Communication

I was reading some American space opera stories, because I’m not dignifying that with the term SciFi. One thing seems to be a constant – “humans” in those stories are in fact a metaphor for Americans, and “aliens” are a metaphor for various non-American human nations of Earth. If you watched enough Star Trek, you’ll know what I mean. Also, how do you know that an American wrote a certain story? Because they implicitly assume that every language is basically English, but spoken with different words, that can be translated 1:1.

The only exception to that nonsense that I can remember was the “Darmok” episode of TNG, where they encounter a civilisation that keeps referencing their myths to explain current experience, for instance “Darmok and Jalad on Tanagra”, or “Shaka, when the walls fell”. Basically, it’s like a reference to “Achilles’ heel”, “opening the Pandora’s box”, or “David and Goliath”. This is actually a great example of why translating things between very different cultures while retaining the nuance of meaning is hard, and in order to understand what a Chinese would mean by “jade mind”, you need to do quite a bit of reading of their mythology and symbolism; also, good luck translating kitsune or qilin.

Basically, in order for an American to truly understand some fundamentally un-American culture, such as Chinese or Indian, they would have to do so much reading and abandoning their own mental position in order to get into another’s skin, that they would stop being Americans, because what seems to define Americans assuming that they are the top of the world and the only valid measurement of value and achievement. And we are talking about understanding merely another human culture, not something profoundly alien, like an octopus that communicates through chromatophores and tentacles, or a dolphin that probably thinks in idiom that would be as foreign to us as phrases such as “bitter anguish” or “sweet recollection” to someone who lacks a sense of taste because they feed on sunlight.

I was asked, many times, why I use sanskrit or Tibetan terms to describe certain states of consciousness or spiritual substances, and the underlying assumption is that those words can be translated to English or Croatian for that matter, and I’m just making it difficult. The thing is, if I’m not translating it, it means that there is no word or phrase of equivalent meaning in the target language, and I’m leaving it in the original because that’s how it works. The people who discover something get to name it. The Americans discovered certain elements such as Americium, Berkelium and Californium, and they got to name them. What are the names of those elements in Chinese? There aren’t any, because they were unknown to the Chinese. Every language has names for copper, tin and iron, though; guess why. So, now that the Americans discovered those elements, everybody in every other culture will use those words to reference them, because that’s how it works. That’s also why there aren’t translations for brahman, kundalini, vajra, mantra, mudra or mandala. It’s not because I’m making it hard for no reason, but for the same reason the Mongols have no word for Einsteinium. Your language has no word for vajra because no member of your culture had enough experience with it to try to conceptualise it; as Wittgenstein would say, if you don’t have a word for it, it is beyond the limits of your world.

Sometimes, in order for you to be able to understand something really alien, you need to leave your own skin and become an alien being with an alien understanding, and leave your words, cognition and feelings behind completely. Then, you will possibly formulate new words for those experiences, and thus make them something within your world, and maybe you’ll abandon words completely. Some things are, in fact, more efficient for conveying emotion or meaning; just listen to cats formulating a long whining tirade of complaint and you’ll see what I mean. So, in order to express emotion, Cat might be more suitable than English, because it expresses emotion directly rather than just map and reference it.

Explanation of real things that are beyond the experience of the audience is a serious problem, and a good example is Pliny the Younger describing the eruption of Vesuvius that buried Pompei and Herculaneum in 79 AD. He made an incredibly accurate and specific description of the eruption and the ash cloud, and yet it was historically seen as a metaphor of some kind because people in the West didn’t actually experience a pyroclastic eruption of that kind until Mt. Pinatubo, at which point they saw the ash cloud that looked like a pine tree, and said, hey, this looks exactly like Pliny the Younger’s description. Now, that type of volcanism is called a Plinian eruption, in his honour.

That’s another problem in describing things: you can be extremely accurate and specific in your description, but if your audience doesn’t have the experience you can invoke in order to form understanding, they will think you’re using metaphors or just talking about things that aren’t real, like fairies and unicorns. So that’s another very real limit of symbolic communication – it works by referencing another’s experience, and if there isn’t any to reference, you have a problem. Try describing some kind of an exotic fruit such as cherimoya or durian to someone who hasn’t seen and tasted it, and you’ll see the problem. Have them see and taste it and then give them the word for it, and now suddenly you have understanding and communication.

Simple solutions

I had a weird IT problem that took me a long time to figure out, because it was so elusive and hard to reproduce. The NUC that used to upload the radiation data was acting up; it would just freeze for some reason. The first thing I did was reinstall Windows 11. Then I installed Windows 10. Then recently it actually got worse; it would stop refreshing data and I would come down to see it stuck at max fan speed and hot, probably 100% CPU for some reason, and not showing image on the screen nor reacting to keyboard. I concluded it’s probably fucked on a hardware level and put a HP mini PC there, with Windows 10. That didn’t fix anything, because it would stop refreshing data and I would come down to find the Radiascan software stuck. It turned out it wasn’t the software; the device itself was disconnected for some reason, and I first suspected some power saving feature, and went through everything in both Windows and UEFI; after each modification I had to leave it running to see whether it would hang, and it invariably did, in intervals from almost immediately to almost a day. As you can imagine, testing that takes a lot of time; a day per tweak, basically. Eventually I guessed the device drew too much power from the USB while charging its batteries, which overheats the USB controller or something and triggers a disconnect, so I tried putting a powered USB hub between the computer and the device, and that didn’t do anything, but I felt I was on to something, and then I remembered seeing that the USB cable connecting the device is frayed to the point where I can see the wires inside, and thought it can’t be, because it connects and reads data, right…? Right? I managed to find another mini USB cable somewhere, changed it, and it solved the problem completely.

Sometimes the solution to a complex looking problem can be remarkably simple.

Social thermodynamics

People periodically ask me for a cause of all kinds of terrible things that are taking place on an almost daily basis in the recent years – whether it’s something some global script designed by Satan is targeting them with specifically, or something of a more broad spectrum is at play.

This is my recent answer:

Honestly, on some deeper level, this no longer feels as if anyone is “doing” anything, it looks like some kind of a thermodynamic event, for instance ocean cooling down by evaporating into the atmosphere and making a hurricane.

Basically, the same as the ocean producing a hurricane merely as a consequence of its inability to hold on to the level of energy it has, the global astral field can’t hold on to the level of energy it had while Sanat Kumar was managing the system, and we are facing a spiritual equivalent of a major temperature drop.

Also, I need to add this, because people who aren’t trained physicists tend to have wild misunderstanding of those things.

An energy drop sounds like a low-energy event, but in fact it’s a high-energy event. When an atom drops in energy, it emits a photon, basically produces radiation when you look at it from the outside, and to you it appears like a high-energy event. Ocean dropping in temperature is a hurricane, a very violently high-energy event. Gas that drops in temperature/pressure emits large amounts of heat. Battery going from high energy state to a low energy state is a very energetic event.

Likewise, the global system cooldown, its descent into a lower-energy state, appears extremely violent and energetic – hysteria, violence, wars, genocide and so on. An energy drop usually means a very big “boom”.

I used to think about the causes of the terrible self-destructive world wars, especially the first one, which looked as if the whole civilisation just threw itself into the meat grinder. One explanation was that the balance of power within the civilisation changed from feudalism to capitalism, while political power remained very much feudal, and the whole war thing looks like a social thermodynamic event that destroyed this obsolete system and brought the formal power structures more in line with the actual ones. Also, the whole concept of politics, economy, war, religion and purpose had to be reshuffled to match the industrial, modernist era. The second world war looks pretty much like a continuation of the first one, and ended with the British Empire destroyed and America and Russia assuming the position of first-tier powers. Then those first-tier powers had a battle for primacy, and that one is still ongoing, where the apparent fall and dissolution of the Soviet Union represents merely one phase, and now Russia under Putin is back, and America and the entire West are having what looks very much like the late-Soviet civilisational crisis. The way things look now, USA didn’t really win the cold war; its collapse just lagged somewhat behind that of the Soviet Union.

At the moment, America looks like the last big remainder of the satanic experiment of some kind, of a country without God where people join together in democracy and take charge of their own destiny – essentially, modernism that started with the French revolution. This same experiment had many branches – European secularism, American free market capitalism and a republican constitution, Soviet Union, and the Third Reich. Third Reich is gone, Soviet Union is gone and Russia is trying to find its reason for existence which currently looks like some mixture of tradition and religion, Europe is a decadent cesspool, and America looks like it’s in late stages of turning into a hellhole. The champion of the West against Russia, Ukraine, looks like something between Satanism and Fascism; basically, the most ridiculous chimera of all Modernist and Postmodernist failures patched together as a weapon against Christianity and Reason, a weapon that treats human life as utterly worthless in the name of human rights and humanism, completely in line with the trend that started with the Guillotine orgies of the French Revolution.

As a conclusion, no, Man is not the measure of all things. Also, human life is not the ultimate value. God is the measure of all things, and Man without God is an empty shell devoid of anything worthwhile to live for, and if human life is the ultimate value, then there’s nothing so great that it’s worth living and dying for, making human life ultimately pointless and worthless. This concludes the godless experiment of Satan – in total, absolute failure.

Amazeballs

I am simply in awe of human faith in the creative power of their thoughts and beliefs – or, in other words, belief that they will override reality and substitute their own if they put fingers in their ears deep enough and yell “la la la” loudly enough.

It’s not just one thing in isolation, it’s a pattern. For instance, the Italians built a city of 6 million people between a stratovolcano with a history of explosive catastrophic eruptions and a supervolcanic field, where they literally intended to build a new spa resort at the edge of the solfatara crater in the smack-middle of what is equivalent of the Norris geyser basin in Yellowstone, and now that the supervolcano is acting up and the experts are advising immediate evacuation of at least the village in the red zone, everybody is acting as if the problem is going to go away if only they stopped noticing it.

On a political level, we are in a situation where nuclear escalation of the conflict in Ukraine didn’t happen yet only because Putin was so opposed to starting the nuclear war himself that he’s trading immediate retaliation for loss of deterrence, basically making it more likely in the long run. This, of course, is only a symptom of the global destabilisation due to a systemic collapse of the entire West, which became so ideologically unhinged it’s acting like a retard with a gun; economically, sociologically, politically and in all other relevant terms, the West is doomed.

And this is the situation where the Internet is full of people who:
– obsess over new gadgets
– obsess over vacation spots
– talk about “1st world problems” ironically while California is either on fire or having an open insurgency or not having water
– ridicule “doomsayers” who are concerned that the world as we know it is fucked
– obsess over CO2 emissions, gender and plastic straws.

The entire news feed looks like something that would have been on “Onion” or some other satire fake-news site a decade ago. But yeah, everything is fine, people have been saying the world was going to end thousand years ago and it’s still here.

That’s true, people have indeed been predicting the end of the world since antiquity. However, people in the fifth century have been saying that the Rome is falling and the anti-doomers, starting with St. Augustine, replied that people have always been predicting the fall of Rome and yet it’s been here for a thousand years and it will be here for another thousand at least.

I wonder whether the dinosaurs would think that the world is still here. Let’s ask them. Oh wait…

Assessment

There was a relatively strong earthquake in Campi Flegrei last night, initially assessed at 4.4 MMS, later revised to 4.2. Everything above 2 there is significant, as it indicates magma movements and possible ruptures. 4.2 is really serious, and adds serious weight to the Bayesian probability of explosive eruption in the near future. Whether the eruption will be phreatic or supervolcanic, it is impossible to say. A phreatic eruption is what happened at Krakatoa, when magma and sea water came into contact within the enclosed space of the half-emptied magma chamber. It is what a pressure cooker would do if the pressure inside exceeded the cohesive forces within the containment vessel. It means a big boom that cooks the people of the local village in superheated steam. That place needed to be evacuated weeks ago. However, other than boiling a few thousands of people alive, the phreatic eruption poses no danger to the wider area. A supervolcanic eruption, VEI 8, however, would end most of Europe. So, the danger of natural events regionally remains high.

As for the political and military events, Trump is performing a circus where America, as a party in conflict that attacked Russia and wanted to destroy it as a country and surround it with enemies and do a regime change in every country that believes in two genders, is now roleplaying as a peace maker of some sorts, as if they’re a school teacher forcing some kids to make up or else. The Russians will politely tell him to piss off, to which he’ll do the typical Trump thing and threaten them with a big stick, forgetting that the Russians have already destroyed more than half of US and European military in Ukraine, and that American “mercenaries” have been killing Russians in Kursk, Russia, for months. This has all the potential of ending badly, because the Russians have already told Putin not to even think about any kind of “truce” or “ceasefire”. I see people behaving as this war is about to end, but on the contrary, I think it’s nearing the most explosive phase, where one bad miscalculation by America will result in instant massive retaliation. I am treating this as “all hell is about to break loose” until proven otherwise.

If you ask why is France so pissed at Russia, it’s because the entire West had a plan of blocking Russia, and intending on compensating for the raw materials they were getting from Russia by turning to Africa, and the Russians understood the plan and completely destroyed it by making deals with African countries that resulted in France and other former colonial powers being unceremoniously evicted and their access to near-free resources ended. As a result, France’s access to low-cost uranium for their power plants and military has been compromised and they are strategically fucked.

Trump, on the other hand, is acting as if America is the big boy in charge, but this is all a bluff. America is bankrupt, their military is defunct and depleted, and other than the decrepit nuclear weapons that are way past their expiration date, they have nothing except the printing press for money, which is currently backed by nothing but brute force. Essentially, the entire West is a starving parasite trying to latch itself onto resources to prolong its doomed existence, and in absence of the usual victims, the vampires are now trying to suck off each other, and it’s going to be a nasty sight.

So yeah, far from it being over; we haven’t actually seen anything but overture yet.