Emperor Claudius miraculously rose from the dead and they eventually brought him someone who speaks Latin:
“So, tell me, what’s new in the world?”, Claudius asked the Catholic bishop.
“Well, Pontifex Maximus took over the Emperor’s role in Rome and presides in Vatican, and the Jews have just started a war with the Parthians in Judea”, the bishop answered.
“I asked what’s new in the world”, the confused Emperor replied.
There is such an extreme tension in the global astral field that I had nosebleed twice this morning; the second time when I sent a link to Božo about a nuclear alert in Kuwait, and it looked as if someone slaughtered a pig in the bathroom. 🙁
This is not going to be pretty. Biljana and I took some gloomy pre-storm pictures last night and I thought they were quite appropriate for what’s coming:
I don’t even know what the prepping advice would be at this time. Stay calm, and create conditions for yourself to stay calm when everybody else goes bat shit crazy with panic, once this blows.
Trump is pretending to have talks to Iran, while Iran is trying to understand what this guy is even talking about. In reality, he’s deceiving the stock markets to lower the price of oil, while at the same time buying time for his Marine expedition team to assemble and arrive. I don’t even understand what he intends to do; in a 21st century battlefield ridden with suicide drones, they are going to get wiped out within days, and then he’ll have to either run with tail between his legs, with losses too high to justify, or use nukes. Israel will certainly cheer for the latter option.
The insane ideologues of the EU are going to be completely incapable of dealing with the crisis that is going to hit, except by introducing more fascism, which has always been their solution to everything. Lock people down, tell them to eat cake if there’s no bread, introduce 256th round of sanctions to Russia and preach bullshit to China. And by all means, keep virtue signalling something about windmills, solar, democracy and human rights.
Israel is trying to force God to send them the Messiah, instead of accepting the one he actually did send two thousand years ago. They actually seem to be working on enlarging their territory, as if that’s going to solve anything.
Trump’s people in the military seem to be thinking they are fighting the battle of Armageddon, trying to force Jesus to come for the second time and tell everybody that America is his chosen land or something.
All in all, in comparison, North Korea and Iran currently look like the adults in the room. The entire West has gone completely bonkers.
Me, I took a few pictures with my new camera last night. It felt so much like the Olympus Pen, that I actually thought “too bad that there’s no more light so the image is going to fall apart at ISO 1600”, and then I remembered that it’s not. Also, I keep expecting autofocus to suck, and it never does. Interestingly, I don’t think of it as a Sony, because the way I use it and the lens I have on it trigger different associations. For all intents and purposes, it’s A7RV in a different package, but the package matters so much that it feels nothing like A7RV; until I look at the images.
Both little lenses I bought are candy. No flare even with the sun in the frame, no CA, and crazy sharp. Also, composing wide and having everything sharp is interesting after a period of shallow depth of field.
The Iran war is going as expected – every day more things are burning, while Trump is trying to short oil prices in order to keep up the pretence. There’s a reason why people traditionally didn’t do that – I mean, go into more debt in order to be able to sell valuable assets under the market price. Everybody who tried, got to go bankrupt and starve. For instance, you hear there’s going to be a bad winter. Instead of hoarding stuff in the basement, you sell everything under cost, because no reality is going to tell you what to do. The winter came, you died and became a cautionary tale. Something like America is about to. Yeah, reduce oil prices artificially. That will make people buy your oil because it’s cheaper, and you’re going to run out, and the low prices will make people not ration, so your supplies are going to run out even faster.
Instead of making popcorn, I’m playing with photography. Specifically, with the small and light setup that I ordered. The A7CR camera is still in the mail, but everything else arrived. I tested the FE 28-60mm f/4-5.6 lens; the small collapsible thing that comes in kit with A7C. It’s very good:
It also seems to work quite well on a macro extender, which is pocketable, so I can have both medium-range landscape setup and a closeup setup in very pocketable dimensions when I don’t feel like carrying the camera. Is it going to be as good as the A7RV? The sensor and the electronics in the A7CR are the same, and the FE 28-60mm, according to my test, is for the most part sharper than the FE 24-105mm f/4 G, except at 60mm, so yes, it’s going to be as good, at least on a sunny day when I work at f/8. Also, what can you do with some kit lens and extension tubes? Quite a lot, as it turns out:
Much more than I can do with an iPhone, that’s for sure. Those two were taken with Canon 5d, and EF 35-70mm f/3.5-4.5 on macro extension tubes. I actually preferred that setup to EF 85mm f/1.8, because it was lighter, and the lens created a very nice glow wide open, which made the pictures look more magical.
So, that’s what I’m doing while waiting. Beats popcorn.
I found this on Telegram this morning:
Australia’s Energy Minister: “We only have enough gasoline for 18 days, diesel fuel for 16 days, and aviation fuel for 14 days. And a ship from the Persian Gulf takes 2 to 4 weeks to arrive.”
I went to check the sources, and I found this. Basically, the statement was from the beginning of March, and the Russians just did the math, and they are very good at math. It checks out.
I would assume that everybody who is dependent on Arab oil is in a similar situation. The Russians and everybody attached to them as a source are perfectly fine. The American colonies are fucked.
This means that, as of now, Russia is the most powerful economic force in the world. They determine who lives and who dies. Everybody else is living on strategic reserves that are being depleted quickly, because they are trying to bring down oil prices in order to pretend that, politically, this is nothing. This means they will all run out of strategic reserves within two to three weeks, after which there’ll be doomsday.
So, either everybody instantly takes measures to extend the duration of their strategic reserve, by raising oil prices and rationing supply, and take measures to secure Russian oil, because it’s not sure how much of a surge in supply the Russians will be able to create, regardless of intent. Those things have technological limits. Pipelines are designed for some projected demand and so on.
Israel and America seems to have run out of air defence. Everything Iran launches now, hits the target. Iran, on the other hand, seems to be doing fine. They are just incredibly pissed. America will be forced to either evacuate their forces from the region, or use nuclear weapons to neutralise Iran. This choice will have to be made within a week. Also, the shortages of oil will become a thing of immediate concern within 7 to 10 days, which is half the time to projected end of supply. This is also the point where everybody starts to panic in earnest, because at that point even if everything instantly restarts, which it won’t, the shortages are already in the pipeline, baked into the supply chain. Also, one third of the world’s production of artificial fertiliser production is in the Gulf, and it’s been disrupted. This will automatically cause disruptions in food production, and higher food prices. It’s already baked into the supply chain. The other third of fertilisers comes from Russia. This makes Russia both untouched by this, and in high demand.
America formally has lots of oil and gas, but it remains to be seen how much of that exists on paper alone. A country that has as much oil as they claim to have wouldn’t need to deplete their strategic oil reserves as much as they are doing, which makes me think most of the data is fake, like everything that comes from America. This is now going to be tested in earnest.
Israel is having a strategic problem at the moment and probability of them using nuclear weapons to solve it is pretty high, in my assessment. Since they are open to air attacks now, the time to decide is already ticking.
This puts my assessment of probability of nuclear use by either America or Israel within two weeks at very high. Trump and the people around him sound completely irrational, as if they were getting high on their own supply for too long and they lost all connection to reality. Israel feels pretty desperate, like it’s now or never, they are faced with complete annihilation and they have to act now. There was a 4.2 magnitude earthquake in Negev desert, near Dimona, mid January, which looks like a nuclear test that nobody talked about. If that is so, it would mean that they wanted to know whether their stuff actually works before they used it.
On first nuclear use, I expect things to escalate rapidly.