Sanctionistas go shopping for rubles

As the situation stands today:

1. Russia has announced that since the US and the EU have defaulted on their US dollar and euro obligations, respectively, by freezing Russian reserves, Russia will now only sell natural gas for rubles.

2. There is no other source of sufficient quantities of natural gas available; thus, the EU has no choice but to continue importing natural gas from Russia.

3. The EU has to keep the gas flowing or it will be unable to make it through next winter without shutting down all industrial production or letting the housing stock go unheated.

How will the EU get the required quantities of rubles? Good question! The following comprehensive analysis (credit: “adventurist”) answers it pretty well.

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Europe has no alternative to Russian natural gas

Those who are still paying attention to the pronouncements of European marionettes I mean national leaders, and who know a thing or two about energy, were probably quite amused to hear one of them say that Germany plans to reduce its imports of Russian gas to 10%, and another one to declare that Europe won’t be paying for Russian gas in roubles because he doesn’t even know what a rouble looks like. Silly pronouncements like these are to be expected from marionettes, who probably haven’t been to school, and if they were, then it was probably some sort of marionette school where they didn’t have to struggle with hard subjects like math, physics or chemistry.

We can lament all we want the sorry state of old European nations and the fact that they are figureheaded by brainless prats, but for those of us still possessed of mental faculties this won’t change the fact that Europe cannot survive for long without Russian natural gas. A proper motto for Europe would be “Give me Russian gas, or give me death!”

I will now provide a full rationale for this motto in both a short-term and a long-term perspective.

Continue reading on Boosty.to/cluborlov…

Not the new world order you ordered

The “Russians killing Ukrainian civilians” fake news factory is still going strong, but sooner or later this story will have to be phased out and some new mass media obsession will be needed to distract the distraught masses from what’s actually happening. What shall it be? Central Park squirrels with bubonic plague? Hunter Biden’s sex change operation? A baby that fell down an oil well?

Joe Biden, tottering on his spindly legs, flew off to Europe to preach unity in the face of Russian aggression in the Ukraine or some such. That was the plan, but then Putin changed it by announcing that Russia will only be selling natural gas for rubles. Coming on the heels of Saudi announcement that it will start selling oil for yuan (a quarter of its exports goes to China) this didn’t sound like good news at all.

You can probably find some expert to tell you that the US, with 20% of world’s oil production, can still call the shots and that ’tis but a scratch. But given enough pre-existing conditions, even scratches can be fatal.

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The Day the Petrodollar Died

March  23, 2022 is shaping up to be an important date. Today Putin announced  that in very short order Russia will stop accepting payments for its  exports in currencies of hostile nations, immediately for natural gas,  eventually for everything. Existing contracts will be honored but  rewritten to stipulate payment in rubles.

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Of Sanctions and Stupidity

According to Reuters, today the Australian government has announced an immediate halt to alumina and bauxite exports to Russia as punishment for Russian military action in the Ukraine. It also announced that it will work on shipping coal to the Ukraine; and, of course, some weapons; and maybe-just-maybe even some humanitarian aid—the only thing the Ukrainians actually need. Since my Australian readers subsist under conditions of totalitarian state censorship, they are unlikely to come across a reasonable interpretation of the impact of these decisions from anyone at home, especially since it makes their fearless leaders look particularly foolish, and so I am eager to oblige and fill the gap.

Continue reading on Boosty.to which is my new publishing venue. 

Structural Hyperinflation Made Easy

The age of resource scarcity, which smart people have been warning us about for well over 30 years, has finally arrived. To confirm this casual observation, it should be sufficient to visit a gas station or to take a look at your utility bill and observe that prices have gone up somewhat. The term “somewhat” may sound facetious because a doubling in the price of energy over a period of just a few months is a bit of a shock for most people. But I chose this word carefully because what I want to explore is the definite possibility that coming up in the near future are order-of-magnitude leaps in price followed by market failure where essential commodities will become unavailable altogether for any amount of money.

This is not to say that the commodities in question will cease to exist. Nor will money cease to exist: there is likely to be more money sloshing around than ever. Nor is this to say that the commodities themselves will somehow be changed in form or function. What will be transformed out of all recognition is money itself. Instead of a universally recognized, infinitely fungible store of value and means of exchange, it will become a fractured and conflicted concept, cumbersome to use, risky to hold and increasingly useless.

To people who throughout their lives have been conditioned to treat money as the wherewithal and the measure of all things and to think that every last thing must have its price (determined by the invisible hand of the free market) this will be a most jarring, psychologically disruptive transition—a Götterdämmerung—twilight of the gods, or god, specifically the god Mammon. This is a romantic interpretation, and perhaps psychologically valid, but a more down-to-earth, technical view of it is that this is a new sort of inflation—one which I choose to give the name “structural hyperinflation.” It shares a lot of features with good old regular inflation which everyone should be getting used to by now, but it also has some additional features which make it potentially life-threatening—especially to liberal economists, investment bankers, traders, speculators, the rich, the poor and (not to leave anyone out) everybody in between.

The topic of structural hyperinflation deserves a book-length treatment—a weighty tome rivaling Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. I can’t provide one here, and so I will instead sketch out the rough outlines of this brave new world and provide some entertaining vignettes from current events to give you a better feel for it.

Continue reading on Boosty… 

Who will denazify the Ukraine?

Short answer: the Ukrainians will.

Long answer: let me walk you down a very short memory lane, merely 16 days long, starting from February 22, 2022. On that day, the majority of Ukrainian forces were massed deep inside the territories of Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics—the two statelets populated by Russians, many of them Russian passport-holders. The Ukrainian forces were within striking range of their capital cities and (as recently obtained official documents prove) were planning an all-out attack on them. That would have been an act of genocide which Russia would have had no choice but to try to stop.

Since the Ukrainian regime does not dare to do anything major without first receiving an “all clear” signal from Washington, this attack would have been on strategy with Washington’s goals, which, perfectly clearly, were to mire Russia in a Ukrainian civil war. This war would in turn provide the rationale for international isolation which would crush Russia’s economy and force it to once again provide its natural resources to the West for almost nothing. Were this plan to fail, the West would collapse.

The way it looks now, this plan is failing. I will return to this subject in a little while; by then the situation will have become clearer to a few more people. As people go through the inevitable denial-anger-bargaining sequence, it is best to hang back until the bargaining part is reached; only then does reasoned discussion become possible.

While the Ukrainian regime was frustrated in its efforts to join NATO by the fact that it does not control its own territory, it in fact surrendered the Ukraine to NATO forces, allowing NATO to order its military around and turning itself over to NATO’s use, thus bringing NATO within striking range of Moscow and driving NATO’s expansion east along the same route used by previous Western invaders—Napoleon and Hitler. Thus, the Ukrainian regime blithely trod across a very well established Russian red line that was guaranteed to trigger a military response. Given the vast disproportion in military strength, this was a delusional, suicidal move.

To top all of this off, at the Munich security conference held this February the (former?) Ukrainian president Zelensky professed his desire to develop nuclear weapons with which to attack Russia. Note that the Ukraine had sufficient nuclear materials, technologies and knowhow, inherited from the USSR, to rush through such a development program, especially if with US help. Although this would directly violate the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (“non-nuclear-weapon states agree never to acquire nuclear weapons”), he did not get any pushback from the assorted Western luminaries assembled there. Thus the Ukrainian regime thus did everything necessary to fashion itself into an immediate existential threat to Russia, sealing its fate.

The Russian response, nicknamed “Operation Z” from the letter “Z” painted on Russian armor involved in it, has two objectives: demilitarization and denazification. The demilitarization part is simple: completely destroy the Ukraine’s military capability (much of it inherited from the USSR) and refashion it into a militarily neutral confederation of semi-sovereign statelets, its security provided for by Russia. Just as everyone should have expected, the conscription-based Ukrainian military, armed with well-worn Soviet-era weaponry, with its morale somewhere down around its ankles, proved no match to the fully modernized and rearmed Russian military and is being systematically destroyed, with the surrendering soldiers being fed, bandaged up and sent home.

Thus, the demilitarization is going swimmingly and as of this writing what’s left of the Ukrainian regime no longer poses a military threat to anyone except its own population, which is still being terrorized by Ukrainian Nazis. And that brings us to Part II: Denazification, which is much more complicated and requires a more thorough explanation. Many people are currently scratching their heads, trying to imagine what it could possibly be, and I am happy to be able to offer an explanation.

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Manifesto on the Formation of the State of the Federal Republic of Ukraine

We, the free people of Kharkov, Nikolaev, Sumy, Chernigov and other regions of Ukraine, declare and proclaim the formation of a new democratic state, the Federal Republic of Ukraine.

When the course of events leads to the fact that people of different nations and peoples are forced to terminate the political ties that bind them to a state by dictatorial repressive methods that impose the ideology of Nazism on society, they have an inalienable right to take an independent and equal place among the nations of the world, and a respectful attitude towards the opinions of mankind requires them to explain the reasons that prompted him to such a separation.

When a long series of egregious and inhumane abuses and acts of violence, invariably subordinated to the same goal, testifies to the insidious design to force our peoples to accept unlimited despotism, dictatorship and the complete rehabilitation of Nazism, the overthrow of such a government and the creation of new security guarantees for the future becomes a right and a duty of the peoples of Ukraine.

The peoples of Ukraine have shown patience for a long time, and only necessity compels them to change the previous system of their government.

The history of the existence of the state of Ukraine is a set of countless injustices and acts of violence, the purpose of which was to establish unlimited despotism and neo-fascist dictatorship.

To confirm the above, we present the following facts to the impartial judgment of all mankind.

► There was carried out the glorification of Nazi criminals guilty of genocide and of the destruction of hundreds of thousands of people—Ukrainians, Russians, Jews, Poles and people of other nationalities.

► Freedom of speech and press, freedom of assembly were eliminated.

► Political opposition was prohibited.

► A system of total surveillance, reprisals against unwanted and massacres was been organized.

► The justice system was destroyed.

► A corrupt model of state administration was been created, which has led to the exodus from the country of 7 to 12 million people who were deprived of their livelihoods.

► The healthcare system was destroyed, which led to a catastrophic die-off of the population.

► An education reform has been carried out prohobiting teaching in Russian, Hungarian and other languages.

► Finally, a civil war was been unleashed in the Donbass.

The ruling regime in Kiev united with others to subject us to a jurisdiction alien to our constitution and not recognized by our laws, and approved acts that claimed to become legislation and served to:

♦ conducting exercises and quartering the armed forces of foreign states with us;

♦ releasing from the punishment military and police officers who have committed murders of residents through legal proceedings only legal in appearance;

♦ termination of our trade with other states;

♦ elimination of jobs;

♦ forcing citizens to leave the country in search of work;

♦ taxing us without our consent;

♦ depriving us in many court cases of the opportunity to enjoy the benefits of trial by jury;

♦ the abolition of some and the adoption of other laws that are contrary to the wishes of the majority of the population of Ukraine;

♦ revoking the rights and freedoms granted to us, repealing our most useful laws, and fundamentally changing the forms of our government;

♦ suspension of the activities of local and regional authorities and appropriation of the authority to legislate in their place in a variety of cases.

Therefore, we, representatives of the regions of Ukraine, having in our hearts the honesty of our intentions, on behalf of and under the authorization of the peoples of these regions, solemnly record and declare that these regions are and by right should be free and independent, that they are freed from any dependence on to the Kiev authorities and that all political ties between them and the state of Ukraine must be completely severed, that, as free and independent states, they are authorized to declare war, conclude peace treaties, enter into alliances, conduct trade, and perform any other actions that are the prerogatives of an independent state.

Our goal is to unite all the peoples of Ukraine who do not want to put up with the domination of neo-Nazism and bloody crimes on our land.

Our goal is to create a democratic federal state and carry out complete denazification and de-Banderization, and the introduction of criminal liability for the rehabilitation of Nazism.

Our goal is to create a democratic federal state where every nation can speak its own language. The number of state languages ​​is not to be limited.

Our goal is to create a democratic federal state, where the main goals will be to ensure human rights and freedoms.

Our goal is to create a democratic federal state where freedom of religion will be ensured and the independence of the Church from the state will be guaranteed.

Our goal is to create a democratic federal state and punish war criminals who are guilty of unleashing a civil war and mass bloodshed.

Our goal is to create a democratic federal state with a free market economy.

Our goal is neutrality and friendly relations with all states of the world.

We ask all countries of the world to recognize the state of the Federal Republic of Ukraine.

May the Lord help us.

This manifesto is open for signing by representatives of regional and city councils of all regions of Ukraine.

Source: https://rusvesna.su/news/1646075757

Russia’s Incursion Into the Ukraine is Necessary for Security

In which we talk about the Ukraine, chances for World War III, whether globalization is even a thing and much more. Enjoy.

Dmitry Orlov: Russia’s Incursion Into Ukraine Necessary for Security