Author Archives: danijel

Sage and swallowtail

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Yesterday we went up our local hill carrying telephoto setups, basically our heaviest gear; it was the first time for me to carry the A7RV with the FE 100-400mm GM lens up there, because the damn thing is so heavy and awkward to carry when hiking. Biljana took the R5 with the RF 70-200 f/4L. The only things worth taking pictures of there at the moment, unfortunately, require either a telephoto or a macro lens. It seemed to have been for nought, because the butterflies were too active and not landing; they just flew chaotically above us, and when I got a good series of a hummingbird moth, the background was too close and the compositions were therefore chaotic and disorderly and I couldn’t use them.

On the way back from the top, however, we lucked out – a perfect swallowtail was feeding on a sage blossom, and kept doing it for long enough for both of us to get several series.

Here are Biljana’s whole album, and mine.

Brainwashing in America

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America has more in common with totalitarian countries like North Korea, than it does with the rest of the world, and it’s because they are so immersed in propaganda, and so ignorant of the actual world around them, that they are unique in the sense that they don’t notice their propaganda as such – to them, it’s just truth and facts. Here’s a good explanation of it:

I’m no stranger to propaganda, having grown up in communist Yugoslavia where you just knew what you had to say in public and what never to say in public, lest you end up on the Naked Island. The problem with propaganda is that sometimes you don’t know it’s propaganda, and I had to systematically deconstruct it for decades in order to even understand some of the more pervasive aspects of it, and of course it’s easier to notice the other people’s brainwashing, because it’s alien and sounds completely foolish. However, understanding things such as human rights, democracy and feminism as brainwashing and historical forgery is quite a bit harder. Even here in Europe, most of what we were taught from history is merely a narrative constructed to present a certain picture of reality that will support the currently ruling regime. For instance, I was shocked to learn, much later, how everything I was taught in school is a political narrative carefully constructed by omissions, selection of sources, and bombardment with insignificant and irrelevant dates and numbers that serve to dumb you down and block your critical faculties. It is extremely easy to keep someone completely brainwashed by merely selecting the sources, and the additional bonus is that the brainwashed person will think they are an independent well educated critical thinker. That’s how you get college educated morons.

 

Antichrist

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I was just thinking how it became exponentially harder to find actual, uncorrupted, correct, human-sourced information since the AI plague. Pictures, articles, drawings, YouTube videos, it’s all mostly AI slop. And then I thought how this is the worst thing you could possibly do in this world: increase the haystack of corrupted, distorted, worthless nonsense through which you would need to dig in order to find a needle of truth. If you’re not already correctly informed and educated before the AI plague, it might now become technically impossible to find your way.

It’s not a new phenomenon; it’s always been this way with spirituality, for instance. With everybody copying each other’s homework and creating derivative work, it was always hard to find genuine sources. Also, standard methods of finding out the truth, such as identifying overlap and common denominator in multiple sources, are unreliable, since they lead you to the most copied and iterated-upon material, which may or may not be true at all.

I faced this dilemma long ago, before I even started writing publicly: am I just making it harder to find actually useful stuff by increasing the haystack, or am I writing things that are the best available stuff, a positive contribution even in comparison to the best things out there? So, I remained silent until I was sure that what I’m saying is the needle, and not hay.

I was thinking about Antichrist last night – what would that even be. One definition that crossed my mind is that the opposite of Christ is a common man, sinful and devoid of the spiritual vertical, materialistic and of darkness. Another definition would be that it is an eloquent and charismatic preacher of atheism and materialism, who increases the darkness of the world that traps people, blocking the light of God and leading people astray, to be destroyed.

But then it dawned to me; the point of Christ is a visible, obvious beacon of God’s light that breaks through the darkness of this world and shows the way out, like Ariadne’s thread through the labyrinth. This was reinforced by the fact of his resurrection, so that he would be set apart from the fakes and the wannabes. He is a needle in the haystack. Anti-christ is the haystack.

The dawn of AI and the dawn of the Antichrist might well be one and the same.

Expected

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The “ceasefire” did nothing.

I did a calculation based on the prices of gold. 1 DEM (German Mark) = 7.182 EUR. People have it in the back of their minds that 1 EUR = 2 DEM, but that was then, and this is now. One EUR from 2000 would buy more than 14 EUR today.

This is the gold price chart:

I’ve only seen this shape in extreme hyperinflation of the Weimar republic kind. Dollar looks the same. That’s the stuff that usually precedes wars and dissolution of countries. That’s what’s actually going on.

On a brighter note, it’s butterfly season: