Prepping mistakes

I’ve been looking at some YouTube videos about prepping, and oh boy, is there some super stupid stuff out there. It’s no wonder people think of the whole thing with disdain. But let me share some of my impressions.

The actual “preppers” seem to be the ones offering the most impractical, immoderate and outright foolish advice out there. Basically, it’s the guys with a huge house, multiple acres of land around it, who are living out the fantasy of surviving apocalypse by returning to a combination of 18th century technology and Robinson Crusoe-esque approach. Their advice on how to prepare for a power outage is to store a year’s worth supply of gas canisters, gasoline and all sorts of gadgets, plus solar panels, generators etc. My reaction to this is a facepalm, thinking about how useless this advice is to an average urban person with a two bedroom flat, no particular storage space available and with only a parking place in front of the building, without a garage. Mind you, that’s how most of the world actually lives. No, you can’t have livestock, chickens or grow crops there. You also can’t store much of redundant supplies. You don’t have a secondary location to bug out to, because if you did, you’d probably be there already.

The second group are the people who regularly have hurricanes, tornadoes or similar natural disasters in their area, and who already have regular experience with conditions that require them to be able to ride it out on their own. They usually also have a large house with land, but they aren’t preparing for an imaginary scenario, they are preparing for a realistic scenario they already experienced, sometimes regularly, and so they know exactly what they are talking about and you should pay attention. Unfortunately, their advice usually assumes you also have a large house, a garage, plentiful storage space and a piece of land. That makes some of their recommendations inapplicable to average urban people.

The third group are the people who are already choosing or are forced to rough it out on a daily basis. This includes hikers, mountaineers, hunters and homeless people (for instance, someone living in a camper van or a trailer). They are forced to be space and weight efficient, either because they have to carry the stuff on their back, or because they live in an extremely confined space where storage space is at even more of a premium than it is to an average person. Also, their life depends on not screwing it up – take too much, you’re screwed, don’t take enough, you’re screwed. Insulate too much and you suffocate, don’t insulate enough and you freeze. They are forced to be extremely practical, and they will use the most modern gear available if it increases their odds, and they will also use the most generic stuff available if it does the job.

The fourth group are the survivalists and bushcrafters. They will try to approximate stone age conditions, use mostly the tools and materials that can be scavenged or harvested from the environment, and they will light a fire with almost nothing, just to show off. While this is definitely something to be aware of as a possibility, because you can never guarantee to be able to access everything you need and it’s good to have some ideas on how to improvise solutions, this bushcrafting/survivalist approach is something you adopt when you’re about to die, and then you do in fact die. This makes it something to avoid resorting to at all cost if any other solution is available.

The fifth group is something I actually haven’t watched on YouTube – it’s the experience of people who actually survived wars, regular power outages and all kinds of shit. It’s the people who know what a kerosene lamp smells like and what kind of light it produces and what a pain in the ass it is to read under it, as you try to reduce boredom in a shelter while your back yard is under a combined sniper/mortar fire.

While all of the above is informative in some way, I would recommend absolutely not taking seriously any advice outside of groups that actually had real life experience with adverse conditions. This means you want to listen to the homeless guy who lives in a camper van, the family who has to improvise their way through a hurricane season each year, a hiker/hunter who has to figure out how to make it on a multiple day trip in adverse weather/terrain conditions, and someone who survived the siege of Sarajevo or Vukovar. Everybody else is full of shit.

Avoid stupid ideas, such as improvised fire making, cooking solutions that will get you killed indoors, or things that would require you to do them in an open unheated space during the winter. Avoid things that have unrealistic or unsurvivable implications. Learn from the experience of people who actually had to figure it out and who had to find something that’s practical, convenient, cheap, and just works, and you can pull it off in a camper van. Also, the war/siege survivors; what they wished they had, what they had that was super useful, and what got people killed.

Your most likely scenario to prepare for is a week-long lockdown with power outages that can last a day, maybe two. Also, scenarios where the gas grid is out, gas stations are overcrowded and there are limitations and curfews imposed, there are power reductions, and the water is occasionally cut off for up to half a day. This is realistic and believe it or not I already had all of that at some point or another. It was very rarely or never all at the same time – basically, you have water, but no electricity, or you have water and electricity but the stores are empty and the fuel is rationed, or you have everything but there’s a lockdown and you can’t access anything outside of your home, or everything basically works but there’s a mass panic that brought the communications down and people are out in the streets, freaked out and sometimes violent. I personally survived hyperinflation, failed economy/country, war, earthquake and two pandemic scares (one was a smallpox scare in Yugoslavia, the other was recent). If you think that stuff doesn’t happen or doesn’t concern you, good for you I guess, but where I live power outages that last half a day are something that happens quite regularly, and last year we had water outages that lasted half a day too, because the water grid was being worked on. In my previous place, I survived a pretty major earthquake, but the building was structurally damaged and we eventually had to evacuate. The kind of prepping I’m talking about is not about doomsday, it’s about survivable inconveniences that can turn quite bad if you’re completely unprepared for them, or you mishandle things in stupid ways. The biggest boon I had from prepping was that I already went through scenarios ahead of time and when shit happened, I was calm when neighbours were in shock and panicking. This psychological effect can’t be overstated. Overreacting or underreacting to a situation can create serious trouble from something that could have been a minor inconvenience. For instance, overreacting to a power outage by making a charcoal fire indoors can get you killed or set your place on fire, when you could have had a butane camping stove and a cartridge at the ready, made some tea by the battery light and had fun times with your family. The attitude that shit just happens and it’s normal can be one of your major assets, while people who expect everything to be fine will freak themselves out.

On compassion and kindness

I am so annoyed by stupid, superficial, arrogant and godless people on the Internet who pose as “compassionate” and “kind”, but who are in fact everything but. Honestly, I don’t think they would be able to recognise actual kindness and compassion if they saw it; in fact, I think they would condemn it as some kind of evil.

It’s actually very hard for me to define kindness. I can recognise it when I see it, but definitions are tricky, as they have to be accurate, specific and exclusive – basically, they need to say what something is, but not by being so broad they are useless. They need to exclude all the similar things something is not. In this case, a definition of compassion needs to exclude all the things that look like compassion, but are in fact not.

So, let me think about it. Compassion is samyama on a person. If I had to explain it to a non-yogi, I’d say samyama is to “grok” something or someone, to understand the inner nature of a thing or a person by means of being. Kindness is now easy to define; from a state of compassion, kindness is to give someone that which he needs to become more of self; to exceed limitations and attain realisation of one’s true nature (or, should I say, attain realisation of God’s true nature). Kindness, in essence, is what a bodisattva or a dakini does and you are awakened from an illusion and prodded forward on a path toward buddhahood.

Making “poor you, I’m so sorry for your predicament” statements is neither compassion nor kindness. It’s a manifestation of narcissism, nothing more. You just wish to be seen by others as a good and compassionate person, in a value-system where those are desirable qualities that elevate one’s social standing. People making such statements don’t really care if they actually helped someone; they just want to be seen as well-meaning and helpful, and in reality they never touch the actual person they are talking to, nor would they wish to. It’s like one of those formal greetings, where you say “how do you do” and you don’t really care, nor do you expect an answer.

I think it’s the problem with the Internet; it empowers poseurs and sociopaths to an extreme. It rewards people for making statements and gestures, that don’t necessarily have to be backed by anything real. Sure, things of this kind existed since forever, but an inherently superficial environment really encourages them.

What’s the difference between a compassionate person and a poseur? Well, a compassionate person sees someone with a problem, feels personally touched by it and drawn to act, and does something very real to help the person. For instance, see someone you used to know who fell on hard times, so you do very concrete things to help them – give them a place to stay, buy them clothes, find them work to do so they can earn money, basically help them end the downward spiral and reverse the negative trend of their life. You can’t really solve anyone’s problem, but you can buy them an opportunity to do it themselves. That’s what compassion and kindness are. What’s the fake thing that postures like the real thing in order to get social points? Mother Theresa. She didn’t solve anyone’s problem, nor did she even try to. She basically faked compassion in order to be thought of as a saint by other people, but she didn’t actually help the people she supposedly helped. Everything she did was for self-aggrandisement only, and it worked; she is generally recognised by people as an icon of compassion or whatever.

Internet is full of people like that; judgmental, self-centred ego-trippers, who always know the right thing to say to make them look good. How can you tell a fake from a real one? See how they deal with the “nazis”, the “tax collectors”, the people their ideology demonises. An excellent example is a black musician who heard about the KKK racists, and didn’t like the idea of being judged and rejected by someone for things that had absolutely nothing to do with him as a person, so he basically went there and talked to the KKK leaders, and eventually befriended them to the point where they renounced their former ideology, which they could no longer espouse in clear conscience. A poseur will call everybody a “nazi” because that’s what you do if you want to pose as someone who’s “a good one”, on the opposite side of a nazi, and would immediately reject a person for a mere suspicion of embracing an ideology that’s not the left of Chairman Mao, thus indicating that he’s so extremely “left”, that anything less than absolute extremism on the leftist spectrum is a “nazi” to him.

What is my recommendation here? Well, stop rewarding worthless people with positive social score just because they make extremist statements of virtue-signalling. Stop assuming someone means well and is a good person because he said all the “compassionate” words, such as congratulating people on apparently good things and telling them how sorry he is when something apparently bad happens. How about putting all such people in a spam filter and completely ignoring them, because that’s what they actually deserve. They are like those people Jesus talked about, who make everyone know when they do something pious or charitable, because what they are actually after is social approval and elevated rating. They don’t give to the poor because they care about the poor, they just want to be perceived as compassionate and generous. They don’t fast and uphold religious rules because they care about God; they do it so that people would perceive them as properly religious, and as such better than all those who aren’t. Interestingly, if you actually helped another person, you would know how wrong it would feel to even mention it, let alone brag about it to third parties. You did it because it felt like the right thing to do. You might have even gotten punished for it in some way. It’s a real thing that exists in the world of real things, and the reward for it is to feel reality, and participate in it. You do good things because to elevate others is to feel close to God, who is the great attractor on the coordinate axis of all greatness. Social posturing would make a real person feel diminished and soiled. On the other hand, it’s everything a fake person lives for, thinking that if they convince people, God will have no other option but to sign off on it as well, because if all the people think someone is a saint, how could God ever reject such a person, yes? The entire thing makes me want to puke, but the phenomenon is quite real, I assure you. Well, let me tell you this: God is not God because he has your vote of approval. In fact, you can all call him Satan or a Nazi for all He cares, and it would affect only you. God is God because he’s the fullness of sat-cit-ananda. God is God because He’s where all the greatness and beauty originates from, and to which all saints aspire. God doesn’t become God by giving His imprimatur to fake people who managed to deceive gullible people who lack discriminative faculties. That’s my opinion.

Dependence on computers

I started writing about something in the comment section, but I decided it’s relevant enough to make it an article.

The CrowdStrike event looks like a very mild example of something I’ve been worrying about for years, namely a widespread systemic persistent IT outage that puts payment systems worldwide out of commission.

Basically, everybody is using digital payment for everything these days, so what happens if it all goes out for some reason? Oh, you’ll use cash. You mean, the ATM is going to work? No it isn’t. You mean, you have cash and will just use it? You mean, the cash register computer will not be afflicted, and the cashier will be willing to take your money without the ability to print out the invoice and register the transaction? Or will all the stores close until this is dealt with? In which case you will have to rely on whatever food and hygienic/medical supplies you have at your place, because you’ve been prepping? Oh wait, you’ve been prepping but since nothing happened you just consumed all the stuff and there isn’t any now? Yeah, that.

I mean, the first level of preparing for an IT outage is to have an air-gapped spare laptop stashed in some drawer, with Linux/Windows dual boot in case one of those two is the cause of failure, but the next question is, what do you connect to, if the cause of the problem is general, so the telecoms are down, banks are down, online services are down, AWS/Azure can’t process your credit card so it locks you out of your servers, GoDaddy is down so you can’t transfer your domains somewhere out of the afflicted area, or DNS is down so you can’t reach anything, or the satellites are down so Starlink doesn’t work. And let’s say it’s something really major so the consequences take so long to clear, there’s serious breakdown of services everywhere.

The first answer everybody has to this is something along the lines of “it’s unlikely that all the computer systems will go out at once”. True, it’s unlikely, but it was also previously unseen that all the enterprise win10 machines go out at once and half the world gets instantly paralyzed. Those machines aren’t independent. Microsoft enforces push updates, and the big corporations have unified IT policies which means they all enforce updates to all their machines. Also, everybody seems to run Windows, which means it’s no longer necessary for an attack vector or a blunder to target billions of computers independently, because it’s a single failure that can propagate from a single point and instantly take down enough of the network that the rest have nothing to connect to.

Also, there have recently been revelations that OpenSSL had severe vulnerabilities. The vast majority of Internet infrastructure uses OpenSSL. A systemic vulnerability that can be targeted everywhere means… you tell me.

Someone will say that people would adapt, and my answer is, what does that even mean? Every single store I’ve been in for the last decade or so uses bar-code readers to scan items, and then the computer pulls out the item data, most notably the price, from the database, so that the cashier can charge you. More recently, all those computers are required to connect to the state tax service where every bill needs to be “fiscalised” for taxation purposes. If Internet fails, the cash register can’t “fiscalise” bills and that’s going to be a problem. If the cash register is out because it’s always a Windows machine and you saw what can happen to those, and it’s connected to the Internet or the “fiscalisation” won’t work, the cashier won’t be able to tell how much the item you want to purchase costs and thus won’t be able to charge you. They don’t have prices on items anymore, like they did in the ‘80s. Everything is in the database.

Some say, run Linux, or buy a Mac. Great, but it doesn’t actually solve anything, because if every Enterprise and most smaller companies run everything on Windows, and those computers all bluescreen, what are you going to connect to, with your Linux PC? How does your computer even matter if you go to a store and you can’t buy anything, and how does it matter if you try to go online and most of everything is down, because OpenSSL has been attacked by something that gets root permissions on your computer and encrypts its filesystem?

I’ve been recently thinking that Internet isn’t so much a framework for connecting computers, but really a separate plane of existence. When I’m using my computer, I’m not really on an island in Croatia, I’m on the Internet. Imagine all the beings that exist in the physical world, but without an Internet connection, like trees, birds, cats and so on. In order to interact with them or even perceive them, you need to switch planes of existence, between physical world and the Internet. However, some aspects of the physical world, like our civilization for instance, have been abstracted into the Internet to such a degree that you can’t even use them anymore if you don’t have access to all kinds of Internet-based infrastructure, which is not currently perceived as a problem, but might become one really fast if something fundamental breaks down with the Internet.

Also, if a nefarious government or a corporation wants to lock you out of the Internet for “non-compliance”, you are really fucked, which makes it a really big sword of Damocles hanging over our heads, forcing everybody to be good and obedient slaves.

Some hindsight

In my first book, I addressed the ecological issues caused by negative anthropogenic influences on the world, namely:

  • pollution of the soil

  • pollution of the waters

  • pollution of the atmosphere

  • damage to the ozone layer

  • the glasshouse effect

  • damage to the food chain and the ecosystem

  • electromagnetic pollution

  • acoustic pollution

  • mental and spiritual pollution

  • moral pollution

So, I think it would be interesting to go back to that list and see whether I understood the problems correctly, in the sense that I called out the actual ones, and if so, have they been remedied or exacerbated since the late 1990s.

The first thing I notice when I read the book again is that I made significant improvements in depth of understanding of the issues since then; basically, I would make a much better analysis today. However, much of it is not actually wrong.

Pollution of the soil was a real problem and actually got worse – for instance, the Americans started using hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) as a method of extracting oil and gas from the ground, by pumping all kinds of toxic chemicals into the ground, contaminating ground water and creating whole lakes of toxic sludge. This is by no means an improvement. The attempt at recycling served to alleviate the guilt of the people but did little to reduce the amount of trash produced, mostly because plastic can’t actually be recycled and it’s all a fraud.

Pollution to the waters was a real problem and it also got worse. The oceans are seriously contaminated by all kinds of plastic debris that gets into the food chain, and then there are the chemicals that get dumped into the oceans, also accumulating in the food chain.

Atmospheric pollution was masked by moving industry to Asia, so that the Europeans and Americans don’t have to see it, so it got better in some places and worse in others.

Damage to the ozone layer was put under control by replacing harmful propellants and refrigerants with non-harmful ones. I guess it will take time for all the harmful stuff to filter out of the atmosphere but it no longer seems to be a serious issue. This seems to be an actual case of a climate alarm that was justified, produced a constructive response, and the issue was put under control or resolved completely.

The glasshouse effect, meaning the anthropogenic CO2 dump in the atmosphere, was an opposite case, where alarmism grew as the predictions were increasingly falsified. Basically, the predictions of the climate alarmists were falsified to such an extent, that I’m no longer sure if any of it was ever justified; there was no increase in sea levels, the increase in global temperature was so small it doesn’t justify any alarm, and the positive effects of increased atmospheric CO2 were noticed on plant life, because apparently the atmospheric concentration of CO2 was normally so little, it was a limiting factor of plant growth, so there was a noticeable greening of previous deserts. However, as the problem turned out not to be real, the hysteria of the climate alarmists reached incredible proportions and became increasingly unhinged. For instance, in Australia the “green” idiots outlawed clearing the brush because CO2 and stuff, and this provided abundant fuel for wildfires, which were then blamed on global warming. This kind of idiocy is becoming more common and is typical for crazy ideologies when they are disproved by reality, and their proponents are simply unable to accept it. For instance, when communism in the Soviet Union failed, this failure was blamed on “saboteurs” and “reactionary influences”, triggering purges.

Damage to the food chain and the ecosystem is still a problem. I don’t know whether it got worse, but it didn’t get better.

Electromagnetic pollution got worse. We are immersed in microwave noise across the spectrum and the consequences of this are not properly researched. My hunch is that some parts of this noise is harmless, because it’s not much different from the natural background, and some parts influence the cellular anatomy that normally deals with interconnectedness between spiritual and material realities, basically saturating with noise the exact parts that are necessary for normal functioning of the subtle spiritual senses.

The acoustic pollution remained the same, however “noise” became a worse, multi-spectrum issue.

The mental and spiritual pollution was a problem then, and absolutely exploded with social media and smartphones that made the connection to the Internet ubiquitous, and made it possible for everybody to be constantly brainwashed with the same, very narrow profile of stuff. It is my estimate that this is probably the worst development since I first addressed the issues, because it turned mankind into, for all intents and purposes, a singular mental entity, and this entity is an imbecile.

The moral pollution was a real problem then, and it got much worse because of all kinds of false morality and virtue signalling. The spiritual space normally occupied by a sense of right and wrong based on transcendence was supplanted by all kinds of false concerns and hysteria, and it all seems to come down to replacement of the traditional concept of human duties with the false concept of human rights.

There are also issues I didn’t address then, because they didn’t look like a problem at that time. For instance, the nuclear standoff of the 1980s seemed to be permanently resolved so I felt no need to address it in 1999, however the Americans mishandled the peace so badly, that most of the world, lead by Russia and China, seems to be permanently done with it, and as they reject American rule, conflict seems inevitable.

As a conclusion, I would say that my analysis from 1999 was mostly correct; the only thing that proved to be a non-issue is the glasshouse effect due to CO2 emission, which is hilarious considering the amount of alarmist hysteria about it. On the other hand, I never anticipated the level of mental devastation caused by the social media and the mental monoculture it created.

About conspiracies

I keep hearing people talking about conspiracies, and they are obviously something they are fond of – they give the powerless the illusion of having power, in a sense of at least understanding what’s going on in the world. However, since their reasoning power and understanding of the world are usually poor, the “conspiracies” they come up with are invariably false. No, the Earth is not flat, and people really did land on the Moon, and two planes did indeed crash into the WTC. However, there are some conspiracies that turn out to be true – covid is an American bioweapon, for instance. America blew up the Nord Stream pipeline. Some “conspiracy theories” are branded as such probably only because the official history is counterfeit for political reasons.

However, I think people have a fundamentally mistaken view of conspiracies. They think the conspirators must be some powerful elites, the invisible secret societies that pull the strings of history, and it’s either the Illuminati, or the Templars, or the Freemasons, or the Jews. They think the conspirators manipulate the events to their benefit, and to the detriment of others. I think this view is fundamentally mistaken.

Yes, there are conspiracies and conspirators. They do make plans and execute them. They frequently manage to do great harm and change the course of history. However, even when their plans are successful, I don’t think they fundamentally change the conspirators’ strategic position.

I will cite two examples – the assassination of Julius Caesar and Lenin’s revolutionary movement. The conspirators against Caesar wanted to stop Caesar from concentrating power in his person. They succeeded and Caesar was killed. The civil war ensued, and ended when Octavian, the ultimate winner, proclaimed himself emperor and concentrated all the power of the state in his person. Caesar was killed, lots of other people were killed, and nothing strategically changed for the Roman state, because concentration of power in the Emperor was actually the logical solution for the problem of the state’s fragmentation of power at that point, which Marius, Sulla, Caesar and ultimately Octavian merely had taken advantage of and solved.

Lenin’s success in spreading the communist propaganda in the Russian empire was the result of a conspiracy of the German political leadership to finance Lenin, whom they saw as a disruptive element that would destabilise Russia and make it exit the war. They gave him tens of millions of marks, which was sufficient to finance the huge and ultimately successful propaganda effort. The conspiracy was successful, and Russia surrendered and exited the war, had a terrible internecine civil war, and its historic progress was degraded. However, none of this helped Germany – it still lost the war, had a terrible period of poverty that caused the meteoric rise of Hitler, which caused the second world war and Germany’s ultimate destruction by the hand of those very Russian communists they helped create.

Basically, what we see are two examples of conspiracies that are a tactical success and a strategic failure – they accomplished the immediate goal, but failed to achieve the actual goal.

What does this tell us? First of all, it tells us that people are mistaken in their view that great historic trends can be changed by influencing one thing – for instance, if you killed Hitler in time, there would be no WW2. This is the mistake the Caesar’s assassins made, thinking their problem was Caesar, and all they did was get themselves eliminated, get a lot of people killed, and promote Octavian to Caesar. If you killed Hitler, the problems that made him rise to power would make someone else rise to power, and that one might not have had Hitler’s weaknesses, making the problem potentially worse. What we see is that conspirators are often successful, but short-sighted, and with a flawed understanding of the issues at hand. They are not some all-powerful, all-knowing cabal ruling mankind from the shadows; they are just men with flawed understanding, who use their power to succeed tactically, get many people killed and often cause terrible suffering for many more, and still fail to accomplish their actual goal.

An example of this are the Jews, with their Zionist efforts. Every single move they made seems to have been successful – get the state of Israel, move there, protect it using the power of America, make it modern and powerful. However, strategically they painted themselves into a corner. They have the worst piece of real estate in the Middle East, which is mostly desert and doesn’t even have oil. They don’t have the majority there because they couldn’t get rid of the Arabs, who hate them and perpetually conspire to destroy them. Their international protection is America, whose power is waning. Essentially, they managed to all move to a single place and make their collective destruction more likely, while still failing to accomplish a Jewish-religious state populated only by Jews, that would be safe for them and allow them to practice their religion and maintain their society, and not assimilate.

Sure, we must be mindful of conspiracies, as history teaches us that they exist, and can produce great harm. However, history also teaches us that conspirators don’t really benefit from their actions, and often succeed tactically only to be doomed strategically.

The ultimate lesson is that if you don’t know what you’re doing, being able to actually do it successfully can be more of a curse than a blessing.