Organizational announcement

I have decided to streamline the operation a bit. Now, instead of piling collapse, English spelling, boat design and various miscellaneous projects all into one blog, I will have one for each:

ClubOrlov

For collapse-related items of interest, geopolitics and various bits of practical philosophy, please keep coming back here.

Project Unspell

For Project Unspell (which is up and running; I am putting the finishing touches on unspelled Tom Sawyer) go to unspell.it.

S/V Quidnon

For reading about and helping me think through a boat design project for a “houseboat that sails,” please go to quidnon.blogspot.com. I will be updating it on a daily basis between now and whenever all the design issues are resolved.

Also, if you are looking for a place to go hiking, mountain-biking, skinny-dipping or bird-watching in Massachusetts, go to masstrails.com and use a special-purpose search engine I built.

That will be all.

The Imperial Collapse Playbook

[По-русски] [In italiano]

Some people enjoy having the Big Picture laid out in front of them—the biggest possible—on what is happening in the world at large, and I am happy to oblige. The largest development of 2014 is, very broadly, this: the Anglo-imperialists are finally being forced out of Eurasia. How can we tell? Well, here is the Big Picture—the biggest I could find. I found it thanks to Nikolai Starikov and a recent article of his.

Absolutely Positive now available in paper form

This book of essays was previously only available as an e-book. But since lots of people don't like reading books on gadgets, here it is in paperback form. It contains essays from 2-3 years back, all available for free right on this blog if you dig deep enough. But the book is much more convenient.

ORDER LINK

Table of Contents

Alice Unspelled

Number Two in the series is ready for purchase. As with all Unspelled Editions, it includes a short but profound introduction and two not very full pages of reference material on how to read Unspelled English.

ORDER LINK

For those who forget what's in Carroll's amazing works, here is the TOC:

First Unspelled Edition available for purchase

I am very happy to announce that the first Unspelled Edition of a children's classic is finally out, so please go ahead and order it. This book, being the first, took 2.5 years to produce. The second (containing both Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Beyond the Looking-Glass) took 2.5 days. The third (Treasure Island) is taking about a day. The tenth, I suspect, will take less than an hour. That's how it works with software: it takes a long time to get all the bugs out, but once they are gone it becomes more or less a matter of pushing a button.

Are Americans Prepared For A Soviet Style Collapse?

Last week I gave an interview to Barry at DR Escapes which is now up on Youtube. Please follow the link to listen to the interview. Barry's notes on it are pasted in below.

If the social and financial structure around you collapsed tomorrow, as it did for many people during the fall of the Soviet Union, are you prepared to survive and even prosper? In my latest interview with best selling author Dmitry Orlov we discuss lifestyle and how your lifestyle decisions may dramatically impact how your family will fare if times get tough.

Can anybody find me... a central banker to love?

Freddie

[По-русски]

[Final update: the ruble seems to have stabilized, for now, and China has declared its support for the Russian economy, but the problem with devaluing currencies is by no means limited to Russia. In the meantime, Russia has stopped grain exports, so we should expect Arab Spring 2.0, because Russia is where couscous comes from. Also, I hear Krugman has declared that the world is not only flat but only a bubble; I wouldn't know since I don't pay attention to him, so please stop asking me.]

[Early morning update: in case you had any doubts, the intervention didn't work. Ruble and oil are continuing to plunge amid increasing financial market turmoil throughout the world.]

[Last minute update: the repo rate has been just hiked to an eyewatering 17%! At the same time, the percentage of bullshit in the rationale given was lowered significantly: it is to prevent further ruble devaluation. Simply put (perhaps too simply), ruble liquidity for currency speculation has just dried up. At the same time, the central bank is backing long-term investments in industry at a far more reasonable 6.5% rate. Will this be enough to stop the slide?]

On December 11 Russia's central bank hiked its rate by one percent, from 9.5% to 10.5%. The rationale offered by the bank's governor Elvira Nabiullina was that this would stop the slide in the value of the ruble. But nobody laughed.

Defeat is Victory

John Holcroft

[In italiano]

On the wall of George Orwell's Ministry of Truth from his novel 1984 there were three slogans:

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

It occurred to me that these apply just a little bit too well to the way the Washington, DC establishment operates.

Minimum Viable Sociopathy

There are absolutely NO Nazis fighting for Ukraine!
If you agree, then just gouge out your eyes!
(Note NATO and Nazi flags side by side.
Isn't that just cute?)

I seem to be doing a lot of hyperproductive things lately: explaining to people how to kill the foul beast of Empire, revolutionizing the way English literacy is taught to both native English speakers and the rest... Somebody just emailed me to tell me that I have become “one of those significant commentators.” Yikes! If I keep going this way, then I will run the risk of making a Significant Contribution to Society (SCS). And that would be a mistake; not just for me, but for anyone.

Plus I'd be spending most of my time deleting blog comments from imbeciles. It's the blogging equivalent of scraping bugs off your windshield. (It's about 1% thoughtful comments from actual readers, and 99% senseless blather from idiotic trolls. I am serious. Very sad. But I liked the one I got the other day from a Ukrainian who said that his people will drown all the Russians in their (Ukrainians') own blood. That was cute, but I deleted it anyway because it's hate speech.

But allow me to explain about SCS and what the title of this blog post means.

Tax Revolt Methods

Niccolò Macchiavelli

[This is a follow-up by Gary Flomenhoft on last week's post.]

“It is just as difficult and dangerous to try to free a people that wants to remain servile as it is to enslave a people that wants to remain free.”
Niccolò Macchiavelli

‘Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces.”
Étienne de la Boétie, 1552

I am pleased that many people have expressed interest in getting more information about different methods of joining a tax revolt.