Category Archives: politics

Some thoughts

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We hiked up our local hill yesterday after the summer heat had cleared, and we got some nice sunset colours.

Most pictures ended up being the typical sunset shots, because that stuff seems to be irresistible, but I got some that are different; sunset merely illuminating the things and giving them a 3d glow. I ended up liking those the most.

Trump, being himself, let it slip that the West has for the most part no more than 4 weeks of oil reserves, which is unsurprising since they’ve been using them up foolishly in order to prevent the oil prices from going up too much, which would reflect poorly on the popularity of the politicians and their foolish wars. Since the current “agreement” between Iran and the USA is of such flimsy nature that the sides can’t even agree enough to publish the same version of what’s supposedly being agreed upon, there’s not much chance of any peace there taking root, at least until Israel gets its way, nukes Iran and gets wiped off the map in return.

I noticed one thing changing in my attitude towards the Apple ecosystem, and Apple Silicon in particular. I no longer see them as an experiment, a thing I’m testing to see if it’s long term viable, while maintaining a backup Intel based system that could take over in case it all fizzles out. It became my primary system, while everything else is essentially obsolete. I know exactly how that came to be. When I was writing the last book, and especially when I was proofreading it, I pretty much exhausted myself to the point of almost passing out, and I noticed that I removed that margin that I always maintain – if the computer breaks, dies, crashes or fubars the data, I am usually always ready to do something. This time, I was so tired that I relied on the computers – the 15″ M4 Air, and the Studio M2 Max – to do everything perfectly because I was simply too tired to do anything about it. And they did – they were both incredibly fast, reliable and good, and nothing went wrong in any way. One would think that after all the decades of IT progress that would be expected and unsurprising, but it isn’t. My Windows desktop, the Ryzen machine, is unreliable to the point of randomly bluescreening whenever I really push it. It probably means that the CPU is damaged and can’t handle the thermal load, or something; but since a machine bluescreening under load means loss of data, I simply stopped using it for anything other than games. I had to push the machines when I was finishing the book – not care how many things I left open, not care how big images I imported into Photoshop for the covers, not care how many layers I had; I just needed to get the job done, and I did the covers after proofreading for multiple days in a row, and had the machine crashed during that, I’d probably throw it out the window and make it a lawn ornament. But it didn’t crash. It didn’t slow down, it didn’t glitch, didn’t do any of the stupid shit I came to expect from both Windows and Linux, and I could rely on both the OS and the hardware to pull me through when I was half-conscious from work. As a result, something changed in my attitude; I now treat Apple Silicon machines as serious stuff I rely on, and I treat everything else as toys. I bought another laptop, the 13″ M5 Air, the 16/512GB model. It’s not that the 15″ did anything wrong; to the contrary, it’s the best laptop I ever had. I wrote almost the entire book on it, and it did everything flawlessly. It’s just that I like having 13″ laptops for some things, and all my other 13″ machines are either old and expected to fail sooner rather than later, or they are much, much worse than Apple Silicon in almost every way. For some things, such as making the covers or editing photos, I use the Studio with a 43″ screen. For some things I use the 15″ laptop, and for some things I use the small one. I think it’s similar to how guitar players have multiple guitars they use for playing different things.

Over the years, I experimented with different kinds of laptops, and I discovered that a very powerful desktop replacement machine is the least useful for me, because I rarely need that kind of power on a laptop. I need it where I need the big screen for editing pictures, and that’s a desktop. I need a laptop to have an excellent keyboard, touchpad, screen and battery, and to be fast enough for all the things I run on a laptop. This ends up being everything other than photo editing, so basically I have photo editing machines and “everything else” machines. This explains why I prefer the Macbook Air to the Pro – the pro models have active cooling and more power, but they are thicker, heavier and more expensive for the virtue of being great for the things I don’t actually use the laptop for. As a result, I managed to “cook” the 15″ Air only twice, and both cases took place in a hotel when I was importing a batch of 350 or so 61MP raw files into Lightroom. To its credit, it actually managed to hold its own and be as fast as my Studio for the first 100 or so pictures, but then it throttled itself to less than half its nominal speed and it was pegged at 100°C. Also to its credit, it managed to actually import everything just fine, and I proceeded to edit everything on the hot laptop and functionally speaking, I got the job done. Would I like doing it regularly, no. But also, would I like buying a 5000 EUR machine that is better at something I do twice a year, while also being so much bulkier and less practical for everything else I actually use it for? Hard pass.

On the other hand, the Studio is a complete opposite. The Air has incredible speed and power, until it hits the thermal limit. The Studio M2 Max is actually somewhat weaker in that range. However, it never hits the thermal limit. It can keep going at 100% load, for hours, days, weeks or years, and it will never give a single fuck. The machine is under-specced for my new 61MP cameras because I bought it for processing 24MP files, so things that used to run instantaneously now take time. The thing is, I don’t necessarily care. I have it import the files while I take a shower, it gets stuff done, and I never have to think about overheating it, stressing it by having it work for too long on 100%, or anything like that. It’s like a rock crushing machine that just crushes rocks for years and doesn’t give a fuck. Also, unlike other powerful machines, it is always completely silent. And unlike my equally powerful Ryzen machine, it never bluescreens.

No wonder Apple ate everybody’s lunch. It’s the thing you need when you’re done with everybody else’s shit and you just need to rely on things to do their job because it’s important, and you don’t have the patience for drivers acting up or the OS update locking up the machine just when you need it, or something crashing and taking your files with it. When you need a rock crusher that works 24/7, and you really depend on it doing the job, maybe it’s not the time for solutions that require you to reserve a part of your mental capacity for fixing the mess after the machine inevitably shits itself.

So yeah.

Do I actually need a zillion computers? Does Mike Oldfield actually need a zillion guitars? Yes, in fact. It’s weird how that works, but this is no place for minimalism.

About matters and seriousness

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When I mostly wrote about politics for a few years, some people understood it as me “not being interested in spirituality any more”. When I started writing about spirituality again, shocked Pikachu face, I guess. So, what’s the deal?

Well, it’s kind of obvious. When I saw Western propaganda accompanying the Olympics in Sochi, Russia, I understood that such propaganda is something that would happen only if they had a long-term plan for a war with Russia. As I analysed the events from this perspective, it gave me such a good match that I started a political blog as a place where I can unload my thought processes as a form of a warning, because there’s no way for a war between West and Russia not to eventually go nuclear, and people should know about that well in advance in order to be able to prepare, and by prepare I mean be ready to absorb lesser impacts before the major one, and when the major one comes, be on good terms with God.

What do I mean by lesser impacts? Well, if you’re in Ukraine, you got to find out already. Likewise if you’re in Israel, or the region around Iran. It’s not particularly great in some parts of the West either; London, Paris etc. have turned into terrible shitholes that resemble Africa. America is also not a great place to be, and it’s getting worse.

I expected that, because the nuclear ultimate escalation isn’t something that just happens out of nowhere. You don’t attack Russia and China because you’re doing well. You’re doing it because your civilisation is at an impasse, and you’re looking for a desperate way out. Others react to your desperate measures in progressively more desperate ways, and it ends in mushroom clouds.

People have a silly idea about nuclear war – basically, both sides push a button and twenty minutes later there’s no world. I wanted to explain why this isn’t so, and why they will try everything else first, and why most people in the world won’t even know there was a nuclear war until much later. You need to understand the logic of those things.

So yeah, that was a priority. Also, the reason why I didn’t write about “spirituality” – God, I hate that word – is because I was thinking and meditating and figuring things out, and I don’t like talking just to hear myself talk. I basically needed a decade or two of processing to do, in order to get to the next level of understanding, and it’s not something you can copy-paste from somewhere, because, simply put, nobody has ever done it before. I did write bits and pieces as I was sure, and eventually “The Light Beyond” happened, as a culmination of all this. One of the more important reasons why I didn’t write much is because people who read it generate their own ideas that feed back into my perception, and then it makes it harder for me to figure things out and get a clear signal through all the interference. Then, as I got the pieces together, I could write it all down, since feedback loops no longer matter once I get it.

There’s another silly thing I found out recently; you see, I sensed that people ask Chat GPT and other LLM AI models about me. I asked Romana to try asking the questions I felt people are asking, and indeed, the answers came immediately, which means the system already had everything cached from recent inquiries. She copy-pasted some of it to me, and I found it incredibly silly. For instance, when you ask AI how competent I am, basically asking it to evaluate me because you trust a statistical evaluator of other people’s opinions more than you trust your own judgment, it tells you, essentially, that I’m quite competent at photography and programming, and less so at politics and religious philosophy – essentially, evaluating my deviation from the data pool that defines its primary neural networks as “being wrong”, while matches with consensus opinion are interpreted as “being right”. People who don’t know how that shitbox “thinks” will mistake it for actually having thought processes, which it doesn’t. The true interpretation of what it said is that my IT knowledge is generic enough that every competent IT person shares it, my photography knowledge is essentially what every competent photographer shares, and my pictures are composed along the lines of what is generally found aesthetically pleasing. My political opinions, however, are completely out of, what its western and leftist data pool of generally accepted propaganda defined by the CIA, defines as “normal”, so it’s “wrong” and “not substantiated by facts”, where facts are what the CIA tells the “journalists” to publish. Also, my opinions about spirituality are not the generally found copy-pasta; it’s actually the real thing, because I have my own independent access to the facts, which is orders of magnitude better than anyone else’s. In fact, some of the facts I have are my own memories from long ago, which are accessible only to me, and nobody else (with the exception of a few who also happened to be there); in simple terms, nobody else knows what actually happened because they weren’t there as it happened. I was. If someone didn’t learn it from me, they don’t know. So, Chat GPT thinks I’m taking myself too seriously, because it can’t verify my sources, so it thinks they are questionable. They are not.

Let me put it this way. Only a few people have been on the Moon. A few more have been in orbit around it. They have a unique perspective on it, and others are not really in a position where they can verify it independently. If they tell Neil Armstrong that he shouldn’t take himself too seriously with his stories about walking on the Moon, my answer is that they, in fact, are the ones who are taking themselves too seriously and they shouldn’t, while he’s taking himself exactly as seriously as he should, as he has an independent source of experience that they can’t access, duplicate or independently verify, so they should shut the fuck up.

Puzzle

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately, and writing only some of it down, while the rest of it remains work in progress.

I also made some interesting pictures:

It’s just that I’m having trouble figuring out what’s going on. The wars seem to be escalating, but contained within a pattern – none of the actors wants to disturb the world that holds the foundations of their power, and yet as the predictable certainties slip away, they seem to be forced into actions that they don’t actually want to make, with consequences they don’t want to accept. America wants to remain in power, but its economy is inherently broken, their soft power is all but gone, and their military is a one trick pony. Europe would want to act based on principles, and yet this sounds so ridiculous when it comes out of the mouths of atheists whose principles are something they themselves made up and is worth less than the paper it’s written on. Based on those principles they act in ways that subvert the foundational architecture that defined them.

Russia and China would want to be powerful and prosperous, and yet they don’t want to pay the price of that, which is to fight America and win. America abuses everybody and says “so, what are you going to do about it?” So far, nobody came up with an answer.

People seem to have found another source of religion. First they followed prophets and revelations of God. Then they followed science. Then they invented social media to receive validation from other humans. Now, they seem to chat with LLM AI, trying to get it to clear their confusion, answer their questions, and be their God. Considering how LLM is merely re-hashing the ideas of their own making and giving them what it sees as normalised results, this newest exercise in navel gazing is as pathetic as it is desperate, and reminds me very much of coprophagy.

But people, stupid as they are, will sooner ask Chat GPT about me, than ask me about Chat GPT. The Great Oracle will tell them what to think. That can’t go wrong.

It’s already very hard to find sources that are not contaminated by AI. With enough iterations, it will become completely impossible, unless you already know what you’re looking for, which makes it moot because searching implies finding new stuff, beyond what you already know. Younger people are destined to ingest the excrement of AI, thinking it’s information. It’s not. It is to information what a turd is to a hamburger that someone else ate.

I’m not saying AI is completely useless. I use it to remove noise from my images, and also for large-object generative cloning. Also, my camera uses it to detect people, birds and insects, and to focus on the eyes. I just don’t ask it for opinions, especially considering how often it fails to identify insects.

 

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.

 

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: