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AI, Gold and Nuclear War

April 17, 2024

AI, Gold and Nuclear War

So-called artificial intelligence (AI) is taking the world by storm. Meanwhile, gold has shot up like a rocket over the past couple of months.

In mid-February, gold was trading at $1,990. Two months later, gold is trading above $2,400 — a $410 gain in just two months.

So here’s a question:

Is there a connection between AI and gold? It seems like an odd question. But as it turns out, the answer is yes. And surprisingly, there has been for decades. It involves the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

In the early 1980s, the KGB was deeply concerned about the possibility of a nuclear first strike by the United States. At the time, Yuri Andropov was head of the KGB.

Andropov’s fear of a nuclear first strike by the U.S. was based in part on the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan and Reagan’s plan to install Pershing II intermediate-range missiles in Europe.

Those missiles could be armed with nuclear warheads and could strike the Soviet Union within minutes of being launched. This put Soviet nuclear forces on a hair-trigger alert. They adopted a “launch on warning” posture.

This means that as soon as credible evidence of a planned first strike was discovered, the Soviet Union would launch its own first strike to avoid destruction of its forces.

The irony was that the U.S. had no actual plans to launch a first strike, but the Soviet Union didn’t know that. Reagan’s speeches about the “evil empire” did nothing to calm Soviet concerns.

AI and Nuclear Readiness

In response, the Soviets developed a primitive (by today’s standards) AI system called VRYAN. That’s a Russian acronym for: sudden nuclear missile attack.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Four Stages of Societal Collapse and Thiel’s Libertarian Challenge

January 14, 2023

The Four Stages of Societal Collapse and Thiel’s Libertarian Challenge

“This is what will happen in the United States if you allow all the[se] schmucks to promise all kinds of goodies and paradise on earth which will bring the country to crisis” Yuri Bezmenov

Rewatching this video of a defector from the Soviet Union in 1985 in context of our post Covid society connected some dots. Those dots were about what Yuri describes in this video as the “Demoralization” stage of the four-stage KGB process.

Separately, Peter Thiel recently offered his view of three dystopian futures being offered by competing ideologies, and the challenge to the Libertarian right to offer a competing better vision of the future.

But first, the 4 stages of Societal collapse as Yuri Bezmenov describes above offer a nice roadmap to how we got here to begin with. The four stages of US societal collapse as the KGB prophet says are:

Demoralization: in which people are (re)educated according to your own ideology- Pressure to conform
Destabilization: in which essentials like economy, foreign relations, and defense pacts/systems are disrupted- E.G. supply chains, Nato, Etc
Crisis: a confluence of events on the back of the previous two steps creates existential crisis for the status quo.- Constantly threatened
Normalization: during the crisis a “force for good” will appear that promises some return to normalcy. We welcome despotic solutions to immediate problems.- Rise of authoritarianism and reduction in liberty

This reads like a playbook for the last two years, and perhaps going as far back as the GFC of 2009. The stages occur simultaneously and need reapplication like so many vaccine boosters until compliance is 100%.

The Media’s Role in Demoralization

The MSM has been revealed beyond the pale to be a water-carrier for elites (a Trump dividend BTW) and in return for their subservience the media gets to manipulate and monetize our emotions.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

How we Became What we Despised. Turning the West into a New Soviet Union

February 13, 2022

How we Became What we Despised. Turning the West into a New Soviet Union

For everything that happens, there is a reason for it to happen. Even for turning the former Free World into something that looks very much like the old “Evil Empire,” the Soviet Union. I understand that this series of reflections will be seen as controversial, but I thought that this matter is important and fascinating enough to deserve a discussion.

It all started two years ago when we were asked to stay home for two weeks “to flatten the curve.” Two years later, we are looking, bewildered, at the wreckage around us and asking ourselves: ‘what the hell has happened?’

In such a short time, we found that our world had turned into something very similar to one that we used to despite. The old Soviet Union, complete with heavy-handed police, censorship of the media, criminalization of dissent, internal passports, and the state intruding on matters that, once, were thought to be part of every citizen’s private decision sphere.

Surprising, perhaps. But it is a rule of the universe that everything that happens has a reason to happen. The Soviet Union was what it was because there were reasons for it to be that. It was not an alien world populated by little green men. It was an empire similar to the Western one, just a little smaller, and it concluded its cycle a few decades before us. We can learn a lot from its story.

Dmitri Orlov, born in Russia, was among the first who noted the parallel path that the Western and the Soviet empire were following. His first book was titled “Reinventing Collapse” (2011). Let me propose to you an excerpt from the book where Orlov tells us of an event he experienced in St. Petersburg in the years just after the collapse of the Union…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Lessons from the USSR Crisis – What brought down the second largest empire of modern times?

December 13, 2021

Lessons from the USSR Crisis – What brought down the second largest empire of modern times?

The collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991, was seen in the West as a demonstration of the superiority of the Western economical and political system. In reality, the story was much more complex and the Soviet Union fell because of the same reasons which may cause the impending collapse of the West. This point was made forcefully by Dmitry Orlov, but he is not the only one who noted the similarities of the two systems. Here, a guest post by the Russian Scientist Svatoslav Zabelin. It is a revised and updated version of a piece that appeared in 1998. Zabelin is also a contributor of the book on the 50th anniversary of the publication of the 1972 book “The Limits to Growth,” expected to appear on the market in March 2022.

Lessons from the USSR Crisis
From “A time to seek, and a time to lose.” 1998.
by Sviatoslav Zabelin

…there are no limits to development, but there are limits to growth.

Meadows DH, Meadows DL, Randers Y. (Beyond limits to growth. Moscow, 1994)

From the book by Donella H. Meadows et al. The Limits to Growth. New York. Universe Books. 1972.

“The world community is developing without any major political changes for as long as possible. The number of people and industrial production increases as long as the state of the environment and natural resources does not limit the ability of the industrial capital sector to provide investment. Industrial capital begins to depreciate faster than new investment flows. As its reserves decrease, food production and health care also fall, leading to a reduction in life expectancy and an increase in mortality.”

The collapse of the USSR

The ecological and socio-economic macro-crises we are seeing are in one way or another a kind of crisis of the limits of growth…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Censorship: How the West is becoming more and more like the old Soviet Union

February 8, 2021

Censorship: How the West is becoming more and more like the old Soviet Union

A message I received from Facebook on Jan 29, 2021. Five of my posts were deemed “spam” and erased. Some were somewhat “political” although non-partisan, but two were purely technical. That these posts were erased is an indication that censorship is by now applied to all forms of dissent, not just political ones. It was not unexpected, but it was still somewhat shocking after decades of propaganda that had convinced most of us that the Western world was a place where you could enjoy “freedom of expression.” But we are quickly moving toward a Soviet-style management of public information, as Dmitry Orlov noted already in 2013. It had to happen and it did.

Last year, a Spanish climatologist, a friend of mine, had one of his posts censored by Facebook. Apparently, it was because it was deemed as too “catastrophistic” (or for whatever reason had caused the opaque fact-checkers of Facebook to erase it). He protested and he also tried to convince other climatologists to start a boycott of Facebook.

The answer was a little disappointing, to say the least. It may be best described as a resounding worldwide “meh.” Those climatologists who bothered to reply to him expressed the concept that, yes, censorship is bad, but, you know, you can’t allow deniers to diffuse their fake science around.

It was on this occasion that I discovered that most people like censorship. It is just that it should be applied to those they disagree with. In that case, they actually love it and protest because Facebook doesn’t censor enough (you can read that, for instance, here).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Wall Street Has Now Morphed Into A Full Blown Soviet Sausage Factory

April 10, 2020

Wall Street Has Now Morphed Into A Full Blown Soviet Sausage Factory

To paraphrase the police officer who told me my old neighborhood had burned down during the 2017 NorCal fires, “the markets are no more.”

After the Fed announced it is bailing out junk bonds today, Wall Street has now morphed into a full-blown “Soviet Sausage Factory.”

Jay Powell probably had no choice and needed to blunt the blow of another 6 million-plus print of new unemployment claims but isn’t Socialism and state intervention dandy?

We can understand providing support to local and state municipalities, now strapped with severe cash flow problems as their tax revenues have gone to near zero, but junk?

You know, like many of the same companies that levered up to buy back shares while shitting all over their employees or, say, the wildcat and shale-oil drillers? Even Jed Clampett and Ellie May understood Texas Tea is risky business. Come on, man.

Chapter 11 and debt restructurings are not only the right thing to do but the only thing to do lest we lose an entire generation to stagflation and a zombie economy. That’s probably the best case unless the economy miraculously snaps back, which assumes the economy was structurally sound before the virus took it out. We seriously doubt that.

Here’s to hoping the bailouts are just a bridge to a major economic restructuring with the long-needed structural reforms.

Waste Of Time

There’s no sense in wasting time analyzing the markets anymore.

We will sit on cash and gold, hope and pray the virus soon passes, and try and tune out this shit show until the major political dislocation that is surely coming on the other side.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

RAY McGOVERN: Thanks to a Soviet Navy Captain — We Survived 1962

October 30, 2019

RAY McGOVERN: Thanks to a Soviet Navy Captain — We Survived 1962

Captain Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov spared humanity from extinction on what has been called “the most dangerous moment in human history.”

Oct. 27, 1962, is the date on which we humans were spared extinction thanks to Soviet Navy submarine Captain Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov.

Arkhipov insisted on following the book on using nuclear weapons. He overruled his colleagues on Soviet submarine B-59, who were readying a 10-kiloton nuclear torpedo to fire at the USS Randolph task force near Cuba without the required authorization from Moscow.

Soviet naval officer Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov. (Wikimedia Commons)

Communications links with naval headquarters were down, and Arkhipov’s colleagues were convinced WWIII had already begun. After hours of battering by depth charges from U.S. warships, the captain of B-59, Valentin Grigorievich Savitsky, screamed, “We’re going to blast them now! We will die, but we will sink them all — we will not disgrace our Navy!” But Captain Arkipov’s permission was also required. He countermanded Savitsky and B-59 came to the surface.

Much of this account of what happened on submarine B-59 is drawn from Daniel Ellsberg’s masterful book, “The Doomsday Machine” — one of the most gripping and important books I have ever read. Dan explains, inter alia, on pages 216-217 the curious circumstance whereby the approval of Arkhipov, chief of staff of the submarine brigade at the time, was also required.

Ellsberg adds that had Arkhipov been stationed on one of the other submarines (for example, B-4, which was never located by the Americans), there is every reason to believe that the carrier USS Randolph and several, perhaps all, of its accompanying destroyers would have been destroyed by a nuclear explosion.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

River Of Radiation: Life Near The World’s 3rd-Worst Nuclear Disaster

August 5, 2019

River Of Radiation: Life Near The World’s 3rd-Worst Nuclear Disaster

Before Fukushima and Chernobyl, the worst-ever nuclear disaster was a massive leak from a plant in the eastern Urals. RT went to see how people live in areas affected by the fallout from the USSR’s risky rush to the nuclear bomb.

Chernobyl and Fukushima are the two names that are most likely to come to mind when one thinks about nuclear disaster, and rightfully so. People in the US will likely recall the Three Mile Island accident, while Britons may say the “Windscale fire.”

The name “Kyshtym” will probably mean nothing to the wider public, despite it belonging to the third-worst nuclear accident in history. An RT Russian correspondent traveled to the area to speak with locals, some of whom personally witnessed the 1957 disaster, to find out what living in such a place feels like.

Bomb at any cost

Kyshtym is the name of a small town in what is now Chelyabinsk Region in Russia, located in an area dotted by dozens of small lakes. A 15-minute car ride east will bring you to another town called Ozyorsk. Six decades ago, you wouldn’t find it on any publicly available map because it hosted a crucial element of the Soviet Union’s nascent nuclear weapons program, the Mayak plant.

The Soviet leadership considered building up a stockpile of weapons-grade plutonium to be a high priority, while environmental and safety concerns came as an afterthought. Some of the less-dangerous radioactive waste from Mayak was simply dumped into the Techa River, while the more-dangerous materials were stored in massive underground tanks.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Tomgram: Susan Southard, Against Forgetting

January 17, 2019

Tomgram: Susan Southard, Against Forgetting

Let me tell you a little story about Hiroshima and me:

As a young man, I was anything but atypical in having the Bomb (we capitalized it then) on my brain, and not just while I was ducking under my school desk as sirens howled their nuclear attack warnings outside. Like many people my age, I dreamed about the bomb, too. I could, in those nightmares, feel its searing heat, watch a mushroom cloud rise on a distant horizon, or find myself in some devastated landscape that I had never come close to experiencing (except in sci-fi novels).

And my dreams were nothing compared to those of America’s top strategists who, in secret National Security Council documents of the early 1950s, descended into the charnel house of future history, writing of the possibility that 100 atomic bombs, landing on targets in the United States, might kill or injure 22 million Americans. And they were pikers compared to the top military brass who, in 1960, in the country’s first Single Integrated Operational Plan for nuclear strategy, created a scenario for delivering more than 3,200 nuclear weapons to 1,060 targets in the Communist world, including at least 130 cities which would, if all went according to plan, cease to exist. Official estimates of possible casualties from such an attack ran to 285 million dead.

An American obsession with global annihilation undoubtedly peaked when President Kennedy came on the air on October 22, 1962, to tell us that Soviet missile sites were being prepared on the island of Cuba with “a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere.” Listening to his address, Americans everywhere imagined a nuclear confrontation that might leave parts of the country in ruins. Such fears, however, began to fade when the Cuban Missile Crisis was defused.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

If Truth Cannot Prevail Over Material Agendas We Are Doomed

December 23, 2018

If Truth Cannot Prevail Over Material Agendas We Are Doomed

Throughout the long Cold War Stephen Cohen, professor of Russian studies at Princeton University and New York University was a voice of reason. He refused to allow his patriotism to blind him to Washington’s contribution to the confict and to criticize only the Soviet contribution. Cohen’s interest was not to blame the enemy but to work toward a mutual understanding that would remove the threat of nuclear war. Although a Democrat and left-leaning, Cohen would have been at home in the Reagan administration, as Reagan’s first priority was to end the Cold War. I know this because I was part of the effort. Pat Buchanan will tell you the same thing.

In 1974 a notorious cold warrior, Albert Wohlstetter, absurdly accused the CIA of underestimating the Soviet threat. As the CIA had every incentive for reasons of budget and power to overestimate the Soviet threat, and today the “Russian threat,” Wohlstetter’s accusation made no sense on its face. However he succeeded in stirring up enough concern that CIA director George H.W. Bush, later Vice President and President, agreed to a Team B to investigate the CIA’s assessment, headed by the Russiaphobic Harvard professor Richard Pipes. Team B concluded that the Soviets thought they could win a nuclear war and were building the forces with which to attack the US.

The report was mainly nonsense, and it must have have troubled Stephen Cohen to experience the setback to negotiations that Team B caused.

Today Cohen is stressed that it is the United States that thinks it can win a nuclear war. Washington speaks openly of using “low yield” nuclear weapons, and intentionally forecloses any peace negotiations with Russia with a propaganda campaign against Russia of demonization, villification, and transparant lies, while installing missile bases on Russia’s borders and while talking of incorporating former parts of Russia into NATO.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Washington is Ramping Up Military Confrontation With Russia and China

November 30, 2018

Washington is Ramping Up Military Confrontation With Russia and China

Photo Source DVIDSHUB | CC BY 2.0

On November 26 the New York Times asserted that “Russia’s seizure [on November 25] of three Ukrainian naval vessels was the first overt armed conflict between the two since 2014, when Russian forces occupied Crimea.”

There was no armed conflict in Crimea and not a drop of blood was spilled. There was no “occupation” because, under treaty, over 20,000 Russian troops were stationed there.

Crimea’s citizens have always been Russian-speaking, Russian-cultured and in general pro-Russia. Following the US-sponsored rebellion in Ukraine that went the way the US intended it to go, there was the awkward matter of Crimea which had been part of Russia until, as noted by the BBC, “In 1954 Crimea was handed to Ukraine as a gift by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.” In 2014 the majority of Crimean citizens wanted to rejoin Russia rather than stay with crippled post-revolution Ukraine which would have victimized them because of their Russian heritage. In March 2014 Crimea’s parliament voted to ask to join Russia. A referendum was held and the vast majority of voters were in favor. But you wouldn’t know this from western media or politicians, who continue to refer to Russia’s supposed “annexation” of Crimea.

The Ukraine revolution of 2014 was encouraged by the United States whose Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland, was photographed together with the US ambassador handing out cookies to rebels in Kiev’s Maidan Square in December 2013. (The goodies were taken to the square by her armed US security guards. Then when the time was right for the cameras she was given the bags and doled them out. It was a gruesome but well-orchestrated little pantomime.)

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The World Order That’s Now Emerging

November 19, 2018

The World Order That’s Now Emerging

The Post-World-War-II world order was dominated by the one WWII major combatant that had only 0.32% of its population (the lowest percentage) killed by the war: the United States. The Soviet Union’s comparable number killed by the war was the highest — it was 13.7% — 4.28 times higher than America’s. The US was the main force that defeated Japan and so won WWII in Asia. The USSR, however, was the main force that defeated Germany and so won WWII in Europe. The USSR suffered vastly more than did the US to achieve its victory. In addition to suffering 4.28 times the number of war-deaths than did US, the USSR’s financial expenditures invested in the conflict, as calculated by Jan Ludvik, were 4.8 times higher than were America’s financial expenditures on the war.

Thus, at the war’s end, the Soviet Union was exhausted and in a much weaker condition than it had been before the war. By contrast, the US, having had none of the war’s battles occurring on its territory, was (by comparison) barely even scratched by the war, and it was thus clearly and overwhelmingly the new and dominant world-power emerging from the war.

That was the actual situation in 1945.

The US Government did not sit on its haunches with its enormous post-war advantage, but invested wisely in order to expand it. One of the first investments the US made after the war was the Marshall Plan to rebuild the European countries that had now become the US aristocracy’s vassal-states. The heavily damaged USSR possessed no such extra cash to invest in (rebuilding) its vassals. Furthermore, the USSR’s communist regime was additionally hobbled by Karl Marx’s labor theory of value, which produced prices that contained no useful information about demand and thus no constructive information for planners. (Planning is essential regardless whether an enterprise is private or public.)

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Global Warming Agenda to Create Authoritarian Government

November 9, 2018

Global Warming Agenda to Create Authoritarian Government

Back in 1996, the former Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev expressed the real truth behind the Global Warming agenda. He said that using climate alarmism could advance the socialist Marxist objectives to restore the power of government. He said: “The threat of environmental crisis will be the international disaster key to unlock the New World Order.” Essentially, this was revealing what I have encountered many times. You create an emergency and then convince the people they MUST surrender more freedom to be safe. What Gorbachev was sayings was, in reality, a path to restoring the U.S.S.R.’s economic and political power.

Those in power always seek more power because they really cannot control the economy nor society. It is the same reason why the bankers always fail is their attempted manipulation. Just as we are now finally reading about bribes that were paid by people at Goldman Sachs to those in Malaysia, they have been allegedly bribing officials around the world to manipulate markets. Even the allegations they made about me that I manipulated the world economy because they lost pointing the finger at me and our model saying I had too much influence after they lost on the whole Russian manipulation back in 1998. This is their mindset. They believe that they can remain in control by expanding power.

To expand power over the general public, they need a crisis. Previously, it was the cold war to keep us frightened and looking to government to protect us. First, it was the Red Scare and communists were everywhere so they launched investigations called the McCarthy Hearings. Then as a child in school, we had drills for a nuclear attack and were told to hide under our desks, as if that would really do something.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Written in History: The Death of America’s Hyper-Power Fantasy

November 9, 2018

Written in History: The Death of America’s Hyper-Power Fantasy

In 1987, Paul Kennedy, a British professor of history at Yale University, unleashed a political and intellectual firestorm with the publication of his great (677-page) book, “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.” Kennedy produced a magisterial overview of the competition for global power over the past 500 years from 1500 AD to the present.

Kennedy proposed the thesis that any power that achieved, imagined it had achieved or sought to achieve and maintain a dominant hyper-power role of global dominance was doomed to lose it and then rapidly decline in overall power, wealth, prosperity and influence.

Kennedy argued – with a wealth of detail drawn from different nations over his vast period of half a millennium – that the very attempt to achieve and maintain such power forced every nation that attempted it into a ruinous pattern of strategic overstretch.

This demanded every major global empire in their turn to devote ruinously far too many economic resources to unproductive military power and ever more costly global commitments and conflicts.

The more ambitious the commitments, the quicker came military defeat, economic ruin and national collapse, Kennedy documented.

Kennedy published his book however at exactly the wrong moment for its abundantly documented conclusions and arguments to be taken seriously in the United States. The Cold War was just ending. The heroic actions of the Russian people in rejecting communism and leading in the dismantling of the Soviet Union were being misinterpreted as an eternal and lasting victory for the United States and for the forces of free market capitalism and minimum government regulation.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Trump, Gorbachev and the fall of the American empire

November 8, 2018

Trump, Gorbachev and the fall of the American empire

“The only wealth you keep is wealth you have given away,” said Marcus Aurelius (121-180 AD), last of the great Roman emperors. US President Donald Trump might know of another Italian, Mario Puzo’s Don Vito Corleone, and his memorable mumble: “I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse.” Forgetting such Aurelian and godfather codes is propelling the decline and fall of the American empire.

Trump is making offers the world can refuse – by reshaping trade deals, dispensing with American sops and forcing powerful corporations to return home, the US is regaining economic wealth but relinquishing global power.

As the last leader of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika (restructuring) led to the breakup of its vast territory(22 million square kilometers). Gorbachev’s failed policies led to the dissolution of the USSR into Russia and independent countries, and the end of a superpower.

Ironically, the success of Trump’s policies will hasten the demise of the American empire: the US regaining economic health but losing its insidious hold over the world.

This diminishing influence was highlighted when India and seven other countries geared up to defy Washington’s re-imposition of its unilateral, illegal sanctions against Iran, starting Monday.

The US State Department granting “permission” on the weekend to the eight countries to buy Iranian oil was akin to waving the green flag at a train that has already left the station

The US State Department granting “permission” on the weekend to the eight countries to buy Iranian oil was akin to waving the green flag at a train that has already left the station.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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