Harder, Faster, Deeper!

’Tis the presidential election season in the US and so I feel the urge to write a token article about it. I generally try to stay off this topic because the US is not a democracy and it doesn’t matter who is president. Gilens and Page proved this in their landmark 2014study, sparing me the need to reargue the case here.

At this point certain people like to object that this is as it should be because the US is a republic, not a democracy. But then why bother with elections? For those who are keen on democracy, I would suggest that they study North Korea; theirs is a “democratic people’s republic.” Fixing the democracy problem would be required to earn a passing grade while making it a people’s republic (instead of an oligarchic republic as it is now) would be for extra credit.

I have been on hand to watch a long parade of presidential stooges, starting with “dim bulb” Ford and all the way to Trump, whose nicknames have ranged from “orange man” to “shit-gibbon.” Though this has been a waste of my time, perhaps I can be useful in putting your mind at ease. A lot of people are currently becoming overwrought over what is a quintessentially meaningless contest and I want to do what I can to lower their blood pressure and cortisol levels and allow them to live longer, happier, healthier lives.

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Interview on Radio Voice America

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXFNKfEcVYc&feature=youtu.be

Welcome back to Turning Hard Times into Good Times. I’m your host Jay Taylor. I’m really pleased to have with me once again Dmitry Orlov.

Dmitry was born and grew up in Leningrad, but has lived in the United States. He moved here in the mid-seventies. He has since gone back to Russia, where he is living now.

But Dmitry was an eyewitness to the Soviet collapse over several extended visits to his Russian homeland between the eighties and mid-nineties. He is an engineer who has contributed to fields as diverse as high-energy Physics and Internet Security, as well as a leading Peak Oil theorist. He is the author of Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects (2008) and The Five Stages of Collapse: Survivors' Toolkit (2013).

Welcome, Dmitry, and thank you so much for joining us again.

A: Great to be on your program again, Jay.

Q: It’s really good to hear your voice. I know we had you on [the program] back in 2014. It’s been a long time—way too long, as far as I’m concerned. In that discussion we talked about the five stages of collapse that you observed in the fall of the USSR. Could you review them really quickly, and compare them to what you are seeing, what you have witnessed and observed in the United States as you lived here, and of course in your post now in Russia.

Taxi Drivers Know Everything

It so happened that yesterday I was coming home in a taxi. The taxi driver, who looked like Bill Murray, turned out to be very talkative: during the trip, as often happens, we touched on all subjects, from the weather to blondes behind the wheel.

At some point, as background noise, there was some news read out on the radio. After the segment about the poisoning of Alexei Navalny, NordStream 2 and possible EU sanctions the taxi driver shook his head and said thoughtfully: “Yeah, mommy is stuck…”

“What mommy?” I inquired.

“What mommy?” asked the taxi driver. “That same one, Angela Merkel. You know why Navalny was surrendered to Germany? Let me explain.” And then, for a quarter of an hour, the taxi driver presented a coherent theory of what happened, worthy of study at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which answered all the questions that had been bothering me.

This is how it all came down.

The Novichok Comedy Hour

Perhaps you’ve already heard the story; if not, here is the synopsis.

The Russian dictator Vladimir Putin had the leading Russian opposition candidate and Putin’s nemesis Alexei Navalny poisoned with an internationally banned battlefield chemical weapon Novichok. Navalny went into a coma and was airlifted in a German military jet to the Charité medical center in Germany, where German military medical experts found traces of Novichok on his body. For this heinous deed the collective West is regrouping and getting ready to impose more sanctions on Russia, perhaps preventing it from completing the NordStream 2 gas pipeline under the Baltic, which would make Europe even more dependent on its natural gas instead of buying cheap and plentiful liquified natural gas from the US.

If reading the above has not insulted your intelligence, then, before you can feel properly insulted, there is quite a steep learning curve for you to climb, but I will do my best to help you surmount it. And if you do feel insulted, then the question is, Just how insulted are you? Because the amount of disdain, condescension, arrogance, indifference and sheer sneering contempt shown toward you by those who are pushing this fake narrative is so extreme that only one psychologically healthy response to it is possible; which is, to laugh at it—at all of it in its entirety, and then at all the individual pieces of it, each of which is funny on its own as a paragon of misguided, delusional stupidity.

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“Our technologies could destroy humanity”

Interview for Sputnik Germany

Part 1: https://de.sputniknews.com/interviews/20200822327765513-moderne-technologien-menschheit-bedrohung/

Part 2: https://de.sputniknews.com/interviews/20200823327765616-russlands-nuklear-technologie-vorteil/

Audio: https://soundcloud.com/sna-radio/our-technologies-could-destroy-humanity-dmitry-orlov-exclusive

Audio in German: https://soundcloud.com/sna-radio/unsere-technologien-konnten-die-menschheit-vernichten-dmitry-orlov-exklusiv

Sputnik: Mr Orlov, today we want to discuss your newest book, “Shrinking the Technosphere” (the German version), but before we start this I would like to deepen one of your answers in our first Sputnik Germany interview.

You said that the US central bank (the Federal Reserve) created new collateral in the banking ‘repo’ crisis of 2019. I would add two more questions: How would you define ‘collateral’? And you said that the US dollar would lose massive value in the next few months; what makes you so sure of it?

A: Well, to answer the first question, perhaps I misspoke in the first interview. The Fed did not so much create collateral as redeem US Treasuries and other debt instruments as collateral because banks stopped being so willing to honor them as collateral for overnight loans between banks, and so the Fed had to step in and provide these loans, provide the liquidity for these loans to the order of hundreds of billions of dollars of new money that was put into circulation—between banks, not into the broader economy.

So what that shows is that faith in US debt (and the US dollar consists of US debt at this point), that that faith was not as rock solid as some people would like to believe.

Now as far as the second question, why the dollar is likely to lose value: if you look at the value of a currency, you have to stack it up against productive capacity that underlies it. Money is a way of paying for goods and services. There has been a drastic increase in the supply of money. Right now the US government is on track to finance half of its budget using new debt—that is, basically the budget deficit is 50 percent of the federal budget, it’s on track to be that. But we don’t see any increase in the productive capacity of the United States to go with this vast increase in the money supply. In fact, the US economy has shrunk by a large amount, and it’s absolutely uncertain whether it will recover any time soon.

So basically we have more money, we have less stuff to buy with this money, and the result of that is that the money is going to be worth less. The logic of that is extremely simple.

Q: OK. Thank you very much. Now Mr. Orlov, your newest book is entitled “Shrinking the Technosphere.” So my questions: what is the technosphere, and why should it or will it shrink? What is your approach in this? And for our audience, you yourself can be seen as a technologist, as a computer scientist. What is your take on this whole topic?

Alexander Rogers: Russia as an Exporter of Stability

 

[Guest post, my translation.]

Again the world is divided into two poles—not capitalist and communist, but based on a new principle.

It’s been a long time since the USA has turned into a pole of instability that generates wars, invasions and government overthrows.

Meanwhile, Russia is gradually becoming a pole of stability that prevents these wars and government overthrows.

Here we have unity and conflict between opposites. If there occurs an action (destructive in the case of Americans/Democrats) there arises a reaction. Dialectics, Sir!

Consequently, since instability has been the main category of export for the USA for a long time now, Russia has started to export stability.

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Why Collapse of the US is inevitable while Russia will be spared

Here is my transcript of the interview on the technosphere which I gave to Sputnik Germany.

 Sputnik: Mr. Orlov, thank you very much for this interview. Today we  want to discuss your newest book, Die Lehre vom Kollaps: Die fünf Stufen  des Zusammenbruchs und wie wir sie überleben
[Rough translation: The Lesson of Collapse: The Five Stages of Collapse and How to Survive Them] 

 It’s [newly] published in Germany by Westend Verlag and Fifty-Fifty  Verlag. But before we start, maybe some of our audience, regular  listeners and readers may not know you yet. Could you give us a brief  and short view of your life as a writer, and also, what’s your approach,  what’s your philosophy?

Europe’s Last Dictator in a Tight Spot

One of my hobbies is charting the progress, or the regress, of the color revolution syndicate. I have predicted some time ago that Western-instigated and Western-orchestrated regime change is going to become less and less effective over time, and to some extent this has turned out to be the case, although not entirely. On the one hand, color revolutions have become less of a threat to healthy political systems, evolving from something that could be turned on and off by remote control (from Washington) to something like opportunistic infection afflicting morbid regimes.

A good example of a color revolution as a fatal ailment is what happened in the Ukraine in 2014; it is now a partially dismantled failed state remote-controlled by the US State Dept. and the CIA. It would be bankrupt if it were not for periodic IMF interventions; when they stop, as they had in Lebanon, the currency will collapse along with what remains of the economy, the government would be forced to resign and the territory would lapse into chaos. For the time being, it is being kept alive to provide NATO with an additional training ground, to facilitate asset stripping and also to maintain it as a minor irritant against Russia.

A good example of an opportunistic infection is what is now happening in Beirut following the massive fireworks and ammonium nitrate explosion at the port which destroyed the port and devastated half the city. It was a one-two punch; first a government default, then the IMF’s refusal to help, and then the coup de grace: a massive explosion. To deal with this humanitarian disaster several nations sent in emergency teams. But instead of helping rescue people from the rubble and working assiduously to shore up damaged buildings and restore services, people swarmed into the streets to throw rocks at the police, demanding that the entire government resign—which it did. That’s great; now they don’t have a government either! Was that helpful? Yes, if you are one of the outside forces that wishes to make use of Lebanon to destabilize the region. No, if you are a Lebanese civilian trying to survive.

An example of an opportunistic infection that failed to take hold because the state organism was too healthy is the spectacularly failed color revolution in Venezuela. Where is Juan Guaidó (a.k.a. “Random Guy D’oh”) now? In spite of Washington’s assiduous efforts to apply every trick in the color revolution book, president Nicolás Maduro remains in power.

And now we have a somewhat similar example in Belarus, but there the outcome is likely to be different because president Alexander Lukashenko, dubbed Europe’s last dictator, did everything possible to blow himself up.

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New book published in German: Interview on Sputnik Deutschland

Another decade, another continent, another language... another book. Collapse never sleeps.

Just in time for the Corona crisis, a new book has been published: Die Lehre vom Kollaps: Die fünf Stufen des Zusammenbruchs und wie wir sie überleben. The US-Russian author Dmitry Orlov wrote it with foresight. In the Sputnik interview, he explains why the current pandemic is not the trigger for the coming downfall of the United States. "The causes are deeper and older," said Orlov.

His analyses are often correct. No wonder: Dmitry Orlov is familiar with state collapses and the Soviet collapse in particular. Orlov experienced the collapse of the USSR up close in the early 1990s. In the second part of the Sputnik interview, he explains how the collapse of his second home, the United States, will take place.

Listen to the interview in englisch here.

Warum Kollaps der USA „unausweichlich ist“ und Russland „verschont bleibt“: Dmitry Orlov Exklusiv

Quasi pünktlich zur Corona-Krise ist ein neues Buch erschienen: „Die Lehre vom Kollaps“. Der US-russische Autor Dmitry Orlov hat es vorausschauend verfasst. Im Sputnik-Interview erklärt er, warum für ihn die aktuelle Pandemie nicht der Auslöser für den kommenden Untergang der USA ist. „Die Ursachen liegen tiefer und sind älter“, so Orlov.

 

„So wird der Zusammenbruch der USA ablaufen“: US-russischer Autor exklusiv 

Im zweiten Teil des Sputnik-Interviews erklärt er, wie der Kollaps der USA ablaufen wird – und mehr über sein neues Buch.

Transcript of Interview on Continuum with Keith Woods

Welcome to the show today. I am delighted to be joined by Dmitry Orlov, who is a Russian-American writer. He has written several books on collapse and technology. Delighted to be joined by you Mr. Orlov. If you’d like to introduce your work to the audience for anyone unfamiliar, that’d be great.

A: Well, first of all it’s great to be on your show. Thank you for inviting me.

I’m no longer a neophyte because I’ve been doing it for a long time, but writing about collapse is not really my profession. I had a career before that, in computer engineering, and then high-energy physics, then e-commerce, and internet security, media conversion, things like that, and eventually I just gave up on all of this corporate stuff because I realized that it wasn’t really heading in any direction I liked. And I started writing on what I thought would happen to the United States based on what I observed happening to the Soviet Union and Russia in the late 80s and early 90s, because I thought that the US would pretty much collapse.

I started doing that about a dozen years ago and strangely enough I got a pretty good reception to start with.

Now there are basically two types of people whom I encounter: the ones who just basically scream and run away – I suppose they’re the majority – and then there’s also people who’ve been following me, or people who are realizing that I’ve been making valid points all along. And so I have quite a following at this point, and I write a couple of articles a month, mostly on current affairs and analysis, and that’s been going pretty well and keeping me busy, not so much writing, but doing the research for the writing. That’s a full-time job at this point. And so that’s where I am today.