Russia is not Puritan. It doesn't hold politicians to the same sexual standards as America. Putin's infidelity didn't reduce his support for a bit. Nemtsov's flamboyance might have actually boosted his reputation. Affairs with (more or less) adult women can't hurt your image here
Context for the photo. In 2006 Putin came out to the group of kids having an excursion around Kremlin. He approached a boy Nikita, asked him several questions, put his T-shirt up and kissed him in a belly. Then he quickly walked a way
That impressed many
One of Putin's critics Alexander Litvinenko actually accused him of pedophilia. Litvinenko was a runaway FSB officer who moved to London and published a book "Blowing up Russia". Basically he argued that it was the Federal Security Service that blew up residential houses in 1999
On 4-16 September, 1999 four residential houses were blown up in Moscow, Buinaksk and Volgodonsk. 307 died, 1700 were wounded. Officially it were Chechens who did this and these terrorist attacks were a major justification for the Second Chechen War that brought Putin to power
Litvinenko argued that houses were blown up not by "Chechens" but by the officers of the Federal Security Service at the orders of their new director Vladimir Putin. Yeltsin's family prepared a transition of power, but Putin was a total noname with rate of approval of like 1,5%
According to Litvinenko the FSB blew up houses to get a casus belli for the Second Chechen War. Victory in the war made Putin electable and allowed to proceed with the transition of power very quickly. There was no other way to boost a noname to the National Leader in four months
Timeline of 1999:
August 4-16 - House explosions
August 16 - Putin becomes Prime Minister
September 23 - First bombings of Grozny
December 26 - Russian army besieges Grozny
December 31 - Yeltsin tells he's "tired" and resigns in favour of Putin, who becomes the acting president
Did Litvinenko tell truth? I can't say. What I can say is that he was poisoned by the radioactive polonium-210 and his suspected assassin (Луговой) later became a member of the Russian Parliament. The end
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Overall, you can expect tech moguls to have much, much higher level of reasoning abilities compared to the political/administrative class. But this comes at a cost. Their capacities for understanding the Other (masses count as the “Other”) are much poorer.
E.g. Putin is much, much less of an outlier in terms of intelligence compared to Thiel. He is much more average. At the same time, I am positively convinced that Putin understands the masses and works with masses much better.
One problem with that is that too much of the supply chain for drone production is located in China. The thing with drones is that they grew out of toys industry. Cheap plastic & electronic crap that all of a sudden got military significance
That is also the major problem I have with "China supports Russia" argument. China could wreck Ukraine easily, simply obstructing & delaying the drone/drone components shipments. That would be an instant military collapse for Ukraine.
Both Russian and Ukrainian drone industries are totally dependent upon the continuous shipments from China. To a very significant degree, their "production" is assembly from the Chinese components which are non alternative and cannot be substituted with anything else (as cheap).
No, Israel being a republic causes it to be more barbaric towards the conquered population than Russia, and with no escape. There is simply no room and no possibility for any sort of integration whatsoever.
Were Israelis slaves to a Big Man, integration would be conceivable.
Crawling on the knees before your Big Man is Lindy
Scaleable, manageable, robust
Every nation on earth will concede to it, after the sufficient amount of sticks (and may be some carrots, but that is optional). Which makes it very, very scaleable
In contrast, crawling on the knees before an other nation is not Lindy. No people on the earth will ever accept it, no matter the degree of violence applied.
That's why republican dominion over the disenfranchised colonial periphery is always so fragile. Not scaleable at all.
Today I will introduce one more concept critical for understanding of how the manufacturing industry has evolved over the last few decades. It is the shift of technological knowledge from esoteric to exoteric
In the pre-digital era, manufacturing used to be mysterious, esoteric
To visualize how the manufacturing worked in the pre-computer/early computer age, imagine the atmosphere of magic, mysticism, enigma. That would be not very far from truth.
To illustrate the idea, I will give you one simple, straightforward example. The train car production.
Train production is a very, very rare example of a Russian machinery industry that survived through the post-Soviet collapse. Of course, it contracted. Of course, it suffered losses. Still, it made it through, while most of the Soviet machinery sector was simply wiped out.
As I have already pointed out, general audience, analysts, strategists & decision makers included holds unrealistic notions of how the global economy is organised. Now that is because they never see the back end of industrial civilisation
So let me show you some
There is a major delusion of seeing Europe as a sort of retired continent that "lags in tech" or even "doesn't produce anything". To some extent, it is just American hubris.
But there is more in there than just hubris. There is also some honest, sincere ignorance. The thing with most people is that they see only facade of industrial civilisation. They never ever had a chance to look behind the curtains
Tu-160M, the "White Swan" is the largest, the heaviest and the fastest bomber in the world. Originally a Soviet design, the plane you see today has limited continuity with the USSR. It was created in late 2010s, as a combined project of Putin's Russia and Siemens Digital Factory
Original Tu-160 was created as a domesday weapon of the Cold War. Designed in the 1970s, it was officially launched into production in 1984. And yet, with the collapse of the Soviet Union the project was aborted. In 1992, their production ceased.
No Nuclear War, no White Swans.
With the fall of USSR, Russia suffered a catastrophic drop in military expenditures. As the state was buying little weaponry (and paying for it highly erratically), entire production chains were wiped out. That included some ultra expensive projects such as strategic bombers.