech culture (not “Habsburgs”).
Czech has been the dominant language in Bohemia since about 6th century. And Prague with its suburbs (as it is today) was always majority Czech. You don’t know what you are talking about.
I gave you James Bond as an example of someone – like most officials or “entrepreneurs” – whose “work” can neither be defined nor really measured. But obviously you didn’t get it. I also just saw the movie…weird twists of collapsing culture, the Brits seem beyond salvation, but go and see it, it’s kind of fun…
Well, I have always thought of Portugal as the ultimate Euro sh..thole. You know the suggestive location and the afro-blood. But then I went, and it was quite nice. Although I have no idea what it was like in the 1900’s.
But seriously, Galicia was poor and backward. Slovakia (if you like to pick one) was poor, but had quite a bit of industry and some wealthy areas, plus decent infrastructure. My point was that when the Habsburgs took over Galicia in the late 18th century it was so run-down that their minimal effort (infrastructure, law and order) made it look to the locals (like you) as a huge improvement. That was not the case with Czechia, Slovakia, and most of the Habsburg Empire.
Galicia was no poorer than Slovakia, it’s literacy was probably comparable, and Lemberg/Lwow/Lviv is more impressive than Pressburg/Bratislava. The Soviets were still living off the Hapsburg infrastructure. Those civil servants, architects and engineers weren’t useless.
Czechia was at non-Mediterranean Western European standards under Hapsburgs. It still hasn’t gotten back to that level without them.
Remember Czechia’s development level was closer to Western Europe in the interwar period than the Habsburg period. The local administration was competent, but that was as expected as quasi-Germanic standards. Without the Habsburgs and with another German or indigenous house, because of all the links with the West, Bohemia would still have been far ahead of the rest of Slavic Europe.
All of the bad things it did were universal ones everyone else did at that time too, and often worse: killing civilians in the Balkans, arresting traitors, and internment camps.
However it also fostered incredible cultural production amongst its peoples while providing them with political power. Compare the fate of Czechs, Poles, Galician Ukrainians to the Irish, Scots, Bretons, Sorbs, Russian Ukrainians, etc. etc. Under the benevolent Hapsburgs, local cultures developed fully and completely.
They shut down all Polish schools in lands Anne to Germany and universities elsewhere. How much clearer is it?
It’s eternal monuments (physical and in terms of literature and music) contradict your silly Soviet claims. Obviously it’s not coming back, nor are the Romanovs. But there are parallels between how and for what purpose they are abused and lied about by ignorant moderns, and in the tragic nature of their downfall for their subjects.
Lol, I found him to be quite readable.
I don’t judge the merits of literature by its author’s politics. Of the four authors from Czechoslovakia anyone would be expected to have heard of, three were created under Hapsburgs. The one exception, Kundera, got fashionable but may fade with time. The others have not.
Forman, sure. Golden era would be production of art on an international scale. Dvorak, Kafka, etc.
So were Gaelic and Breton. If not for Hapsburg benevolence Czech would have had the same fate, a village talk for grandparents. Prague flipped from being a German speaking to a Czech speaking city under their rule. If English had been like Hapsburgs, Edinburgh, and Glasgow and Dublin would have become Garlic speaking cities. If French had been like them, half of French cities would be speaking Provençal, Breton, etc. with flourishing cultures in these languages, as Czech flourished under the kindly Hapsburgs. And you compare Hapsburgs to Nazis!
A shot at Novaya Gazeta and its editor winning a Western based award:
https://thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com/2021/09/22/highway-to-the-danger-zone/comment-page-2/#comment-64176
The most visible evidence of that is that Soros funds or funded many organizations which would inevitably clash with Islam, if it would come to that, such as Pussy Riot, and others. He only funds Islam indirectly — because he funds immigration activism. He likes immigrants because he thinks a diverse society is less prone to fall prey to what he views as fascist-like (as opposed to “open”) regimes. Soros’ other focus of attention aside from immigration is gun control, for basically the same reason. Yellowface Anon’s reply (though not necessarily his signalled reaction towards you) is correct.
The Trial is a masterpiece and Kafka was way ahead of his time. Our time, where we have an Alzheimer’s patient as American president, a former Commie running Germany, it’s illegal to post a picture of Winnie the Pooh on the Chinese internet, and spook Putin is the current gold standard in world statesmanship is referred to quite accurately as Kafkaesque. A bunch of the stuff available under his name was scavenged from his papers after he died that he asked be destroyed and it kind of shows.
Exactly. So perhaps I should say instead that there is no evidence that Soros is a Muslim. He tries to weaken Christianity (or Christian hegemony anyway), which is good for Muslims but does not prove that Soros personally espouse Muslim dogma (it’s just a side effect which he hopes will be fixed in the future).
So, your argument holds a certain symmetry in regards to mine. I prefer mine because it has less unnecessary assumptions to it (Occam’s razor). Same goes, more or less, for the rest of your comment. I cannot prove you wrong, and you cannot prove me wrong. I just think that my argument is simpler: Soros is on the level about what he is trying to do, and is doing precisely that (with the support of large segments of organized society, like the press, etc.). Of course his plan may backfire horribly, and then some of his allies may be subjected to forced Muslim conversion. Soros will probably not live long enough for that to happen to him personally, though.
Are you Nullius from the Bitcoin Forum?
Exactly. There is no space for Islamism in his “Open Society” since at the root it is the same “religious fundamentalism” as Christian politics, that offers a centripetal alternative and therefore a threat to his internationalist cosmopolitan vision.
Soros has other focuses in the US which are aligned more with something like its destruction or a Communist takeover, not a so called open society. He’s got a Secretary of State project which puts the usual suspects in charge of US state government voting systems, shouldn’t need to remind us how well that worked for the Democrats and GOPe in 2020.
He’s got another for state and county level prosecutors, Attorney Generals but especially District Attorneys, the elected officials who decide to prosecute or not criminals. Not prosecuting Antifa/BLM except when their crimes are too big to ignore like murder (for now), and prosecuting people like the McCloskey’s in Saint Louis and many in Oregon for defending themselves from those paramilitaries of the Left/Blue/Democrats/Deep State is of course integral to their success.
Although a major effect of them is just to make Blue hellholes even worse, but that also works to cause people to flee them while of course bringing the politics they’re fleeing with them. Look at Colorado in particular, I’ve read The Blueprint: How the Democrats Won Colorado (and Why Republicans Everywhere Should Care) is supposed to be good, but I haven’t read it yet.
You might also be confusing discivic Jewish billionaires, Bloomberg is by far the most important anti-gun figure in the US now that Jews have completely replaced Methodists in that effort. After the above win in Colorado which he helped fund, the state went significantly fascist on gun control with no laws as far as I know being rolled back.
Pay particular attention to laws which are designed to prevent the creation of new gun owners, like forbidding the lending of guns to try out without first doing the whole purchase process at a gun store, and then the reverse. When floods hit the state, the prosecutors had to tell the people they wouldn’t be charged if they left their guns with friends at higher elevations, but that sort of forbearance won’t last forever in our modern slave states. Of course the 2020 COVID and BLM circus didn’t help this effort, although September 2021 was reported to be the first decline in gun sales since that started.
Of course all this doesn’t work well for particularly Red state parts of the country, but they’ve got plans for us turbulent people, with the anti-vaxxers unwittingly playing their tune.
On this forum, I’ve seen a lot more evidence that you are Jewish (not that there’s anything wrong with that) than Soros is Muslim.
If you want to prove that you’re not a Jew, please feel free to do so. By your logic, the burden of proof is on you.
This must be my lucky day: Two new theories about my identity. It avoids too tiresome a repetition of the same-old “Raches is Ron Unz”, much though I appreciate that flattery; and it helps to grow the ever-lengthing list of people who have been accused of being me.
Per my longstanding policy, I neither admit nor deny being “Nullius from the Bitcoin Forum”. Though I love Bitcoin; if you are one of the canaille of Bitcoin-haters here, get in line, and wait your turn for me to tell everyone why you are wrong about the only form of money that protects the freedom of speech. ®
Would a Jew use the phrase “The Anti-Christ Muhammad”?
Jews can’t be trusted to write in good faith.
All of us at Unz know that!
I am not a Bitcoin-hater (nor a lover, for lack of enough knowledge). I am vaguely excited about it.
PS: I just saw your reply to the other guy, and let me be clear that I don’t mind flattering you. I wouldn’t discuss certain topics which you do often (race is one of them), and probably will disagree sometimes with you, but I have nothing against you.
Also Azerbaijan itself, even without potential add-on of Turkmenistan gasfields, is becoming quite serious player lately in EU gas market. Obviously, it can’t replace all of RF flow, but at projected full capacity of 60 billion cubic meters a year, it will relatively quickly achieve 30% of Gazprom current yearly EU export volume and will be capable completely to offset Holland, Norway production declines or Gazprom flow reductions:
https://www.azernews.az/oil_and_gas/184191.html
Well, I don’t see it that way, but rather as an unintended consequence, much like my hypothetical scenario in the case of Muslims. I’d adapt the argument I used against A123 to this discussion: if Soros wanted a Black dictatorship in America, why would he support mass immigration?
it would be much easier if I was Jewish. I am much more instinctively attuned to the Old Testament methodology.
Believing in a God that treats you like a red-headed stepchild at times does have its good points.
According to Maddison Project, in 1913 Czechoslovakia had a per capita GDP PPP n 20111 dollars of $5100, compared to France’s $5700. Czechia was a lot richer than Slovakia, so it was probably very close to France, perhaps even a little higher.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
Economically, probably. Czechia is too small to exist as an independent power in that neighbourhood in Europe. If not for the benevolent Hapsburgs, it would likely have been ruled by Berlin. In that case one could forget about Prague flipping from German to Czech, it would have been the usual, Czechs would have shared the fate of the Irish, Bretons, Provençal speakers, etc.
The small nations between Russia and Germany either band together to collectively defend their interests, or just become hapless subjects of either Germany or Russia. The 1920s and 1930s were a temporary reprieve due to internal Russian problems and Germany’s loss. Decades of brutal Nazi and Soviet rule were the result of destroying that collective.
Or Poland.
The Police could not prove any of their allegations on Malkit Singh. No connections with any of the organisations that Police mentioned were found out.
https://amaanbali.wordpress.com/2021/10/08/malkit-singh-sheras-death-in-custody-raises-questions-about-falsely-framed-sikhs-in-indian-jails/
https://amaanbali.files.wordpress.com/2021/10/img_3737.jpg
The only material that made NIA court to keep Malkit in prison was the material found in his phone and laptop. The material included books on Sikh genocide and Sikh struggle for independence.
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
My apologies that I misread you as being hostile to me and/or to Bitcoin. I get much speculation about my identity, and at least 95% of it is extremely hostile. Most of those who propound these theories are not even interested in whether or not the theories are true—unless it may mean they could dox me, or otherwise hurt me in some way; mostly, they just keep slinging stuff out there to be argumentative, and rather absurdly to try to discredit me.
That is one reason for my “neither admit nor deny” policy: To cut off arguments with trolls. Whereas those who are acting in good faith will take a gentle hint that if I am writing under a pseudonym, I probably do not wish to discuss my identity or theories thereof; I think that is why Mr. Unz stopped asking about his “Wintermute” theory, which he definitely did not intend to be hostile to me.
—Which brings me to BlackFlag’s theory that I am Camille Paglia. Tyche awarded that one triple-7s in its comment ID; and I awarded it a gold box, because BlackFlag just won the Internet.
If you want to learn more about Bitcoin, I will be doing more Bitcoin blogging interspersed amongst other topics. Mostly on the technical and political aspects of Bitcoin, and its nature and fundamental value—some on the economic side, but not so much at all on the speculative “how do I get rich from this” side.
I am interested in knowing what questions may be asked by people who are sincerely just curious about the topic. Please feel free to raise those in any of my Bitcoin-related threads. In the manner of letters to the editor, I may file them away for future blog posts, if I think that they should be answered by something other than a brief comment.
Thanks. And I do not mind some disagreement. I generally don’t bite people here who disagree with me, unless they are lying, stupid, rude, insulting to me or to others who don’t deserve it, or otherwise just plain bad people.
Elsewhere, I even once had a cordial discussion with a rare creature: An intellectually honest, highly educated devout Christian, who was generally a good person by my standards (!). It was an historic event, a happening of once in a thousand years; but it did happen.
Compare my early assessment of Kathryn Paige Harden: “I don’t dislike her, and I really want to like her.”
I even like Camille Paglia—well, I must, if I am she!
If I wanted an echo chamber, I would retreat to some obscure far-right site, where I could toe the party line and preach to the choir. If I just wanted to troll and insult people, I would go to 4chan, et al. I am at The Unz Review for a reason. ®
American conservatives often run into the Randian mistake of “capitalism or communism”. Even if some of their observations are correct (i.e. institutional consolidation of the Democrat political coalition), that doesn’t mean a Communist or “Black” takeover is immient. What we are witnessing is the replacement of a politics of consensus with one of fatal struggle.
But if enough people believe in the narratives of struggle, how they act changes and that will write their worldviews into reality.
From my Pagan friend:
The root of the term “feudal” originates in the Proto-Indo-European word *péḱu, meaning “cattle”, and possesses cognates in many other Indo-European languages: Sanskrit pacu, “cattle”; Latin pecus (cf. pecunia) “cattle”, “money”; Old High German fehu, fihu, “cattle”, “property”, “money”; Old Frisian fia; Old Saxon fehu; Old English feoh, fioh, feo, fee.
The term “féodal” was first used in 17th-century French legal treatises (1614)[19][20] and translated into English legal treatises as an adjective, such as “feodal government”.
“In my kingdom, One crime is punishable by death, cow slaughter”- Maharaja Ranjit Singh
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
False. The same database (2020 version) says $3341 for Czechoslovakia in 1913 vs $5523 for Austria, $5555 for France, $5815 for Germany. Czechoslovakia was on the level of Finland. Even if you assume Slovakia was on Polish level of GDP per capita and then exclude it you will still get a Czech GDP per capita of ~$3500, which was below Norway & Italy. Only in the interwar period did the Czechoslovakian economy grew immensely, going from 60% French level in 1913 to 65% French level in 1929. Even by 1948 it was 70% French level and by 1960 69% French level. After that point the Czechoslovak economy started its stagnation.
What source did you use for the $5100 figure?
I was talking about an AH scenario where the PoD was in the Middle Ages.
Yes, but those are pathetically small reserves:
https://www.energy.gov/fecm/services/petroleum-reserves/strategic-petroleum-reserve/releasing-oil-spr
How many weeks of national oil consumption could we sustain with these reserves? Moreover, they leave us extremely vulnerable to sabotage or natural disaster because they are stored in very few locations rather than in every congressional district or even every county as we need.
I don’t think we have any public stockpiles of natural gas, and I know we don’t have any public stockpiles (let alone non-profit provision of) medications.
Nor do we have any public reserves of metals and minerals that have important medical, military, and industrial applications.
Damn – you are right. I saw the wrong row – $5105 was for Hungary
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
Czechoslovakia was $3929. Finland was $3417.
It was probably poorer. Slovakia was similar to Galicia. Poland included Galicia, plus German parts (culturally repressive but economically strong), plus Russian parts (eastern parts poorer than Galicia but included Warsaw and Łódź which were relatively rich). German
parts plus Warsaw probably pulled Poland ahead.
What. Hungary – $3344 in 1913. Don’t rely on Wikipedia for anything.
If you want to see GDP per capita levels according to old divisions see here: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/22311/1/WP106schulze.pdf (units are 1990 Int’l$ and I’m doing my conversion into 2011 Intl$ with the numbers from the 2020 version)
In some way it’s possible that indeed I was hostile to you, as in opposing your wish for unlimited privacy, in which “unlimited” encompasses not drawing others’ attention to another pseudonymous guy who sports so many coincidences in style, ideas, sources, etc., with you. That hostility is probably inevitable, and you probably know it. Both authors are very interesting and publicly accessible, and, while it is in your right to abstain from admitting you are him, people will notice the similarity sooner or later (maybe many already have, as there are so many lurkers in this site), and that will make you look somewhat silly for not even taking an interest in the matter.
On the other hand, no hostility here towards your writings (some occasional disagreements, yes!).
PS: I have reported an apparent bug that happened on one of your blog posts’ comment area (see section Bugs & Suggestions); I don’t know whether it has already been published — my sleep hours are somewhat different than Ron Unz’s since I live in Brazil. It doesn’t look like that bug was your fault at all, but since initially I didn’t have a clue, and you were less than forthcoming in your explanation, I decided to report it. Hope you don’t mind.
Following up on one of GR’s comments on the other thread: don’t see how much longer Catholic traditionalists can hold on, considering the move by German bishops to back gays.
I believe that some were looking for a moral niche where they wouldn’t have to cuck all the way, but wouldn’t become social pariahs by acknowledging racial realities and trends. I can kind of see it in a way – technically, there may be a lot of black Catholics globally, but it doesn’t seem to be something that they hold onto if they immigrate, for the most part. Or when they do, it will be an urban church and people have already abandoned the cities, at least over here. Or maybe, they live in still Euro countries like Poland and delude themselves.
But I believe the next Pope will probably give full sanction to gays. And with papal infallibility, I don’t see how a schism would work.
IMO, the Church just doesn’t have the necessary structural defenses to decouple from the broader societal trends. Maybe, people will migrate to Eastern Orthodox for a while.
These are nominal not PPP.
Czechia: Bohemia $2647 and Moravia $2333.
Austria: Lower $3343, Upper $2492, Salzburg $2592, Styria $2271, Carinthia $2114, Tyrol $2289.
Rough calculation: Czechia $2500, Austria $2900. So Czechia 86% of Austria.
This is the comparison to make over time: similar populations, geographic regions, and background histories. Remember France spent the 1950s and 1960s in expensive and failed colonial wars.
Czechia did great during that artificial time between the wars and then fell behind, being in relative poverty by 1990.
Turns out I was wrong – the Maddison project has indeed understated Czechslovak GDP under the Habsburgs. I revised the Czechslovak GDP with the Habsburg regional integration paper I linked and benchmarks for Austria & Hungary from the Maddison Project, and got the following numbers:
1870 – $2261
1880 – $2521
1890 – $3113
1900 – $3532
1910 – $4279
1913 – $4504
Czechia was about 8-9% above these levels.
Looks like the region that would become Czechslovakia was on the level & track of Scandinavia. WWI sent it following the track of Austria itself instead, if Interwar numbers are to be trusted.
Per the remarks that I just left in the bugs thread (currently in moderation), I have no duty to be “forthcoming” to a nutcase who hurls wild accusations at me, and demands answers IN ALL CAPS while also insulting me. Actually, that is an excellent way to get no answers from me beyond what I said: Nobody was impersonating him.
Now, may I ask whence your interest in this mundane bug, added to your interest in attempting to find alternate identities for me? ®
I cannot imagine thinking that you are Camille Paglia. That’s like confusing Wittgenstein with some empty vessel like Kevin Alfred Strom.
It’s a mundane interest. I see a bug, I think it needs fixing. I’ve been using this site for years now, it’s only natural I want to contribute to the health of its underlying software. (Note: I haven’t read Ron Unz’s reply, if any, yet.)
Mine and half the readership of the Unz Review, you mean? It is not an unnatural curiosity, especially in view of your eccentric style, and I haven’t been the first one. Maybe I’ve been the first relatively successful one, and that makes a difference, am I right? Anyway, big deal. Raches and Nullius are just a pair of pseudonymous privacy-obsessed internet personas (though interesting writers on their fields of expertise, which by the way seem to overlap quite a bit). You really shouldn’t worry so much, or if you must, please worry about the dozens of lurkers who possibly beat me to it and may be scouring bitcointalk.org as we talk (based on what I have read so far, they will be wasting their time unless they are merely looking for good technical stuff about cryptocurrency, cryptography, etc.).
AK should turn his ideas into a Manga. (Get someone else to draw) When it inevitably gets turned into a movie, then he can sell the novelization rights.
This is quite an interesting story.
From what I was reading about it, various bishops and cardinals in other Western European countries have already started warning about the German church entering into schism i.e. the people who were doing the homo blessings and advocating for it will be expelled from the Church, including their bishops, if they fail to desist. So far it is just other Western Europeans getting involved, I think things could escalate if the more traditional parts of the Church outside of the West weigh in as well.
AFAIK the Popes don’t have the same kind of powers as Protestant bishops to radically alter traditional teaching on this, the teachings against homosexuality have too much authority behind them. The issue seems to be how long and in what additional ways they can resist globohomo pressure on this; maybe globohomo will ultimately try to create some kind of fake alternative Catholic Church, or adopt other elaborate subversive measures to try to shrink congregations more or less to nothing, at least in the West .
https://unherd.com/2021/10/europes-war-on-sex/
https://unherd.com/2021/10/how-france-conquered-europe/
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
Quite interesting that it is happening in Germany. Don’t know enough about continental politics to put it into perspective, but I do know that German churches do not have collections. It is all handled through taxes collected through the government and people’s self-identification.
I wonder if Germany could have the largest “rich” Catholic population where that is the case. I heard somewhere that that the Archdiocese of Cologne has more money than the Vatican.
If there was a schism in Germany, that spread outward, it would be a weird case of history repeating itself. Perhaps, with economic or HBD undertones.
But I do see enough signs outside of Germany to imagine broader implications.
I think the current Pope may just be laying the groundwork.
You could use a meme of Karlin as scrooge mcduck leaping into the pile of cash he is going to roll in from the substack.
https://asiatimes.com/2021/10/poll-crisis-looms-for-modi-after-farmers-deaths/
As per some others, Substack might be what the California Gold Rush was for many. For now, I’m undetermined on the matter.
Plenty of good stuff to read out there without paywalls. Comparatively speaking, darn shame that these folks are probably doing well pay wise:
https://www.c-span.org/video/?514519-1/author-discussion-russia
No small wonder why there’s a low public opinion of a media which rewards BS and suppresses qualitatively better better input.
Never
On russian Aftershock.news
https://aftershock.news/?q=node/1022809
…Will the Soviet experience be useful to America? Biden invited a Marxist from Moscow State University to manage US finances. Sergey Latyshev
0K 08:27 – 12/Oct/21 Elena A.
…Komsomol member, athlete, excellent student, fan of aerobics and dancing. And all this is not in the cinema, but in reality, and not even in the USSR, but in the USA. This is not a delusion or a dream. A Lenin scholar, a graduate of Moscow State University, Kazakh woman Saule Omarova, who was born in a yurt in 1966, lived in a communal apartment on Lenin Avenue in Uralsk, a gold medalist, whose university thesis title includes Karl Marx, is now an American professor, convinced – and not hiding it – of the advantage of socialism over capitalism and the Soviet system over the American one. The Biden administration has proposed her candidacy for the post of Comptroller of the U.S. finances. To reign over trillions of dollars. And this is after the Democrats destroyed the careers of their opponents in the United States for fictitious ties with the now capitalist Russia! Is this what the “American dream” looks like now?…
Biden got a confessed eco-terrorist placed in charge of our Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which governs 1/8th of the country’s landmass, almost all in the West, where the Feds started to decide they’d keep a lot of land instead of parceling it out to Americans as was earlier done. She’ll be able to do a lot of mischief to help keep everything from the price of beef to oil and gas high.
Well, what do you expect? He placed a Red China asset in the Ambassadorship to the UN.
Surkov has just made a (non surprising) coming out as a transhumanist Globalist:
https://actualcomment.ru/bezlyudnaya-demokratiya-i-drugie-politicheskie-chudesa-2121-goda-2110111125.html
Meanwhile, Medvedev reminded everyone that he is well positioned to replace Putin again by publishing an in your face article about Ukrainian elites, an article that is far more “based ” than the historical publicist exercises of VVP.
https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/5028300
When one recalls that Medvedev (and not Putin) made Saakashvilli eat his tie in 2008, one starts thinking about making some popcorn. Dimon is tough and capable of unleashing swift violence.
On the economic side of things, the outflow of capital has made another record in RusFed, doubling up since 2021.
Hmm, coincidence? Don’t think so…
To the contrary, my impression was that Medvedev just confirmed himself as the wet rag that he is. Fully agree with this assessment from Vile Varangian:
https://twitter.com/vrngnvl/status/1447552785189322753
Leave that church or peacefully replace and eject the entire hierarchy. Period. Lesser measures won’t do.
Sounds like that advice might apply somewhere else, too. Hmmm……
I’m not even Russian, but it would seem obvious that Medvedev is no nationalist and should not be trusted with more power. Curious what AK-47 thinks about Shoigu: is he Putin’s choice for successor? Should he be? Would other power players be likely to accept Shoigu?
He is trying to write descriptively, rather than normatively. His text contains a lot of explanations about the system he has helped to design.
I guess this is why he cannot be a politician – he is too honest, even in a pathological level of honest. I mean, his speech for London School of Economics, or his recently interview with London Financial Times https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/interview-an-overdose-of-freedom-is-lethal-to-a-state-says-former-key-putin-adviser-1.4598641
This is postsoviet politics. It would be more accurate to reality, if journalists just wrote those names as hypens Putin-Medvedev-Sechin (“people of Sobchak’s office”). And for Surkov’s game, it would probably always needed to be written something Surkov-Solovyov-Fridman (“dorm friends of MISiS”).
Lol it’s just what was wanted. To make Bashibuzuk start talking about Shoigu again.
Of course, supposedly internal tension in the hypthen, if you believed the “three is a crowd” between the Medvedev-Sechin parts of this love triangle.
Perhaps what they say about weed is somewhat true. I think I used to be smart enough to understand this comment.
But is Shoygu the perfect man for the era ahead? The Great Eurasian Helmsman at the head of the great Eurasian Kingdom as it turns to the east?
https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/industry-and-energy/2021/09/sergei-shoigu-has-grand-masterplan-siberia-it-will-move-russia-towards
Yes that is maybe something significant about this, how they position him in the public space as a kind of visionary, that plans cities (formally he is Minister of Defense, not of city planning)? But I don’t know. Maybe Bashibuzuk can follow more about this story.
–
I read very little about Russian politics, and just read mainly occasionally funny stories of politics, rather than the serious topics. So most of my knowledge is only of funny stories.
The last funny Shoigu story for me is when he presented the Russian army’s fashion collaboration with Timati. It was reportedly Chinese clothing purchased from aliexpress and then they increased the price.
What can Kushner give the Saudis in the future?
https://twitter.com/MiddleEastEye/status/1451752771468808195?s=20
How much influence does Medvedev have?
I suspect that he has less than he used to.