Anyone behind the steering wheel?

From all the available evidence, Hillary Clinton has some serious brain problem and should be in the hospital preparing to die, not running for president.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-O3QO-Bssv4

Meanwhile, Obama is playing golf on his vacation.

We are one fuckup away from nuclear war. America is simultaneously provoking Russia and China. Muslim invaders are flooding Europe and America. Muslim terrorist attacks have become a daily occurrence. Incirlik airbase in Turkey, hosting nuclear weapons, is basically under siege. Russia just used cruise missiles launched from the Black Sea to strike targets around Aleppo.

missile_strike_map

The missile path wasn’t published but my guesstimate based on observing the map would allow for the possibility that it went very close to that airbase.

There are unconfirmed reports that Americans are evacuating the nuclear weapons from the Incirlik base and moving them to Deveselu base in Romania, which just accidentally happens to host the newly installed AEGIS missile defense system. Putin went ballistic recently, warning that any kind of weapon can be brought there once the system is in function, among other things the offensive nuclear-tipped cruise missiles.

And all the while, the current American president is on a vacation, playing golf, when he’s not watching ESPN, and the main-stream supported candidate to replace him is a fucking zombie. The world governments are busy bullying anyone who has an anti-Muslim stance, and the media is busy nitpicking over politically correct bullshit, displaying outrage over meaningless trivia, while the world burns.

Am I dreaming this or what the fuck is going on?

The state problem and the issue of defense

I’ve been listening to the arguments against state power and, for the most part, I think they are perfectly valid and reasonable. Unfortunately, I think there is one serious issue with them that makes all such theories moot. In order to explain that, I will use the example of the ancient Rome.

You see, the reason why Rome became powerful and why it spread across the known world is that it had an organized state that could maintain a steady army that was well organized and could indulge in prolonged military campaigns. Other nations, that didn’t have an organized state, that didn’t have an organized government that could implement laws and levy taxes, they simply didn’t have a chance against a country that did those things. Their army needed to disband quickly in order to work for a living. There was no state infrastructure that could support prolonged campaigns of a large standing army.

So, let’s say that America returns to its small-state origins. One of its main problems during those times was that its military was very small and unable to wage major wars. Essentially, Mexico had a better organized army. It’s perfectly understandable why – in a capitalist, market-oriented society, military is an unwarranted expense, and could make sense only if you want to make your country into a predator that robs other countries of their resources and you finance yourself that way, as Islam did from the days of Mohammad, for instance. Otherwise it’s a dead expense. But if you don’t have a well organized modern army, you are defenseless against countries that do.

So, want it or not, you need to increase the state in order to arm your country, but then you empower the military industry and the people who decide where the money goes. You also incentivize borrowing or printing money, because this way you delay and defer the financial impact of war. Once you get defense as a valid reason for taxation, some people will come up with ideas about better ways of spending all that money, such as fighting poverty instead of waging war. So, essentially, in a few logical steps you get where you are now.

But is there really an alternative? I certainly don’t see how a civilization could shun defense and survive – the imperial China and its fall under the Mongols is a great warning. Wealth attracts predators. You need to have defense. In a modern world this doesn’t mean pitchforks and swords, it means intercontinental nukes and strategic submarines, networks of satellites and a conventional armed force. Someone, of course, needs to pay for this. You can say, let’s make them mercenaries. Yeah, that went well historically. So keeping a democratic control over the military is preferable, and this means government, which means either taxes, borrowing/printing money, or simply invading and robbing other countries in order to pay for your army.

Essentially, if you want to have a modern army you need to dedicate a significant portion of the GDP to that, and you need to dedicate a significant portion of the industry to military production. You can avoid financing this with taxes if you simply invade and rob other nations, but sooner or later you’ll run out of countries to invade, like Rome did, and then the cost of the military will be directed inwards, in form of taxes and government regulations, or inflation. This will very quickly result in destruction. An alternative is to do what the Imperial China did, to demilitarize to the point of only having a small mercenary force at the borders for token defense. Then the invaders come and make the mercenaries a better offer: “Let’s kill all those wealthy folks, take all their gold and divide it between us”. We know what happened to imperial China at that point.

So basically, you either have a country that collapses under the foreign invaders or under the burden of the expense of its own military. The state does seem to be part of the problem, but there are no obvious ways of getting around it in a way that doesn’t result in the other extreme, of having no borders and protections against invaders.

The situation is a direct consequence of the equality of all men in power. From this, it follows that the only way to get greater power is to organize men into larger groups and/or arm them with better weapons. Other human groups are then forced to respond with symmetric measures or risk being violently conquered; basically, when one human group invents the state, other human groups need to organize into states as well, in order to be able to deal with external pressure. It’s like the nukes: when one nation invents them, everyone else also needs to invent them or be bullied, invaded or destroyed. If anything is to be done, those basic parameters need to change.

Why are there lightning rods on churches?

There’s a phrase that never fails to piss me off and trigger an episode of violent facepalming.

If God exists, why are there lightning rods on churches?”

Because this world is not ruled by God, but by Satan (Matthew 4:8; John 12:31, 14:40, 15:11), because belonging to the church that celebrates the true God puts you under all kinds of hazards due to Satan’s vitriolic hatred of him (John 15:20, 16:2; Matthew 10:16-25) and his Church (1 Peter 5:8), and because Jesus himself made moves to protect his students against Satan’s wrath (John 17:15), so following his general advice is very wise, because the prince of this world would like nothing better than to have the Church carelessly tempting God (Matthew 4:5-7).

Christians don’t believe that believing in the true God is a “get out of jail free” ticket, something that can allow you to break the natural laws because you have divine protection. They actually believe that being faithful to Christ is closer to a death sentence than a protective shield in this world, but without accepting the possibility of martyrdom they are not really following Jesus. However, they are also advised not to tempt fate carelessly by doing things against natural laws that are likely to result in harm, and are especially advised against thinking that they are protected by God because they are his chosen people, because, as John the Baptist said, God can take a piece of rock and turn it into his chosen people if he so wishes (Matthew 3:9). If God allowed Jesus to be slandered, ridiculed, spat on, flogged and crucified, and his disciples and apostles persecuted, tortured and murdered, why would he prevent lightning from hitting a church building? God’s existence doesn’t preclude the existence of evil in this world, because this world is ruled by God’s sworn enemy. If God could use his power to vanquish evil this world wouldn’t even exist, and how it was allowed to exist in the first place and fall under the domain of Satan is a mystery. Instead, God can only provide an alternative to this world, and he can point to it, show the way. Salvation of the soul does not mean immunity to physical harm; in fact, it usually invites physical harm.

So yeah, I’m not a Christian and I know all this. And atheists pride themselves with being smart? My-oh-my.

Addressing the recurring Planet X doomsday theories

My younger kid is playing with an astrophysical simulation called “Universe Sandbox 2”. Of course, he’s using it in his own way, which is to crash things spectacularly, but it made me want to try some ideas of my own.

First of all, I must say I’m very impressed with this software, since the n-body physics seems to work very accurately. That this kind of software is available outside of NASA, ESA and other space agencies’ supercomputers and can be used by the general public is outstanding.

What I wanted to test were two things. First, how sensitive the solar system is to modifiers; essentially, if you add something significant, does all hell instantly break loose, and second, I wanted to test the Nemesis hypothesis, basically I wanted to test what would happen to the solar system if I added a red dwarf star outside the Kuiper belt, to see if we would get a radically different state of the solar system, which would preclude the Nemesis hypothesis, or if the state would remain more-less as it is, making the hypothesis viable.

You see, every other day we get those “sky is falling” characters rambling about how there’s a Nubiru planet X on the outskirts of the solar system and how it’s going to wreak havoc on the inner solar system and usher the Apocalypse. So I wanted to make it even more extreme and radical than their scenarios. I inserted a copy of Neptune between Mars and Jupiter, right outside the asteroid belt. My expectation was that a gas giant in this sensitive position is going to at least disrupt the orbits of Ceres and Vesta, if not the entire inner solar system.

Then I accelerated the simulation to 52 years per second and waited some 10000 years to see what happened.

This is the control, the inner solar system at year 11600:

normal solar system 11800 Universe Sandbox ² - 20160811-150007 UI

This is the solar system with a Neptune added between Mars and Jupiter, year 11800:

inner Neptune 11800 Universe Sandbox ² - 20160811-142210 UI

The four planets of the inner solar system are basically unchanged, except for the slight “tug” Mars experienced. Jupiter influences orbital eccentricity of the “inner Neptune” to some degree, but it appears to go back and forth. Everything else looks unchanged. Let’s go forth in time to year 15000:

inner Neptune 15600 Universe Sandbox ² - 20160811-144651 UI

No significant changes. Nothing collided, nothing had its orbit significantly disrupted, nothing fell into the Sun or was ejected from the solar system. Basically, business went on as usual for 13000 years of my simulation.

So, after I absorbed the shock of this, I set up another simulation – I placed the Wolf 359 red dwarf star on the outer rim of the Kuiper belt, 439 AU from the Sun. To make it clear how far that is: Pluto is at 29.8 AU, but Pluto is a relatively well behaved Kuiper belt object with low orbital eccentricity. Eris, for instance, has a perihelion of 37.6 AU, and aphelion of 97.6 AU. Sedna, the most eccentric of them all, has a perihelion of 76 AU, and aphelion of 860 AU. That is 119.2 light hours, or 0.0136 light years, or, in more scientific terms, it’s in the kingdom of far far away. 🙂

So, I placed a M-type star with 0.15 solar masses well within Sedna’s orbit and let things run.

Things started looking interesting at year 10000, when our red dwarf was about to cross Sedna’s path:

wolf 359 about to cross Sedna orbit Universe Sandbox ² - 20160811-134927 UI

Oh yeah, that’s going to be very bad. It sent Sedna right into the inner solar system, where it is going to wreak havoc.

wolf 359 disrupted Sedna Universe Sandbox ² - 20160811-134941 UI

That’s about the worst thing that could possibly have happened and very much along the lines of Nubiru-type doomsday prophecies.

wolf 359 sedna returning Universe Sandbox ² - 20160811-135003 UI

Year 11925, Sedna went through the inner solar system on the way in, passed around the Sun, went through the inner solar system on the way out, missed everything, and went out into the outer solar system, approaching the point where it encountered the Wolf, which more-less became its new aphelion. This process was repeated several times until the 18000s, when it had the misfortune of encountering the Wolf in the same place, and it was slingshot away from the solar system forever:

wolf 359 sedna slingshot Universe Sandbox ² - 20160811-135219 UI

I let the simulation run for a while, till the year 32751, and checked the state of the inner solar system:

wolf 359 inner solar system disruption 32751 Universe Sandbox ² - 20160811-140046 UI

Sedna’s rampage wasn’t without consequences. Venus was seriously disrupted, its orbital eccentricity is significantly changed and it now apparently intersects Earth’s orbit. I say “apparently” because this is an artifact of 2D projection; in 3D, they miss each other by quite a margin, due to the offset from the ecliptic plane.

“Wait a minute”, you’ll say. “You want to tell me that you turned the solar system into a binary star system, with Sun having a red dwarf companion in the outer Kuiper belt, that this star disrupted the orbit of a dwarf planet, flung it into the inner solar system, this repeated several times until the dwarf star finally kicked the dwarf planet out the solar system, and the result of all this knitting in-and-out through the inner solar system, after 30000 years of simulation, is that Venus had its orbit disrupted enough for us to have a very close look at it every now and then, but without other consequences? Nothing even collided?” Yup, you got it right. Nothing even collided. We just had the worst possible combination of the Nemesis hypothesis and Nubiru hypothesis, where a companion star flings a small planet into the inner solar system, and nothing even collided.

The solar system is so incredibly difficult to fuck up, you need to resort to completely extreme shit in order to do it, such as having a neutron star or a black hole traverse through it. In short, I heartily recommend the Universe Sandbox. You’ll never look at the “something big disrupted the Oort cloud and we are going to immediately all die” theories the same way. 🙂

On the other hand, this makes the Nemesis theory, of Sun having a dim stellar companion somewhere out there, completely plausible, as this possibility wouldn’t result in a solar system that was much different from what we know. It just has to be well outside Sedna’s orbit.