@MentORPHEUS Let me change it around. So say that many countries are upset that Biden is attacking Somalia again to the point that they started seizing American assets. Bill Gates, Elon Musk, George Soros, etc. They just started seizing assets. Do you think that Americans would be more upset with Biden or with this international conspiracy to pirate American wealth? I think the later.

I think that the West is is doing far more damage to itself now than to Russia long-term. A large part of a country having its shit together in this globalized world is simply having the incentive to do things itself. Russia was already given many hints a decade ago, and all through it that the West would be willing to weaponize any advantage that it has to a cruel level. Some examples are cutting Iran off from SWIFT, stopping the sale of computer chips to China. So Russia was able to have some very easy signs that it was life or death to start taking these subjects seriously.

Also, if "even the appearance of being a Putin ally a huge financial risk" is such a problem then where else are rich and mega rich Russians supposed to safely turn? I'd argue that the West has done such a comprehensive very racist, and very culturist attack against Russians that these oligarchs that are still close to Russia (rather than the ones who fled with billions) don't have a lot of choice but to seek further protection from the Russian state and to be folded back into that system. My take is that Putin is very good at letting the bygones pass to establish the new rules. That is essentially his claim to fame upon taking power. He said "Sure you took all of this money illegally by plundering the Russia state, but that era is over now. You can keep your wealth as long as you play by the new rules". Those new rules are essentially what separates the trajectory of the once fairly advanced Ukraine from Russia. One never stopped the unlimited plundering 90's style, and the other did.

So no, I don't think that Putin is incapable of wrangling these oligarchs who are still part of the Russian system back into serving the state somewhat. Where else are they going to get intelligence reports from? Russians spy well. If I was an oligarch then no way in hell would I want to be cut off from that when many in the world are hunting for me. The alternative to go work for the US being a literal traitor is not going to go down well. They'd have a very short shelf life. What the hell do these oligarchs even really know anyhow? Nothing worth protecting them for life. Then they're dead as fuck poisoned with radioactive isotopes (because they would be traitors). It's one thing to eat Japanese massaged cow in New York, it's another to seek protection from Putin by selling secrets to DC.

Copied from Telegram:

[The Right People Z] This morning I was reading about Russian satellites, in general they follow the general line of the top technologies currently in use in Russia. They are not the best, but they get the job done. Like so many other things, after the fall of the USSR and the two decades of stagnation (80s-00s) the Russian space agency closed the gap at least partially by making use of foreign technologies to a large extent. For the period 2015-2020 there were plans to modernise the GLONASS system to be as capable as the current American GPS system (Europe's Galileo being the best system at present). But these plans were drastically affected by the sanctions, with most of the manufacturing budget for the new satellites (Uragan-K) being redirected to research on systems that had to be imported, such as chips resistant to space radiation. It is then funny to see that in 2011 and 2014 two K-type satellites were launched respectively, but no new K-type satellites have been launched until 2020. This in general is parallel to what I already said about the Russian microelectronics industry, which had no real investment until 2014. Thus it is logical to assume that the dependence on foreign systems in these 8 years has been greatly reduced and the K-model satellite launched in 2020 does not really depend on foreign technology (the sale of these components to Russia was forbidden, so it stands to reason that they are not in fact foreign). While these new satellites and their components were being researched, Russia continued to launch the Uragan-M model, which was developed in the late 1990s and does not depend on foreign technologies as much or could be easily replaced. Of course every satellite in general is a work of craftsmanship, and a current M model is more advanced than one from 2005 although not as powerful as a K model ...

Interestingly, in September the first prototype of the K2 model, which will replace the K1 models at the end of the decade, is planned to be launched. The final launch of the M model is planned for the second quarter of 2022, with the remaining models to be launched over the course of the decade, K1 and K2. However, a stock of the latest version of the M model will be left in storage in case there is a need to quickly replace any of the satellites currently in orbit.

I think this speaks volumes as to why Russia is not suffering from the sanctions as many people in the West had hoped. Much of the damage, whether economic or industrial, was done almost a decade ago, and for some reason, many of these "analysts" seem to have forgotten that fact. Since then the Kremlin has put a lot of effort into shielding itself from these sanctions, both by developing its own technologies and by securing supply lines with neutral countries such as Malaysia. This does not mean that the new sanctions will not have an impact, but it will generally be much less than many people thought three months ago, as we are already seeing ...

@TheRedPike I was following those devastating floods while they were happening, and then basically nothing. The Party has an amazing ability to control information.

I don't know if you know this about the flooding, but they make it far worse than it needs to be to prevent liability. If they give notice downstream that some water will be let out then they're liable. It seems that the only way to prevent that is to pretend that everything is normal and then to either let the damn break or go into emergency last option mode depending on the specific arrangement. So the people below then get hard fucked, but that is just nature so everything is fine. I think that living like that would be terrible. The morale must be miserable there.

Check out this GET OUT! - Foreigners Being Kicked Out of China video. Feel free to turn it off once they start going off point some ways into it. Basically that system is going into a full on blame diversion game that doesn't look viable to me at all.

I was there the first time around the 2010-2011 time frame, and then again shortly after the coup in Ukraine in about 2015-16 or so. It really had changed a lot during that time. They rolled out the ultra hard Great Firewall block for a few weeks or so shortly after I arrived. It was bad. Strangely reddit was open, and so I really got back into using that site around that time. I was asking online about WTF was happening there. The consensus was that China was hard going into North Korea mode, and that no good would come of the place. I left fairly soon after with no thought of ever returning there for even a moment.

Somehow (because I'm a smartass I guess) I ended up living in China and Ukraine, both some of the most troubled areas of the world for bullshit. To top that I ended up in Transnistria, which became one the journalistic hotspots of the world, although it's very chill here in practice.

All of that to say that I'm feeling a bit too much in the shit myself in Transnistria (being next to Ukraine) to spend a lot of time figuring out what is going on in China. My feeling is that they're up to no good. One final bit of thought for you is that The Party managed to kill, purge, harvest or imprison so many Chinese who were of the mind to share information with videos during the Chinese "Covid" Virus period that they' just seem to have a brutal iron grip on the place like we haven't seen for a long time.