Update

I moved into the new apartment I bought on Hvar island, so one can imagine I was quite busy, and obviously I did not follow the news anywhere as closely as I did in Zagreb. It’s not because I would be lacking in Internet speed; I have 35 Mbit download and 12 Mbit upload:

In Zagreb, I had a “homebox”, basically a router with a built-in SIM card that connects to the 4G network, and I had 24Mbit download and 22Mbit upload. Yes, the upload speed was higher, but the overall speed variability and lag were quite bad. Also, I have 5G mobile coverage here:

Of course that’s on half signal, this is on full signal:

Upload speed is not great on either network, but I managed to get by with a fraction of that, so I guess I’ll live. The download speed is stellar, at least for my standards which are a tenth of this. There are no fiberoptics available on the island, which is unfortunate, but, also, I’ll live, since there weren’t any available on either ot the two locations in Zagreb where I used to live recently. All in all, my Internet connectivity is improved.

The reason why I’m out of touch is that I’m deliberately reducing my exposure to the news, because it was stressing me out so much I needed a break from it all, so it’s intentional and quite deliberate. I check my mail and keep connected to work, I check the private forum, but beyond that, I’m surrounded by a pine forest with crickets and I find this much more appealing than humans, whom I am thoroughly sick of. The main cause for this profound aversion is the fact that they are so abrasively godless, they literally hurt my spiritual inner senses for “listening to God”, and they, spiritually speaking, turn everything they touch into shit, like some kind of anti-Midas. A person who has God in their inner vision turns every place they inhabit into a tirtha, a place of pilgrimage. A godless person turns every place they inhabit into a pigsty, and they remember God only when they are in need of something to curse when they hit their finger.

Top Gun Maverick review

I watched the new Top Gun movie recently and I actually liked it, but I couldn’t help myself noticing a few things that probably make sense to Americans, and to nobody else.

The hypersonic Mach 10 prototype in the beginning of the movie would have been Russian. The Americans can’t pull that off.

The mission is to bomb some sort of “rogue state’s” underground nuclear facility that’s protected by SAM’s and 5-gen fighters. What kind of a country has 5-gen fighters and still doesn’t have nukes? The 5-gen fighters in the movie are the SU-57 with a dark color scheme, probably to appear more villainous, but the target description looks more like Iran. The target is an underground facility inside something that looks like a deep crater in the mountains, which makes no sense whatsoever, because how would that thing even get built there? Also, why would anyone build it in terrain so difficult to defend properly, and then leave the “air vent” at the bottom of the damn crater where it’s actually the least likely to vent anything? This looks like something of a Bond villain’s lair, if anything, but I guess the Americans think it’s perfectly plausible that “villains” do crazy things like that. After all, they are “rogue” and “crazy” and intend to destroy the world because, well, evil.

The mission is almost an ideal case for either a cruise missile attack through the canyon, using TERCOM/DSMAC guidance, or an overhead attack from either high altitude or using a hypersonic deorbiting vehicle. To use fighter jets in such a scenario is utterly insane, for several reasons. First, the probability of success is extremely low, because it exceeds realistic capability of both pilots and airplanes. Second, the political implications of planes shot down and pilots getting captured and paraded on TV are unpleasant. Third, the tomahawks give you an almost endless number of second chances, unlike the fighter-bomber assault, which either works in the first attempt or not at all. Also, the tomahawks were indeed used to attack a nearby airfield, which implies that they went through the target air defenses without difficulty, which is not realistic, but if it worked on the airfield, why not through the canyon and into the crater? After all, the Tomahawks don’t really need to be fast, since they are not attempting to get out of there alive after striking the target.

The assault is launched from an aircraft carrier, and it somehow doesn’t get noticed in advance, there are no enemy ships with anti-aircraft missiles intercepting the assault, there are no radar stations on the coast to detect either the airplanes or the Tomahawks, and yet the country has lethal air defenses elsewhere, and 5-gen fighters. How in the hell would that be a realistic scenario? Even Iran would send a hundred patrol boats with MANPADs to harass the intruder. Anyone capable would have the shore bristling with mobile radars and rocket launches the moment American fleet was noticed anywhere near the nautical border. The canyon and crater defenses would be the last line of defense, not the first thing the Americans would encounter. In fact, the aircraft carrier would have to live in constant fear of being struck by hypersonic missiles from either the shore or the enemy ships, in a several hundred kilometer range. Also, it would have to live in fear of enemy hunter-seeker submarines. After all, we’re talking about a foe that has SU-57 fighters. The moment the enemy figures out where the attack came from, that aircraft carrier is in acute danger of becoming a radioactive coral reef.

The defending SU-57 fighter jets are called “bandits” by the Americans. How is someone defending his country from a foreign invader a “bandit”? But that’s how the Americans see the world. A country doing things on its own territory that America did during the WW2 is “rogue”, its defenders are “bandits”, and the Americans attacking a foreign country by a sneak Pearl Harbor-like attack, they are the “good guys”.

Other than that, the movie was great. 🙂

Update

I haven’t been writing anything here for a month, so here’s a quick update.

That condo I’ve been living in, the one damaged in the Zagreb earthquake of 2020, has been sprouting leaks through the damaged hydro-isolation layer on the roof for the last year and a half, and it quite suddenly got so bad it flooded the boiler room, destroying the equipment inside and basically leaving us without hot water and central heating during winter. Also, the main bedroom and bathroom had so many water leaks through the ceiling and walls, with black mold forming rapidly, that we had to evacuate.

Fortunately, the backup heating (5 air conditioning units) worked, so we were not freezing at any point, but showering in cold water in December is not an experience I would recommend to friends. 🙂 We had to quickly find a reasonably suitable house, and I decided to rent and not buy, because we are still facing a major global crisis and I felt gold is better than bricks in such a scenario; I’m basically spending sacrificial cash to protect the metal before the storm. I know the plan was originally to save money in form of gold in order to buy a house, but now that I can do it, I don’t think it’s a good idea at the moment and I went for the delayed gratification route. The house I’m in now is much safer in case I need to dig in, but I’m treating it more like very fancy shelter, than a home.

This process of moving five people and tons of stuff took several weeks, from the point where I decided that we need to do it, to the point where we had all our stuff at the new location, and it was super stressful and labor-intensive, and we all came down with a flu of some kind; I don’t know if it’s of the beer variety or not, and I don’t care because it’s nothing particularly serious, just the usual snivel fest of early winter, and we all look like Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer.

So, basically, now that I’m not packing or moving, and I’m recovering from the flu, I can finally write a heads up. The interesting thing about the flu is that I’m recovering very slowly, which reminds me of the beer flu I had in 2020, but I can’t be sure. In any case, my prepping again came in handy because we couldn’t go to the store to get the groceries when we were all sick, so we actually tapped into our food storage and got the bread machine out of the box, too; Mihael is the only one who didn’t get the virus, probably because his immune system is so strong he’d have to get AIDS just to be normal. 🙂 It’s also an opportunity for him to drive now that he has a license and a car, so all is good. 🙂

 

America is a shithole

Evidence most eloquently presented:

Not only did America turn into a 3rd world shithole, it’s exporting it to the rest of the Western world, which will inevitably, if it keeps copying American ideas and practices, follow along this path with the usual time delay.

What are the causes? Well, some of it is cultural – educate children poorly, remove religious teachings and moral criteria, introduce the value-destroying “human rights”, be lenient and accepting to deviants and criminals, be compassionate to the incompetent, promote incompetent minorities for the sake of “diversity”, and give everybody the right to vote regardless of their personal merit, and that’s what you get. Interestingly, that’s why the founding fathers of America decided against democracy and instead went for the republic; they knew democracy inevitably means poor voting to take money from the rich and dividing it among themselves, and I would also add that unrestricted democracy means inevitable degradation of the social and cultural level to the lowest common denominator of the unwashed masses. But yeah, by all means let’s copy what America did, that’s what we need, to become a 3rd world shithole that they are. Just watch your gender pronouns and everything will be fine.