Category Archives: society

Warning

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There has been an increase of seismic and volcanic activity around the world, including recent precursors that usually indicate strong earthquakes; magnitude of 8 on the momentum magnitude tensor scale in the Mediterranean basin is realistic within days. Prepare accordingly.

Also, the earthquake swarm near the Santorini volcano is increasing in magnitude, and something appears to be imminent.

There is a correlation between this increased seismicity and volcanism and the current solar maximum, but the correlation might not necessarily mean causation – for instance, both might have the common cause in the major planetary conjunction that’s going on, meaning that the same tidal force is squeezing the Sun, causing increasing activity, and the Earth, causing increasing tidal forces in the magma, resulting in increasing seismic and volcanic activity. There might, however, be a different explanation, where the planetary conjunction causes increased activity in the Sun, and some type of neutrino is increasingly produced, that causes some minor increase in the radioactive decay, which actually causes the interior of the Earth to remain molten, and even a minor increase can cause major events on the human scale of things. In any case, the whole thing is poorly explored.

In any case, I would avoid travel and have supplies sufficient for two weeks of autonomy in the entire mediterranean basin, just as a precaution. The recommended minimum of 3 days of food and water is probably sufficient if you’re not really close to the areas most likely to be afflicted – Greece, Turkey, Italy, and so on. I would treat this as a serious enough threat to act on it. Also, it’s not a distant threat, since electromagnetic precursors of strong earthquakes, usually indicating a big one within 96 hours, were detected 2-3 days ago.

Why

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A Ukrainian military unit raped and killed eight women and murdered at least 14 other civilians in the village of Russkoye Porechnoye, a captured Ukrainian soldier has admitted during interrogation by Russian investigators.

Russkoye Porechnoye, home to around 300 people, fell under Kiev’s control in August last year during a Western-backed incursion into Russia’s Kursk Region. Russian forces liberated the settlement earlier this month, where they discovered decomposing corpses of civilians stashed in basements throughout the village.

On Friday, the Russian Investigative Committee released new evidence on the massacre, including footage of the interrogation of Yevgeny Fabrisenko, a soldier with the 92nd Separate Assault Brigade. Fabrisenko stated that he was deployed to the village on September 28 alongside his immediate commander and two other soldiers.

According to Fabrisenko, their company commander explicitly ordered them to “cleanse” the village of Russian civilians. The unit remained in Russkoye Porechnoye until October 3, during which they raided homes, raped women, and executed men on sight. Those who resisted were tortured and killed, he admitted. (source: RT)

Yeah, that’s a thing. Getting my mind away from this kind of things would be a sufficient reason for getting into photography again, and taking nice calm pictures depicting good states of consciousness. Also, I’m God’s favourite trash can, the equivalent of a sewage collector that processes shit and lets out clean water, and whatever needs to be processed has been increased lately, which is making my life absolutely miserable. I could say this is why I’m getting back into photography, and people would believe me.

But no, those are not the primary reasons; at least, they are not the only ones. The primary reason is that I felt, multiple times, that this nightmare will soon be over, and I got glimpses of what awaits beyond. I’m trying really hard not to think about that, because I’ll go insane, simply because it’s not already here. I’d rather think whether this picture would look better if taken with a FE 50mm f/1.4 GM.

Yeah, it’s not working. I’m getting concurrent streams from the global astral field – genocidal rage against this or that group, chaos that looks like astral substance that’s been crushed in a blender, things that feel like elixir of lobotomy that makes my brain numb as if injected with novocaine, terribly stupid ideas on how to make this world go on, and occasional flashes of the other side, as if someone is showing me the future. I really, really wish I could make it all go away by thinking about cameras and lenses, but it’s an illusion that actually makes things worse, so I’m trying to not get too carried away. But in any case, there are worse things in the world than poor little pink flowers getting shot. 🙂

There are, however, better things beyond the horizon than I dare to even think, or remember what I’ve been shown. Yeah, I just did. I must be a masochist. 🙂

Photographic frustrations

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While we’re at photography, I have to mention that I’m hugely annoyed by the fact that everywhere I look on the forums or the YouTube people are exaggerating things into hysteria. By that I mean the extreme and opposite “cults” – on one side, you have those who think they need to have the most technically sophisticated equipment in order to make anything of value, and on the other hand you have the “lo-fi” groups such as lomography, who intentionally screw things up as much as possible technically, and people in those groups are all supporting each other in the most extreme nonsense.

The truth, of course, is that both sides kind of have a point. On one hand, equipment is important, and I often found myself just staring in awe at the beautiful renderings from a high-end lens or a camera, that manages to get parts of the image completely crisp, just to seamlessly flow into toffee-sparkles of blur. However, it is also the case that photography is much more than merely a formulaic thing where you get the best hardware, apply a correct technical procedure and get everything sharp from corner to corner, and you have the perfect photograph. If I had to describe my personal attitude, I’d say that for someone who sees photography primarily as a way to capture my own thoughts and feelings, and not the things in front of the lens, I’m very technical about it. 🙂 So, let me make a small exhibition of photos that combine things that would make people in dpreview forums have a fit.

Equipment: Canon 5d, EF 35-70mm f/3.5-4.5. That’s the lens that’s almost never seen outside of lo-fi circles, because it’s one of the first EF lenses ever made, dating from 1987, where it was sold as the kit zoom for the EOS 650 film camera, the first in the EOS lineup. It is so lowly rated that it’s not even seen as something that deserves testing and rating at all, and putting it on the 5d would be seen as a ridiculous “lomography” move. Let’s see some more pictures I’ve taken with this combo:

The macro shots are taken using the extension tubes. Nothing fancy, just the cheapest stuff from ebay. The results, however, are very much not lo-fi. In fact, I could make prints from the original raw files that would be as big as anything one could realistically print from the 13MP 5d sensor. B2, no problem. B1, possibly, but I’d have to massage them somewhat, but those are all material that can go between 70-100cm on the longer side. Mind you, I’m more interested in color than resolution and sharpness, but there’s plenty of both. Let’s see the next heretical combo: using Olympus E-PL1 micro 4/3 mirrorless pocket camera with its 14-42mm plasticky kit zoom, that would be universally poorly rated:

How about using Sony A7II with the FE 28-70mm f/3.5-5.6 kit lens, that’s always trashed in the reviews as something you should immediately remove from your camera if you want the pictures to be any good:

Those pictures weren’t taken with said equipment because I wanted them to look like shit, or because I didn’t know any better. The files are all B1-print sharp. There’s a saying “if it’s stupid but it works, it’s not stupid”. In this case, if “inferior” equipment creates results that get a green light from me regarding technical quality, maybe it’s not inferior. Maybe, just maybe, you’re just holding it wrong, to paraphrase Steve Jobs. 🙂 Or maybe people tend to lose perspective when they compare gear. For instance, if a lens renders closeups with glowy spherical aberration and ethereal softness, it’s only an “optical defect” if you’re trying to use it where those effects detract from the image. Also, if it’s “only” tack sharp from f/8 to f/16, and you use it for landscape photography, what’s the problem? Also, colors are either ignored or hard to test, but if a lens renders beautiful, crystal-clear and perfectly neutral colors, should that somehow matter less than resolution in conditions you don’t intend to use it for?

I had the misfortune of being forced to produce results in life using whatever was available and working in conditions that would be immediately dismissed as unfit for anything, and this is not just about photography anymore. If you don’t have a hammer, use a rock. If you don’t have perfect conditions, learn how to turn imperfect ones to your advantage. For instance, I learned to meditate in conditions so terrible, that I could later resist all kinds of interference. If everything tries to kill you and fails, you become indestructible. I was always annoyed by people who keep whining about their tools and conditions – they can’t do anything spiritually because they don’t have a perfect guru, and don’t know the perfect technique of yoga. In reality, that usually means they are more interested at finding imaginary flaws in order to justify their inaction and inertia, than they are at figuring out a way to avoid the obstacles and make things work anyway.

I had an experience at the University in early 1992 that changed my perspective on excuses forever. You see, one of the professors had a rule that you can’t be absent from more than 5 lectures in a year, or he won’t allow you to take the exams, basically failing you by default. Before one lecture a girl approached him and gave him a letter of medical excuse for her absence. He said, “Young lady, you misunderstood me. I do not care whether you were absent with or without a legitimate excuse. If you were absent from more than five lectures, you simply cannot have sufficient knowledge to take the exam. Therefore, the reason for the absence doesn’t matter in the slightest”. This clicked incredibly hard – nobody cares about your excuses for failure. You just have to find ways to succeed, because there’s no other way to avoid disaster. It’s basically like climbing a cliff; you have to find a way to do it perfectly and avoid falling, because if you fall, nobody’s going to give two shits that the cliff was slippery or the rocks were crumbly. If you failed for “valid reasons”, you failed and you’re fucked regardless. So get your shit together and figure out a way to make things work and to attain success. That’s probably the reason why the whiny “demanding” people annoy me. They think excuses matter.

 

What the …?

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Just in case, I looked at the official Los Angeles plan in case of nuclear war:

IMMEDIATE ACTION FOR NUCLEAR EVENTS

If a nuclear event is occurring or about to occur:

GET INSIDE a sturdy building as quickly as you can, even if you are far from the blast site. Go to a room without windows on the lowest floor that’s close to the center/core of the building. If you are unable to get inside, take cover behind a sturdy object and stay low to the ground.

STAY INSIDE the building. Shelter-in-place. Do not go outside or look out windows to observe the blast and fallout, as this can expose you to radiation and cause serious damage to your eyes.

STAY TUNED to updates from public safety and government authorities or trusted media sources. Some communications systems may be down. During emergencies, simple text messages often work best. You may also want to have a battery powered or hand-crank radio.

My immediate thought was that this doesn’t make any sense, since the houses in the LA area are made of super-combustible material, as evidenced in the recent fires where the houses burned down faster than trees. The main hazards in a nuclear blast are overpressure and thermal radiation, which means fires and 3rd degree burns. The entire LA building code is a terrible match for sheltering in situ in case of a nuclear blast. Then I thought I already saw identical instructions a while ago, and indeed, it’s the city of New York. It looks like someone in FEMA figured out they don’t have any realistic plan in case of a nuclear war, so they made a plan-like list that is now mindlessly copied everywhere, including places where such “plan” would amount to suicide.

This is so stupid I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, because I know how those morons are thinking: they need to “have a plan”, because someone could ask them what’s their plan for x, and now they can say “we have a plan for x, go to our web site, it’s a great plan”. However, let’s see what it all means.

Back in the 1950s, people in America were taking nuclear war very seriously, and the plans were made by the people who actually made the atomic weapons in Los Alamos, and who had first-hand experience with nuclear blasts, having observed the tests from the closest possible proximity. What they recommended was widely ridiculed later, but as I learned more about the nuclear weapons, I got to understand their thinking.

Their plan was to evacuate the political and military leadership into nuclear bunkers or high in the air, in order to preserve the chain of command and have control over the situation. The next idea was to evacuate the major populated centres, but they soon realised that this can’t be done. Basically, you’d have to do it in a timely and orderly manner, have enough shelter space, with food, water and fuel, for population of every major city. They ran simulations and figured out that an order to evacuate would cause instant widespread panic which would block the roads and make evacuation impossible. Even if they managed to evacuate, they couldn’t possibly care for hundreds of millions of people. Also, an order to evacuate would necessarily be given too late, because they would avoid giving it until the rockets were already flying, and then it would be too late for anything other than sheltering in-situ. If you gave the order early enough, the enemy would take it as a sure sign that you are preparing for a first strike, which would increase the probability of pre-emption, and it would make the political solution less likely. Also, when you give the order to evacuate everything, your society essentially ceases to exist. Your economy is no longer there. You started spending the supplies of last resort. No, that’s not something you want to do unless the nukes are already in the air, and then you have 20 minutes max, which is not enough to evacuate anything. It is, however, enough to move into your own basement, essentially to shelter in-situ.

So, let’s make a list of the dangers of a nuclear strike, and see what kind of measures would make sense.

If you are close enough to the blast, nothing can help you. You are dead. In some rare cases, being in a very deep bunker would help, but that calculation doesn’t matter for the urban centres, only for the military command bunkers. Basically, the urban centres are impossible to evacuate in time because of the traffic, there aren’t enough shelters for the population, and for them, the only advice you can give them is to shelter in situ, avoid the windows and all kinds of objects that could become airborne in conditions of overpressure, hide from the debris and cover yourself with a white reflective cloth to reflect as much infrared as possible; that was actually tested and it helps a lot. Similarly, paint your house white, because it reflects most of the radiation. Dark stuff burns much more quickly. Also, yes, duck and cover. Hide under a desk, a chair, and cover your head and face with clothes in order to protect yourself from heat and debris. Depending on the strength of the blast, you will either die or not, but if you take those measures you will reduce probability of all kinds of injuries that would get you killed in the aftermath even if they are not that serious normally, because forget medical care, that’s not happening. Also, the area where the nuclear blast is absolutely deadly is quite small compared to the area that is quite survivable if simple protective measures are taken, and you can’t do anything for those in the ground zero of the blast anyway. Imagine concentric circles of the target – those in the black centre are dead anyway, and no measures could save them. Those on the periphery of the target might survive with the simplest of measures, such as avoiding the windows, hiding under a desk and covering themselves with a white sheet. Between those two, there’s a gradient of probabilities, circumstances and luck.

So, their thinking was that the most likely targets are going to be military sites and urban centres (black on the target). For those, nothing could be done. Those close to the blast (grey on the target) are mostly fucked; probability of serious burns, lacerations, radiation injuries, being buried alive in the ruins etc. are very high, but some general precautionary and protective measures could still help them. However, the largest percentage of people are going to be more lightly impacted (the white on the target), and very simple measures such as “duck and cover” could drastically improve their outcomes.

There’s a very good reason why those protective measures were introduced in the 1950, only to be completely abandoned by the 1980s. You see, in the 1950s there was a very limited number of nuclear weapons, and delivery vehicles were very primitive. The calculation was that America had to deal with a dozen or so hits in the urban centres, at worst. However, by the 1980s, as the number, yield and sophistication of the nuclear weapons grew exponentially, it meant counting on thousands of hits in the urban centres, with hydrogen bomb MIRVs. The calculation then became obvious – nothing can be done to save the population once the nukes are in the air, so all efforts must be directed at avoiding the nuclear outcome.

However, we are no longer in the 1980s. Neither America nor Russia have tens of thousands of nuclear weapons armed for the first strike. Sure, the number is still high, but have in mind that those are mostly battlefield weapons, not the intercontinental ones. The expected number of intercontinental warheads expected to actually strike is numbered in the hundreds, and since those are precious, they will aim mostly at the military installations. Striking at the cities is useless for the first strike, and exists only in the plans for a retaliatory strike. As the number of deployed nuclear weapons grows, it becomes tempting to wipe out the urban centres as well, but as things are right now, very few if any urban centres would be targeted. This brings us back to the 1950s and the “duck and cover” exercises, because they become very relevant if we assume that civilian targets will be at the periphery of any nuclear strike, unless they are considered of military importance.

So, what would be the reasonable advice in case of a nuclear exchange? First, don’t be on the X. This means evacuating early and being nowhere near the expected target zones, or the zombie apocalypse zones of the aftermath, which for the most part means the urban centres. Second, expect to shelter in situ and have at least two weeks of supplies that would guarantee that you don’t have to exit your shelter early. Third, adhere to the “duck and cover” principles as laid out in the 1950s; those guys built and tested the nukes themselves and had hands-on experience with that stuff, and knew what they were talking about. Fourth, have a radiation sensor so that you can know what is safe and what is deadly, and fifth, yes, have a radio or some other means of getting the public broadcasts, especially the ones of local importance.

 

Thoughts

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I’m watching the coverage of the LA fire and multiple things cross my mind.

The first is compassion. It’s extremely easy to get caught up in it, and I’m thinking, if I had to map the areas of the world where the most guilty people for all of today’s evils live, the place that’s burning would be in the top 3. And yet, when a man’s house is burning down, you feel bad for him and want to help, especially watching from a distance, when you don’t know who the man is. And that made me think further – what do we even know about all the people who are suffering? If we knew the karmic background, would we still be feeling sorry for them? We see a little girl who lost her limbs in a petal mine explosion and we feel sorry for her, but what if she were a cruel man who raped his baby daughter and this is his hell? If we saw him before, we would feel righteous anger and curse him with all our strength to be punished by God to all the extent of justice, and yet, now that we no longer see that past life and the context of the suffering, we see the maimed little girl and wish damnation upon those who caused it – and the godless people of course always blame God for such instances. In case of those Americans, we know that all the leftist propagandists live in those burning houses, we know that most of those people are the ones causing the virtue signalling hysteria, insisting that men can menstruate and women can fight men in combat sports, insisting that women be hired as firefighters and soldiers, and that some stupid fish species should be given its favourite brackish water at the expense of the LA water supply, because imagine the suffering of all those little fishes in water whose salinity isn’t to their liking. So, misguided compassion can be said to have greatly contributed to their misfortune, and now I feel misguided compassion watching their fate.

Would we ever feel compassion for anyone if we knew the whole karmic background? It’s easy to see the victims and instinctively think them innocent, but innocent victims seem to be a very rare kind in this world: basically, the Christians think there was only one in history, and his suffering was redemptive for all of mankind. If they are hard pressed to think of another, they will name his mother. And yet, I don’t think it’s all that simple. The circle of evildoers who in turn become victims is for the most part merely an aspect of this world, where the wheel of samsara turns to make both evildoers and victims from everybody, and they all keep investing their energy into the system, trying to make things right, trying to have a better opportunity, trying to live a better life, causing harm, trying to repent for it and fix it, ad nauseam. People who are deluded and think they are doing good, but are in fact doing great harm, while pontificating about virtue by eating their vegan gluten-free toast. People who watch their houses burn and feel compassion for the innocent victims, investing energy and focus into the world, bleeding into it to make it fertile.

Buddhists have the right idea about compassion – they will say that the intelligent person will see all that cycle of projection, suffering and ignorance and feel compassion at those suffering from it, but the solution is to detach them all from the world, from this entire cycle, and not keep feeding this fire with gasoline. Essentially, proper compassion is the kind that liberates from the world, not the kind that gets you entangled and the kind that gives the world’s victims the feeling of validity of their endeavours here.

Another thing I noticed is how illusions shatter. Expensive homes, expensive computers and other gadgets in them, expensive cars, the illusion of untouchable and powerful America, it all burned down and turned into a heap of burning trash. It suddenly doesn’t matter which model of car, phone, computer or microwave oven it was, when it’s all lost – and guess what, that’s what happens when you die. You lose all your material possessions, it no longer matters which brand your watch, handbag, car or phone it was. No more status symbols. It’s just you, and what you are, in your true nature, stripped of things and illusions.