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Category: War

  • Digital ID, War and Troubles Ahead

    Long time no write. I got employed (at will, contract until the end of November) and have been working since last week’s Monday. Still learning the ropes, enough of that.

    Federal government

    Secretary of War, Hegseth, had called all generals, 1-star and up for an all hands meeting. This includes those who have ‘active situations’ going. Very unusual. The rumors online ranged from imminent intensification of WWIII, invasion of Venezuela, an alien arrival, a complete reorganization of US military, or mass lay offs to clean out our top heavy military organization chart. The official explanation was pep talks telling the armed forces to merit base up, go on diet, and concentrate on learning how to efficiently win wars rather than having rainbow events and PC talk. It is generally thought that the pep talks were a cover for something else, though what that might be is unknown to public.

    The mass lay offs in military would have dovetail nicely with the threatened imminent mass lay offs of Federal bureaucracy in general, due to government shutdown, because congress cannot (again) pass a budget, or as the case has been for quite a few years, a continuing resolution. Trump has been itching to take a machete or a flamethrower at our bureaucratic jungle and to cut our budget deficit (our current Federal debt has ballooned since the summer 36 trillion to today’s over 37.5 trillion and keeps rising)or at least the funding to his political opponents. Instead of putting the Federal workers on furlough with back pay when the continuing resolution has been passed, the president proposes to simply fire the non-essentials (or a fraction of them) to reduce Federal complexity and expenses. Considering the recent increase in debt levels, methinks, this is an opportunity for a political purge, any savings would be incidental.

    The immigration enforcement (Feds) vs antifa + their affiliates (supported by democrat jurisdictions) situation seems to be verging towards civil strife of the Irish Troubles type. Basically the central government (the new establishment) is bringing rebellious city states and provinces back under control, task complicated by the democrat (the former establishment) outrage over having lost their control over the central government. Meanwhile, I suspect the people would be more interested in what either of the parties would be doing on the rapidly rising cost of living and the employment and housing crises.

    Digital ID

    Vietnam froze about 86 million bank accounts, they can only be unfrozen if the account owner gets a government digital ID and provides a proof to the bank.

    In UK, Prime Minister Starmer told the folks that everyone must get a digital ID, soon it will be illegal to work without one. ‘Ministers have ruled out’ that welfare payments or healthcare would need digital ID. I suspect them of being economical with truth, what with Tony Blair Institute for Global Change clearly stating its usefulness for accessing benefits.

    This is, of course, ‘to combat the illegal immigration’ (much encouraged by successive Labour and Tory governments alike.) Exactly how the UK government believes forcing digital ID on people who do not use even paper IDs is going to help, but I think the digital ID for legitimate, as in taxable, work and other economic activity will collapse what is left of UK finances. Or the people will revolt (though at this point I think that less likely than finding metabolically active extraterrestrial life.) In any case, immigrants without ID could presumably still access welfare and healthcare, even if they cannot work legally.

    While I unfortunately did not find a reference, I recall that during COVID, Sweden discussed banning cash, but the government retreated when they realized that large enough fraction of of their economy functioned on informal basis to sink the rest of the economy(sarskillt utsetta omraden would have exploded or become even less governable than currently. While the White Hall may know their people better than I and are banking on them being hopelessly obedient (rebels having left during 17th and 18th century), lots of White Hall mandarins are clueless elites that live separate from normal life and consequences of their actions.

    I also read about digital ID already existing or being rolled into various EU countries. The same source also mentions online access. Omitted was the potential barring of online access.

    In South Korea, there was a big fire in a government data center, which crippled many of the government services, including things requiring digital ID. The fire started from a lithium battery (the batteries were being replaced because they were getting old) and it is unknown how much actual data the South Korean government lost.

    While I was anticipating hackers having a fiesta with people’s IDs online, and rolling blackouts and other such infrastructure misery making them unpracticable (the Indian Aadhar system has reportedly led to deaths by starvation due to lack of access to government social security), I had forgotten about the vulnerability of the data centers. TietoEVRY, which is a major PPP contractor for various data base services to Finnish government (including the election vote results, at least once in collaboration with Scytl when still known as TietoEnator) managed to years ago (when it was known just as Tieto) totally mess up multiple Swedish databases. Considering this and the South Korean example, I expect any digital ID to result in Kafkaesque nightmare for the subjects and massive confusion and potentially paralyzing dysfunction to the governments. But perhaps that is not a bug but a feature – maybe it will allow greater variety for financial oppression while reducing the citizens’ ability to defend themselves against the governmental predators, the profits of which are then calculated to outweigh the cost of national collapses.

    Local news

    California has on November 4th special elections about redistricting. The cost estimates range from 250+ to 280+ million dollars, that is over quarter of billion dollars to invest on Democrats (maybe) taking Congress (and US budget.) Nevertheless, as a California tax payer, I am annoyed. I have gotten two mailings of official election information. I suppose that is my tax dollars at work.

    War and Troubles

    Drone attacks and air space violations of NATO countries are intensifying. Involved parties: at least Poland, Denmark, Germany, Norway, Estonia, Hungary, Romania, and, of course, Russia and Ukraine. I probably have missed countries – these days the news come too fast for me to follow. Also who did what to whom is unclear, including to many of the targets. Meanwhile, I am more worried about cyber attacks and domestic terrorists.

    Of domestic terrorists: someone set (or attempted to set) the concert bus of Ice-T in fire while he was touring in Portland, Oregon. Many thought that happened because someone mistook it for ICE vehicle, though now the official explanation is a random act of vandalism. I don’t know if this was a contributing factor for Trump’s orders to sent National Guard to Portland to protect ICE there. Maybe the generals were called in to take marching orders for intensifying civil troubles. Meanwhile, some dude got 19 years for terrorism for setting a police vehicle on fire in UC Berkeley campus. UC maintains a police force separate from City of Berkeley. I wonder what Janet Napolitano, a former president of the UC system and a former Secretary of Homeland security would think about the current happenings.

    There are many other items I could write about, but there is no time.

    Butterfly on a flower, flew away. Life does not need to be so grim all the time.

  • Restless Times – 2

    As mentioned in the previous Restless Times posting, France just changed their prime minister.

    But so did Nepal. Their parliament burned, and the prime minister fled on helicopter. People were teed off by the government decision to shut down all social media because the companies refused to censor content that Nepalese government did not like (no, I don’t have any details) and then the pro-social media demonstrators were met with a hail of bullets, and then it turned out that the number of teed off citizens exceeded the government firepower and willingness to use it. Some people are suspicious about the social media companies’ unwillingness to censor in Nepal, after all, the social media have been over the years been weaponized for color revolutions and some interests may have wanted the Nepalese government out. However, the people of Nepal have probably been thoroughly disgusted by their leaders and corruption so I think the uprising was organically powered, with social media companies merely allowing the people to egg each other on.

    Also Samoa is changing their primer minister, though that event is more orderly.

    In Qatar, Israeli airstrike is claimed to have taken out Hamas leadership. There are dissenting reports. The news have within the last decade become a fun-house mirror maze, where people hear what they are supposed to think and then are left to figure out if anything happened let alone in the manner the news present the events.

    Gold prices are shooting up. I am waiting to get some money to buy gold and silver. The physical metals, not the futures. Currently, as I type, I read that each silver ounce in the COMEX vaults has been overbooked by 36 times, i.e., there are 36 paper contract ounces to each physical ounce, which means that in case of a panic, the first / strongest to assert their claim will get the nuggets. Whether the rest will get even the cash value of their paper metals will depend on whether the vault on which you have claims has money to cover the debts. In other words, the same logic as in Resolution Weekend.

    Europeans are busy with military exercises. There were at least six simultaneous ones within Finnish territory, including joint force exercises and urban warfare exercises, and Finland also participated in the CBNR exercise in Sweden. Poland had massive exercises, and aside from Quadriga exercise, Germany has moved a panzer brigade to Baltics. The French and UK orders regarding hospital readiness in case of mass casualty event I may have already mentioned earlier. I had so hoped that the United States 2024 election results would have brought peace, but depressingly it looks like this will not happen.

    Especially now, as Poland shot down Russian drones in Poland’s air space, and consequently, Poland is invoking NATO Article 4.

    Also Belarus says they shot down stray drones (either Ukrainian or Russian) and warned Poland about the arriving drones. However, there are too many reports for me to follow but it sure looks bad.

    In Vilnius, there were LNG rail car explosions. In the report I read, they were attributed to OHSA violations, but the cause is still being investigated.

    Other unrest:

    Indonesian finance minister has been removed, after demonstrations in multiple provinces.

    Government troops to deal with violent crime in Brussels, Belgium, and possibly in Chicago, IL, USA (national guard).

    Secretary of War Hegseth gave a speech to military in Puerto Rico telling the soldiers that this was not training but to end poisoning of the American people.

    Economy will not improve, either. Layoffs are increasing, but the hirings (at least in the USA) keep getting revised down. On Tuesday, I saw in LinkedIn feed a discussion about even recruiters finding new careers (sorry no link or screenshot.) I have been actively looking for a job since last year, and based on my job listing feeds the job market has been getting crazier by month.

    Needless to say, I am doubtful about the idea of getting a job. At least a job matching my skills and work experience. Why I get advertisements for ‘CDL-A drivers needed’ is anyone’s guess, I don’t have a commercial trucking license, but based on recent news, maybe that is not a hard barrier in California.

  • Oil

    China imports more Canadian gold than Canada officially exports to China.

    Canada de facto protects Chinese (international) drug super laboratories.

    I wonder if these two things have something to do with each other?

    Trump administration has used this as an excuse to tariff Canada. Trump administration also supports Albertan separatism.

    Towards south, US has sent military and naval units to fight drug cartels in Venezuela.

    ‘Certain cartels’ had been designated as foreign terrorist organizations on the same day as Trump was sworn into presidency paving way to military action, but I was slightly surprised at this week’s movement to Venezuela instead of Mexico, which the US media more commonly connects to cartel activities (not to mention being the focus of our militarized border wall.)

    Crude claims that USA just wants Venezuelan oil again, just like in the past 20+ years of regime change attempts, seem somewhat plausible.

    It might be the Venezuelan threats against Guyanan oil fields in Essequibo that are currently exploited ExxonMobil that triggered the latest action.

    An infographic shown by X user placed Canada among the high oil resource countries – most of which were either destabilized, contested, under hybrid warfare / influence campaigns, or Western sock puppets. Kazakhstan may have been the only exception in the list, but that may be just US being more remote than Russia and China. Bouts of sanity, like recognizing the limits of former ‘hyperpower’ are extremely rare, rarer than pacifism, in Washington DC.

    But a grim fact is that the Western technocivilization is running out of energy, among other resources. Whether for AI powered surveillance dystopia or utopistic popst-scarcity dream, reality is reasserting itself crushing them all with resource scarcity.

    Looks like the oil wars (including hybrid warfare), this time north and south, are back on menu. With War on Drugs joining hands with War on Terror as casus belli.

  • Department of Narrative Mismanagement

    I have followed the recent discussions about Jeffrey E., a dead criminal whose suspicious passing away in custody has caused years of speculation (including that he was taken secretly away and is now living somewhere nice.) Namely, he is known to have committed his crimes with lots of people and suspected of blackmailing the said people, which tend to be the very wealthy and powerful type. Which is why he was rumored to have been self-deleted.

    The current administration has loudly and repeatedly promised to publish the list of Jeffrey’s associates, until about a week ago an FBI memo was leaked(?) to Axios claiming: he offed himself, there is no list of people, and he did not blackmail anybody. The administration is trying to sweep the issue under the metaphorical carpet. Then the officials published a video of his cell from the night of his death. Except the video contained about 1 minute gap (or maybe more than 1 minute). It had been stitched together so badly that aside from the gap in the timestamp, the aspect ratios were subtly off. As Asmongold pointed out, there could be legitimate reasons for this blooper, but with all the other circumstatial evidence, to me this points towards a conspiracy concerning Jeffrey E.’s demise, the reasons for it, and the existence of more rot in the circles of power.

    As I keep on watching the government stumble from narrative fail to a narrative fail, with people becoming increasingly convinced that something is off with the official story (which has presented already by the previous administration), I have began to suspect that all this furor is deliberately fanned to distract the hoi polloi from something really important, possibly even more insidious than the idea that we are being governed by a huge criminal blackmail network, until it is too late to do something about it. This is quite a common tactic by the powers that be. For example, in Finland, I have imprecise memories on how government starts making noises about changing regulations or taxes on selling beer, and people get upset. Huge discussions rage over newspaper opinion columns and on-line boards, pro and con, while the government passes something else, much more important for people’s lives. The beer issue can be resolved, or if necessary, retreated from, people will calm down, and meanwhile something actually nasty was done to them.

    While the incompetence of governments can be stupendous, it stretches my credulity to have so many bloopers in the narrative management coming one after each other, and I am beginning to suspect we are being purposefully distracted. Whether it is from the coming (proxy) war against China (maybe started between Thailand and Cambodia, maybe still waiting for the Iran situation to worsen), the ongoing (officially proxy) war against Russia, the economic collapse (US consumers sentiment has been reportedly low earlier this year, though Goldman Sacks just reassured that everything is merely returning to normal), the incoming digital surveillance grid (brought to you in collaboration with Musk and Thiel under the guise of tracking immigrants – spoiler alert: to track immigrants they will “need to” also map the non-immigrants), or something possibly worse, it must be humongous to merit this level of egging of the masses. I don’t think Obama’s referral to Department of Justice for suspicion of having ordered narrative to be manufactured for the Russia Collusion quite qualifies, more likely it is just more noise to distract the masses. By the way, US just moved nukes to UK, but that’s probably a nothing-burger (I am still sitting on the fence about whether to link and comment to the article on the subject in aviationnews.eu.)

    I am also currently sitting on the fence on whether our government truly is this incompetent at narrative management or whether there is some obscure Department of Narrative Management, who are gloating about their latest glorious success in psyop against the people. Or maybe the Department of Narrative Management has gone rogue and is actively fighting against the current administration.

    Although considering the everyday dysfunction I live in due to the ongoing complexity crisis infecting all aspects of modern society and worsened by the ongoing incompetence crisis fanned by the decades of education crisis, I still think that, yes, they really could be that incompetent. Maybe.

  • Possible Bad News

    I fear that if the ceasefire between Israel and Iran fails, USA will be entering into two-front proxy war.

    Our current proxy war in Ukraine is not going well, and we are pulling our weapons help away (every other day, it seems, on the other days we are giving them more). European part of NATO is upset but considering the state of their economies and especially their armies (with a couple of exceptions), I doubt their help will be decisive in any manner. If it would be, this war would have been over years ago.

    I thought the news about us stopping to give missiles to Ukraine was about our economy and military-industrial complex, which in these days is more military than industrial (our industries having been long since outsourced), no longer sufficing for policing the world, but the latest rumor / development, namely China (PRC) strengthening its military support to Iran to counter our support to Israel, if true, means potential opening of a new proxy war. Against the biggest manufacturing powerhouse in the world that desperately needs a boost for its stalled economy. And needs the Iranian oil, the access to which has been complicated by the conflicts involving US backed Israel (although China has benefited hugely from US sanctions which have forced Iran to sell their oil on discount.)

    I have for some time thought about China and Iranian oil and China-Iran railway, and how Japanese got motivated to attack to Pearl Harbor by US blockade of Japanese oil imports. Just having an ominous feeling about this.