ClubOrlov

The psychiatric profession prefers to ignore the possibility of mass insanity and to focus on individual disorders in spite of a mass of historical evidence of societies and entire nations being gripped by mental disorders of one sort of another. Be that as it may; the Napoleon Complex, so named after Napoleon Bonaparte, who was much too short for a national leader of his time and also incredibly nasty and quite full of himself to compensate, is not a recognized medical diagnosis in any case.

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It’s been over 18 months since the launch of Russia’s Special Military Operation (SMO), which has the following stated goals: to provide for the security of the Donbass region, to demilitarize and de-Nazify the Ukraine and to assure its neutral status in perpetuity.

Since that time, the collective West did a number of things to help Russia and to hurt itself.

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Yesterday I forced myself to watch Tucker Carlson’s interview of Donald Trump on X (formerly Twitter). I was pleasantly surprised: it was more entertaining than painful. Trump was actually somewhat funny, especially when eviscerating Biden and Harris, and even somewhat charming. The role of a martyr, assigned to him by the hopelessly corrupt American establishment, suits him well, allowing him to mix and match his usual combativeness with the new elements of serenity and tranquility, which are new to his character and typically develop with advancing age. Speaking of advancing age, although in a few instances he repeated himself almost verbatim several times (not a good sign) he did seem together enough, unlike Washington’s various living cadavers like Biden, Pelosi or McConnell, who would best be put in a home for similar-minded people.

About the only really interesting question from the generally fawning Carlson was whether Trump thinks it likely that they (the establishment) would try to kill him. This put the martyrdom theme front and center. Trump didn’t say “Yes” — that would have been too much, verging on “This is my blood, the blood of the new testament” — but he didn’t clearly say “No” either.

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The BRICS conference that is currently underway in Johannesburg has already produced some stunning revelations. One is that the share of trade between existing BRICS members still transacted using the US dollar has fallen below a third; the other is that no less than 40 countries are at some stage of joining BRICS.

These are, of course, very positive developments, but much work lies ahead. On the agenda is the task of replacing the US dollar as the yardstick everyone uses to price commodities and other products and to choose some neutral notional unit that is unaffected by exchange rates, which are subject to political manipulation: when a country does something that the Washingtonians don’t like, its currency promptly crashes. Prices of products priced in the new notional unit would be subject to supply, demand, energy and labor content and other such real world considerations, not the whims of currency speculators.

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I have long maintained that the US is not a democracy and that it doesn’t matter who is president; the US is getting flushed down the same golden toilet regardless. More recently, I have been raising the question of whether there is even going to be an event worthy of being called a “national election” in the US in 2024, seeing as the outcome of the last one hinged on the blatantly falsified, fraudulent results in just one state (Georgia, as the case may be) accounting for an infinitesimally small percentage of the popular vote. The late, great Vladimir Zhirinovsky, fearless leader of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, who had been prescient about a great many things, had stated, with his characteristic bombast, that there won’t be a national election in 2024 in the United States because there will no longer be a United States.

As with most predictions, the timing may turn out to be rather inexact, but the trend toward national decay, degeneracy and dissolution is unmistakable. Still, in spite of the pervasive stench of corruption and deceit, I believe that some elements of the US national election circus should be salvaged and immortalized in the form of comedy.

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Many people seem happy to live by the ironclad logic that if something bad that was predicted to happen hasn’t happened yet then it automatically follows that the predictors were wrong and the bad thing will never happen. It is of absolutely of no use to try to explain to them that it is much easier to accurately predict THAT something will happen than to accurately predict WHEN it will happen. There seems to be a genetic predisposition that all humans share to lump all unwelcome and perhaps inevitable but not yet incipient developments into a single category of “things not to worry about yet.” This is a vast category that includes the onset of the next ice age any millennium now, the world running out of oil (the world won’t — but you might) and, of course, US financial house of cards doing that thing that houses of cards all do eventually if you keep adding cards to them, except that (and this is what makes houses of cards so exciting) you never know which card is going to be one too many. More…

I once saw an unidentified flying object. I couldn’t identify it, it was up in the sky, and I assumed that it was an object rather than a subject, and certainly not a verb. But no Congressional subcommittee was summoned to listen to my compelling testimony and ask me about its implications for national security

My timing must have been off. Most recently, such a hearing was indeed held, and some government person or other, gratuitously labeled a “whistleblower”, imparted startling facts: that certain secret parts of the US government (which he couldn’t name) was in possession of some bits and pieces of crashed alien craft, including some samples of “non-human origin.” This could be a tin can with a dead rat that had crawled inside it and died (that fits the description) but we’ll never know the details because this is all very hush-hush and top secret (because, you know, nashanasecuriteh, blah-blah-blah!).

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A quick note on where we stand with regard to the terminal crisis of global oil production. Spoiler alert: Peak Oil is doing just fine, sharpening its claws, getting ready to take a big bite out of your flank. Why isn’t everyone running around with their hair on fire over this? More…

I’ve been waiting for the hubbub to die down since the NATO conference in Vilnius, Lithuania, on 11-12 July 2023, waiting for someone — anyone — to point out the obvious reason for why the Ukraine’s cocaine-sniffing mascot-president Zelensky, having been lionized only a year ago, has suddenly fallen into disfavor with this organization. Yes, the Ukraine might still some day be invited to start the long and arduous process of joining NATO, but only after some undefined number of NATO members decide that it has done enough to comply with “NATO standards” (I’ll explain what those are later) and various other vague things. Keeping in mind that back on 20 September 2018 the Ukrainian parliament approved amendments to the constitution that would make the accession of the country to NATO and the EU a central goal and the main foreign policy objective, such a turn of events is most embarrassing for the mascot president and his backers and handlers. More…

Here’s an exercise you can easily perform. Go to translate.google.com. In the left-hand pane, select “English” and in the right-hand pane, “Chinese (Simplified)” (or “Traditional” if you like extra strokes). Now, in the left hand pane, type BRICS. What you will then see in the right-hand pane is this:

金砖国家

(Jīn zhuān guójiā)

Take this opportunity to practice your calligraphy: take out some rice paper, a calligraphy brush and a block of ink, and keep drawing these four characters until all of your strokes are perfect. Go to strokeorder.com if you are not sure about the ordering of the strokes; copy and paste each character and watch how it’s done. Next, click the little speaker icon under the Chinese and practice singing out “Jīn zhuān guójiā” until your tones achieve a perfectly clear, bell-like quality.

Now you are ready to meditate on the meaning of each character.

金 (jīn) = gold

砖 (zhuān) = brick

国 (guó) = country

家 (jiā) = home

A bit more digging will allow you to establish that 国家 (guó jiā) translates simply as “countries”.

And there you have it: BRICS = “Gold Brick Countries”. Isn’t that pretty?

This was all a warm-up for discussing the potential future “BRICS currency”, of which, in preparation for the forthcoming BRICS summit, to be held in Johannesburg, South Africa (the “S” in BRICS) this August, a great deal of baseless and spurious speculation is to be observed in the wilds of the internet.

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