The Russian Academy of atrocities. New World Order needs electricity. Money when the lights go out

20230114

The thermometer in my office says 18° – that's 64° to you in America. Absolutely toasty. The hapless Russians entered this war without a plan.  Every half-assed scheme that they improvise seems to fail. Knocking out our infrastructure so we would freeze to death this winter was only the one among many.

Our electric company does an amazingly good job of fixing things as fast as Russians break them. Their rationing schemes work. We have always had electricity at least one third of the time, enough to keep the house from freezing and check our mail more or less daily.

The very attempt to freeze out civilians solidified world support for Ukraine. It was bad public relations. The Russians are going from bad to worse. Two days ago they dropped a thousand pound bomb on one of the brick-like Soviet-era apartment buildings in Dnipro.  It was devastating – as you can see in these pictures a nighttime attack blew out one or two stairwells clear down to the ground. The death toll is 37 and rising.

The fact that they would do this shows the absolute amorality, lack of any scruples whatsoever of the Russians. It also shows their stupidity and ineptitude. The world becomes more and more disgusted with Russian conduct. The Russians are burning through their inventory of obsolete weapons (it is agreed that this munition has very imprecise guidance) and such mayhem is doing nothing to stop our military.

Civilian morale here remains high. Just like British morale remained high during the World War II blitz. There is more evidence every day that we are fighting pure evil, and to come to any accommodation with Russia just to end the war would be a mistake. We cannot trust their promises.  They have never had good intentions. Their treatment of civilians in occupied territories is scandalous.  We have no choice but to fight until we win.

Even Ukraine's reluctant friends like Germany and Hungary are concluding that Putin will understand nothing except force. They are finally providing us the weapons we need to win a decisive victory.

Many of the alt-right sources that I follow are rightly afraid of the New World Order by which the rich and powerful will control our every move. I am not going to credit the Masters of the Universe with anything less than the most evil of motives, but my observations here in Ukraine suggest that the control they want will be difficult to obtain.

What do they want?  Central bank digital currencies, electronic medical records, universal surveillance via face recognition, voice recognition, gait recognition, cell phone tracking, license plate readers, online transaction monitoring, and credit transaction monitoring. This list is incomplete. Any list would be – they are limited only by their imagination.

Every scheme depends on electricity to support communication and computer databases. Take away electricity and it all folds into a cocked hat.

Our electricity has been spotty since the Russians targeted our infrastructure. Debit cards don't work when the power is out – banks cannot immediately debit your account. Presumably they can't tell whether a credit card is valid or not. I still zip right through the cash only lanes.

When our power is out the cell phones don't work in our part of the city. They use the same power lines we do. I am sure that they could be made redundant – using dedicated power lines or built-in battery backup – but that would be expensive.

The banks have similar problems. ATMs don't work when there is no electricity – you can't make bank transactions or deposit or receive cash. We have to get our banking done when there is power.

Thank goodness we don't have electronic medical records here. They still do it the old-fashioned way – dig out your paper records when you show up. The doctor can still talk to you and figure out what's wrong with you, and compare your condition today with what it was the last time they took x-rays or blood samples or whatever.

It would be worse in other countries. I recently received an advertisement for The Home Doctor, a book by a couple of Venezuelans giving advice on how to cope when no part of the medical infrastructure works. No electronic medical records – in fact no electronic devices at all. X-rays, CAT scans, or even lights in the operating room.

Schools are having a hard time functioning here. Not being able to depend on light or heat, they have given the kids the month of January off. Thank goodness they largely depend on paper record keeping. Databases of student records would be hard to maintain. I am sure this is true in Venezuela, as well as other large swaths of Latin America, Africa and southern Asia.

The things that can get by with intermittent electricity still get done, just as they do in Africa and Latin America today. SMS messages get through, if not immediately. People still use email. They use generators to power tools to build houses. Many things that demand full-time electricity, however, stop happening.

The Masters of the Universe appear to be shooting themselves in the foot, forcing the world to switch from reliable, simple fossil fuel technologies to expensive, unreliable (and actually, unsustainable and polluting) solar and wind technologies. We will simply not be able to support the infrastructure required for all of their intrusive technologies.  Certainly not electric cars.

Electricity will be inadequate even making the generous assumption that the Luddites of the world don't rise up in reaction.  But they are becoming restive.  Hoodlums have already gotten wise to the surveillance techniques in American inner cities. Thieves are pretty good at knocking out surveillance cameras on people's porches and private businesses. Bad guys understand how their cell phones betray their presence, how to cover their faces walking down the street, how to 3D print pistols or to file the serial numbers off of guns and make it hard to trace them by ballistics.

Once it becomes clear that the government has decided we are all bad guys, how much effort will it take to sabotage the surveillance state? The EMF signals those ubiquitous 5G wireless transmitters emit betray their presence.  They still depend on wires for their electricity. They are not bulletproof. Probably not even from pellet guns. Or crowbar-proof.

The governments may be able to impose central bank digital currencies. The realities that they cannot eliminate – soaring obligations for healthcare, pensions, welfare and interest on their debt, and a taxpayer base diminishing in numbers and talent – will force them to push inflation. Something will have to give. Barter systems will arise. The next generation may give rise to a Meyer Rothschild or two who come up with systems of credit backed by precious metals, bitcoin or whatever.

This has already happened, though not for the better. The FTX business model for bitcoin was "You deposit your Bitcoin with us, and we will handle the trades when you want to use it." The problem was that it was a fraud. They stole the Bitcoins. It was not the first – there were previously Mt.Gox, Silk Road, Bitconnect and many others.

When a trusted party emerges capable of issuing and handling trades using fractional interest in gold or Satoshis (1/100 millionth of a bitcoin, or 1/47 penny), and Bitcoin is more stable than the government currency (!?), people may switch.  Precious metals are already more stable than many currencies.  The problems metals must overcome are (1) they are too valuable for small transactions, (2) they can be stolen, and (3) they have to be physically exchanged.

Gold-backed currencies, such as the US dollar prior to 1971, overcame all of these difficulties.  That's one reason that paper US dollars were widely used throughout the world. Swiss francs likewise. If some entity, private or governmental, is able to issue metals backed certificates that can be easily validated, traded and redeemed for metal, they should be preferred to central bank digital currencies. Of course governments will fight tooth and nail to "protect" us consumers from such evils and preserve their monetary monopoly.

Returning to my theme, when electricity becomes iffy throughout more of the developed world due to unworkable "green" schemes for generating it, or social chaos brought about by changing demographics and rampant inflation, I expect that some alternatives will emerge. The topic has been under discussion for several decades now.  The prudent should note that no strong alternatives have emerged to precious metals and cybercurrencies, and act accordingly.

There is some strong pushback against electronic record-keeping. The most obvious is in the realm of electronic voting machines. It is clear that the results of elections can be manipulated by whoever controls the machines. Jurisdictions throughout the United States are going back to paper ballots. They need to have a strong audit trail.

Electronic medical records are also being manipulated. The Department of Defense’s DMED system for tracking the health of members of the United States military showed an embarrassingly a high incidence of heart problems among people who had been compelled to receive the injectable biological products claimed to prevent Covid. As attorneys have forced them to disclose, the records as they exist today are not the same as they were previously. Somebody changed them.

If you were a soldier with a heart condition, would you want the record of that problem to go away simply because it was embarrassing to the government? Probably not. Going back in time, however, it appears that the government did exactly that to erase the connection between “Gulf War syndrome” and the forced anthrax vaccinations. It is quite possible that health maintenance organizations have changed records to obfuscate the correlation between childhood vaccinations and autism.

Big Pharma and the medical industry – patient management, hospitals and so on – have pushed hard for electronic medical records. The computers have taken over. They tell doctors how to code whatever they see. More than that, they tell doctors not to see that which cannot be accurately coded. They forced doctors to see a lot more Covid than may have been present. Conversely, doctors who refused to see Covid when the people who pay their salaries told them they must suffered financial penalties. Many were fired. If patient records were kept on paper, confidential between the doctor and the patient, these problems would not arise. There is a movement afoot to put things back the way they were. I would belong to this one if I were in the United States.

Returning to Ukraine, we note that in the areas of conflict all they have is a cash economy. I am certain that pawnbrokers and others working in the shadows are willing to buy precious metals for local currency. We are lucky in that although the exchange rates have fluctuated a lot, both the ruble and the hyrvnya have only lost about a third of their vaue so far.  By comparison, over the same time the Venezuelan Bolivar lost 4,200,000% of its value. It makes Bitcoin look pretty good.

Those are the musings from Lake WeBeGone, where the strong man's prognostications about a brutal winter turn out to be delightfully wrong, the good-looking woman is teaching music to Mariana's set and enjoying a conversation with the mothers, Zoriana's cough has been demoted from illness to annoyance, allowing her to go back to nursery school, and Eddie is trying out as a caretaker for second and third grade kids at the Sunflower School where a teacher just quit.

Graham

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